Religious leaders are warning that the United States is nearing a day of judgment based on its treatment of the nation of Israel.

What’s more, they say, signs in the heavens are coinciding with what is shaping up to be an unexpectedly controversial address by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on March 3 and a fiercely contested Israeli election weeks later.

Pastor Mark Biltz of El Shaddai Ministries warns that “our nation will be judged” based on whether the United States sides with or against the Jewish state.

Biltz believes signs in the heavens and correlations with feast days on the biblical calendar show such a judgment may be coming soon.

“When Netanyahu speaks before Congress on March 3, this is the day before the Fast of Esther when the enemies of Israel, specifically Persia/Iran, had planned to destroy the nation of Israel,” he said. “The next day is Purim, which celebrates the day Israel achieved victory over Iran. The timing significance of this is just as important as the timing of the blood moon.”

Biltz, author of “Blood Moons: Decoding the Imminent Heavenly Signs,” warns that the next blood moon is scheduled to appear over Passover, which begins April 3, just one month after Netanyahu’s speech.

And this will be preceded two weeks earlier by a total solar eclipse on March 20, three days after the Israeli election, and coincides with Nisan, the beginning of the New Year according to the biblical calendar.

Such total eclipses only happen on Earth where they can be observed.

These prophetic warnings come amid unprecedented tumult in the American-Israeli relationship.

President Barack Obama and other leading Democrats say they will not be attending Netanyahu’s speech, and the White House condemned House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation as a breach of protocol.

Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, is circulating a letter signed by 22 other House Democrats urging Boehner to delay the speech.

Top staffers in the Obama administration are also heavily involved in the political opposition to Netanyahu, who faces an election on March 17.

“God tells us in Genesis 1:14 that the heavenly bodies were created to serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years,” Biltz said. “But the word seasons is better translated as divine appointments, and here we have a solar eclipse and then a blood moon falling on the New Year and Passover respectively – all at a time when the Jewish state is under great persecution. God is trying to tell us something about a divine appointment.”

Pastor Ray Bentley of Maranatha Chapel in San Diego, California, enthusiastically agrees with Biltz and warns that Christians need to be “praying like they never prayed before.”

“Rabbis have a saying,” Bentley said, “that the word coincidence is not a kosher word. These kinds of signs show we are in a powerful, phenomenal time, a time of great testing for both Israel and the world.”

Bentley believes Israel is facing a “second Holocaust” and that Christians need to become more vocal in their defense of the Jewish state.

Pastor Biltz agrees and says the fact that Israel has become a partisan issue is nothing less than tragic.

“This shouldn’t be political,” Biltz said. “This is about the survival of Israel. Iran is the issue of the day. It is developing nuclear weapons. And our own nation will be judged depending on how it acts in this moment.”

Both Biltz and Bentley cited Joel 3:2 to justify their positions. The verse says the nations will be judged by God for having scattered the people of Israel among the nations and divided its land.

As Biltz puts it, “God says he will divide the sheep from the goats, one nation from another, and he will do it on the basis of those who supported Israel and those who didn’t.”

Laurie Cardoza-Moore, founder of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations and special United Nations envoy for the World Council of Independent Christian Churches, said Israeli-American nations are at a crucial juncture.

“This is a critical turning point,” she said. “It seems that with Obama’s presidency, every year that goes by the relationship between Israel and the United States becomes more strained, and not because of the Israeli prime minister. The overwhelmingly majority of Americans support Israel and believe Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorism. But this president is trying to undermine Prime Minister Netanyahu.”

Cardoza-Moore believes Obama’s agenda goes behind simple opposition to Netanyahu.

“I see this as anti-Semitism,” she said. “The president of the United States has bought into the BDS movement.”

The BDS movement is the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” campaign taking root on college campuses and in churches around the country. The goal of the campaign is to economically strangle the Jewish state to force concessions to the Palestinians.

However, Cardoza-Moore believes Netanyahu will receive a rapturous reception in Congress, “the body that really represents that American people. You will see standing ovation after standing ovation for this man.”

Pastor Bentley warns that “the nations will be judged collectively” on what they do in this moment. And he believes Christians need to be talking just as much about prophecies of the End Times as they do about prophecies of the past.

“We are told that Israel will be alone during this time,” Bentley said. “We may be seeing the beginnings of that process.”

Cardoza-Moore sees the controversy over Israel as core to the survival of the United States.

“There will be judgment upon this nation based upon how we act right now,” she said. “That’s all I can say.”

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have long enjoyed close relations, but Islamabad's new-found resolve for fighting the root causes of extremism has seen the Gulf state come in for rare criticism.

The two countries, both with majority Sunni Muslim populations, are bound together by shared Islamic religious ties, financial aid from oil-rich Saudi and Pakistani military assistance to the kingdom.

But a Taliban massacre at a school that killed more than 150 people in December, mostly children, has led the government to crack down on militants and talk of bringing religious seminaries under tighter control.

Now the country's media and even government ministers have begun to question whether support from Saudi Arabia for seminaries, known as madrassas, is fuelling violent extremism -- bringing tension to the relationship for the first time.

Last week the Saudi embassy issued a statement saying that all its donations to seminaries had government clearance, after a minister accused the Riyadh government of creating instability across the Muslim world.

The Pakistani foreign ministry responded by saying that funding by private individuals through "informal channels" would also be scrutinised closely to try to choke off funding for terror groups.

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A policeman stands guard outside a government school in Peshawar after schools in the city reopened …

While the statement avoided mentioning Saudi Arabia specifically, it was widely interpreted as a rebuke.

Away from the seminaries, there has also been widespread criticism of the decision to allow Saudi royals to hunt the rare houbara bustard, prized in the Middle East for its supposed aphrodisiac properties, in the southern provinces of Sindh and Baluchistan.

Officials granted permission to hunt the bird, which is on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's "red list" of threatened species, in defiance of a court order, prompting allegations that the government prized its lucrative ties to Riyadh over its own wildlife.

Badar Alam, editor of Herald magazine, a respected Pakistani current affairs monthly, said the recent wave of criticism was unprecedented.

"Saudi has vast commercial and economic interests in Pakistan. There are open questions being asked on this relationship," he said.

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Relatives of schoolchildren killed in a Taliban attack on the Army Public School weep as they protes …

"Before, nobody would ask any questions in any manner. Now even the Urdu press is asking questions."

- Terror funding -

Donors in Saudi Arabia have long been accused of quietly funding terror groups sympathetic to the kingdom's hardline version of Sunni Islam.

Leaked diplomatic cables by then-US secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009 said Saudi Arabian donors were "the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide".

The cable cited the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and Pakistan's Sunni Muslim sectarian militants Lashkar-e-Jhangvi as examples of where funds were being channelled.

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A Saudi official (R) welcomes Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (L) upon his arrival in Riyadh t …

Linked to the funding is Saudi Arabia's long geostrategic struggle with Iran, the key Shiite Muslim power in the region.

Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's current prime minister, enjoys particularly close ties with the Saudi royal family, which hosted him during his almost decade-long exile from Pakistan following his ouster by then military ruler Pevez Musharraf.

And last year the government said it had received a $1.5 billion "gift" from a friendly Muslim nation, widely thought by experts to be in fact a loan from Saudi Arabia.

But Najmuddin Sheikh, a former foreign secretary and ambassador, said the December attack on an army school in Peshawar, which left 153 people dead including 134 children, had opened the door for criticism.

"This has been triggered by Peshawar and a strong feeling that much of the terrorism that is here is being financed by outside countries," he said.

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A falcon (R) tries to catch a houbara bustard during a falconry competition, part of the 2014 Intern …

"Countries like Kuwait, UAE and Qatar must also do much more at home to curtail this."

But, he added, any efforts to cut back on foreign funding for extremist seminaries must go hand in hand with similar efforts at home.

He said this would include the state dropping its links with proxy groups that have historically been used by the military establishment to further strategic goals in Afghanistan and Indian-administered Kashmir.

"Our fund collection within Pakistan remains unimpeded. If you want more from abroad you need to do more at home," he said.

A senior government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed.

"We didn't need the Saudis to radicalise us, we have geared ourselves to that," he said.

And while the current mood may be critical of Riyadh, the official said in the long run the relationship was too important and too beneficial to jeopardise.

"There is no change in policy. Both the Sharif government and the military are very much on board with Saudis. Actual policy is not likely to change," he said.

Alleged war crimes in Khuzaa and other hard-hit areas of Gaza may come under closer scrutiny in the months ahead.

Khuzaa, Gaza - Upon entering Khuzaa, a Palestinian town in the southern Gaza Strip, visitors are confronted by ubiquitous destruction.

Homes, schools, supermarkets and mosques were destroyed in last summer's Operation Protective Edge, Israel's third major offensive on the Gaza Strip since 2008. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates the Palestinian death toll at more than 2,000, about three-quarters of whom were civilians. Israeli casualties amounted to 66 soldiers and four civilians. Khuzaa, with a population of roughly 9,000, was significantly impacted in the war.

"There is ample evidence to show that the Israeli army carried out gross violations of international law, including war crimes," Saleh Hijazi, a Middle East researcher for Amnesty International, told Al Jazeera. Amnesty is currently finalising its analysis of testimonies and other material for a report detailing the actions of the Israeli army in Khuzaa and elsewhere.

RELATED: ICC 'close' to opening Gaza war investigation

During the attack and siege on Khuzaa from July 21 until August 1, "entire neighbourhoods were besieged and their evacuation prevented", Hijazi noted.

"We documented cases where it seems the army targeted inhabited civilian homes, directly fired at and killed civilians [and may have used Palestinians as] human shields."

Fawziya Arjela, a 62-year-old Khuzaa resident who has lived through every major conflict since 1967's Six-Day War, told Al Jazeera this was the worst she had seen.

"They were all hard; everything is hard here. But this was much worse," said Arjela, who spent most of her time during the siege in a 500-square-metre health clinic with hundreds of other people. "During the war, they were bombing us, shelling us; it was impossible to sleep or eat. They wouldn't let us leave."

Saed Anjjar, 31, told Al Jazeera that he saw Israeli forces shoot his father while he waited to exit Khuzaa.

"We had been trapped inside our home for four days," Anjjar said. "We couldn't go out, because there were soldiers and snipers surrounding us."

Eventually, the Israeli soldiers told them to prepare for evacuation, and on the morning of July 24, Anjjar and his family joined roughly 3,000 others in an attempt to exit. "As we approached the exit, a group of soldiers asked us to get on our knees and put our hands up," Anjjar said.

As shots hit the ground around them, Anjjar said, one of the soldiers asked whether anyone in the group spoke Hebrew. As his father, who spent half his life working in Israel, stood in response to this, another shot rang out from a tank behind them, Anjjar said.

"It hit my father near his shoulder and exited through his neck. He died instantly," Anjjar said. "We are interested in bringing whoever is responsible to court. My father was a civilian."

Were war crimes committed in Palestine?

Contacted by Al Jazeera for comment on the alleged shooting, the Israeli army responded: "We have no record of such an incident."

RELATED: Gaza: After the war

This and other alleged violations that occurred during the 2014 war may come under closer scrutiny in the coming months, with Palestine set to formally join the International Criminal Court (ICC) on April 1. All events that took place during Operation Protective Edge will be retroactively eligible for prosecution.

Earlier this month, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opened a preliminary probe into war crimes in Palestine. The Rome Statue, the treaty that established the ICC and set the standards for war crimes, states that "intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities" is a war crime.

According to sources who spoke to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity, at least four separate Israeli army brigades were involved in the attack on Khuzaa, including the Givati Brigade, led by the controversial Colonel Ofer Winter, who first made headlines bylikening Operation Protective Edge to a holy war against the enemies of Israel. In an interview with Hebrew press, Winter spoke about "clouds of glory" sent by God to protect his soldiers as they descended upon Khuzaa.

Winter and the Givati Brigade were also involved in "Black Friday", the aerial bombardment of Rafah on August 1, which caused severe destruction to the southern city. The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights placed the death toll at 123civilians, while Israeli authorities said it was closer to 41, including 12 Hamas operatives.

RELATED: ICC to probe possible war crimes in Palestine

Philippe Sands, a professor of international law at the University College of London who has appeared before the ICC and other international courts, noted that any case would have to be brought against individuals, rather than states or corporations.

"A decision is taken only by the prosecutor. No one else can force the decision to be taken," Sands told Al Jazeera.

If, after a preliminary investigation, the prosecutor feels a formal investigation is warranted, she must seek authorisation from a judge. The prosecutor's office can thenreach out to people from whom it wants documents, testimony and evidence, Sands said. In addition to Israeli soldiers, Palestinians from various armed groups, including Hamas' al-Qassam Brigades, could be eligible for investigation, as alleged violations on all sides would be investigated.

Israel did not granted access to the Gaza Strip to groups such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, making it difficult for them to gather evidence immediately after the war.

Furthermore, the ICC has faced significant challenges with recent cases in Sudan, Kenya, and Libya and may be hesitant to open another difficult case. "Things don't happen overnight," Sands noted.


Source: Al Jazeera

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — The shooting spree in Copenhagen by a radicalized former gang member has highlighted an overlap between Islamic extremists and the criminal underworld.

Danish police say gang members with Muslim backgrounds are being radicalized both in prison and outside, and some have joined the ranks of foreign fighters in Syria.

"We know that some of the fundamentalist groups are fishing in that pond," said Michael Ask, head of Denmark's National Center of Investigation. "Because they know that they have some young people who are vulnerable and rootless, who lack a sense of belonging, a community."

Born in Denmark to Palestinian parents, Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein had a long history of violence and crime before he went on a rampage last weekend, killing two people and wounding five in attacks on a free-speech event and a synagogue.

The 22-year-old, who was killed in a shootout with police, had been member of "Brothas," an inner-city immigrant gang in Copenhagen, but was reportedly kicked out because of his temper.

"He got into fights with members of other gangs. So when they wanted to make peace agreements with other gangs, they threw him out," said Aydin Soei, a social worker who's been researching Denmark's gang scene and who met El-Hussein in 2011.

Where and when El-Hussein was radicalized remains unclear. Prison authorities alerted the Danish domestic intelligence service, PET, last year while he was serving time for a stabbing, but the latter said there was no reason to believe he was plotting an attack.

Already before the shootings, Danish authorities were concerned about gang members crossing over to Islamic extremism.

In July last year, police informed lawmakers that among the scores of people who have left Denmark to become foreign fighters in Syria were at least five known gang members, and several others with a "peripheral relation" to street gangs.

"Some of them use it as an exit strategy," said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College. "They leave criminal gangs for a new belonging, a new identity."

Others are tempted by violence more than religion or ideology, said Ask, of the National Center of Investigation.

"It is some kind of test of manhood. You get credit in the criminal world when you can say that you have been in some kind of war zone," he said.

Ahmed Samsam, a member of a gang in the city of Odense, traveled to Syria in 2012 and posted pictures on social media of himself posing with automatic weapons. Abderrozak Benarabe, a Copenhagen gang leader, went to Syria with a Danish documentary crew in tow. He joined Ahrar al-Sham, an ultraconservative Muslim rebel group. Both are back in Denmark and have never been charged for their Syria trips.

The link between organized crime and Islamic extremists is not new in Europe. In the mid-1990s, French police uncovered an extremist network by going after what they thought was a gang carrying out violent robberies in France's northern Roubaix region.

Members of the gang, dismantled in a deadly 1996 shootout, allegedly tried to bomb a police station in Lille ahead of a G-7 summit meeting there.

The link between gang members and international terrorism strengthened after al-Qaida shifted tactics from large-scale attacks by well-trained terrorists to smaller strikes by homegrown militants, said Frank Jensen, former operative chief of PET. For those attacks, gang members seem like the perfect foot soldiers: angry, aggressive young men who know where to find weapons.

Jihadi recruitment networks have long targeted poorly integrated Muslim youth who feel marginalized and discriminated against in the Scandinavian countries and elsewhere in Europe. However, Swedish and Norwegian security officials said they hadn't seen any significant numbers of gang members being recruited for jihad.

"We see everything from people with a background in petty crime to well-established young men who have found a place in society," said Sirpa Franzen, spokeswoman of the Swedish security police, SAPO.

Though young Muslim gang members in Denmark don't live an Islamic lifestyle — their focus is on crime, drug dealing and turf wars with rival gangs — they often harbor a hatred of Danish society that can easily lead to radicalization, said Mohammad Rafiq, a writer and social worker who heads the Copenhagen-based International Institute of Human Rights.

Being Muslim, they say, just adds to their feeling of being outsiders.

"They do not feel they are part of society," said Khaterah Parwani, a law student born in Afghanistan who is part of a network helping immigrants with legal advice. "They did badly in school, they do badly in their daily lives. They find an identity in the gangs."

In the Muslim-dominated neighborhood where El-Hussein was killed by a SWAT team, there were mixed feelings about what he did. While many were appalled by the violence, some mourned him as young man who never got a chance in life.

On Monday, about two dozen young men in hooded jackets, some with masked faces, arrived on the street where El-Hussein died. Identifying themselves to reporters only as his "brothers," they put up a sign saying "rest in peace" and a letter listing grievances against Danish society. After shouting "God is great" in Arabic, they left.

___

Karl Ritter in Stockholm and Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed to this report.

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