Pastoral Bible Institute News

Haunted by want, depleted from hunger, Akhtar Muhammad six weeks ago did something that has become ruefully unremarkable in this desperate country. He took two of his 10 children to the bazaar of the nearest city and traded them for bags of wheat. Gone now from his home are the boys, Sher, 10, and Baz, 5. "What else could I do?" the bereft father asked today in Kangori, a remote hamlet in the mountains of northern Afghanistan. He did not want to seem uncaring. "I miss my sons, but there was nothing to eat," he said, casting a glance sideways to prove that his misery was hardly unusual. In the nearby foothills, enfeebled people were coming back from foraging wild spinach and even blades of grass, a harvest of hideously bitter greenery that can be made edible only if boiled long enough. "For some, there is nothing else," Mr. Muhammad muttered. Afghanistan, cradle of tragedy, is now in its fourth year of drought, and with the drought has come its inevitable offspring, famine. The hungry, spiraling deathward, try to cope in pitiable ways, selling all, eating fodder, wandering away to beg. In Afghanistan, two decades of war have also left it hard to distinguish between the bad times and the worse. Even without famine, more than one in five children die before the age of 5 and the average life expectancy is a mere 44. Traditionally, girls are "sold" for marriage, with the bride's family collecting a price. But what is occurring now is closer to the practice of bonded labor. Arrangements differ but most often the child is exchanged for a continuing supply of cash or wheat.

—New York Times, 3/8/2002

The number of foreign-born residents and children of immigrants in the United States has reached the highest level in history, according to a Census Bureau report released in February. It found that the number had leapt to 56 million from 34 million in the last three decades. Mexico accounted for more than a quarter of all the foreign-born residents, the bureau's analysis of data from its March 2000 Current Population Survey showed. That share is the largest any country has held since the 1890 census, when about 30 percent of the country's foreign-born population was from Germany. While the number of foreign-born residents and their children is higher than ever, their percentage in the population is not. In the 1910 census, that group made up 35 percent of the population, compared with 20 percent in 2000, a spokesman for the Census Bureau said.

—New York Times, 2/7/2002

7% of people [U.S.] who died in 1975 were cremated.
26% of people who died in 2000 were cremated.
49% who die in 2025 (estimated) will be cremated.

—Time, 3/4/2002

Early winter in the United States was pretty much missing in action this year. The three months of November to January were the warmest November through January period on record. The average U.S. temperature over those months was 39.94 degrees-a whopping 4.3 degrees more than the same three-month average in the previous 100 years, according to the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The old record was set only two years ago. More than two-thirds of the U.S. recorded extremely higher-than-normal temperatures for November. "This is one manifestation of global warming," said Kevin Trenberth, head of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

—Philadelphia Inquirer, 2/22/2002

Malaria is the leading killer in many sub-Saharan countries, with children accounting for 90% of the estimated 1.8 million deaths each year. Across the continent public health experts are debating how to replace chloroquine, to which the malaria parasite has become resistant. As the disease's resistance to drugs has increased, deaths from malaria have soared across Africa. The cost of [an effective drug] is prohibitive for most African countries, which rely on international donors for money to buy medicines. Nearly half of Burundi's 6.5 million people contracted the disease in an epidemic that broke out a little more than a year ago, killing thousands of people. In Tanzania malaria accounts for 300,000 deaths a year according to government figures.

—Los Angeles Times, 2/14/2002

Civil

President Olusegun Obasanjo told an anxious nation that rising violence and lawlessness were dangerously undermining its three-year-old democracy. The warning was his direst since Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, emerged from nearly 16 years of military dictatorship in 1999. Speaking after months of rising anarchy and a week of convulsive violence here in the nation's largest city, Mr. Obasanjo said Nigeria appeared "to be steadily losing ground to the suffocating influences of violence and lawlessness in the conduct of our political affairs."

—New York Times, 2/8/2002

The wave of anti-Semitism sweeping through France has triggered mounting concerns about the safety and welfare of Western Europe's largest Jewish community. Though a surge in violent attacks against Jewish schools and synagogues has elicited the usual condemnations from French politicians, it seems that France's government has yet to recognize the seriousness of the problem. Home to the third-largest Jewish community in the Diaspora, France has some 600,000 Jews who span the religious and political spectrum and are outspoken in their support for Israel. According to Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Melchior, there were 320 anti-Semitic attacks in France in 2001.

—Jerusalem Post, 1/20/2002

A research team of U.S. and Brazilian scientists has provided compelling evidence that rates of forest destruction in the Brazilian Amazon have accelerated over the last decade. The team, led by William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, analyzed deforestation estimates produced by Brazil's National Space Agency that were based on detailed satellite images of the Amazon since 1978. Contrary to the claims of the Brazilian government that threats to Amazonian forests have fallen in recent years because of improved environmental laws and public attitudes, the Smithsonian team asserts that rates of deforestation have risen sharply since 1995. "Forest destruction from 1995 to 2000 averaged almost two million hectares a year," said Laurance. Although new environmental laws in Brazil are designed to slow forest loss, the research team claims that most laws are rarely enforced. That, in concert with a rapidly growing population and dramatically expanding logging and mining industries, means that threats to Amazonian forests are growing.

—Smithsonian Institution, 1/15/2002

Afghanistan may have been a failed state, but it was a state that Somalis could gaze upon with envy. Somalia is so fractured that the nominal government controls less than half its capital city and some coastal strips. The north has two breakaway states, and in the rest 30 clans with overlapping borders go to war over land, cattle raids and blood feuds. With no central bank to object, businessmen have privately printed billions in the national currency, the shilling, rendering it almost worthless. The country's biggest exports, beef and camel meat, were banned 14 months ago for fear of Rift Valley fever, which can be fatal to humans. And in 12 years of civil war, warlords have shelled or looted everything. In Mogadishu, the nominal capital, AK-47's are everywhere and hotel taxis are trailed by trucks full of hired gunmen to protect guests from unemployed gunmen seeking kidnapping victims. On the coast, pirates attack Red Sea shipping. The languid coastal boulevards are awash with garbage and sand.

—New York Times, 2/10/2002

Financial

Israel and China signed a $180 million contract under which Israel Aircraft Industries will sell China two communications satellites. The satellites will assist in the broadcast of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Government officials said that the agreement is a sign of positive relations between the two countries.

—Arutz 7, 01/17/2002

Boll weevils, once a leading pest for farmers in the U.S. cotton belt, is on the way to being eliminated in the country, a government report said. Osama El- Lissy and Bill Grefenstette of the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service said in a joint report to the annual Beltwide Cotton conference that a large chunk of the cotton belt stretching from Georgia to California had virtually eradicated the pest. El-Lissy said 33 percent of cotton-growing states have completed elimination of the boll weevil and some 65 percent "are nearing eradication."

—Reuters, 1/12/2002

Water will be to the 21st century what oil was to the last-controlling it will make vast fortunes and nations will go to war to preserve access to it. In a world in which fresh water is increasingly scarce, that axiom is being taken to heart in the boardrooms of some of the globe's most powerful corporations. In nearly every corner of the planet, international water conglomerates are vying to sign operating contracts, make deals, buy rights and acquire local water supply and treatment companies. It's a worldwide water rush. Given that less than 1 percent of the Earth's water is drinkable, the corporate betting is that the price of water can only go up. Fresh water is a finite resource for which there is no substitute. Estimates of the value of the global market for water range from $300 billion to $800 billion. About 86 percent of the municipal water in the United States is delivered by public utilities, while 85 percent of French customers already get their water through privately owned or operated water utilities. In the United Kingdom, nearly all the water services have been privatized for more than a decade. Private water companies contend they can provide water services more cheaply and efficiently than governments or public utilities. Their services will be essential if the world hopes to stave off the impending global fresh-water crisis that is forecast to occur as water scarce regions scramble to find new supplies for a growing population.

—Scripps Howard News Service, 1/1/2002

Israel

There are 137,000 Christians in Israel's population, compared to 120,000 in 1995, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) reported. The total population of Israel is nearly 6.5 million. Israel is often blamed for the considerable drop in the Christian population in the West Bank and Gaza, yet while their numbers drop in the PA areas, they have increased in Israel. The report said that about 115,000 of the Christians are Arabs, while the remainder are immigrants who mostly arrived with Jewish relatives, either from Poland and Romania in the 1970s and '80s or from the former Soviet Union during the past decade. The figures do not show the expatriate Christian numbers who are not Israeli citizens and work in Christian organizations in Israel. In 1949, according to CBS figures, there were 34,000 Christians in Israel; in 1961, the first census year, 51,000. In the 1995 census, the first which differentiated between Arab Christians and other Christians, there were 101,000 Arab Christians.

—Jerusalem Post, 12/31/2001

A new publication by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics shows that 850,000 people made aliyah (immigration) from the former Soviet Union during the 1990s. Haifa absorbed more new immigrants than any other city with 58,000, followed by Ashdod with 55,000 and Beersheva with 47,000. Immigrants from the former Soviet Union now account for 13 percent of Israel's population. A third came from Russia and a third from the Ukraine. Almost 60 percent have higher education, compared with 40 percent of the general Jewish population.

—Central Bureau of Statistics, February 2002

The cornerstone of Israel's first desalination plant was placed in Ashkelon on February 12, during a festive ceremony presided over by National Infrastructures Minister Avigdor Lieberman. The installation is slated to produce 50 million cubic meters of water annually within 2-3 years, or the equivalent of 30 centimeters of height in Israel's main reservoir, the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee). The Kinneret falls roughly a centimeter a day during the summer, and rises about that much or more, each day during the winter. The Ashkelon plant will also provide some 1,000 jobs. Minister Lieberman said that within 5-6 years, Israel is expected to produce some 500 million cubic meters of water annually.

—Arutz 7, 2/12/2002

The number of unemployed Israelis surged to 9.9% of the civilian work force at the end of November, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics reported. Over 250,000 Israelis are out of work and government officials expect this number to rise. "This is one of the toughest periods our nation has been going through," labor and Social Affairs Minister Shlomo Benizri said. "With the exception of 1997, which was an abnormal year for unemployment statistics, 2001 saw the highest rise in unemployment figures ever," he said. Economic policymakers are particularly worried about the 29% increase in jobseekers since the start of January 2001. "The main problem we are dealing with right now is reducing our dependence on foreign workers," Benizri said, noting that the proportion of foreign laborers has reached 10% of the local civilian work force.

—Jerusalem Post, 1/17/2002

Book Review

Philistine: The Great Deception, Ramon Bennett, Shekinah Books, Citrus Heights, California, 1995, 344 pages.

Bennett writes with passion hurling forth quote upon quote from his seemingly bottomless file of news clippings. These clippings chronicle the current unremitting pain, misery, suffering and pathos of the holy land, and he is right about many things:

• Islam arose in the seventh century of the Christian era and with blinding speed its sword cut a wide swath across the ailing Roman and Parthian empires of the Middle East, Levant, North Africa, Persia, and Bactria to become a major world religion.

• Islam adheres to belief in Muhammed as God's prophet and the Quran as God's final revelation to man before the Day of Judgment.

• Islam claims authority to sweep aside both the Old and New Testament based on the belief that the Arabs are victims of a conspiracy to keep their branch of Abraham's family—Ishmael's branch— from receiving their proper recognition as Faithful adherents to Abraham's God.

• Yassir Arafat was born and bred to live by the sword with a Nazi-inspired hatred of the Jews and the morality of a pirate. Arafat holds little in common with Saladin, an earlier Islamic protagonist for Jerusalem who even the crusaders grew to respect.

The work has the appearance of some scholarship and value. However, the reader is strongly cautioned against unreflective deep drinking from this heady brew. The cause of Christ is little served by taking the sad state of culture offered up by the current crop of Islamic fundamentalists, terrorists, and suicide bombers and making things even worse by repeating every innuendo and half-truth that spills into the popular press. Scripture provides a warning against the baneful and corrupting influence on us from repeating half-truths and lies; even Michael the archangel when contending with the devil, "durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee" (Jude 9,10).

Dubious scholarship permeates Bennett's book. Equating the name of "Allah" with "the [Arabian] moon god" (p.46-47) is as meaningful as equating Jehovah's title of "Baal" (Hosea 2:16) with the worship of the Canaanite deity "Baal." Moslems in places as far away as Nigeria have ridiculed such ideas. The Hebrew Elowahh (Strongs #433) is recognized as cognate with Arabian "ilah" by the Gesenius Hebrew Lexicon. "Allah" is a contraction for "Al-ilah," meaning "The God."

In another example, statistics do not support that there is an "extremely high rate of homosexuality among Arab males" (p. 33). This is inconsistent with current World Health Organization statistics for AIDS sufferers that report infections among 0.2% of the male population in the Middle East, much less than the 0.6% in the U.S.

Ultimately, we must agree that God will judge and bring to destruction both Islam and every false system of worship. However, there is little of value in this unsavory work by Bennett to warrant its recognition and respect among the Lord's people, and under no circumstances should Bennett be offered as a primer on the Middle East or Islam.

—Richard Doctor