NEWS STORY: Jews, Muslims, Christians seek to untangle divine intentions in Iraq crisis

c. 1998 Religion News Service JERUSALEM _”Does the Messiah need a gas mask?”wondered Jerusalem writer Rolinda Shonwald, as she pondered the religious meaning of the current U.S. standoff with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Just miles away, in West Bank Palestinian towns, fundamentalist Muslims urged Hussein to hit Israel with chemical weapons while in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _”Does the Messiah need a gas mask?”wondered Jerusalem writer Rolinda Shonwald, as she pondered the religious meaning of the current U.S. standoff with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Just miles away, in West Bank Palestinian towns, fundamentalist Muslims urged Hussein to hit Israel with chemical weapons while in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish village of Kfar Chabad near Tel Aviv, religious scribes were churning out amulets, which promise to protect the bearer from”Scud missiles, both chemical and biological.” While the Pentagon worries about weather conditions, missile penetration and diplomatic support for a possible U.S. attack on Iraq, some Jews, Muslims and Christians in Israel and Palestinian-controlled territory are trying to untangle the divine intentions they believe lurk behind the threatened clash.


And with the religiously symbolic millennium just two years away, many see the Iraqi-U.S. standoff as the start of a larger showdown between the heavenly forces of good and evil.

It’s a showdown some adherents of all three faiths _ each with their own respective calendar _ expect to envelope the Middle East sometime in the coming years.

Theologically conservative Jews, Muslims and Christians share a remarkably similar vision of mankind’s ultimate battle in terms of scene, execution and even scriptural references.

These visions often express a deeply felt sense of rage and powerlessness over a world seemingly beyond control. But they also represent an attempt by average people to find spiritual meaning in events that otherwise leave them overwhelmed, said Joshua Ritchie, a rabbi and crisis counselor who has organized teams of Israelis to cope with a possible Iraqi attack.

But Jews, Christians and Muslims do not agree on who will play the central roles in their end-time scenarios.

Christians assign a revered role to Jews _ God’s”chosen”people _ but hold that the Messiah, Jesus, will ultimately convert them to Christianity.

In the current fundamentalist Muslim view, it is Israel _ often in an alliance with the”evil”United States _ that serves as the villain.


In the Jewish apocalyptic view, meanwhile, the forces of evil often are represented by the Arab nations _ this time allied with decadent European states or Russia.”I see the confrontations of the present days as the beginnings of the final war, in which only a third of humanity will survive,”said Shabtai Shilo, an Orthodox Jewish scholar here who has written three books on Old Testament apocalyptic predictions.

Shilo connected any renewed U.S. bombing campaign against Iraq with a passage in the biblical Book of Numbers, which talks about”ships”crossing the Mediterranean Sea to afflict”Eber”_ an archaic reference to the region that is now Iraq.

The”afflictions”come in a time of”wonders”in which U.S. military might has prevented Iraq from obtaining nuclear weapons that could obliterate Israel, said Shilo.

But the really final war _ often described as the war with the evil biblical prince of Gog and the nation of Magog _ is scheduled for Jerusalem, not the Persian Gulf, Shilo contended. “Right now we are in the era of wonders, but the final showdown will be in the era of miracles, when divine intervention alone will save the Jews,”he said. As for the timing, his biblical reckoning places the showdown within the next few years.”In the end, all of the nations will gather on Jerusalem,”said Shilo, referring to a cryptic scenario discussed in the biblical Book of Zechariah.”It seems the Jews will withdraw from half of the city without a battle, because we will be overwhelmed. But the invaders will be stricken by plague, and they will begin to fight one other around the world. God will defend the Jews, culminating in the establishment of a regime of eternal justice and redemption and the revelation of the kingdom of God on Earth.” Christians and Muslims, like their Jewish counterparts, also tend to see the present-day conflict with Iraq as a mere forerunner of the final apocalypse _ which they believe will begin in the northern Galilee locale of Har Megiddo, also known as Armageddon. “I do see things shaping up,”said the Rev. Ed Smeltzer, chaplain at the evangelical International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem and former pastor of Pleasant Valley Evangelical Church in Niles, Ohio.”I see that in Ezekiel 38, the Bible prophesies that the nations like Iraq will have a major ally in a great nation from the north _ which is commonly thought of as Russia. Still, I believe that the battle that may happen now or in the next few weeks is definitely not Armageddon,”he said.”At Armageddon, Israel must stand alone, and God intervenes on her behalf, whereas today, Israel still has a powerful ally in the United States,”he said.

Some Muslim authors also see Armageddon as the site of the start of the final battle between the forces of good and evil. In the Muslim scenario, however, the forces of good are on the side of Islam, while Israel plays the role of”dajjal,”or anti-Christ.

Recent decades have seen a flowering of Islamic literature about end-time scenarios. This literature expresses not only a passionate hatred of Israel and the West, but also a sense of helplessness, and mixes classical Islamic themes and traditions with vividly anti-Semitic descriptions of the bloody destruction of the Jews.


Popular Egyptian writer Said Ayyub, in his book”The Antichrist,”foresees Jews losing to Muslims at Armageddon, after which Muslims will advance upon Jerusalem. Jews will then be”burnt beneath the feet of the prophet of God … trampled under after the dawn,”Ayyub wrote.

Many Muslims expect this final confrontation to happen soon _ some even ascribe meaning to the Christian year 2000.

Yet in the Islamic view of the final conflict, as in the Jewish and Christian views, Saddam Hussein and Iraq play something of an ambivalent role. On the one hand, Hussein has been lauded by Muslims for standing up to the United States and Israel. During Desert Storm in 1991, moreover, Hussein cast himself as a heroic Islamic fighter confronting the decadent West.”Any attack against Iraq is obviously aimed at weakening the Islamic nation in its stand against the Zionist enemy,”said Palestinian Islamic leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, in a recent interview with the English-language Jerusalem Post.

But more mainstream Egyptian Muslim writers have bitterly criticized Hussein for his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds and Iranians, both also being Muslims.

While many of the apocalyptic visions end in a fiery showdown of violence, plague and annihilation, that isn’t always the case.

Palestinian Sheikh Bassam Jirrar, in a popular book called”Disappearance of Israel,”anticipates a confrontation between Muslims and Israel by 2022. But in his view, that will be followed by a largely peaceful conversion to Islam of the world’s Christians and remaining Jews.


Meanwhile, many Orthodox Jews, as do the faith’s more liberal movements, scorn”messianic”aspirations, which they say have often divided _ and nearly destroyed _ the Jewish people. “There has always been a Jewish tradition that there will be tremendous war and upheaval before the messianic age, but many Jews also associate that with the Holocaust and say that it is already past,”said Ritchie, who prefers a softer vision of the future.”I think we are close, God willing, to a messianic age when all mankind will live in brotherhood and peace. Our goal should be to try to avoid another conflict and work toward a messianic age of peace, without going through another apocalypse.”

DEA END FLETCHER

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