…since 1945, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with Hitler-supporting King ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and promised that no U.S. decision regarding the Middle East would be made without first consulting the Arabs, neither has any nation been more closely linked to the Muslim nations in that region. I wonder if his death within weeks of making this decision was simply a coincidence.
So writes Michael D Evans (or Mike Evans) in The American Prophecies, a book that is currently riding high on the Amazon Religion and Spirituality bestseller lists (and as the book has not yet been released, one assumes this is from advance orders). The book is published by Warner Faith (part of AOL Time Warner) and carries endorsements from Benjamin Netanyahu, Charles Colson, Paul Crouch and Ehud Olmert.
Evans argues (as he has done ad nauseum in a number of previous books) that the USA has a role in Biblical prophecy, the role being to offer uncritical support for Israel. Plus Arabs are all Nazis and rejected by God. Time Warner is so proud that a lengthy extract is available on its website. Among highlights (and I had to restrain myself from going on for pages) are the following:
America has married two brothers, both descendants of ancient Abraham, who was told by God to get out of Ur of the Chaldees (modern-day Iraq)…One of these marriages was based on America’s guilt over its appeasement policies, which resulted in the deaths of millions of Jews during the Holocaust…The marriage to the other brother, Ishmael, was one of convenience…America now finds herself trying to accommodate an ancient Jew-hating older brother (Ishmael) who has refused to make peace with the younger (Isaac).
The Middle East conflict, then, is not so much about particular political circumstances as something in the essential nature of the Arabs, Ishmael.
While Middle Eastern oil flows to the West, we ship arms in their direction. In fact, the Middle East region is currently America’s number one client in the world for weapons of war. The U.S. has sold Saudi Arabia alone more than $200 billion in weapons since the 1980s.
Nice to see a Christian fundamentalist who agrees with Michael Moore. But hold the presses:
The terrorists’ war against America and Israel is rooted in this radical religious doctrine called Islamic fundamentalism.
Plugging his previous book, Evans states that:
I stated my belief that weapons of mass destruction were in Syria. I also stated that, compliments of the Syrian government and the Iraqi embassy in Damascus, money and key Iraqi leaders were being moved through Syria.
He’s written more on this for WorldNetDaily. Evans then turns to the subject of Palestinian refugees:
The truth is that the Arab world has fueled and fed the Palestinian refugee crisis… Why did the Arab League tell the Arabs to leave Palestine and fight Israel, then turn their backs on the very refugees they created? Why did they make up the myth that Israeli Arabs must have a state inside Israel, even though they never had such a thing in three thousand years of history?
Unfortunately for Evans, the Arab League never told Palestinians to leave, as was established years ago. And I was not aware of Israeli Arabs wanting their own state within Israel proper. Perhaps Evans means Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, who are apparently suffering from a “myth” that they are hard done by just because they live under military occupation.
Clinton-bashing follows (inevitably, “Neville Chamberlain”) and ruminations on 9/11, and more explicit racism:
The ancient Scriptures of the Bible have a great deal to say about the two spirits behind these brothers who are fighting it out through the nations of the earth. Ishmael was not the son of promise, but the son of a man trying to work the will of God in his own way. God had promised Abraham a son, but his wife, Sarah, was barren. At her request, Abraham took Hagar, her maidservant, and impregnated her. The result was the son Ishmael. Though a man of faith, Abraham acted in his own wisdom and lust, not God’s direction—he justified a foolish action through moral relativism, tradition, and human reasoning, trying to get God’s blessing on his own terms. It was not until some years later when the son of promise, Isaac, was born that Abraham fully realized the gravity of his mistake. Rejecting the “son of human reasoning,” God blessed and cut covenant with the “son of faith.” Ishmael went on to be the father of the Arab race, and Isaac a patriarch of the Hebrews.
So – the very existence of the Arabs is a mistake born of lust, and they have been rejected by God.
A series of questions concludes the chapter, including:
Why did the State Department keep FBI agents from arresting three terrorists who were part of a Saudi entourage on its way to meet with President Bush in Crawford, Texas, seven and a half months after the attacks of September 11?…
Why is no one talking about the missing suitcase nuclear bombs from the former U.S.S.R., or the weapons of mass destruction Saddam moved out of Iraq through Syria before Operation Iraqi Freedom? Who has them, and what are they planning to do with them?…
Why is Hitler’s Mein Kampf a best-selling book throughout the Muslim world more than fifty years after Hitler’s death? And why is it used as a textbook in Muslim schools in the Middle East?…
Why, even after he had publicly condemned these mass executions, did Roosevelt refuse to bomb the gas chambers in Auschwitz, when Allied planes were flying routine missions near them nearly every day in the last months of the war?…
Why is America spending billions of dollars to rebuild ancient Babylon, when 62 percent of the population are Shi’ites who would guarantee another Iran in time? The scriptures pronounce an end-time curse upon ancient Babylon more than upon any country in the world. Is America blessing what God has cursed?
Evans also name drops like crazy, and this is why he deserves a certain amount of attention:
“Mike, are you watching TV?” said Reuben Hecht, senior adviser to Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin. “Harel’s prophecy is coming to pass before our eyes.”
Reuben Hecht and I had enjoyed dinner with Isser Harel (founder of Mossad, and head of Israeli intelligence from 1947 to 1963) at his home a few months earlier…
During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, I had lunch one afternoon with the governor of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed Khalid…My words antagonized Khalid…
…in 1981, I was willing to use what I knew about the Middle East to help President Reagan’s staff act with moral clarity concerning the issue of that region. In that role, I was asked to attend a high-level briefing with U.S. generals and admirals over the sale of AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia. I challenged the White House staff over the decision… Several months later, a small U.S. delegation and I were invited to have lunch with the president and his cabinet. Chuck Colson sat next to me.
…Dr. Yossef Bodansky [former director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare] and I spent considerable time in Jerusalem discussing…
I have an older book by Evans, which is full of pictures of him meeting Israeli politicians like Shimon Peres and Netanyahu. Mike Evans Ministries has a rather incompetent and uninformative website (one part has black writing on black that you need to highlight to see); he is also responsible for the Jerusalem Prayer Team. Apparently his own background is as a convert from Judaism to Pentecostalism. He is also one-time chair of the board of the Corrie Ten Boom Foundation and sometimes works as a regular journalist, appearing in USA Today and elsewhere as a “Middle East Analyst”.
Warner Faith operates out of Nashville, with Rolf Zettersten as its vice president and publisher. Zettersten formerly worked for Thomas Nelson, also of Nashville (Thomas Nelson took legal action over his alleged poaching of authors).
UPDATE (14 Oct): The New York Press has more on Evan’s book, including the following quotes:
[I]n 1981, I was willing to use what I knew about the Middle East to help President Reagan’s staff act with moral clarity… My arguments were mostly pragmatic, but I had so much intelligence that they let me speak. When I inserted a Scripture into my short speech, I was flagged with this question: ‘What does God know about foreign policy?’
I replied to the question, ‘He is foreign policy!’
…I remember standing up to Robert McFarland the national security adviser to Ronald Reagan. McFarland had said, ‘The status of Jerusalem must be determined by negotiations.’
I said, ‘Excuse me; I have the book on Jerusalem. God is not negotiating with you or anyone else.
And, rather bizarrely:
A brilliant and respected scholar whom I have known for decades told me: ‘If you look at a satellite image of the city of Jerusalem, you will see the tetragrammaton YHWH. It is clearly visible from the photo. What does the YHWH mean? It is the Hebrew for Yahweh—the (unspoken) name of God!”
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