- Daniel 11:43-45
Considering how much Libya and Col. Gaddafi is in the news these days here is a post for those who wish to think and dig below the surface.
PLEASE, PLEASE, understand my point in all of this: I am NOT suggesting Gaddafi is the anti-Christ (or better, one of the two, i.e. anti-Christ and false prophet) or even to suggest he is a candidate. Most students of the bible would find that laughable at best. No, just that here is a character that lives in such a way that shows just how precisely Scripture can and will be fulfilled. I am just looking at facts and keeping emotions out.
One other curious phenomenon surrounding Gaddafi is some of the “Messianic” descriptions used for him just similar to that of Barack Obama. However, we are in a time when there are “many anti-Christs” and many who have titles and descriptions that are “Messianic” in nature including the pope in Rome who walks around with the literal title of anti-Christ “Vicarious Christos” written across his body.
The following is from a set of articles a planned for but never published ‘Be Alert!’ regarding Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and the nightmare of logistics, upheaval and uproar surrounding his visit to the UN in September of 2009 some interesting Scriptural considerations concerning unfulfilled prophecy with the nation of Libya.
Col. Gaddafi, travels with a large retinue and “pitches” his Bedouin style tents wherever he travels just like in biblical times, the only exception being that he is able to load them up onto aircraft and ships them cross-country, cross-continent or overseas when necessary.
Again, when this was hitting the press in 2009 it struck me how this lined up with the anti-Christ character mentioned in Daniel 11. My thoughts were that I could not see how Gaddafi fit into this other than it showed that some are living this way today and Scripture will be fulfilled exactly.
BE/\LERT!
A Tents Standoff Pits a Town Against Gadhafi and a Synagogue Whether Shelter for Libya's Strongman or Site For a Bar Mitzvah, Englewood DisapprovesTHE WALL STREET JOURNAL [News Corporation/Murdoch] - By Barry Newman and Suzanne Sataline - August 27, 2009 ENGLEWOOD, N.J. -- This green, unassuming New York City suburb has a couple of problems involving tents.
One concerns Col. Moammar Gadhafi. Many people here believe Libya's leader plans to put up a tent in Englewood during his trip to the United Nations in September. They don't like that.
The second problem concerns East Hill Synagogue. It puts up tents for bar mitzvahs. Some people in Englewood don't like that, either.
"I was hoping the community had put this behind it," Mayor Michael Wildes says of the bar-mitzvah-tent battle -- "until the head of a nation decided to pitch his own tent in Englewood."
As Col. Gadhafi has become visible in countries that once shunned him, his tent has been getting a lot of attention. He travels with it. Visiting Paris in 2007, he pitched his tent in a garden of the Elysée Palace, the presidential residence. Last June in Rome, he chose Villa Doria Pamphili, a park. (Protesters pasted up "No Camping" signs.) Now the colonel is getting ready for his first chance to address the U.N. General Assembly. He needs a place to camp out.
The State Department is trying to persuade the Libyans to steer clear of New Jersey. "We're expecting that we'll be able to come to some sort of agreement where all of these sensitivities are respected," spokesman Ian Kelly said Wednesday.
But New York City is defiantly anti-tent. A few weeks ago, Libya's government asked if Col. Gadhafi could sleep in Central Park. A city department said no.
"There is no camping in the park," said Jason Post, a city spokesman.
For Libya, that left Englewood. In 1982, Libya's U.N. mission paid $1 million for a 10,000-square-foot stone mansion here -- some people in town know it as "Thunder Rock" -- on nearly five acres of land in East Hill, one of the city's leafier neighborhoods.
The Libyans, who at the time had no diplomatic relations with the U.S., got a letter from the State Department warning them that only their ambassador had the run of the property. Neither the ambassador nor his successors appear to have taken up the invitation: Over the years, the house went to ruin.
Englewood's mayor would like to keep it unoccupied. He's doing everything he can to keep Col. Gadhafi from camping out in his city of 26,000, across the Hudson River from the Big Apple. That counts double after last week, when Libya gave a hero's welcome to the man responsible for blowing up Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
"Our tent-enforcement rules are laborious and tedious," says the mayor, Mr. Wildes. "When you're putting up a Bedouin-style tent for a period of weeks, there's enough to warrant a more aggressive approach."
Tents, of course, have special meaning for people with deep roots in the desert. For Col. Gadhafi, they seem to represent a nomadic heritage applied to jet travel and diplomacy. Religious Jews, for their part, get married under a kind of tent and celebrate the harvest in another kind of tent.
Over the years, Englewood's Orthodox Jewish community has grown. It now numbers about 700 families. One of the newcomers was Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, whose Web site identifies him as "America's Rabbi," and who has gained fame for his book, "Kosher Sex." Rabbi Boteach's much more modest house is next door to Libya's.
"I wanted to go say hello, but there was never anybody to say hello to," he says. "It was a real hovel," he adds.
A month ago, Rabbi Boteach and his family awoke to noise. Workers next door had cut down some oak trees between the two properties. Libya's house was under total renovation.
The rabbi went over to complain, and received warm apologies. Then, the Lockerbie bomber was released, and the rabbi is ready to sue.
"I was prepared to give Gadhafi the benefit of the doubt -- that he really wanted to change," Rabbi Boteach says. "Now he's shown that he's the same guy. And they haven't replanted my trees, which they cut down."
As of yesterday, newly raked earth led down to a pond and a new cabana at Col. Gadhafi's place. It might be a good spot for a tent. But unless the colonel is planning a bar mitzvah, Englewood's other tent controversy won't help him escape the tent enforcers.
East Hill Synagogue occupies a shingled three-story house with a turret, a short drive from Libya's mansion. The temple bought the property 10 years ago, and began holding bar mitzahs, and the occasional circumcision party, under a tent in the parking lot. Not unlike the Libyans, the synagogue ran into trouble from the neighbors. They complained about noise, and said the parking-lot parties, often held on Saturdays, forced members of the congregation to park their cars out on the street.
But the temple said that was impossible: Its members don't drive on Saturdays. "Come the Sabbath, we don't drive -- we walk," says a temple member who asked not to be identified. "Nobody's going to be driving there. So, we figured, why not a tent?"
The dispute was big news. Before Col. Gadhafi's trip loomed, it was Englewood's prime source of ethnic and religious passions.
When the planning board ruled tents could go up just three times a year, the temple went to court, claiming religious discrimination. Englewood's tent-suppression, it contended, "imposed a substantial burden on religious exercise." A settlement in 2008 finally let the temple put up tents 12 times a year.
But if Libya's diplomats imagine they might turn to East Hill Synagogue's fight for tent liberation to ensure that Col. Gadhafi has a place to sleep in New Jersey, they will be disappointed.
"The government of Libya can't sue under a statute designed to protect religious freedom," says Andrew Frackman, the attorney who represented the synagogue in court. "Gadhafi's situation is more like putting up a tent for a wedding. In Englewood, everybody has to ask for permission to put up a tent."
Unedited :: Link to Original Postinghttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB125132927204562111.html
Qaddafi’s Visit Upsets N.J. ResidentsNEW YORK TIMES [NYTimes Group/Sulzberger] - By Joseph Berger - August 27, 2009ENGLEWOOD, N.J. - At a run-down estate on Palisade Avenue here, construction workers and landscapers clamber around in what appears to be a hurried top-to-bottom, inside-and-out makeover - all in anticipation of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and his traveling tent.
Colonel Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, will be coming next month to address the United Nations, and the logistics of his stay are complicated by the Bedouin-style, air-conditioned tent that he uses to greet visitors. In a visit to Russia, for example, the tent was pitched in a garden at the Kremlin; in Rome, a public park.
Colonel Qaddafi had wanted to plunk his tent down in Central Park, but New York officials rejected the idea. Next on the list was the Libyan-owned estate on Palisade Avenue, which would produce one of those only-in-America cultural collisions.
Many Americans are incensed at the Libyan leader for his past sponsorship of terrorists and would probably prefer that he not come at all. But Englewood is a suburban city of 30,000 with a large Orthodox Jewish population, a community that has particularly detested Colonel Qaddafi because Israel has been a favored target of terror.
In fact, Englewood’s largest yeshiva is right next door to the estate on Palisade Avenue. …
On Wednesday, the rabbi addressed reporters gathered on his lawn. He took note of the star-crossed coincidence that Colonel Qaddafi could become his neighbor, and sounded like Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca” lamenting, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/nyregion/28tent.html
‘African King of Kings’ Makes Waves in New York, Offers to Move U.N. to LibyaIn his long and disjointed address, Gaddafi said the Taliban should be allowed to establish an emirate, he $7.77 trillion in compensation for Africans, and he called for new investigations into the JFK and Martin Luther King assassinations. He also suggested that the U.N. headquarters move away from the U.S.CYBERCAST NEWS SERVICE (CNSN.com) [Media Research Center] - By Patrick Goodenough - September 24, 2009(Editor’s note: [CNSN] Although he was scheduled to attend and address Thursday’s Security Council summit on nonproliferation, Gaddafi did not appear and a Libyan envoy read out a statement instead.)
– It took 40 years in power before Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi decided to address the U.N. General Assembly, and he made up for it on Wednesday, delivering a seemingly interminable address in which he tore up the U.N. Charter and laid out his vision for revolutionizing the Security Council.
The speech, running some 80 minutes longer than the usual 15 minute time limit, threw out the day’s carefully-crafted schedule, but there appeared to be nothing the General Assembly president, Libya’s Ali Triki, could or would do to stop it.
Triki, who served as Gaddafi’s foreign minister in the late 1970s, had earlier introduced him as “king of kings of Africa” – an epithet bestowed on him by a group of African traditional leaders when Gaddafi was elected head of the African Union (A.U.) early this year.
As A.U. head, Gaddafi had a prime speaking slot, immediately after President Obama, who left before the Libyan began his address. Also not in the chamber to hear Gaddafi’s speech were Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, who vacated the U.S. delegation seats. Lower-level diplomats took their places.
Early on in his speech, Gaddafi called the recently-departed Obama “my son,” and later described him as “a young African Kenyan.”
“Can you guarantee after Obama how America will be governed?” he asked. “We are content and happy if Obama can stay forever as the president of the United States of America.”
The Libyan’s lengthy address covered numerous bases ranging from calling for the Taliban to be allowed to establish an emirate if it wished, to demands that former colonial powers compensate Africans to the tune of $7.77 trillion and that investigations be opened into the JFK and Martin Luther King assassinations.
He suggested the U.N. headquarters move away from the U.S. Having been in the western hemisphere for more than half a century it should now be moved to the “middle of the globe or the eastern part of the globe.”
“All of you came across the Atlantic Ocean, the Asian continent, the African continent to reach this place. Why? Is this Jerusalem? Is this the Vatican? Is this Mecca? All of you are tired, suffering from jet lag …”
Gaddafi said the General Assembly should vote on the proposal: if it decides to move the U.N. to the “middle part” of the globe, Libya could host it; if it chooses to go to the east, Beijing or New Delhi could do so.
“You will thank me for this proposal, for eliminating the suffering and the trouble of flying for over 20 hours to come to this place.” Gaddafi also spoke at length about the Security Council – which he dubbed “the Terror Council” – saying it was responsible for the conflict in the world since the end of World War II. Rather than reform it by adding other countries it should be remade, he said, with seats being designated for multinational organizations like the A.U., Non-Aligned Movement, Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the Arab League.
Gaddafi also tried to rip apart a copy of the U.N. Charter, saying the existence of the Security Council violated the charter’s provision about the equality of all member states. ...
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/54480
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