Thursday, June 10, 2010

Bush & Bible Back In News

Evangelist Geo W. Bush Back In Headlines

In the publication “Free Inquiry - Secular Humanism,” May 25, 2010, James A. Haught began with this blockbuster of a paragraph:

“Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac, in early 2003, that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible's satanic agents of the Apocalypse.”

James A. Haught, editor of the Charleston (WV) Gazette, without blinking an eye, wrote: “Honest. This isn't a joke.

I’ve spent a month searching for more about this story. I have yet to see it pronounced as true, false or a joke. Mainstream media apparently are ignoring this alarming revelation. Canada's Toronto Star recounted the story, calling it a "stranger-than-fiction disclosure ... which suggests that apocalyptic fervor may have held sway within the walls of the White House."

It is difficult to believe a former president (even of noble France) would make up such a story.

As the story goes Chirac did not jump at the chance to go to war. But in 2007, he includes this stunning story that President George W. Bush, in a top-secret phone call, said: “"Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East.... The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins."

This secured international phone call was supposed to have happened around the time President Bush was seeking a “coalition of the willing” for his bizarre and totally unnecessary Iraq invasion in 2003.

(For more on Gog and Magog see the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. Two of the chapters (38 & 39) in the prophet Ezekiel’s book has Israel up against these “enemies of the north” called Gog and Magog. If reading these chapters are no help (be warned it is not easy reading), any televangelist worth his collection plate will expound this fifth century B.C. poetry as the coming end-time prophecy that ends our world.

In 2007, Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, In 2007, Dr. Romer recounted Bush's strange behavior in Lausanne University's review, Allez Savoir. A French-language Swiss newspaper, Le Matin Dimanche, printed a sarcastic account titled: "When President George W. Bush Saw the Prophesies of the Bible Coming to Pass." France's La Liberte likewise spoofed it under the headline "A Small Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog."

Ex-President Chirac confirmed the event in an interview with French journalist Jean-Claude Maurice, who relates the tale in his book, “Si Vous le Repetez, Je Dementirai,” released last March and not yet available in English.

Slowly it began to dawn on me why the American media or the late night talk shows were not having a ball with this story. It could be that it blends with so much we do know about George W. Bush’s religious leanings.

He stormed into Iraq claiming it was a “crusade,” reminding the Muslim world of the ravages the Western Christians brought on the Orthodox Byzantium churches as well as the Muslims from A.D 1091 to 1205.

Our former president went around calling countries evil just like in the Old Testament. “Your are for us or against us,” has the distinct ring of fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible.

The dogmatic certitude President Bush had on things “Christian,” is well documented by both friends and foes. In a 2003 summit in Egypt the Palestinian foreign minister later said Bush told him he was “on a mission from God” to defeat Iraq."

I will leave it to the readers, now that they have the facts, what this strange, but plausible, report tells us.

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