NOTE: It might be time to republish this, with Purim coming up.

"The ruler was a strong leader who brought renewed wealth and power to the nation. He restored the border. He made new trade possible and money flowed into the country from abroad." – Beyond Today magazine, January 2017

BUT A HICK OUT IN THE STICKS had a different message from God: "The time is ripe for My people. I will spare them no longer." That was about 782 BC and the leader was Jeroboam. The man was a sheep herder by the name of Amos. He said, "Sovereign Lord, forgive!" And God delayed His judgment. For a while! But will He delay it for America?

In 2017, an Amos might have said to the President, "If the Lord didn't spare Jeroboam's kingdom, will He spare ours when the people continue to sin time and again?" A political awakening is all well and good, but what we really need is a spiritual and moral awakening. Are we living in pre-World War III days? I'm just glad I'm in my 81st year, so l won't have to see all of it.

I've also been thinking about the world as it was when my parents conceived me, in 1941 about a month before Pearl Harbor. The President was Franklin Roosevelt, who wasn't pro-immigration like his "altruistic" admirers who opened our border on the south. In May 1939, the SS St. Louis left Hamburg, Germany for Cuba with 925 Jews trying to flee from Germany. They had Cuban passports, but the ship was not allowed to disembark. It sailed to Miami, but FDR sent the Navy to prevent access to America's border, and warned other countries in the hemisphere not to allow those [bleep] Jews to land.

In June 1939, the ship where the people were allowed to disembark in England, Holland, Belgium, and France. The Nazis took over Holland, Belgium, and France the following year. About 200 of the passengers from the St. Louis were deported to concentration camps, and nearly half of them died in the Holocaust.

"By late 1941, the doors into the U.S. had been all but closed." [source: Friends of Zion magazine, January 2020].

But late 1941 is exactly when I came into the "picture." Eighty years later, I'd like to remind you about a book entitled "As America Has Done to Israel." Maybe it's no mystery why God allowed Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt had been told what was happening to the Jews by a Polish diplomat, Jan Karski, face to face. Though nearly two million Jews had already been murdered in Poland, Roosevelt didn't want to hear about it. His wife Eleanor said this at one point:

"If something was unpleasant and he didn't want to know about it, he just ignored it. He always thought that if you ignored a thing long enough, it would settle itself

"AMERICA REFUSES TO BOMB THE RAILS": that's another article in the 1/20 FOZ issue. It tells the story of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr.'s investigation into the State Department in 1943. State told him that their role in the destiny of Jews in Europe was none of his business (he was Jewish). Rabbi Stephen Wise had told him about the atrocities, and he confronted a career bureaucrat at State and then Secretary of State Cordell Hull, but finally took the issue to FDR himself. By the spring of 1943, we could have bombed the rail lines into Auschwitz; we were already ready to bomb an industrial complex near there.

Morgenthau's assistants produced a Report on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of Jews." Finally, FDR must have seen the light, and he removed the Department of State from the issues involving Jews, refugees, and so on.

"Deplorably, by the time of this action, some four million Jews had already been slaughtered."

In retrospect, it's amazing that the Lord allowed us to win that war. It was the last one we won. More to come.