I don’t have cable TV so inevitably whenever I visit my mom’s house in Akron, Ohio I end up gorging on the news channels—Fox, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN.

This past Thursday I caught an incredibly riveting, thought-provoking interview on CNN’s Glenn Beck Show. His guest was former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, in the interview that was actually taped a year ago, declared, “Iran is Germany, and it’s 1938, except that this Nazi regime that is in Iran, that’s a religious kind of fanaticism, but it wants to dominate the world—

annihilate the Jews, but also annihilate America. Remember, we’re the small Satan. You’re the big Satan.”

As you might have heard, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made international headlines last week for calling Israel a "stinking corpse," further stating, "Today the reason for the Zionist regime's existence is questioned, and this regime is on its way to annihilation."

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Here’s the segment of the Netanyahu interview I found most gripping (trust me; it’s worth reading and reading carefully):

BECK: “My biggest fear is that you’re being set up, that Israel is going to—we’re (America) not going to do anything about it. The rest of the world is already starting to talk, ‘Hey, let’s talk peace with Iran; let’s bring Iran and Syria in as partners for peace,’ which is absolutely insane. You will be sitting in a position saying, ‘OK, well, we can’t deal with it.’ You’ll go in and do something about it, and then the whole world will turn and say, ‘It’s Israel. We were close to peace.’ ”

NETANYAHU: “Yes, well, that’s what they said about Czechoslovakia when they sacrificed it for Hitler and they thought they’d have peace in their time, and the Munich Accords. And it turned out to have been merely feeding the wolf and wetting its appetite . . . You sort of have to be woken up from your stupor, from your sleep to realize that you’ve got a new Hitler around the block and you have to take action. Do you let him first demolish a few countries and a few millions of peoples?

“I hope not. I hope that we have the ability to learn something from history. And certainly, I think that we’re facing a juncture of history unlike any other, where primitive religious creeds are trying to acquire the weapons of mass death. That has never happened before, because nuclear weapons have been around only for half a century. And now the most primitive creed on Earth is trying to get the most advanced weapons on Earth.

“And we’d better wake up. We’d better hear the jarring gong of self- preservation and act to preserve our lives, our cities, our children, our civilization in time.”

BECK: “What is a sign that people can recognize here? What is it that you -- the first sign that you said, back in Israel in the day and you went, ‘Oh, boy, that’s not good.’ What is the sign that may be just beginning to hit over here, that people can recognize over here, and say, ‘Oh, wait a minute. I have noticed that.’ Do you remember the first signs you saw over Israel?”

NETANYAHU: “I think the most important thing to understand is that -- you know the best sign of how dangerous things are? That the president of Iran is not even trying to fake it.

“You know, normally, if he wasn’t as fanatic as he is, he’d say, ‘Well, you know, yes, I think we could recognize Israel if it made the right concessions to the Palestinians.’ He’d play along; he’d play the game. He’d say, ‘We’re not really developing nuclear weapons. We just want nuclear energy for peace.’ You know, he’d say all that.

“But that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying -- and listen to him carefully. He’s saying, ‘We’re going to wipe Israel off the map. The Holocaust didn’t happen. America’s the great Satan. Iran will have the power to reshape history.

“Now, a normal person would not say that. An insane person says that. In the 1930s, an insane person wrote in a book called, Mein Kampf, My Struggle, and that was Adolf Hitler. He said exactly what he would do. He was stark-raving mad, but he communicated.

“You asked for a sign? That was a sign, 300 pages of signs, OK? Ahmadinejad every day is writing a page. He’s saying what he’s going to do. That’s the best sign. That tells you that there’s a fanaticism at work here which is not even calculating. He’s just going to do it. And let’s not enable him to do it. Let’s stop him.”

BECK: “It is interesting to me that Mein Kampf is My Struggle. Jihad is ‘my struggle.’ ”

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In a Bible study my preacher, Richard Jordan, gave some time after the start of the Iraq War, he delineated the ins and outs of war from a biblical standpoint, emphasizing not only war’s legitimacy in Scripture when waged by a government against evil, but how a country need not wait until it’s been attacked—a pre-emptive strike is wholly acceptable.

Jordan also addressed God’s disapproval of taking a “peacenik” or “conscientious objector” position.

“Peace propaganda is actually a weapon of warfare designed to defeat and demoralize people so they won’t go to war,” says Jordan. “It’s trying to take away from individuals the courage of the battle and is designed to put a psychology in the populace’s thinking of, ‘Wouldn’t we all rather have peace than war?’

“Sure, but when Ecclesiastes says ‘There’s a time for peace and a time for war’. . . Psalm 55 is probably the greatest example of peace propaganda in the Bible. Talking about the Antichrist, the passage says, ‘He hath put forth his hands against such as be at peace with him: he hath broken his covenant. The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart: his words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords.’

“He had all the propaganda of ‘peace, peace, peace’ until he got the people doing what he wanted and then the enemy came in like a flood. Peace can never be achieved by co-existence; by appeasement.”

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While people endlessly debate whether war is morally right or wrong; biblically the debate is simply, ‘Are we, as a nation, going to war against a real evil?’

“To secure justice and protect the freedom of a nation; that’s the only legitimate reason for a war,” says Jordan. “Personal and political aggrandizement is not a motive for war.

“You have to understand, when (Solomon) talks about ‘a time for peace and a time for war’ it isn’t that some leader just wakes up one morning and decides, ‘Well, it’s time to go over there and knock them dudes out!’

“It’s not the selfish exercise of power for political or personal gain. It’s to oppose evil, and when the enforcement of justice against evil—that has priority over non-violence.

“The only just way to gain real peace is by the defeat of the enemy of justice. The objective of war is the decisive defeat of the enemy, knowing that’s the only way to assure peace. When war’s the only path to gaining true justice, then it has precedence over non-violence.”

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Out of 10 headings Jordan gave for his study on war, No. 1 was, “War will always exist in time; until the new heaven and earth there’s going to be war on Planet Earth—wars and rumors of war.”

Going back to early Genesis, war first came on the scene shortly after the Flood with God’s establishment of the institution of nationalism into the human race.

As Jordan explains, “Nations didn’t exist in the earth prior to the Flood and that was one of the basic elements, socially and structurally, that allowed the corruption of man to permeate the earth—there were no boundaries to hold in corruption and protect freedom from the corrupting influence of sin.

“Genesis 9 and 10 is the first time nations appear in the Bible, and in chapter 11, the satanic counterfeit or counterplot of internationalism, or globalism, comes into play.

“In chapter 12, God gives up the nations of the earth and calls out Abraham and establishes Abraham as His nation in the earth, and in chapter 14, you see a war break out.

“I mean, He just established the nations in 9 and 10 and by the time you get to 14—

only three chapters later—what’s happening?!

“Those nations are at war against each other. They’re not just nations either; they’ve got a league of nations, taking these other nations and making them subject to them. Genesis 14:3 talks about how they were amalgamated together as a kingdom by military force.”

(Editor’s Note: To be continued . . .)