Temple Denial Vs. Archaeology
Aug/05/10 05:20
Updated and enlarged August 5, 2010 (first published May 15, 2007) (Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -
The following is excerpted from The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City by Dore Gold (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2007):
“[T]he Palestinians’ battle for Jerusalem incorporates more than just the frontal, military assault of the intifada. Its first stages entailed a campaign by Arafat to completely delegitimize the Israeli claim to the city. This began on the ninth day of the Camp David summit [in the year 2000], when Arafat subjected Clinton to a lecture of staggering historical revisionism. His central argument was that the biblical temple never existed on the Temple Mount or even in Jerusalem. Arafat baldly asserted that ‘There is nothing there [i.e., no trace of a temple on the Temple Mount],’ further insisting that ‘Solomon’s Temple was not in Jerusalem, but Nablus.’ ...
[This] doctrine of ‘Temple Denial’ quickly became a new Palestinian dogma that was even repeated, with the firmest conviction, by Western-educated Palestinian officials who are assiduously courted by the international media. ...
Arafat’s eventual successor, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), also embraced Temple Denial. ... Temple Denial spread across the Middle East like wildfire from the editorial pages of al-Jazirah in Saudi Arabia to well-funded international seminars in the United Arab Emirates. It even subtly slipped into the writing of Middle East-based Western reporters. Thus Time magazine’s Romesh Ratnesar in October 2003 described the Temple Mount as a place ‘where Jews believe Solomon and Herod built the first and Second Temples.’ In three years, Arafat’s campaign had convinced a leading U.S. weekly to relate the existence of Jerusalem’s biblical temples as a debatable matter of religious belief rather than historical fact. Arafat had moved the goalposts of historical truth. Read More...
HARRY TRUMAN’S RECOGNITION OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL
Apr/01/09 15:36
April 1, 2009 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -
I believe that one of the most important events in American history was Harry Truman’s recognition of Israel on May 14, 1948.
America’s friendship toward Israel has not been perfectly consistent by any means, but the fact remains that America has been Israel’s greatest friend in modern history, and that is significant. God told Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation,
“And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:2-3).
On this authority there can be no doubt that one of the chief reasons for God’s blessing on America has been her blessing of Israel.
Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) was vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt and became president when died early in his third term in April 1945. Truman subsequently won the presidential election in 1948 and declined to run in 1952, so he was president for eight years. Read More...