Focus on Israel

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: Hello and thank you for tuning into Focus on Israel. I'm Laurie Cardoza-Moore, President of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating Christians about their biblical responsibility to the Jewish people. Many Christians do not realize that the word explicitly tells us to stand with our Jewish brethren and defend the land God calls His.

Last week, we concluded our teachings on the evidence for the Jewish state. We started with the biblical evidence as I had a chance to travel to Israel and meet with and interview two leading Rabbis in Jerusalem. Over the last three weeks, we focused on the archaeological, historical, and political evidence for the State of Israel, and I spoke with prominent archaeologists, historians, and political leaders in Israel. So please go to the PJTN website to review these important lessons, as well as our first four lessons on anti-Semitism.

Today, we begin our teachings on the relationship Israel has with the international community and America. In our program today, we'll focus on how the nations of the world have treated Israel, from the establishment of the Jewish homeland to the recent debacle at the United Nations. Recently, I was appointed as special envoy to the United Nations to represent the World Council of Independent Christian Churches. Although it's a huge honor, it's an even greater uphill fight.

The UN was established out of the ashes of the Holocaust and World War II and voted to establish the State of Israel in 1947. That body is long gone, and unfortunately, has become a bastion of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment. Issues relating to the State of Israel, the Palestinian people, and other aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict occupy a large amount of debate time, resolutions, and resources at the United Nations.

In recent years, Israel was the subject of 76% of country-specific General Assembly resolutions, 100% of the Human Rights Council resolutions, 100% of the Commission on the Status of Women resolutions, and 50% of reports from the World Food Programme. In 1973, a General Assembly resolution about apartheid condemns, in particular, the unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, apartheid, and Zionism.

On November 13th, 1974, Yasser Arafat became the first representative of an entity other than a member state to address the General Assembly. In 1975, the PLO was granted permanent observer status at the General Assembly. Starting in 1974, Palestinian territories were named occupied Arab territories in UN documents. In 1982, the phrase occupied Palestinian territories became the usual name. This phrase was not used at the UN prior to 1967, when the same territories were under military occupation by Jordan and Egypt.

The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People was created in 1975, and the United Nations Division for Palestinian Rights in 1977. Also in 1977, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People was first celebrated on November 29th, the anniversary of Resolution 181. The 1975 resolution 3379 determined that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. It was sponsored by 25 Arab states; 72 voted for, 35 voted against, and 32 abstained.

Following six years of intense diplomatic pressure by the US, it was revoked in 1991. Daniel Moynihan, US permanent representative to the UN, apparently qualified the 1975 resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism a reckless and obscene act. Israeli Ambassador Chaim Herzog told his fellow delegates this resolution was based on hatred, falsehood, and arrogance. Hitler would have felt at home listening to the UN debate on the measure.

These decisions, passed with the support of the Organization of the Islamic Conference countries, invariably criticize Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. The degree of criticism is in all regards excessive and is widely criticized for failing to condemn other real human rights abusers. The abuses perpetrated by Islamic countries on their citizens, and of course the women in those countries, is seldom given a second thought.

I had the opportunity to talk with three experts on this problem of a UN that leans decidedly against Israel. The first is Joseph Farrah. He is an American author, journalist, and editor-in-chief of the conservative website WND. Born to parents of Syrian and Lebanese ancestry, he's a bit of a contradiction as an Arab-American Christian journalist. Farrah worked for six years as executive news editor at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, later became editor of the Sacramento Union.

In 1991, Farrah left the Union and co-founded the Western Journalism Center, and in 1996, he received the Washington Times Foundation National Service Award. Next, you'll hear from Dr. Aryeh Eldad, a member of the Knesset, which is the legislative body for Israel. And finally, you'll hear from Shai Ben-Tkoa, a historian and Torah scholar. All three gave me great insight into why Israel continually faces extreme criticism and downright hatred from the United Nations.

Joseph Farrah: Israel is in a unique struggle because part of the justification for rebirthing Israel in 1948 clearly rests on the Bible and the history of the Bible, the historicity of the Bible. Well, many people obviously don't accept that in the world. In 1947, when the United Nations voted on creating the new state of Israel, it was a close vote. It was basically one vote majority. As far as I know, this has never happened at any other time in the world that a nation has been created by a UN vote, by a popular vote of other nations in the world.

And it would seem that if a nation could be created by a popular vote, then it could be destroyed by a popular vote. I think this is one of the fundamental things that is at work in the mind of the Arab propagandists. When they saw that they couldn't win the wars, the battles against Israel in conventional military terms, they thought about asymmetrical ways—propaganda, politics, the United Nations. And I think that they have fundamentally won that battle.

If there were a vote today of all the nations in the world, Israel is probably the most unpopular nation in the entire world. How many United Nations resolutions have there been condemning Israel? As I understand it, I believe there are more resolutions condemning Israel than all other resolutions combined since 1948. So they have won that battle.

And so Israel is indeed fighting for its very existence. I don't know where else we can point in the world to a country that has to justify its very right to exist. And how ironic that that nation happens to be one that was created of refugees who were victims of unbelievable persecution and genocide just three years before the creation of Israel. So those are, I think, the remarkable circumstances that affect Israel, that affect no other country in the world or any other country in history.

Shai Ben-Tkoa: The Arab block have 57 states of Arab and Muslim states. Together with another hundred or so states that used to be called the third block between the West and the East, they are having almost 150 states in the United Nations that will vote automatically. If the Arabs will ask for a vote that the sun will rise tomorrow in the West, it will do so because the sun is a very obedient planet. Usually, it obeys the decisions of the United Nations.

So we can't expect any positive or productive results coming from the United Nations General Council. It's a little better, not always, but a little better with the more responsible powers that are represented in the Security Council. But in the Security Council, we are totally dependent on our friends that have some veto power to prevent any irresponsible or illogical decision.

Therefore, when the Palestinians will go to the Security Council to ask to become members of the United Nations—and a state cannot become a member of the United Nations unless the Security Council recommends it—we expect the United States to veto such a suggestion, to veto such a resolution and to prevent them from becoming a member of the United Nations.

We cannot trust that the United Nations will vote on the General Council that they will vote against a Palestinian state, but still, they'll be recognized as a state but not a member of the United Nations. By the way, Yasser Arafat came to the United Nations in 1988 and got a resolution to recognize Palestine as a state, and 104 states voted for it and only two objected: Israel and the United States.

So officially, they are a state. Nothing of it happened on the ground. And such steps only contribute to more and more frustration. The Palestinians expect something miraculous to happen after the United Nations resolution to recognize them. When nothing will happen practically, they'll become more and more frustrated. I'm afraid that such frustration will lead to another collision, another bloodshed, another violent conflict that can be prevented if we just stop them from going there and building such unrealistic expectations that will lead them nowhere.

Dr. Aryeh Eldad: In 1991, following the Gulf War, I was hired by the office of the Prime Minister of Israel to do a statistical analysis of UN voting patterns. I did. It took me three months. I read 870 UN resolutions in the General Assembly and the United Nations dealing specifically with the Arab-Israeli conflict between 1949 and 1989. This is a third of the work of the UN. The UN spends about a third of its time fighting for a state for the Palestinians. This is what they do. This is how they spend their time. This is their budget.

They pass these resolutions constantly. In the UN General Assembly, over time, as the number of states grew, the number of votes on each resolution grew. There are now 193. You have, between 1945 and 1989, a cumulative total of anti-Israel votes in the General Assembly of over 55,000 votes. When you vote up 150 states voting again and again and again over 800 resolutions, it comes to a figure like that.

The UN Security Council voted to condemn Israel 49 times in that period; never voted to condemn the Arabs, never voted to condemn the PLO. The UN is, as others have said like the great late Jeane Kirkpatrick, an anti-Semitic operation. There is in every department a Palestinian representative to make sure that the business of that department involves bashing Israel. This is the UN. This is where American taxpayers go to pay for all of this nonsense at the UN.

The UN is not a place to find justice for the Jewish people. On the one hand, it's not so bad because of the 193 nations at the United Nations, only one is not allowed to sit on the Security Council, which is the fulfillment of the prophecy in the book of Deuteronomy: "You will be a people that dwells alone." This is what the Gentile prophet Balaam says in the book of Deuteronomy. And that's exactly who we are at the UN. Nobody talks to our representatives; they are isolated in the cafeteria there. No one says hello to them in the corridors. They are a people that dwells alone. That's the UN.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: One of the key things that Mr. Farrah brought forward is that the Arab world believes that if a country can be voted into existence, then it can as well be voted out of existence. What we see in the UN is a series of votes that are an attempt to slowly strip away the rights and the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Abu Mazen and the PA leadership's current campaign to get international recognition for Palestinian statehood amounts to shirking the obligations undertaken with the 1993 Oslo Accords.

While a similar campaign was tried by Arafat in 1988 and abandoned, Abu Mazen believes that this effort would, at the minimum, extract additional concessions from Israel without the PA having to reciprocate. The Palestinian strategy to gain international recognition of a Palestinian state is gaining ground in many places outside of the Arab world. Indeed, the Palestinian side has achieved success in Latin America, with Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia officially recognizing an independent state of Palestine, and Uruguay, Ecuador, and Paraguay expected to officially recognize the state of Palestine.

And it now appears that the 27 incorporated states of the European Union are ready to follow the Latin American states in recognizing a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, with France and Norway in the lead. And here in the US, you've seen what has been called the flea party or, as the mainstream media calls them, the Occupy Wall Street protesters. But I'll bet you'll never see on the news what you're about to witness: rampant anti-Semitism on our own streets.

Guest (Male): Political leaders are praising Occupy Wall Street.

Guest (Female): American people are now occupying Wall Street. Do you support them?

Guest (Male): Well, I support the message. I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel.

Guest (Male): I'm with them emotionally, viscerally in my bones. I know they're right.

Guest (Male): What is happening at the Occupy Wall Street protest?

Guest (Male): Jews control Wall Street! You're a bunch of Jews! The small ethnic Jewish population in this country, they have a firm grip on America's media, finances.

Guest (Male): You've got the money, that's why you're fighting. You Jewish man! You can't even speak English, are you Israeli? Go back to Israel!

Guest (Male): Why are our leaders turning a blind eye to anti-Semitic, anti-Israel attacks? Tell President Obama and Leader Pelosi to stand up to the mob. Hate is not an American value.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: The greatest threat today by far to Israel is the Islamic nation of Iran. Ahmadinejad's rantings against Israel and the Jewish people have only been paralleled by Hitler himself. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warns that time is short before Iran obtains nuclear weapons and poses a direct threat to Israel and the rest of the world.

Iran poses certainly a great danger to Israel, but it represents an enormous danger to the Middle East and to the world, Netanyahu said during a recent visit to New York to speak at the United Nations. This is the premier sponsor of terrorists. I've spoken about this issue with all world leaders and I think that it's important that everyone understands that Iran with nuclear weapons is a danger to us all.

Pointing to steps Iran has already taken against Israel, Netanyahu said we vacated Gaza and Iran essentially walked in with its Hamas proxy and they're packing a lot of missiles. We walked out of Lebanon and Iran walked in with its Hezbollah proxy and they fired thousands of rockets into the north of Israel. We know that the Bible tells us that the nations of the world will unite against Israel in the end times.

Joel chapter 3 verses 1 through 2 read: "For behold, in those days and at that time, when I bring back the captives of Judah and Jerusalem, I will also gather all nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat; and I will enter into judgment with them there on account of My people, My heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations; they have also divided up My land."

As the leaders of the nations mobilize against the nation of Israel, there are people around the world who are standing with the apple of God's eye. The video you're about to witness was shot in Papua New Guinea. It was to counter the call from Pastor Rick Warren, Reverend Robert Schuller, and Pastor Bill Hybels to invite Muslims into the pulpits of churches around the world to celebrate the common values of Christianity and Islam.

Pastor Mark Biltz of El Shaddai Ministries in Tacoma, Washington, called on Christians to say the Shema during church services the weekend of August 13th through the 14th. This is the same weekend that Jews around the world read the Torah portion that recites the Shema in their synagogues. Here is one tribal people in New Guinea who answered the call.

Guest (Male): Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. Baruch shem kevod malchuto le'olam va'ed.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: That's such a powerful video ladies and gentlemen, and we see again Christians are responding around the world. It gives me chills every time I watch that. At Focus on Israel, we appreciate hearing from you. Please send your comments and questions to comments@pjtn.org. I want to share one letter we received recently. This is from Robert and Jody Gould.

It says, "Dear Laurie and PJTN, thank you for all you do for Israel. We have enjoyed so very much your program Focus on Israel. Laurie, please know that whichever direction you go in upholding Israel, we will support and pray for you. You are a woman of integrity and courage, and we are honored to be counted among your friends and supporters. Thank you for being a premier watchman on the wall for Israel. We love you, Robert and Jody."

Here's another letter from Jill: "Just finished The Forgotten People. Thank you for your role in putting this together. I think the greatest blessing for me was the 'In Memory of Elizabeth LaMoore' at the end. Elizabeth was a dear friend to me and my work in Holocaust education is a commitment that I made to her a number of years ago. I do remember her telling me about you. At one point, I believe she attended one of the PJTN gatherings and asked me to come, but I was working at the time. I will be going to Israel in June to a conference at Yad Vashem. 'Telling the Story, Teaching the Core' is the theme and I hope to put a face on my commitment as a Christian to making sure the Jews are supported in their ongoing crisis of media attacks. Thank you for passing the DVD to me. I will continue its message by sending it to the other fellows of the Tennessee Holocaust Commission."

And finally, from Charlotte Cash: "I really enjoyed watching your program and admire what you are accomplishing. I would love to be part of what you do. How else can I help? If you ever have need of registered nurses on your travels or in your conferences or in your staff, I would be more than happy to help. I have been to Israel once in 2010 and it changed my life and my attitude on the world. Thank you for all that you are doing."

The time to stand up ladies and gentlemen is now. Be a leader in your community and in your church. One person can make a difference. Get involved with and support pro-Israel organizations such as PJTN. Call your senators, congressmen, the White House. Let your elected leaders hear from you.

Please visit our website to learn more, sign up to receive action alerts, and order our films to share with family and friends. I want to thank you for watching our program today. Be sure to join us next week as we'll be focusing on America's unique relationship with the State of Israel. So please encourage your family and friends to tune in and check the PJTN website for the program schedule. God bless you and thank you for all you do on behalf of our Jewish brethren and all Israel. We'll see you next time on Focus on Israel.