“Wide swaths of the Israeli public, particularly supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have little trust in the American leader, considering him naive and even hostile. One recent poll showed less than a tenth considered him ‘pro-Israel.'”

(from Josef Federman’s AP article: “After Iran deal, Obama struggles to gain Israel’s trust”)

“‘He is naive,’ said Alexander Yakobson, a historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In Israeli eyes, ‘he doesn’t get the Middle East, doesn’t understand how the Mideast functions, and he doesn’t therefore understand what dangers Israel has to face,’ he added.”

[I argue that Obama is not naive or stupid, he just isn’t trying to achieve the goals most people assume an American president wants to achieve – like better relations for America, a better economy, stability and peace… instead imagine that you grew up hating your country and its culture and its power and influence, and wishing you could reduce its influence and power, perhaps by strengthening its enemies, crushing it with extra debt, and changing its laws for the worse while instigating divisive racial tensions…]

“But the biggest issue has been the U.S.-led nuclear agreement with Iran. Politicians across the spectrum have come out against the deal, agreeing with Netanyahu’s assessment that it does not have sufficient safeguards to prevent Iran from gaining the ability to make a nuclear bomb and that it will boost Iran’s influence across the region. Iran is a key backer of Israel’s toughest enemies, and Netanyahu has warned that the ending of sanctions against Iran will result in more money and arms flowing to groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Recent opinion polls reflect these sentiments. In one survey published Sunday in the Maariv daily, 77 percent of respondents said the deal endangers Israel, compared to 15 percent who said it didn’t. The poll interviewed 500 people and had a margin of error of 4.3 percentage points.

An April survey of Jewish Israelis, carried out just after a preliminary nuclear deal with Iran was reached, had an equally harsh view of Obama. Just 9 percent of respondents described the White House as “pro-Israeli,” while 60 percent called it “pro-Palestinian.” More than 60 percent described Obama as the worst president for Israel in the past 30 years, far outdistancing runner-up Jimmy Carter at 16 percent.

That survey, conducted by the Panels Politics agency with the Jewish Journal, questioned 503 Jewish Israelis and had a margin of error of 4.6 percentage points.

In a survey of 40 countries, the Pew Research Center found the sharpest decline in Obama’s image over the past year occurred in Israel, where confidence slipped from 71 percent to 49 percent.

At times, the anger toward Obama in Israel is palpable. On the streets and in online news forums, Israelis often refer to Obama by his middle name “Hussein,” a reference to his Muslim heritage on his father’s side. Last year, after an anonymous White House official used a pejorative term to describe Netanyahu as cowardly, Cabinet Minister Naftali Bennett warned that Obama was “throwing Israel under the bus.”

——— so Israelis are finally starting to wake up to Barack Obama.  What will it take for you?

In Revelation 3:3 Jesus said “if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief” – even those who are sort of expecting the Second Coming someday will be surprised by his arrival if they don’t watch for signs and think about correlating prophecy and current events.  If you take Bible prophecy seriously, you know the restrainer will reveal the identity of the Antichrist to the world half way through the final seven years, and even if you are surprised by THAT, you still have an obvious 3.5 year “heads up” (if you manage to not end up beheaded) for the events at the end of the seven years.  But there are plenty of warnings, signs, prophecies, and clues allowing us to calculate the timing (and homeland, and identity) of the Antichrist in advance.  If interested, consider reading the Book of Daniel, and Revelation, and Antichrist 2016-2019

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David Montaigne

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