The earth is utterly broken down, the earth is clean dissolved, the earth is moved exceedingly. The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again. And it shall come to pass in that day, that the LORD shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth.(Isaiah 24:9-11)
We are currently witnessing an unraveling of the already fragile modern order of the Arab world. Current Arab nations were formed by the victorious allies of World War I, France and Britain, after they had defeated the Ottoman Turks who had sided with the Germans in the conflict.
Diplomats pored over maps, border lines were drawn, sometimes by straightedge, and nations were mapped out such as Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, “Palestine”, Iraq and Lebanon.
During the post war period, North Africa and the Arab Middle East was ruled under British or French “mandates”. The Arabs, chafing under the yoke of being ruled by the “christian west” formed dissident groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood which nurtured the ideal of a return to Allah as the only way to reverse the current humiliation.
On a more secular note, the Arab world churned with a swirling political maelstrom of Arab versions of Communism, Socialism, and in the thirties, even Hitlerism. Eventually a special kind of Arabic fascist party was formed and took the rule in Syria and Iraq ,which was called the Ba’athist party.
After World War 2 , an exhausted Britain and France began to undertake a “colonial retreat” which ultimately led to Arab independence and national self determination. Two movements have since been brewing in the Arab world, one which was secular and the other religious, Pan Arabism, and Islamist fundamentalism.
Algeria threw off the French in the 1950’s in a bloody Islamist inspired war for Independence. Egypt experienced a military revolt, which allowed Gamal Nasser to replace King Farouk, as the nation’s leader. All over the middle east similar things were occurring during the ‘decolonialisation’ period.
The new Arab leaders were secular for the most part. They were Muslim in name, but knew enough to keep movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood suppressed and on the run. Any dissent at all was brutally crushed. In nations such as Egypt, the people were kept distracted from their misery by a constant barrage of state run media based conspiracy theories, blaming all problems on either the Jews or the Western powers.
These middle eastern leaders feared fundamentalist Islam, after all they had bitter experience to guide them. Nasser’s successor in Egypt, Anwar Sadat was assassinated by his own troops who had been influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood. Mubarek, his successor wasn’t about to let that happen.
King Hussein of Jordan killed 20,000 members of the PLO in one month when they tried to foment a rebellion on his soil in 1970. For another example, when the Muslim Brotherhood inspired an uprising against the rule of Syria’s Hafez Al Assad, in the city of Hama, Syria in Febuary, 1982, Assad wasted no time, crushing the revolt, killing tens of thousands of Syrians, and bulldozing much of the old portion of the city as a brutal example to any other potential revolutionaries.
Saddam Hussein brutally suppressed all domestic Sunni and Shiite terrorist groups, as did the Shah of Iran. The Assads of Syria knew that they had to be ready to brutally crush any Islamist uprising without hesistation. The Saudi’s are no less ruthless in their rule.
Through brutality these leaders suppressed the aspirations of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, because they knew better than anyone who they were dealing with. Egypt jailed and tortured hundreds if not thousands of those who were inspired by the writing of Hassan Al Banna, and Sayyid Qutb to wage a Jihad; violently , politically or otherwise, in order to restore the Caliphate, and to bring the world under Shariah.
In May of 1948 an event occurred in the heart of the middle east which galvanized the Arab world against a new common enemy. Israel was reborn and the Jews scattered around the world began to come back into the land.
Within hours of the announcement, the combined armies of five Arab nations gathered with the openly stated intent to drive this infant nation of holocaust survivors into the sea. Armed only with the remnants of surplus, cast off rifles and a few armored personnel carriers, Israel resoundly defeated the massed Arab foes.
This humiliation became known among the Arab people as Al Naqba, “the calamity” and to this day the day is marked by mourning and demonstrations.
Since that day, in four separate wars, the combined might of the Arab world, superior in arms, personnel, and resources had been unable to accomplish it’s great boast, that they were going to erase Israel, wipe it off of the map, push it out of existence into the sea! This impotence has been a constant source of humiliation and an affront to the religion of Islam.
It was after the 1973-1974 Yom Kippur war, that the conviction began to become widespread in the Arab world, that only by an Islamic revival, a return to fundamentalist Islam could Israel ever be annihilated. This concept is the fuel that ignites our current crisis.
Since then, Saudi Arabia has spent its billions in oil revenue to propagate its own nefarious brand of Islam. The Saudi royal family are the custodians of the sect known as Wahhabism, a puritanical ,violent, holier than thou but with hand grenades version of the religion. Through its Saudi financed madrassa’s ,Wahhabism is literally inciting mass hatred and murder among the poverty-stricken Muslim masses in Africa, Indonesia, Pakistan and throughout the world.
The Saudi’s have made a domestic devils bargain with the Islamists, as far as the Arabian Peninsula is concerned. The Royal family will bank roll Madrassas, ”charities”, Mosques, and terrorist groups any where in the world. They will arm and train them, to go anywhere , as long as the “Kingdom” is left alone. All but one of the 9-11 hijackers were Saudi’s.
Up till lately, most of the leadership in the rest of the Arab world is secular, and resists Islamism in their respective lands. However the terrorists hate with a passion these secular rulers of the Arab countries, and they also hate the debauched and hypocritical Saudis, perhaps even more than they hate America.
What we are seeing in the Arab world is the breakup of this devils bargain. The popular uprisings are not the democratic revolution of Jefferson, Madison and Washington part two. They are instead the popular removal of the restraining forces on something even more brutal than the Mubareks, Attaturks, Assads or the Shah of Iran. These leaders are falling down to the forces of the Islamic revival.
These brutal leaders served as restraints on something even more savage than themselves, for they have restrained true Islam. Yes, the postwar Arab leaders were brutal, utilitarian and self-serving, they did what they had to keep their restive populations distracted and subdued. But they knew what they were dealing with in Islam.
What we are seeing in the Arab world right now, is the removal of those restraints, the release of the long pent-up pressure, the opening of the floodgates again to the true followers of Mohammed.
Don’t be deceived by the preferred narrative of the “facebook” revolution. Supposedly peace-loving, cell phone and face book using Egyptians yearning for democracy have just toppled a dictator in a virtually bloodless revolution, and now all is well. Indeed a thirty something Egyptian Facebook exec initially was a leader of this movement, but he has been rejected by Egypt.
When the masses gathered on Tahriri Square to celebrate the abdication of Mubarak, the Facebook exec was forced away from the podium. Instead the dais was given to the formerly exiled but wildly celebrated Egyptian preacher Yusuf Al Qadrawi, who called upon the Egyptians to not be content until prayer was offered to Allah on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
The real face of the current Arabic revolution was revealed in the brutalization of the western Journalists, particularly the woman brutalized by a mob, chanting Jew, Jew, Jew as they performed unspeakable indignities to her on a public street.
These demonstrators are people who have been fed a steady diet of anti western, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, and whose main complaint with Mubarak, was that he suppressed fundamentalist Islam, and honored a peace treaty with Israel.
The True and Living God , the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah, is uncorking the corks, He is releasing the forces that will culminate in Jerusalem for the last battle before the millenium, stay tuned this gets intense!
Pastor Bill Randles Blog 