The reason for the season — now outlawed by the UN?

By Tomas Sandell in The Times of Israel

There could not have been a more bizarre backdrop to the already infamous UN Security Council Resolution 2334 than the simple fact that the resolution was passed on December 23rd, when world leaders tried to contradict the core message of two religious holidays, Christmas and Hanukkah. This year, incidentally, both holidays were celebrated on December 24th.

Let us recall the story lines. Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the Jewish Holy Temple in 164 BCE, after the Hellenistic (Greek) superpower of the time, the Seleucid Empire, had started a campaign to “de-Judaize” (sounds familiar) Jerusalem by aggressively Hellenizing the Jewish capital. Today, more than 2,150 years later, few of us have ever heard of the Seleucid Empire, while Jerusalem is still at the center of world attention.

Less than 200 years after the rededication of the temple, a young Jewish girl by the name of Miriam (Mary) gave birth to her firstborn son Yeshua (Jesus) in Bethlehem, the town of David.  She had travelled together with Joseph, to whom she was betrothed, from the town of Nazareth to Bethlehem in Judea, because Joseph belonged to the house and line of David. This is the familiar Christmas message which is read each year in millions of homes around the world.

But, wait a minute. What business does this Jewish couple have in occupied Palestine? In three separate UNESCO resolutions this year the Jewish links to the land of Israel were denied as all the holy places in Jerusalem were referred to only by their Arab names. The resolution is implying that there has never been a temple in Jerusalem, thus trying to falsify the core message of both Hanukkah and Christmas. The New Testament clearly records that the baby Jesus was brought to the temple in Jerusalem to be dedicated on the eight day after his birth.

But if there was no temple in Jerusalem at the time of the birth of Jesus, none of this makes any sense and our Western civilization will fall apart like a house of cards. No temple, no Jesus, and our measure of time will have revolved around a false assumption for 2016 years!

The United Nation’s newly revised version of the Holy Bible will need some serious editing. Jesus could not possibly have been born in Bethlehem as there were no Jews in Palestine at that time, unless Jesus was the first Palestinian, as Mahmoud Abbas claimed some years ago. But the same Abbas also claimed that there was no Jewish temple in Jerusalem. When the Messiah, according to Christian and Jewish beliefs, one day will return to the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, he will clearly be violating international law as his return would be considered “illegal settlement activity”.

This would all make good material for a comic book if it were not for the tragic fact that it is all taking place before our very own eyes. Perhaps UN diplomats would benefit from getting out of their bunkers in Turtle Bay, Manhattan, for a moment and discover what is called the Isaiah Wall just across from the UN Headquarters. The Isaiah Wall features the famous words from the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 2, which are said to illustrate the concept of world peace better than in any other piece of literature and are often quoted around Christmas time.

The scripture speaks about a time when peoples “will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks and nations will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war any more”.

This will all happen at a time when the nations will stream to Jerusalem and the peoples say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the temple of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.” The scripture also tells us: “The law will go out from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”

As the campaign to hellenize Jerusalem failed some 2,150 years ago, so will today´s attempts to Islamize the Jewish capital also fail.

 

You can read the original article here: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-reason-for-the-season-now-outlawed-by-the-un/