News and Views PBI News Date of Annual PBI Meeting The annual meeting of PBI Members and
Directors will be held on Friday, July 18, at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown,
Pennsylvania. The General Convention of Bible Students will begin on Saturday, July 19, at
the same location and end the evening of July 24. Those who are interested in the Pastoral
Bible Institute, whether members or not, are encouraged to attend this meeting. Contact
the Institute's secretary for details concerning accommodations. New Booklet We are pleased to announce a small book What
Everyone Should Know About Being Saved, produced by our Bible Student friends in
Oakland County [Michigan]. It contains a thorough presentation of this important doctrine
and concludes that just saying the right words is not enough. Order it by filling out the
form on the back of the insert found in each issue of this magazine sent to subscribers.
Alternatively the text may be downloaded from our web site at www.heraldmag.org.
Click on “Bookstore.” It is the last title in the list. World News Religious Touched off by the plan to have the Miss
World contest in Nigeria, more than 200 people were killed in riots. In the last three
years, more than 10,000 lives have been lost in conflicts there between Christians and
Muslims. Fundamental shifts are taking place in Nigeria, the fifth largest supplier of oil
to the U.S. and home to Africa's largest population. Nigeria is almost evenly split
between Muslims, mostly in the North, and non-Muslims. After one of the most brutal and
corrupt military regimes in Nigerian history came to an end in 1999, the country elected
Olusegun Obasanjo president. His election was seen as a new era in Nigeria. However, he
has been unable to manage the growing tensions within the country. Once awash in oil
earnings, corruption has robbed the country blind. Nigerian per capita GNP has declined
from $750 in 1982 to less than $250 today. Foreign debt stands at $30 billion. State
governors in the North have been
introducing Islam sharia criminal law. The historic fault line between Islam and
Christianity has shifted and become more fluid, more dangerous. American evangelical
organizations who funnel money to Nigerian Christian radio stations are seen as
contributing to what is one of the most explosive factors in religious
tension—proselytization. —Wall Street
Journal, 11/27/2002 Cardinal Bernard F. Law, whose credibility
and stewardship as archbishop
of Boston were irrevocably damaged by how he handled the clergy sex abuse crisis,
became the highest-ranking American Catholic leader to lose his job because of scandal.
Now that the scandal has resulted in the downfall of the nation's senior prelate, the
American bishops recognize that the crisis in the church may only grow as laypeople and
priests, lawyers and judges, see the power they can have. Church experts say they cannot
recall another instance in which a bishop resigned after a virtual revolt from his
parishioners and his priests. Five other bishops, former associates of Cardinal Law who
once worked in Boston and were eventually promoted, have now been subpoenaed to testify by
a grand jury in Massachusetts. “I think we're seeing just the beginning of serious
interest by the government in criminal investigations,” said Seth Taube, a lawyer who
has defended the church in the abuse claims. Grand juries are investigating the church in
at least nine states. —New York Times,
12/15/2002 Tighter security around churches in
Pakistan has failed to prevent a fatal attack at a Christmas Day service. Three
worshippers were killed and up to eight more injured when masked men threw hand grenades
into a Presbyterian Church in a village in Pakistan's central Punjab province. A Pakistan
Interior ministry spokesman called it an act of terrorism. News of the attack came despite
greater efforts to protect Christians in Pakistan. This year around 50 people have been
killed in attacks on western, or Christian targets in Pakistan. —ABC Radio
Australia News, 12/26/2002 Approximately 142,000 Christians live in
Israel, or 2.1 percent of the general population, the Central Bureau of Statistics
announced. Approximately 81% are Christian Arabs. The rest immigrated to Israel under the
Law of Return. A few thousand arrived during the waves of Aliyah in the Seventies and
Eighties from Romania and Poland. Most arrived in the wave of Aliyah in the Nineties from
the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. —Jerusalem Post,
12/25/2002 The Book of Mormon, made public by Joseph
Smith in 1830, is taken literally by the faithful. It teaches, among other things, that
many American Indians are descendants of ancient Israelites who came to this continent 600
years before Christ—a time period within the reach of modern archeology and genetics.
Anthropologist Thomas W. Murphy set out to test that key principle of his Mormon faith
with the latest technology. He wondered: Would DNA analysis show that many American
Indians are descended from ancient Israelites? His finding: negative. The result:
excommunication—if a church disciplinary panel finds him guilty of apostasy. The
church hierarchy has repeatedly warred with historians, anthropologists and others who
have questioned its doctrines. Murphy appears to be the first member of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to face expulsion for genetic research. —Los Angeles
Times, 12/8/2002 [In fact the disciplinary
hearing was indefinitely postponed. The next day a church spokesman said it
was “best not to proceed at this time” against Thomas Murphy.] Social Thieves are stealing water from rivers and
public waterways and selling the precious liquid to hard-up Australian farmers struggling
against one of the worst droughts in a century. Queensland state Natural Resources
Minister Stephen Robertson said his department was investigating 146 complaints and would
prosecute anybody found to be taking more water than they are allowed to or anyone
profiting from the hardship of farmers. The farmlands of this vast food exporting nation
have been devastated by a severe drought that has halved the winter wheat crop since it
took root in March and now threatens to prevent planting of the summer sorghum crop.
Exacerbated by a return of the periodic El Niņo weather event, which every few years
brings reduced rainfall to eastern Australia and downpours to western South America,
weather forecasters say the drought is likely to last through into 2003. —Reuters,
11/26/2002 Ice in the Arctic Ocean and on Greenland's
massive icecap shrank to record levels this summer, providing more evidence that global
warming is causing unprecedented environmental change that is alarming seasoned climate
watchers. The dramatic loss of ice in the Arctic Ocean and Greenland, coupled with
other new work showing the rise of trees and shrubs across once-barren Arctic tundra
lands, “presents a compelling case that something is changing very rapidly over a
wide area,” said Larry Hinzman, an expert in Arctic change at the University of
Alaska at Fairbanks. —Los Angeles
Times, 12/8/2002 Civil The Yongbyon Nuclear Center, the focus of
an escalating confrontation between North Korea and the United States, is one of the most
guarded places in one of the world's most isolated countries. North Korea says the complex
was built to generate badly needed electricity. U.S. officials say the site is a nuclear
weapons facility with a peaceful cover, and a tool of nuclear blackmail. Nuclear activity
began at Yongbyon in 1965 when the former Soviet Union helped build a tiny research
reactor there. Russian and U.S.
satellite photographs show the site since has grown steadily into a 10-square mile
complex. The site now includes a 5-megawatt reactor and an unfinished 50-megawatt reactor,
facilities for fuel manufacture and waste storage, and a radio-chemical laboratory that
can reprocess spent fuel rods to extract plutonium, a material used to build bombs. North
Korea says it will restart the 192-yard-long laboratory to store spent fuel rods from
reactors. It plans to resume construction on the unfinished 50-megawatt reactor west of
Yongbyon. —Associated
Press, 12/30/2002 Ethiopia faces a famine two to three times
as bad as the food shortages of the 1980s, which prompted an international relief
effort, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said. Six million people already need food aid and the
number may rise to 15 million early next year if international donors don’t come to
the country's assistance, said Meles, speaking on BBC Radio. “It's like going through
recurring nightmares. In the disaster we had in 1984-85, the number of people involved was
roughly a third to half the people involved now. The Ethiopian government is already
barely able to keep its people alive, let alone supply adequate food, and can't afford to
buy extra stocks,” Meles said. “There is no possibility for us to deal with this
problem. Even if we had the food available in the domestic market, the government doesn't
have the money to buy surplus food for distribution.” —Bloomberg News,
11/11/2002 Lawlessness
has plagued Indonesia since 1998 when the military dictatorship of President
Suharto collapsed. Despite Indonesians’ desire for democracy, disorder has reigned.
The country of 231 million people has suffered from chronic corruption, feeble leadership,
and ineffective law enforcement. The military finances most of its activities through
a business empire that operates inside and outside the law. Its enterprises
include hotels, oil refineries, and insurance. They also include drug dealing, gambling,
prostitution and illegal logging. The police, independent of the military only in recent
years, are widely perceived to be as corrupt as the army. In the courts, justice is for
sale. ... Indonesia has the world's highest Muslim population. —Los Angeles
Times, 12/10/2002 Financial Ronald Noble, the American who heads
Interpol, recently said that
al-Qaida is unscathed by the U.S.-led war on terror's finances. Al-Quaida gets
between $20 million and $50 million a year, according to a June 2002 study by University
of Linz professor Friedrich Schneider. His study outlines sources of terror money for 25
groups, including al-Qaida: Transporting drugs, 30-35%; donations from governments,
wealthy individuals or religious groups, 25-30%; crime, 10-15%; illegal diamond trading,
10-15%, miscellaneous, 5-25%. Editor of the Malaysia-based World Money Laundering Report,
Nigel Morris-Cotterill, says, “Terrorists can do business in anything with tradable
value. The U.S. has not accepted that a boatload of light bulbs is money. If they're
exchanged for weapons, the arms merchant can sell them.” In August 2002, a U.N. panel
said al-Qaida is flush with money from charities and businesses. Rachel Ehrenfeld of the
Center for the Study of Corruption and the Rule of Law found that “Saudi Arabia
is a major source of terror funding. The Saudis have been using the money we pay for their
oil to fund international terrorism.” —Investors’
Business Daily, 11/26/2002 Major U.S. stock indexes fell in 2002,
their third straight calendar year decline. The last time the market dropped for three
consecutive years was 1939-41, during the early years of World War II. The market fell
four straight years in 1929-32 at the start of the Great Depression. —Los Angeles
Times, 1/1/2003 As the world economy struggles to exit a
downturn, the prospect of a sustained rise in oil prices is coming at the worst possible
time for some of the least resilient regions, threatening to crimp already fragile growth.
Fears of military conflict in Iraq and a waning supply of oil to the United States from
Venezuela have pushed the price of a barrel of crude to around $30—up more than 40
percent from a year ago. Barring an unforeseen and peaceful resolution of the standoff
over Iraq, most analysts expect prices to remain above the range of $22 to $28 a barrel
favored by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for at least the next few
months. In Asia, higher oil prices would sting Japan, which imports all of its oil, at a
time when policymakers are struggling to dig the economy out from a long recession and to
eliminate a mountain of bad debt at the nation’s banks. —International
Herald Tribune, 1/3/2003 Israel
2,792
People killed in the 9/11/2001 World Trade Center attacks. Over 400
Israelis who died in terrorist attacks in 2002. —TIME, 12/31/2002 Palestinian TV is broadcasting a series of
documentaries with one single objective: to disprove the “myth” that any Jewish
Temple ever stood in Jerusalem, and to present any historical reference to that claim as
an act of deception. The message is that the Jews have no business in the Holy City. The
inevitable conclusion is that significant numbers, though by no means all, of the young
generation of Arab artists, a stratum that usually represents liberal trends and openness,
have volunteered their services to sharpen and stylize the message; that up until now has
been promoted by fundamentalist movements such as Hamas. The essence of the message is
that there is no possibility of making peace with the Jews—not because of any
political argument or clash over territory, but because that nation is a priori
unfit to be counted among the human race. The Jewish religion is one big, ongoing lie, and
Jewish history is the fruit of a consistent distortion of the past. Furthermore, the
Jewish people present a future threat to the rest of the world. Where is this campaign
leading? It is a far-reaching, dangerous rationale laying the ground for the
justification of a mass exile of Jews from Israel—”ethnic cleansing” in
contemporary terms. —The Jerusalem
Report, 12/16/2002 Suicide bombing is more than a
particularly vicious method of killing. Suicide bombing is a best effort to produce a
Final Solution. The suicide bombers of September 11, emulating their Nazi role models,
even created a makeshift oven to incinerate 3,000 people. If they could have killed
100,000 or 1 million, they would have done so gladly. The same is true of all suicide
bombers, particularly those who daily attack Israelis. Suicide bombers kill and maim
dozens at a time, with but one regret: that their victims are so few. What they truly
strive to bring about is a Holocaust. They come as close to that end as their means will
allow. —Editorial by
Steven Zak, Evidence is growing that a British boycott
of Israeli academics is gathering pace. British academics have delivered a series of snubs
to their Israeli counterparts since the idea of a boycott first gained ground in the
spring. In interviews with the Guardian, British and Israeli academics listed various
incidents in which visits, research projects and publication of articles have been
blocked. Colin Blakemore, an Oxford University professor of physiology, who supports a
boycott, said: “I do not know of any British academic who has been to a conference in
Israel in the last six months.” The issue of a boycott was highlighted in the
spring when two British academics, Steven and Hilary Rose, had a letter published in the
Guardian supporting the idea. It was signed by 123 other academics. —The Guardian,
12/12/2002 The Simon Wiesenthal Center has been
invited to jointly sponsor an international conference on the recent upsurge of
anti-Semitism. The conference will be held in May at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. “Not since the
end of the Second World War has there been such a campaign of vilification directed
against Israel and her supporters worldwide,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean of the
Center. —Arutz 7,
12/22/2002 New archaeological findings from the Bar
Kokhba period, over 1,850 years ago, were discovered in a cave in the Ein Gedi Nature
Preserve just west of the Dead Sea. Two documents written on papyrus, coins, and even
remnants of fruits were among the artifacts found in hard-to-reach caves atop mountain
cliffs—the destination of choice for many Jewish refugees from the Romans at the
time. The documents are now in the Israel Museum, where they must be carefully opened and
analyzed. Dr. Tzvika Tzuk, Chief Archaeologist of the Nature and Park Authority, said that
the caves served as refuge for the fleeing Jews, “as indicated by what we found
there, especially the coins on which we found the name Shimon, who was the leader of the
rebellion at the time.” —Arutz 7,
11/20/2002 The Israeli government is weighing whether
to allow a team of Jordanian engineers to repair a worrisome bulge along the southern wall
of Jerusalem's Temple Mount. The Jordanians made a series of recommendations in November
following their inspection of the bulge. The Jordanian team recommends dismantling some
1,500 square feet of wall at the center of the bulge, reinforcing the area with new
building materials, and then recovering the area with stone. The decision to allow the
inspection ended a year-long standoff between Israel, which has nominal control over the
Temple Mount, and the Waqf, the Muslim religious trust that has de facto
control over the Temple Mount esplanade, home of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa
mosque. Neither party would allow the other to make needed repairs to the bulge for fear
of seeming to relinquish control over the Mount. Jordan, which ruled the Old City of
Jerusalem until the war of 1967, was a compromise. Just as Israel and the Waqf could not
agree on who should repair the bulge, neither did they agree on the cause of the bulge.
The Waqf blamed Israeli excavations outside the southern wall carried out in the decades
after the 1967 war. A more likely cause, however, as many Israeli archaeologists have
claimed, is the extensive construction work undertaken by the Waqf in recent years in the
southeast quadrant of the Temple Mount in connection with a large-scale expansion of an
underground mosque in the area. —Biblical
Archaeology Review, January/February 2003 |