This is a blog that I’m dedicating to you! On the 17th of June, I wrote a blog entitled “Free Our Boys.” On that day, I so deeply felt the pain of this nation, the togetherness, the caring and the love. And then I thought about the readers of these blogs—true Believers in the Messiah of Israel—and I just knew that you had to share in this tragedy together with us. We are one family. You have been grafted in to the nation and the people of Israel because you know and you serve our Messiah and King. And so I sent the blog forth, asking for your prayers and love and hope to join together with ours. Well, your response was so amazing that it simply made me cry. So many of you responded with love and with prayers—the warmest of comments—and it touched us very deeply. So I’m writing today this post-blog blog to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. We truly are one family, and I know that your kindness and loving response blessed our Father’s heart!
So today I’ll share with you some of the events that have happened recently, since you truly are a part of it all. As I shared in the previous blog, a huge search operation has been launched and continues unabated. In the fields, in the caves, in the hills, in the towns and in the villages, searches are being conducted. At the same time, Israel has been dealing with the Hamas infrastructure in Judea and Samaria—an organization committed to Israel’s destruction and responsible for the kidnapping of the three teens.
In the midst of it all, the mothers of the three missing boys have shown incredible fortitude and bravery. They travelled last Tuesday to address the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) at their meeting in Geneva. This took courage because it is a council that is notoriously anti-Israel. The UNHRC holds a debate three times a year, and has a mandate to dedicate Agenda Item 7 at every session to Israeli activities against ‘Palestinians’—the only country in the world that the UN is mandated to debate every time it meets. Our dear little land! And the day when the three mothers were present, before speaking they had to listen to a two hour debate where the PLO, Syria and 35 other nations censured Israeli actions and only a few countries briefly mentioned the kidnappings. Rachel Frankel, the spokeswoman for the three, when invited to speak, said many touching things. “My son texted me, said he was on his way home, and then he was gone,” she told the assembly. “Every mother’s nightmare is waiting endlessly for her child to come home.” She tried to personalize them by saying, “Naftali loves to play guitar and basketball; Eyal loves to play sports and cook; Gil-ad is an amateur pastry chef and loves movies.” She also thanked the Red Cross, the UN Secretary General for condemning the abductions and those members of the international community who have spoken in support of the teenagers. She asked that everyone do whatever they can to help bring their sons home again.
The mothers this week also addressed the Israeli Knesset, where they were smothered with love and with their husbands visited Netanyahu at his official residence in Jerusalem. We need to pray extra hard for these families. Every day that passes without any news makes one day more painful than the next…
And, this week, another courageous person arrived on the scene, Governor Mike Huckabee. When his plane landed, he headed directly to the Frankel home. When interviewed by Arutz Sheva television, Huckabee said, “Well I just literally got off the plane an hour ago and I can’t think of any place that I’d rather go to immediately, even without the opportunity to kind of freshen up—to just come and show solidarity with the Frankel family. This is a young man who is also an American citizen, and I’m here not just as an American but as a father. And I think that every parent in the world feels something in the pit of his stomach with the thought of something like this happening to their own child.”
After meeting with the family, he told IBA News, “It was a remarkable opportunity to express my support for the Frankel family. I was so moved by the extraordinary strength and resilience of Naftali’s parents and the other children. They are just remarkable people. One of the things that I hope to convey is that every parent across the world wants to stand with them during this time. It is a remarkably tragic thing that someone so monstrous would take a child on his way home from school. He’s not a soldier. He’s a school boy. This is so absurd and I want every American to be upset about this also because he does have American citizenship”.
In contrast to the love that you all showed as a result of my last blog, the response of the world in general has been so disappointing. All of the nations and organizations that were willing in a second—including Obama—to recognize a ‘Palestinian’ government that included the terror organization Hamas, have been very slow to condemn the kidnapping. The European Union waited a full five days before making any comment at all, and the response from D. C. has been tepid at best. And now that this nation that cares so very much about these three children launched an operation to rescue them, those same nations and organizations are calling for restraint. I love Huckabee’s reply when asked about it in that same interview with Arutz Sheva!
Reporter: “We’ve heard a call for restraint on both sides”.
Huckabee: “What’s to restrain? What is Israel supposed to do? That to me is nonsense. The only restraint at this point is the restraint of whoever has those boys to do nothing to hurt them. Anything and everything that Israel and the rest of the world can do to get them back, they should do and God help those people if they touch a hair on those boys’ heads. I think Israel has every right and America should join in with Israel in saying, ‘You touch that young man who’s an American citizen and you’ll have hell to pay for it’. That should be the message and the only message that we’re sending right now. The State Department and the White House should be reacting to the overall abduction but particularly because Naftali has American citizenship.”
Reporter: Are you satisfied with the Obama administrations response?
Huckabee: I am most certainly not because we haven’t heard from the President. The one thing we heard was from the State Department spokesperson that both sides needed to be restrained. And I’m not sure what it is that the Israelis are supposed to be restrained about. They did not kidnap anybody. There’s no restraint to people who are the victims. This was absurd. I think that we need to say that the Americans will join with the Israelis and do everything to get these boys back”.
There was yet another disappointing development on the world scene this past week. On Friday, the 20th of June, a group of church elders and ministers from the Presbyterian Church, a church of 1.8 million members, voted 310-303 to pull financial investments from three U.S. companies that do business in Israel. Over the centuries, so many horrible things have been done to the Jewish people in the name of Jesus that it’s no wonder that without a Divine revelation, they can’t possibly imagine that He could be their Messiah! I’d like to once again quote Huckabee’s response when asked by the reporter of his opinion of the divestment movement.
Huckabee: “It is one of the most irrational things I’ve ever heard about. To punish the one true democracy in all the Middle East and in fact the greater continents of Africa and Asia. Because they are actually creating jobs, opportunities, they’re protecting human rights, the rights of people, and the rights of women. This again is irrational. I just got back from China last month. If they want to go after someone who is denying people their rights, they can start there, they can go to Saudi Arabia, they can go to Syria, they can go to Lebanon, they can go to Egypt. There are so many places on the globe if they want to protest”.
Reporter: “So what do you think the problem is and how can it be countered?”
Huckabee: Well, I don’t think there’s any other answer other than anti-Semitism. This is a clear example of people who have an irrational hatred for the Jewish people and for the Jewish people to have a homeland. I speak that as an American and as a Christian. One of the reasons that I want to be as loud as I can be about this is not from someone who has a vested interest in Israel and in the Jewish faith, it is a person who believes in justice and in truth—and there is no truth being spread by those who are pushing for the BDS movement and there is certainly not a sense of justice”.
Best of all, I love Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comments on the subject when recently interviewed on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’. When asked in the interview if the divestment troubled him, he replied, “It should trouble all people of conscience and morality because it is so disgraceful. Most Americans understand that Israel is a beacon of civility and modernization. While most of the ME was riveted by religious hatred, savagery of unimaginable proportions, Israel is the one democracy that upholds basic human rights, that guards the rights of all minorities, that protects Christians”
He encouraged the Presbyterians to come to “fly to the Middle East, come see Israel for the embattled democracy that it is, and then take a bus tour, go to Libya, go to Syria, go to Iraq, and see the difference. I would give the Presbyterians two pieces of advice. One is to make sure it’s an armor-plated bus, and second, don’t say that you’re Christian.”
Bless you again for caring. Because of God’s promises for this little land, we are on the winning side!
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