Turkish Islamic proselytizer Adnan Oktar (also known as Harun Yahya) continues to fascinate apocalyptically-minded US evangelicals; Bob Unrah writes at WND:
A Turkish television show featured prominent Muslim and Jewish leaders agreeing on the coming end times and declaring an expectation to live in “love, peace, friendship, brotherhood, good faith, kindness.”
The Muslim participants are Oktar Babuna and Adnan Oktar, both prominent Islamic personalities. The Jews are Rabbi Yeshayahu Hollander, a member of the Sanhedrin and an associate justice on the Jerusalem Court for Issues of Bnei Noah, and Rabbi Ben Abrahamson, a historian and consultant at Jerusalem’s Rabbinical Court on matters regarding Islam.
…Walid Shoebat, a former Muslim Brotherhood activist who now is a Christian researching Islam, told WND the encounter “has prophetic significance.”
“Turkey is leading Israel into making a peace treaty, which Isaiah calls ‘a covenant with death’ (Isaiah 28:15) which will happen in Egypt (Isaiah 30:1-2),” he said. “Soon Turkey is likely to confirm the Camp David Accord, which is the main concern for Israel and its neighbor Egypt and if this happens, then we need to be looking upwards, for our redemption draweth nigh…”
Evangelical “Last Days” thinking tends to have it both ways: bellicose anti-Israel rhetoric from countries such as Iran demonstrates that prophesied conflict is inevitable; but more friendly overtures are the harbingers of a “false peace” by which Israel will make an alliance with the anti-Christ before the final conflagration. More on Shoebat – who regularly speaks at churches and conservative events – here and here.
Meanwhile, Oktar has also just had a second meeting with “Glenn Beck’s End Times Prophet” Joel Richardson. Richardson has written books (endorsed by Robert Spencer, among others) claiming that the Bible’s anti-Christ will appear in the form of the Islamic Mahdi, and Richardson seems to think that Oktar may play a special role of some sort here. In a courteous exchange on Oktar’s TV programme, Oktar explained his hope for the rebuilding of the Jewish temple, and that Jews, Christians, and Muslims will make an alliance against “atheists, Darwinists, and materialists”; Richardson talked of friendship, but urged that Oktar and his followers should follow “the Jesus of the Bible as opposed to the false Jesus of the Qur’an”.
The meeting with Sanhedrin representatives took place last November, and followed a previous conversation with other Sanhedrin figures that occurred in 2009. As I noted at the time, the Sanhedrin is self-styled, and has no official standing.
Shoebat also complains:
Whoever imagined that before Jesus’ second coming that Israel must be reestablished with its religious legal institution, the Sanhedrin, the very agency that put him on trial before a Jewish Council. Recently, the Sanhedrin, still, chose someone else besides its rightful Messiah, and have even embraced the Islamic idea, that Messiah could be the Islamic Mahdi.
This negative view of the Sanhedrin contrasts with that of Hal Lindsey, who in 2005 wrote approvingly of how the “religious sages” were talking about the rebuilding of the Temple.
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