Star

I couldn't think of one, but now, based on what all of you have told me about yours, I think I know what mine will be.....

And this on the topic: Sharon censures European mediators 21.01.2003 JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said yesterday that European members of a "quartet" of foreign mediators were biased against Israel and would stall peace efforts unless they backed the removal of Yasser Arafat. In a meeting with foreign reporters, Sharon singled out the European Union for not taking a balanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and for failing to understand that "to move things forward, (Palestinian President) Arafat should be removed from any influential position". The quartet - the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia - has yet to release its final "road map" to ending more than two years of Middle East violence. Sharon's remarks could undermine its effectiveness. Palestinians said the Israeli leader's comments showed he had no real plans to settle the conflict. "We see eye-to-eye with the US and not always with the other members," Sharon said regarding the blueprint for peace. The US has called on Palestinians to replace Arafat as their leader in elections and carry out reforms. "We don't underestimate Europe," Sharon said. "I would like to see very much more involvement on the European side in what's happening here, but I have one condition ... your attitude toward Israel and the Arabs and Palestinians should be balanced." Sharon faces a general election on January 28 and tough talk against the Palestinians is proving popular among voters rattled by Palestinian suicide bombings. In other developments: * Jewish settlers incensed at the killing of a comrade by Palestinian militants turned his funeral on Sunday into a revenge rampage and ended up in a tug-of-war over his body with Israeli security forces. Blood seeped through Nathanel Ozeri's shroud as he was manhandled outside the West Bank city of Hebron by settlers who wanted to bury him in the illegal outpost where he was shot dead on Friday night as he ate a Sabbath supper with his family. However, police blocked the way to Har Harsina outpost, and the hundreds of mourners - many armed - headed towards Hebron, the resting place of the biblical patriarchs and a flashpoint in Middle East unrest. The procession turned around again, making a short-lived bid to reach Jerusalem, 24km to the north. Ozeri's widow apparently planned for his body to be part of an impromptu demonstration in the Holy City before burial, but she was overruled by rabbis worried about the dignity of the deceased. Earlier, settlers smashed windows of Palestinian homes and set cars ablaze in Hebron. * An Israeli court rejected jailed Palestinian uprising leader Marwan Barghouthi's appeal to dismiss charges of orchestrating political killings and ordered his trial to begin on April 6. Barghouthi, a leader of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction who is widely viewed as worthy to succeed the Palestinian President, appeared in the Tel Aviv District Court without counsel, which had filed pre-trial appeals to stop the proceedings. "Israel has no right to try me ... This court represents the power of the occupation," he said. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydi....n=world

One thing about Sharon, he seems not to be afraid to speak his mind, nor to have an opinion that is not a popular one. I recall him speaking against military action against the Serbians before he was Prime Minister, and his view was against world opinion, he was scoffed for it, but he was right. That's the mark of a good leader. He is on my daily prayer list.

I am loving these explanations. I have to tell you that oftentimes, a signature really encourages me, or inspires me, or makes my day. Whenver I read a post of Adstar's, for example, I start humming the phrase "O Ancient of Days" from that praise hymn. Or I will stop and pray "Make in me a clean heart", like traveller's says. I also find some of the handles here very encouraging and uplifting. This is one great forum. Thanks for all of your answers, guys.

I have noticed that some posters here have some very interesting signatures to accompany their posts. I would like to know how everyone came to choose his/her signature, and what the significance of it is, please.

I am not disputing the link at all that you gave, Fabrice. My comment was in relation to buying a Koran in English in a bookstore. I just thought that having a copy of the Koran where it is divided into topics might help someone who is reading it for the first time. That's all.

A few links: http://answering-islam.org/Quran/index.html http://members.ozemail.com.au/~dbates/koran.htm http://usr.ijntb.net/thickman/islam.html

The thing you have to watch with the Koran is that they are promoting a newer version in North America that was designed to be more benign than the version they actually use in Muslim countries. There are some older versions that are available on the internet, in English, that have sections divided by topic. I will try to find one.....

Benny Hinn has been caught lying more than once about his testimony. He lied that his father was mayor of Jerusalem (never happened), and he has a variety of testimonies he gives that all contradict each other. To me, that is as red a flag as any.

Traveller: I was thinking the same thing! Tarrier: Your story left me wanting more, it was so beautifully written, with lots of depth to it. If you haven't been published, you really should be.

What the Palestinians still haven't figured out MARTIN PERETZ http://www.jewishworldreview.com | Warren Christopher wrote last week in The New York Times of terrorist attacks "wreaking havoc in far-flung places such as Indonesia, Kenya, Jordan and Yemen." Maybe I am being myopic, but why didn't he mention Israel in that list, the state that suffers most from this savagery? Certainly Bill Clinton's secretary of state wouldn't be the first prominent American to believe that terror against Israelis is different, not quite so satanic, as terror against other civilians. Palestinian terror, say its apologists, is political--the illegitimate means to a legitimate end, statehood. But many peoples have pursued statehood in modern history, and only the Palestinians have pursued it so barbarically. Terrorism, truth be told, is about the sum total of what the Palestinians have bestowed on our civilization during the last five decades. The Palestinians aren't skittish about claiming this peculiar gift to the world as their own. Take the double suicide bombing near the old bus station in south Tel Aviv. Before all the shattered bodies had been dispatched to hospitals, Islamic Jihad had taken credit for the deed. And, not long after, came word from Hamas that it, too, should share in the kudos. Then, this competition became snarled. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed gang of Yasir Arafat's own Fatah, announced that, no, it had committed the act. And, then, Arafat's Palestinian Authority (P.A.), itself dominated by Fatah, condemned it. The P.A. boldly promised to act against those responsible. But by now this is an old trick, which only the European Union still seems to believe. The purveyors of murder and the denouncers of murder are the same people. (To make the P.A.'s horror even less credible, authoritative Israeli observers now believe that it was Tanzim, another of Fatah's militias that actually shed the blood.) This was not the first time these particular Tel Aviv streets had hosted Palestinian carnage. On Tisha B'Av last summer, a day of fasting and mourning for the destruction of the First and Second Temples, terror took the lives of five and wounded dozens over the same pavement. There was another bloodletting earlier. This is a poor neighborhood, and many of those present in its alleys and open spaces are foreign workers, the poorest of the poor. A wise Jerusalem friend speculated that the murderers now target foreign workers because they are the ones on whom Israel depends for the work once done by Palestinians from the territories. The Palestinian aim is to make the Filipinos and Romanians, Nigerians and Colombians, Turks and Thai, so scared that they leave. If my friend has divined an intention of the Palestinians, it is a mad intention. The intifada has not only brought current agony to nascent Palestine; it has guaranteed that economic misery will continue far into the future. In the coming months, a wall, urged upon Israel by many of its foolish doves and many of its foolish hawks, separating much of the disputed territories from the Israel-to-be, will be an established fact. When (and if) there is a peace agreement, the borders will not again be open for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers to share in the prosperity that will surely return to Israel. The peril of admitting an alien and hating workforce is simply too great. Edmund Burke wrote in his Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), "War never leaves where it found a nation. It is never to be entered upon without mature deliberation." At what might have been the dawn of a real state, the Palestinians started this macabre war in a fit of delirium. The war has been and will remain, long past the day when agreed rules govern relations between Israel and whatever becomes Palestine, a calamity for their people. One index of the immaturity of Palestine even as a concept is that its elites still turn to neighboring Arab countries to fight their battles for them. (The term "Palestinians" is immature as well. The U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 never called the local Arabs "Palestinians" and neither did the crucial 1967 Security Council Resolution 242). When the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Syrians sent armies to fight in 1948, 1967, and 1973, they were there not on behalf of the Palestinians but on behalf of their ambitions for sovereignty over the lands of what was historically called Palestine. The other Arabs talked a lot about Arab Palestine but did little. They are now doing even less. In real terms, the Palestinians are now on their own, which is why they nourish the fantasy that Saddam Hussein might somehow become their liberator. (The Boston Globe reported just this week on a pro-Saddam march in Nablus.) Egypt is now in a panic that the deteriorating situation of the Palestinians will inflame Cairo's rent-a-mob populace. So, just as the bombs went off in Tel Aviv, Hosni Mubarak was trying to convene meetings with Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and two "Marxist" murderous bands (one, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; the second, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine) aimed at an agreement to stop terror against Israeli civilians within the armistice lines of 1949. Terror outside those armistice lines, of course, would still be perfectly acceptable. No national movement in modern history has been more compromised by collaborators than that of the Palestinians. I know that the Shin Bet and the Mossad and the various legendary Sayerets are smart and brave. But they're not that smart or that brave. Still, it's part of the anti-Semitic repertory, and not just among the Arabs, to impute demonic gifts to the Jews. This is the only excuse the Palestinians have to explain (away) the shame of so many of their own being informants for Israel. Yes, there are heroic Palestinians, perhaps many of them. And there certainly are passionate Palestinians, passionate enough to blow up school buses. But, since the Israeli security services seem able to locate particular terrorists--many of them--at particular times and in particular places, the Palestinian nation seems to me not yet a faithful community, not yet faithful to itself beyond family or tribe, class, or degree of Muslim piety. There were, not long ago, hundreds of thousands of Christians among the Palestinians. But Palestine somehow did not truly encompass them, and they were envied, denounced, and persecuted. So, many decamped from their homes to the usual places that take in the unwanted. Western Christians pretended not to notice this abandonment of Palestine by its historic inhabitants. But betrayal is a grisly habit that is not easily contained. The Yishuv (the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine) was divided along ideological lines, and its warring politics were often steeped in bitter history. But, unlike the Palestinians, Jews did not rat on one another, not to the British and not to the Arabs. They did not have a civil war. The Palestinian civil war, by contrast, is yet to come, and it will be vindictive. Like Spain's. And the society it produces won't be kind, regardless of how it ends or who wins

Woodsprite: The link is right there in my post. Here are some more sites for you to look at. Islam is a far cry from Christianity, almost opposite in fact: http://www.aboutislam.com/index-2.shtml http://www.thequran.com/ http://atheism.about.com/gi....nce.htm http://answering-islam.org/index.html

For the second time in less than two months, PA terrorists tried to blow up an Israeli Navy vessel. It happened this morning off the northern Gaza coast, near the beach of the Jewish community of Dugit. Israeli sailors noticed a suspicious raft approaching them, in waters banned to PA vessels. They opened fire at the threat, and the raft exploded. No Israelis were hurt, and no damage was caused. It is not yet known how many terrorists were aboard the raft-bomb. On Nov. 22, four Israeli sailors were wounded when Islamic Jihad terrorists detonated a boat-bomb off the coast of Gaza very close to their Dabur patrol craft. Two Islamic Jihad terrorists were killed in the blast. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Hillson: Whenever I am hurting and feel as though God's will didn't work out the way I had hoped and planned, I go to Philippians. I always like to know that, regardless of how the circumstances appear, that God is working His best out in me. And so, in that spirit, I offer the following verses. May God use them to comfort your girlfriend: Philippians 1: 6 Philippians 2:13 And the following: Psalm 37: 29 Psalm 37: 24 Psalm 42:11 Psalm 73:26 Psalm 126:5,6 Psalm 31:23 Psalm 18:28 Lamentations: 3:31-33 Hebrews10:24 Psalm 9:10 Psalm37:3-5 Proverbs 3:5.6 1Peter 5:7 Psalm 40:4

Alias, I get almost weekly updates about suicide bombings and terrorist attacks being prevented. If I posted them all, you wouldn't believe it. Maybe I should for a few weeks, just to show everyone how often this sort of thing goes on. It's relentless! The fact that Israel is still here is a real testimony to the Lord's faithfulness.

Lanakila: I LOVE your story and would love to hear the other one, too! Sounds intriguing.....

Tatie: Your story sounds so wonderful! Before I was saved, I prayed to God for help, and He heard and helped me. I also had a Christian friend who would pray for me very specifically. Those answered prayers were instrumental in my salvation. May God bless your efforts!

Fabrice: If you don't understand what the expression on the smilie is all about, you can always click on it, and the words will appear in your post that tell you what the smilie was meant to convey: laughter, love, wink, that sort of thing. You can always delete it if it doesn't match your meaning. I use smilies a lot because I tease a lot and don't want anyone to get hurt feelings over a well-intended joke. And about that food fight issue: for the record, TIMOTHY started it.

Traveller: I wonder what would have happened had he tried to take the table from you girls a little more vehemently!

Traveller's thread on the differences between spouses and worship styles made me wonder about this: How did you meet your spouse, and how did you know that person was the right one for you?

Okay, traveller, but what is "make the drag"? Driving around for awhile?

A liter of cokes for a litter of Texans?

How many Texans are on WorthyBoard anyway?

Good.

TIgershark: Now your feelings weren't REALLY hurt, were they? We were just teasing you.