If America continues to sleep, jihadists will bring their battle to America.
On September 23, 1980, the senior adviser to then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin and I had dinner with Isser Harel, who was the director of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, from 1952-1963. I asked Harel: “Will terrorism ever come to America?”
“America is developing a tolerance for terrorism,” he said. “Yes, I fear it will come in time.”
“Where will it come to?” I asked him.
He thought for a moment. “New York is the symbol of your freedom and capitalism. It’s likely they will strike there first, at your tallest building, because it’s … a symbol of your power.”
The following year, I wrote a book and produced a network special titled Israel: America’s Key to Survival. For more than two decades following their release, American tolerance for terror grew. The U.S. knew that Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization from 1969 to 2004 and president of the Palestinian National Authority (1993–2004), was a terrorist but defined him as a “good terrorist” because he agreed not to kill Americans as he had in Beirut.
He did not, however, agree not to kill Jews. The U.S. proceeded to negotiate a land-for-peace deal with Arafat in which he would essentially get Israel’s land, and America would get peace.
I was so outraged at this appeasement policy that I flew to Geneva in 1988 to confront Arafat at the 43rd U.N. General Assembly. While Arafat sat in a room surrounded by his executive council, I stood, Bible in hand, and boldly declared Israel’s biblical, historical and legal rights to the land. Arafat screamed, “Shut up, shut up, what must I do to make you shut up?”
American policy then was one of containment (appeasement), not pre-emption. Israel was never allowed to fight a war against terror. Each time it tried, the U.S. ran to the rescue of Arafat, the “Godfather of World Terrorism.”
For instance, just before the end of the Clinton presidency, in what was the only major foreign policy decision in 2001, Arafat was offered 98 percent of the territory of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, all of East Jerusalem except for the Jewish and Armenian quarters, Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount—conceding only the right of Jews to pray there—and a compensation fund of $30 billion.
The war on terrorism is a war against bigotry. It began with Jew-hatred when millions of Arab bigots propagated as truth the diabolical lies penned by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf and by others in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Don’t discount the effectiveness of the global “Zionist crusader conspiracy” that says, “After all, everyone knows that the Jews are responsible for all the world’s problems.”
Terrorists monitor the American media. In fact, Osama bin Laden wrote to his associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that 50 percent of the terror war was, in fact, a media war.
Now that Israel has been weakened, the terrorists’ goal is to weaken America, and they are succeeding. If America continues to sleep, jihadists will bring their battle to the streets of America.
Iran now has an embassy in Baghdad and consulates in every major city in Iraq. With its 400-mile open border, Iran is able to send a flood of terrorists into Iraq.
The good news is that God is on His throne, and He answers prayer. It is time for the church to stand up and speak up.
Isaiah 59:19 says, “When the enemy comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against him” (NKJV). The flood is on its way; let’s cry out for God to lift the standard!
Mike Evans is a New York Times best-selling author. His newest book, The Final Move Beyond Iraq, was released by FrontLine in May and has been made into a major television special.