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Friday, March 27, 2015

Scofield

Before his alleged experience of Christian conversion, Scofield had failed as a lawyer, been involved in a political scandal, had been an alcoholic, & defrauded his fellows of their money in a railroad scam, as well as his wife’s mother in a real estate swindle. Of course, what happened after his conversion (the specifics of which are proven to be fabricated, including the time, place & other particularities) is what matters: In that period of his life, he abandoned his wife & 2 daughters, took a mistress, misrepresented his war record to his own benefit, & conferred upon himself an unearned doctorate title. It must be said that showing Scofield to be a scoundrel does not in itself undermine the ideas he promoted. To claim otherwise would be to employ the logical fallacy of ‘argumentum ad hominem’ -- attacking someone’s character rather than engaging their ideas. But because it is impossible to overstate the influence of Scofield on 20th-century Christianity: his heavily-annotated Bible is the standard reference work in virtually all Christian ministries & divinity schools, so considering the impact he has had on Christendom, his life should be examined. The type of person that he was had a major influence on the theology that he taught.

1Tim.3:2-7 – “A bishop then must be blameless, sober, of good behaviour, not given to wine, not greedy of filthy lucre; not covetous; one that ruleth well his own house. Moreover he must have a good report of them which are without.”

“É necessário, pois, que o bispo seja irrepreensível, temperante, sóbrio, ordeiro, não dado ao vinho, moderado, inimigo de contendas, não ganancioso; que governe bem a sua própria casa. Também é necessário que tenha bom testemunho dos que estão de fora.”

Tit.1:7-11 – “For a bishop must be blameless; not self-willed, not given to wine, not given to filthy lucre; a lover of good men, sober, just, holy, temperate; holding fast the faithful Word as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort & to convince the gainsayers. For there are many unruly & vain talkers & deceivers: whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre's sake.”

“É necessário que o bispo seja irrepreensível, não soberbo, nem dado ao vinho, nem cobiçoso de torpe ganância; amigo do bem, sóbrio, justo, piedoso, temperante; retendo firme a Palavra fiel, que é conforme a doutrina, para que seja poderoso tanto para exortar na sã doutrina como para convencer os contradizentes. Porque há muitos insubordinados, faladores vãos e enganadores, aos quais é preciso tapar a boca; porque transtornam casas inteiras, ensinando o que não convém, por torpe ganância.”

Cyrus Scofield was born 19 August 1843 near Detroit, Michigan. His family was nominally Episcopalian. His mother died 3 months after his birth, & his father twice remarried during Cyrus' minority. In 1861 Scofield was living in Tennessee, & at the beginning of the American Civil War, the 17-year-old enlisted in the Confederate Army. In 1862, after spending a month in a hospital, Scofield successfully petitioned for a discharge. He then returned to Tennessee, & was conscripted into Southern military, so he deserted & escaped behind Union lines. In 1873 he worked for the election of (Jewish) John J. Ingalls as Senator from Kansas, & when Ingalls won, the new Senator then pulled strings to get Scofield appointed Federal District Attorney for Kansas. That same year Scofield was forced to resign under a cloud of scandal because of questionable financial transactions, including accepting bribes from railroads, stealing political contributions intended for Ingalls, & securing bank promissory notes by forging signatures. While in prison for his scams, Scofield began studying the philosophy of John Darby, leader of the Plymouth Brethren movement & the “any moment now” Rapture doctrine. Upon his release, & perhaps in part because of his heavy drinking, Scofield then abandoned his wife & children, & he took as his mistress a young girl from a Mission in St. Louis. He later dumped her for another woman, whom he eventually married.

During the early 1890s, Scofield began styling himself “Rev. C.I. Scofield, D.D.”; but there are no records of any academic institution having granted him the Doctor of Divinity degree. In 1895, Scofield attempted to take over Moody’s Northfield Bible Training School. Later, Scofield left the Congregational Church to become a Presbyterian. His relationships with his children by his second wife were distant at best. Scofield provided deliberately inaccurate personal information to Who's Who & to his official biographer, & was not above distorting the facts. The title page of his famous annotated 1909 Bible, with introductory essays to its books & sections, & extensive footnotes interpreting the text according to a presupposed scheme, & a system of marginal cross references, lists 7 "consulting editors" -- but apparently this was just a ruse to get more support. Royalties from the work were substantial, & Scofield bought real estate in 3 states.

Following his Illuminati connections to NY, he settled in at the Lotus Club, where that he was taken under the wing of Samuel Untermeyer, Chairman of the American Jewish Committee. Untermeyer introduced Scofield to numerous Zionist leaders, including Samuel Gompers (labor syndicate founder), Fiorello LaGuardia (Congressman, 3x mayor of NYC; grandmother a Kabbalist), Isidor Straus (a Rothschild partner, eventual owner of Macy’s), Bernard Baruch (“advisor” to Presidents Wilson & FDR, major Wall St financer, Chairman of the War Industries Board) & Jacob Schiff (spent $20,000,000 for the triumph of Communism). These behind-the-scenes handlers were the people who financed Scofield's “research” trips to Europe & arranged the publication & distribution of his Bible, & also saw to it that his swindles & schemes were swept under the rug & that only a positive image of him was promoted, especially an exaggeration of his Biblical knowledge & wisdom. Thirty-third-degree Freemason George Dealey, owner of the Dallas Morning News, contributed greatly to the cause.

The lawyer firm in NYC of which Untermeyer was the leading partner (Messrs. Guggenheim, Untermeyer & Marshall), is still today one of the nation's most prominent & most prosperous law companies. Untermeyer contributed generously to the National Democratic Committee that installed Wilson as President in 1912. He was a “Special Advisor” to the government in the interpretation & enforcement of the income tax law, & participated in preparing the Federal Reserve Bank Law.

One day, Untermeyer told Wilson that he had been hired to bring a breach of promise action against him. Untermeyer informed that his client was willing to accept $40,000 [the equivalent of $975,600 in 2013 dollars] in lieu of commencing the legal process. Untermeyer's supposed client was the former wife of a Professor at Princeton University, from when Wilson taught there. Untermeyer produced a packet of letters from his pocket, written by Wilson to his colleague's wife, which established the adulterous relationship that had existed. Wilson examined them & acknowledged his authorship.

Wilson's former sweetheart had divorced her husband & married again. Her second husband had a grown son in the employ of one of the leading banks in Washington. He explained that this son was in financial trouble & needed $40,000 badly & quickly, as he told the story, to liquidate a pressing liability. Wilson declared that he did not have the money to pay his blackmailer. Untermeyer then offered a solution to the President for his problem.

He volunteered to give the woman the funds out of his own pocket, on the condition that Wilson promise to appoint to the first vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court the nominee of Untermeyer’s choice. Untermeyer retained the love-letters, probably to further threaten him should Wilson step out of line. This deal was to bring to pass a dream close to his heart -- a Talmudist Jew on the Supreme Court. The day soon arrived. Untermeyer named Louis Dembitz Brandeis from Boston for the vacancy, who was immediately appointed by Wilson, & they became unusually intimate friends, Brandeis knowing the circumstances of his appointment. By 1914, Justice Brandeis was the most politically-influential of all Zionists in the U.S.

After the Oct16 agreement concluded between the British War Cabinet & the World Zionist Organization, the Talmudists were hopeful that an international incident would soon occur to justify a declaration of war against Germany by the U.S. Brandeis instructed the President that the 24Mar16 attack by a Nazi submarine on the French S.S. Sussex Channel ferry justified going to war against Germany, so Woodrow “He-kept-us-out-of-the-war” Wilson got Congress to declare hostilities on 7Apr17, as it was given out falsely that 78 Americans had been killed (some were injured, but none died).

This guaranteed the Talmudists that Palestine was to be turned over to them upon the defeat of Germany, as it technically was by the Balfour Declaration, sent 2Nov17 to Baron Walter Rothschild. But very few Jews wanted to leave their homes for a desert, surrounded by Arabs. So when Hitler had been soundly financed by international Jewish bankers, Untermeyer went on radio Aug33 to call for war again on Germany. He had just returned from a world conference of Jews at The Hague, Holland. In the broadcast, he called for a “holy war,” & described the Jews as “the aristocrats of the world.” His organization, known as the “International Boycott on German Goods,” promoted worldwide an intense “Hate Germany” campaign.

Scofield's heresies promoting an earthly Zionist NWO quickly became fashionable among the apostate denominations, especially idolatrized among the Southern Baptists & their heavily Masonic Lodge membership. Rabbis everywhere must be laughing that their Scofield scam has worked out so beautifully.

Germanwings Crash Inquiry Focuses on Pilots’ Silence and Jet’s Fall

By Nicola Clark and Dan Bilefsky, NY Times, March 25, 2015

PARIS—For about 10 minutes on Tuesday morning, the Germanwings jetliner with 150 people on board hurtled downward from relatively clear skies above the French Alps.

The rate of descent from its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet was alarming but still gradual enough to indicate that the twin-engine Airbus A320 had not suffered any catastrophic damage and might have remained under the control of the pilots or the autopilot. At no point during the descent was there any communication from the cockpit to air traffic controllers or any other signal of an emergency.

When the plane plowed into craggy mountains northeast of Nice, it was traveling with enough speed that it was all but pulverized, killing the 144 passengers and crew of six and leaving behind almost no apparent clues about what caused the crash.

On Wednesday, French officials struggled to solve that mystery as the leaders of France, Germany and Spain converged on the remote site and families, friends and colleagues of the victims mourned around the world.

Investigators, constrained by the difficult topography of the crash location, the condition of the wreckage and technical difficulties, were unable to provide immediate answers, leaving room for speculative theories.

The French aviation authorities initially struggled to extract useful information from the cockpit voice recorder, which had been recovered from the wreckage on the mountainside six hours after the crash and was badly battered by the impact. They eventually succeeded in recovering an audio file, but did not say whether it was partial or complete or whether it contained any information to address what had happened.

At the crash site, a senior official working on the investigation said, workers found the casing of the plane’s other black box, the flight data recorder, but the memory card containing data on the plane’s altitude, speed, location and condition was not inside, apparently having been thrown loose or destroyed by the impact. (Was the CIA involved in this?)

The flight’s trajectory ahead of the crash also left many unanswered questions.

Rémi Jouty, the director of the French Bureau of Investigations and Analysis, said at a news conference that the plane took off at around 10 a.m. local time from Barcelona and that the last message sent from the pilot to air traffic controllers had been at 10:30 a.m., which indicated that the plane was proceeding on course.

But minutes later, the plane inexplicably began to descend, Mr. Jouty said. At 10:40 and 47 seconds, the plane reported its last radar position, at an altitude of 6,175 feet. “The radar could follow the plane until the point of impact,” he said.

Mr. Jouty said the plane slammed into a mountainside and disintegrated, scattering debris over a wide area, and making it difficult to analyze what had happened.

It often takes months or even years to determine the causes of plane crashes, but a little more than a year after the disappearance of a Malaysian airlines jetliner that has never been found, the loss of the Germanwings flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf is shaping up to be particularly perplexing to investigators.

One of the main questions outstanding is why the pilots did not communicate with air traffic controllers as the plane began its unusual descent, suggesting that either the pilots or the plane’s automated systems may have been trying to maintain control of the aircraft as it lost altitude.

Among the theories that have been put forward by air safety analysts not involved in the investigation is the possibility that the pilots could have been incapacitated by a sudden event such as a fire or a drop in cabin pressure.

A senior French official involved in the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the lack of communication from the pilots during the plane’s descent was disturbing, and that the possibility that their silence was deliberate could not be ruled out.

This official said that the lack of communication suggested that the pilots might have been incapacitated as a result of an onboard failure such as a loss of cabin pressure, which could have deprived the crew members of oxygen.

While all pilots are equipped with emergency oxygen masks, the pilots would first have to be aware that a depressurization had occurred, the official said.

“If for any reason they don’t detect the problem in time, they would black out,” the official said.

Mr. Jouty said it was far too early in the investigation to speculate about possible causes.

“At this moment I have no beginning of a scenario,” Mr. Jouty said. However, he said there was not yet any evidence available that would support either a theory of a depressurization or of a midair explosion.”

Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, has characterized the crash as an accident. The airline has not disclosed the identities of the pilots, except to say that the captain was a 10-year veteran with more than 6,000 hours of flying time in A320s.

The French Bureau of Investigations and Analysis, which is leading the technical inquiry into the crash, sent seven investigators to the crash site on Tuesday. They have been joined by their counterparts from Germany, as well as by technical advisers from Airbus and CFM International, the manufacturer of the plane’s engines.

Speaking on Europe 1 radio, Jean-Paul Troadec, a former director of the French air accident investigation bureau, said one of the big challenges for investigators would be to protect the debris at the crash site from any inadvertent damage.

“We need to ensure that all the evidence is well preserved,” Mr. Troadec said, referring both to the pieces of the plane littered across the steep slopes as well as to the remains of the victims. The identification of the victims will most likely require matching DNA from the remains with samples from relatives.

The recovery effort will be a laborious task, given the state of the wreckage, the difficult terrain and the fact that the crash site is so remote that it could be reached only by helicopter.

Cabin depressurization, one of the possibilities speculated about on Wednesday, has occurred before, perhaps most notably in the crash of a Cypriot passenger plane in 2005 that killed all 121 people on board as it approached Athens. In that case, Helios Airways Flight 522, a slow loss of pressure rendered both pilots and all the passengers on the Boeing 737 jet unconscious for more than three-quarters of an hour before the aircraft ran out of fuel and slammed into a wooded gorge near the Greek capital.

Investigators eventually determined that the primary cause of that crash was a series of human errors, including deficient maintenance checks on the ground and a failure by the pilots to heed emergency warning signals.

Is Israel democratic?

By Dan Perry, AP, Mar 23, 2015

JERUSALEM (AP)—Is Israel a democracy? The answer is not so straightforward, and it increasingly matters given the diplomatic fallout over hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election last week.

The displeasure felt in some quarters over his win has placed front and center the world community’s unwritten obligation to accept the results of a truly democratic vote. It is a basic tenet of the modern order which has survived the occasional awkward election result—as well as recent decades’ emergence of some less-than-pristine democracies around the globe.

For Israel, the argument is especially piquant, because its claim to be the only true democracy in the Middle East has been key to its branding and its vitally important claim on U.S. military, diplomatic and financial support. Israel’s elections, from campaign rules to vote counts, are indeed not suspect.

But with the occupation of the West Bank grinding on toward the half-century mark, and with Netanyahu’s election-week suggestion that no change is imminent, hard questions arise.

Republican Sen. John McCain reflected the traditional appreciation of Israel when he advised President Barack Obama to “get over it”—a reference to reports that the United States was reassessing relations with Israel in the wake of the result. McCain told CNN that “there was a free and fair democratic election” in Israel—“the only nation in the region that will have such a thing.”

But among Israelis themselves, there is increasing angst over the fact that their country of 8 million people also controls some 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians who have no voting rights for its parliament.

If the 2 million Palestinians of Gaza—a territory dominated indirectly by Israel—were added to the equation, then together with the 2 million Arab citizens of “Israel proper” the Holy Land would be home to a population of some 12 million, equally divided between Arabs and Jews.

Of the Arabs, only a third have voting rights. These are the “Israeli Arabs” who live in the areas that became Israel in the 1948-49 war, which established the country’s borders.

Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 but Israel never annexed them, both for fear of world reaction and due to concerns about millions more Palestinians gaining the vote.

Israelis argue that since the areas are not formally part of Israel, the goings-on therein do not undermine the democracy claim.

But critics increasingly consider it a little too convenient: Israel builds towns by the score in these non-annexed lands—communities which have bestowed an oddly controversial aspect upon the once-innocent term “settlements.”

Through an amendment to the electoral law, Israel allows the settlers who live in these places to vote in its elections even though it otherwise has no provision for absentee balloting. Several top Cabinet figures, including Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, are in this extraordinary fashion not technically residents of Israel.

And Israel holds undeniable power over the lives of West Bank’s Palestinians, despite their ostensive autonomy. In just one example, Palestinians with great fanfare built a new city in their territory—only for it to remain uninhabited in part because Israel has prevented the building of access roads and other infrastructure.

The supposedly temporary arrangement shows no sign of a change—at least not one initiated by Israel.

“Israel is galloping toward an anti-democratic, bi-national future saturated with hatred and racism,” wrote columnist Ravit Hecht in the liberal Haaretz daily, echoing the rising stridency that has taken root among liberals in the days since the vote.

Besides the West Bank, that “bi-national future” would include three other Arab populations:

— Gaza’s nearly 2 million Palestinians have been ruled by Hamas militants for most of the period since Israel withdrew settlers and troops in 2005. Many feel they are still occupied: Israel controls the airspace and sea access and together with Egypt blockades them by land. Israel’s not-unfounded fear is that Hamas, if allowed, would arm itself to the teeth. Already the sides have fought three wars.

— Israel annexed East Jerusalem, and its approximately 200,000 Arabs can have voting rights if they choose. Most have rejected it—whether out of solidarity with the idea of Palestine or for fear of future retribution.

— Israel’s Arab citizens are increasingly integrated and can point to success stories like Salim Jubran, the supreme court judge who presided over the election. But they also claim discrimination in a variety of ways—and are currently seething over Netanyahu’s election day efforts to fire up his nationalist base with warnings that Arabs citizens “are streaming to the polls” in an effort to bring down his rule.

The Palestinian issue was almost absent from the campaign. Decades of failed peace talks have left many Israeli voters skeptical and hostile; dovish politicians seem unsure of what they can sell, and nationalists don’t dwell on the messy situation much either.

But Netanyahu, trailing in the last campaign days, put it front and center nonetheless, declaring that no Palestinian state would arise on his watch because the region was too dangerous and the West Bank too strategically valuable. He has since tried to reverse himself—but trouble brews with the world community, not only because of his words but also his actions over the years.

A centrist coalition remains technically possible, but the talk for the moment is of a nationalist one with Netanyahu’s “natural allies”—and that promises a deepening of Israel’s hold on the land and a perpetuation of the status quo.

Under this arrangement, the vast majority of West Bank Palestinians live in islands of autonomy run collectively by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. The PA has full self-rule only in about 5 percent of West Bank land, centered on the urban areas where most Palestinians live. Another quarter of the land is under joint rule. Israel fully controls the rest, containing the settlements, much of the natural resources and open land.

Israel controls all entry and exit from the territory, whether with Jordan or Israel proper. It also controls the airspace, most water supplies and travel between the main urban areas. Checkpoints are set up at will—though less frequently than in the past—manned by soldiers whose decisions leave ordinary people with little practical recourse. It prevents the Palestinians from setting up an army and can limit the import of weapons or anything else.

It also controls roughly $1.5 billion in tax revenues that it collects on behalf of the Palestinians, over a third of the PA’s budget. Israel occasionally withholds these sums when it considers a punishment to be due.

Netanyahu’s security argument against concessions resonates strongly among Israelis, including many who vote for parties who would nonetheless seek to unload much of the land. They know that they face hostility among Palestinians that is likely to persist among radicals even after any peace deal. A reluctance to part with the territory is not difficult to understand.

But Israel has gone further, allowing, encouraging and subsidizing a settlement movement that increasingly entwines the territory with Israel proper.

Some 350,000 Israeli Jews now live throughout the territory. Some are fairly close to the old border and could be incorporated into Israel in a land swap. A third to half are deep inside, though, and many of these are religious or nationalist radicals who can be expected to refuse efforts to compel them to leave; Israelis can hardly contemplate leaving them behind, perhaps to be massacred.

Another four years of a Netanyahu government can be expected to add many thousands more settlers, complicating the prospects of a future pullout even more. That is causing a growing clamor among liberal Zionists who are the core of the Israeli opposition. It is difficult to tell what they fear more: the perpetuation of a situation that they increasingly compare to apartheid—or the emergence of a future, single, binational entity that in a trick of history would supplant the Jewish state.

Nusra Front quietly rises in Syria as Islamic State targeted

By Bassem Mroue, AP, Mar 24, 2015

BEIRUT (AP)—The Nusra Front, Syria’s al-Qaida affiliate, is consolidating power in territory stretching from the Turkish border to central and southern Syria, crushing moderate opponents and forcibly converting minorities using tactics akin to its ultraconservative rival, the Islamic State group.

But while the Islamic State group gets most of the attention largely because its penchant for gruesome propaganda, the Nusra Front quietly has become one of the key players in the four-year civil war, compromising other rebel groups the West may try to work with while increasingly enforcing its own brutal version of Islamic law.

Its scope of influence now abuts the Golan Heights bordering Israel, and its membership largely composed of Syrian nationals refuse any negotiations with the government of embattled President Bashar Assad, further complicating the brutal conflict.

“The Nusra Front will most likely outlast ISIS in Syria, and will represent a severe and existential threat to the aspirations of the Syrian people in terms of a pluralistic, democratic society,” said Fawaz A. Gerges, director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics, using an alternate acronym for the extremist group.

The Islamic State group helped create the Nusra Front, providing financing, manpower and military hardware in 2012. But the group and its patron eventually had a falling out in 2013 for ideological as well as strategic reasons.

In recent months, the group has overrun rebel strongholds in Syria’s Idlib province, trouncing two prominent, U.S.-backed rebel factions, Harakat Hazm and the Syria Revolutionaries Front. Following the deadly clashes, SRF leader Jamal Maarouf fled to Turkey and Hazm announced it was dissolving.

A Middle East-based Western diplomat said the Nusra Front began its attacks on moderate, U.S.-backed rebel factions after the American-led coalition began airstrikes in September targeting both the Islamic State group and the Khorasan group, which Washington says is a special cell within Nusra plotting attacks against Western interests. U.S. officials last week said airstrikes have hit as many as 17 separate targets connected to the Khorasan group.

The Nusra Front responded with a series of spectacular attacks targeting moderate rebel groups and forces loyal to Assad in northwestern Syria, the diplomat said.

It “has now created coherent control of a strategic area between Idlib and Hama (provinces) in northwestern and central Syria,” said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity as he wasn’t authorized to brief journalists.

At the same time, the group has become increasingly aggressive toward local populations. In January, members of the group reportedly shot a woman dead in front of a crowd in Idlib after they accused her of being a prostitute. The group also has carried out public lashings, crucifixions and kidnappings—though it has not publicized the atrocities like the Islamic State group.

Activists in southern Syria say the Nusra Front was behind the January bombing that destroyed the shrine of a 13th century Muslim scholar. The Nusra Front issued a statement denying it was involved but activists say its members were seen placing the bombs.

“They’re trying to come across as rational, moderate, more dynamic,” Gerges said. “They don’t celebrate savagery in the same way like the Islamic State group.”

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