Tag Archives: kingdom of darkness

Munich Massacre Widow Still Seeks Justice

Iconic news photo one one of the Munich hostage-takers

In the summer of 1972, I was living in a dormitory at the University of Arizona, taking Organic Chemistry in summer school. That was five days of lecture and three days of labs, each of them three-hours long. The labs required a full written report for each session as well. It was a lot of work, and I had no job. Also no money… that was the summer I counted out pennies for a taco at Taco Bell, though mostly I lived on oatmeal, green grapes and “cup custard” sandwich cookies… I lost a good deal of weight, but at the end of three months I started getting sick all the time and went back to a more nutritious diet.

Clearly I had little time for radio, newspapers or TV, yet even I managed to hear about the massacre of the entire Israeli Olympic team at the Munich Olympic Games that summer.

During the Games’ second week, PLO terrorists sneaked into the Israeli dormitory one night around 4am, killed two of the Israeli team right there, took the other 9 hostage and in the end killed them all.

The movie Munich with Eric Bana is based on this event, focusing on the actions of Israel’s Mossad to bring the criminals to justice… or to exact retribution, however you wish to look at it. I think they accomplished both. (It’s a good movie; I recommend it)

Recently The Times of Israel ran an article on Ankie Spitzer, wife of slain Israeli fencing master and Olympic team coach Andre Spitzer. For decades she’s been trying to get the Olympic authorities to commemorate her husband and the other murdered athletes within the framework of the Olympic Games themselves.

Why at the Games? Because all the victims were Olympic athletes or coaches, and all were attending the Olympic games when they were killed. The International Olympic Committee has allowed official commemorations for all sorts of other tragedies, some of which had nothing to do with the games or the athletes, so remembering the Israeli deaths seems entirely appropriate.

She’s been at it for 40 years, stymied by the committee’s fear of alienating Arab nations who have threatened to boycott the Olympics should there be any such official remembrance of the slain Israelis. This from the representatives of the so-called Religion of Peace. And in the context of an event that supposedly celebrates “Man is Wonderful! Lets All Just Get Along!”

Except for the Jews, it would seem.

Here are a couple of quotes:

 The International Olympic Committee, while promoting peace and fraternity, also has a history of honoring the despicable. In 1936, some 11 months after the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, the committee allowed Hitler to host the Olympics in Berlin. In the 1980s, the committee bestowed its highest honor, the Olympic Order, on Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania and Erich Honecker of East Germany. In the 1990s, the committee welcomed Saddam Hussein’s psychopathic son, Uday, as the head of Iraq’s National Olympic Committee even though it was well-known that he regularly tortured and killed athletes who underperformed during the Games.

And,

 “They are a corrupt organization, led by greed rather than the Olympic spirit,” said Spitzer, noting that a great deal of funding comes from the oil-rich gulf states.

The whole situation illustrates one of the major fronts in the unseen spiritual war around us — which is the fact that the kingdom of darkness HATES Israel. It will do anything it can to destroy the Jews, being God’s people, the nation and race to whom He has promised a messiah and human king who will rule over them  personally on this earth during the Millennium.

If Satan can wipe them out, then God will no longer be able to keep His promises to them…not only that they’ll have a special part in the Millennial kingdom, whose king is directly from the line of David, but that He will preserve them as a nation until that time. If He can’t keep His promises then He is proved weak, unjust, misguided, unrighteous, untruthful, in short, not God.

This Times of Israel article provides a good outline of events seen from Ankie’s perspective and is well worth your time. Read it HERE.

For further information check out Wikipedia’s article on the Munich massacres as well. You can find that HERE.

Update: And now that the 2012 Olympics have begun, with this year’s opening ceremonies including a moment of silence for Britain’s victims of Islamic terrorism in the London bombings which occurred the day after London was selected to host these very games, the Olympic committee’s refusal to hold a moment of silence commemorating the murdered Israeli athletes only confirms their hypocrisy.  You can watch the memorial  production for the Londoners — one NBC chose not to air Friday night HERE.

Greater is He Who is In Me

So Monday I was reading in my old journal as part of my pre writing routine and found this, dated 25 November 2000…

“Just getting started. I’ve again wasted the morning and I suppose I need to stop blaming my circumstances… [My husband]’s gone hunting and [my son]’s playing computer games before getting read to go to his friend’s… maybe… I find myself just waiting, feeling like a leaf blown here and there — no goal, no target, just whatever moves me. Not good.

“Anyway, even now I need to do Bible class, I don’t know when my hubby will be back, I want to start (writing) but I don’t want to if I’ll just have to quit. Plus I still haven’t developed any momentum. I feel detached from the work. It’s like when you read a book in small increments over weeks. It’s hard to bring it all together in your mind. Right now I can hardly remember where I am (in the book).”

Well, that’s exactly where I’ve been for way too long in this current work. I could’ve written those words on Monday (or today, for that matter) and was excited to copy them into my current journal (don’t ask me why but I like copying things down into notebooks and journals — I guess it makes the thoughts stand out more; and I think I hope it will make they stick in my mind though clearly, that’s not often the case the way I keep getting surprised by things I’ve written down in the past that could describe today.)

Anyway, as I copied it, I recalled how Satan will send distractions — and it seems there have been a lot of hindrances, distractions and interruptions of late… come to think of it, not just of late, but for a really long time. Some are big and obvious, some are small, some are things that get me sidetracked and focused on stuff that may not be what I’m supposed to be doing but I’m so caught up in the moment, or the focus of “getting it done” I don’t think about that. (At least not clearly enough to STOP what I’m doing and get to work).

And he sends more than just distractions. At this point  I recalled a little excerpt from notes from Bible Class  I’ve got tacked to my bulletin board where I can see it every day, if only I’d look (one I’ve probably posted here before, but obviously it doesn’t hurt to be reminded):

“Satan knows how to attack your mind, body and emotion(!!) and his intent is to STOP you from going forward in God’s Plan for your life. That could mean the intake of doctrine, the application of doctrine, and specifically the function of your spiritual gift (!!) If we saw the invisible realm, we’d be shocked at the plots to disrupt concentration, cause problems and get us to quit. To rip apart our mental attitude and get us sidetracked with something that doesn’t matter. He destroys patterns and routines. He loves to tear the mind apart with negative viewpoint. He attacks the emotions, gets you to react, beats you down. And he’ll attack your body…”

I had forgotten much of this but as I read it, it all jumped to the fore. I’ve been experiencing a lot of this. Even the attack on my body in the form of sleep deprivation… Could this be a reason I seem to have been stymied at every attempt to get back to writing?

And lately it seems almost worse to get in a day or two and then be interrupted for five, then not to do anything at all. Why? Two reasons.

First, because the days I do get some work done make me think that the interruptions are just anomalies, happenstance. That today was just an aberration, but tomorrow it will be back to the “routine”. Then I let my guard down and when tomorrow doesn’t work out either, I give up and just let things go and days go by… filled with legitimate activities — it’s not like I’m sitting around watching old movies. I’m getting stuff done, I’m doing good things, worthwhile things… just not functioning in what I believe to be my spiritual gift.

Second, because when I only get in a day or two and then get interrupted for five, and come back, I have to start all over and when you keep repeating that cycle, you really do get worn down. I never make any progress so when I finally get back to it, I start to dread a repeat of what’s happened so many times before. I also get bored with the work, since I keep going over and over the same stuff and never breaking out of it.

I confess I’ve been waiting for circumstances to change, to “settle down.” Today, right now I believe they are not going to settle down. I’ve realized this is just like the decisions you have to make when you embark on making sure you listen to Bible class every day. As soon as you do, all kinds of challenges come up. And if you give in to them, each time you fail to do the class, it gets easier the next time.

I know this sequence well. I’ve been very hard-nosed about making sure I get class in every day. I think it’s time to apply that (once again) to writing — though it makes me uneasy to declare it so clearly here on the blog because now the enemy will know what I intend. And adjust accordingly.

Fortunately greater is He who is in me than he who is in the world.

The Adjustment Bureau

Last Friday we watched the new Matt Damon movie, The Adjustment Bureau, which I thought was going to be much more like Inception than it turned out to be.

Briefly, David Norris (Damon) is on track to become New York’s youngest senator, when he has a chance meeting with the woman of his dreams. As he seeks to find her again, he discovers the Adjustment Bureau, a behind the scenes organization of non-human operatives who keep track of everyone — making sure they all proceed in accordance with their “Chairman’s” plan.  Unfortunately for Norris, the Chairman’s plan doesn’t include him and the mystery woman ever getting together and the story is about how he fights that plan in going after her, essentially attempting to write his own destiny. Ultimately this is the “message” the film leaves us with: that we must fight for what we want to do, to achieve our own destiny in order to really be free.

At least… I think that’s what the message was.

At first it seems that this is a movie about destiny, about God’s plan for our lives, about how unseen agents are moving and shaping us along the tracks we’re supposed to follow. The AB guys have a book which they consult to keep them on track with respect to the actions their charges take — whether such actions are part of the plan or not. And there is that Chairman up there (at the top of a New York skyscraper apparently), who has many names, one of which is “God”.  There are special doors that lead into another world and back to ours, and the caseworkers have special powers that enable them to manipulate the environment of their charges, all of which could be taken for angelic ministers, shepherding us on our way.

Except of course… Jesus doesn’t figure into any of this. His name is only mentioned in the usual way it’s mentioned in Hollywood movies…as an expletive. And the Plan changes each time someone does something outside it, so that the agents are constantly playing catch up, trying to “clean up this mess,” and get things back on the track they’re supposed to be on. Not exactly the way God does things.

So, on the one hand, it’s cool that the film is going to cause some people to think about God and His plan, about free will, about their decisions, etc… But on the other, it’s annoying that they make God and his agents so inept. And weird because it when you get down to it, the movie’s set up and even resolution really implies we have no free will at all — only what the agents allow us to have. Like unwitting cattle we are moved about as they desire, oblivious to their manipulation. The exceptions are a few, stubborn, passionate individuals  (like Norris) who manage to break out of the track that has been laid for them and follow their own plan…

Ick.

We’ve spent the last month studying the Divine Decrees in Bible Class. Thinking about God’s awesome power. Reflecting on how He knew simultaneously all the plans there ever could be and all their courses, successions, outworkings in every detail. Every detail. He knows every decision every one of us has ever made and ever will, and every decision we would have made, had circumstances been different. And out of all of those options, He chose the best, the one that will provide our highest blessing and His glory. It buries the Keystone Cops stuff that’s put forth in The Adjustment Bureau.

Moreover, as I said, the real plan all hinges on Jesus: “What do you think of the Christ? Whose son is He?”

God has shut all of us up in sin so He can have mercy on us all. And His mercy is the fact that He sent His son to die for the sins of every one of us, believers and unbelievers alike. All we have to do is choose to believe. Or to reject. In the end those who have rejected Christ, the only sin He couldn’t die for, will stand before the Great White Throne and give an account for why they rejected the work of Christ, and provide whatever they think they have to offer God that could possibly compare with what He’s done.

Of course none of that was in the movie.

Because really, the movie wasn’t about God, in my view.  Early on my take in watching it was that the Adjustment Bureau couldn’t be God’s organization — there was no grace, for one. No, I think it’s a great illustration of Satan’s organization.  The Adjustment Bureau is the kingdom of darkness, the rulers and principalities mentioned in Ephesians. The agents going about trying to make sure people don’t find out what God’s plan for their life is, and seeking to impose the plan their Chairman has written. Yes, they are presented in some cases as appealing, nice, trying to be helpful, etc,  even as they have no idea what they’re doing. One is guilt ridden for some of the things he’s had to do to Norris’s parents. And many of them even wonder if what they are doing is right.

But the strength of a counterfeit lies in its closeness of form to the thing it is counterfeiting. And Satan’s many systems always incorporate ministers of light, and deception and confusion.

I cannot imagine any of God’s elect angels  wondering if what they are doing is right. Or feeling guilty. Or going against His directive will. Or any of that.  The agents in the film spend much of the time blundering around. They threaten and intimidate and lie…

But God is not the author of confusion. God is not taken by surprise. He’s not up there going, “Oh no, Norris got off track! I didn’t foresee that! He must not kiss that woman or disaster will ensue! You guys get down there and clean that up!” He’s not up there going, “Oh, gee, I had a plan for you, David Norris, but I see now that your plan is far better than what I came up with and since you are sooo insistent… I’m going to give you what you want.

Paul was insistent. He was going to Jerusalem to see his people and never mind that God told him not to go three times in a row. He was going. So he went. And ended up imprisoned in Rome for years as discipline because of it. Granted, God used that to allow him to witness to the Praetorium Guardsmen he was chained to, and to write half the New Testament, but that only shows how God can take our messes and make blessing out of them, not that we have any business writing our own destinies.