Is Hamas v Israel the Start of World War III? (Updated)
All over YouTube this weekend were sermons, many from evangelical preachers, about the prophesy in Ezekiel, in the Old Testament, particularly 36-38, predicting a war over Israel and the end of times before the Messiah returns. It is not difficult, reading the news, to conclude that it has already begun.
Ukraine is already at war — underwritten by $113 billion in US taxpayer funds, with $300 million more in the wings. As I wrote recently, the rationale for this investment has shifted from saving democracy to saving America’s military weapons industry. Either way, it’s a proxy war that is pushing Russia into China’s orbit, not good for US interests. Some worry Moscow will also join forces with Iran and Turkey.
Meanwhile Israel is fighting for its life against a terrorist organization — Hamas — that is funded by Iran (and hence President Biden) and that refuses to let citizens — Palestinians, Americans or Christians — leave Gaza in advance of an expected Israeli retaliatory ground attack. According to the Israeli Defense Forces, Hamas has already killed about 70 Palestinians who have tried to leave Gaza, an attempt to frame Israel. The attack also scuttled, at least for now, talks for a first-ever Saudi-Israeli peace treaty and threw into doubt whether the kingdom will realign with Iran, or Israel.
On yet another front, China is increasing its military footprint around Taiwan. The Guardian reports that Beijing has sent a carrier strike group and dozens of warplanes to the area, even as it accuses the US and Canada of “inciting conflict” by sailing through the Taiwan Strait. President Biden is so compromised by his influence peddling scheme with China that it’s hard to see how he will challenge President Xi Jinping’s military ambitions, even as China has called for “comprehensive” military combat readiness of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
As for the US, President Biden’s criminal neglect of our southern border means that 8 million — or maybe it’s 10 million or 15 million — migrants have entered our country and we have no idea who or where they are. The odds are good that Iran or Hamas or China has sent squads of young soldiers in embedded cells to destroy us from within.
Anyone who has studied either Sarajevo in WW1 or Austria in WW2 knows that a local fire can trigger the inferno of world war. Add to this a drumbeat of media narrative that Israel deserved the attack because it is a colonizer, even though it has not occupied Gaza since 2005, and you have a powder keg waiting to explode.
It does sometimes feel as if we are living inside the Vesuvius Volcano in Pompeii, Italy, just before it blew in 19 AD. I wrote that line for one of the characters in my new novel, The Concert. In this historical novel, based on a true story from WW2 when the Germans invade the Soviet Union, civilians trapped in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) suffer from Hitler’s attempts to starve them to death and Stalin’s efforts to purge them through torture. Somehow they summon the courage to persevere, to find hope in their passions, to perform a symphony that lifts the city to its feet.
I hope in these grim times you will read the book — one reviewer called it “a majestic book, sweeping across history, told through the eyes of its survivors” — and take solace from the musicians who played Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 for a wartime audience, many starving themselves, giving them, and us, hope.