Apps making the Web obsolete?

WALL STREET JOURNAL

http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-web-is-dying-apps-are-killing-it-1416169934

Keywords
The Web Is Dying; Apps Are Killing It
Tech’s Open Range Is Losing Out to Walled Gardens
By
Christopher Mims

Updated Nov. 17, 2014 2:53 p.m. ET

Phil Foster

The Web—that thin veneer of human-readable design on top of the machine babble that constitutes the Internet—is dying.  And the way it’s dying has farther-reaching implications than almost anything else in technology today.

Think about your mobile phone.  All those little chiclets on your screen are apps, not websites, and they work in ways that are fundamentally different from the way the Web does.

Mountains of data tell us that, in aggregate, we are spending time in apps that we once spent surfing the Web.  We’re in love with apps, and they’ve taken over.  On phones, 86% of our time is spent in apps, and just 14% is spent on the Web, according to mobile-analytics company Flurry.

This might seem like a trivial change.  In the old days, we printed out directions from the website MapQuest that were often wrong or confusing.  Today we call up Waze on our phones and are routed around traffic in real time.  For those who remember the old way, this is a miracle.

Everything about apps feels like a win for users—they are faster and easier to use than what came before.  But underneath all that convenience is something sinister:  the end of the very openness that allowed Internet companies to grow into some of the most powerful or important companies of the 21st century.

Take that most essential of activities for e-commerce:  accepting credit cards.  When Amazon.com made its debut on the Web, it had to pay a few percentage points in transaction fees.  But Apple takes 30% of every transaction conducted within an app sold through its app store, and “very few businesses in the world can withstand that haircut,” says Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz.

App stores, which are shackled to particular operating systems and devices, are walled gardens where Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon get to set the rules.  For a while, that meant Apple banned Bitcoin, an alternative currency that many technologists believe is the most revolutionary development on the Internet since the hyperlink.  Apple regularly bans apps that offend its politics, taste, or compete with its own software and services.

But the problem with apps runs much deeper than the ways they can be controlled by centralized gatekeepers.  The Web was invented by academics whose goal was sharing information.  Tim Berners-Lee was just trying to make it easy for scientists to publish data they were putting together during construction of CERN, the world’s biggest particle accelerator.

No one involved knew they were giving birth to the biggest creator and destroyer of wealth anyone had ever seen.  So, unlike with app stores, there was no drive to control the early Web.  Standards bodies arose—like the United Nations, but for programming languages.  Companies that would have liked to wipe each other off the map were forced, by the very nature of the Web, to come together and agree on revisions to the common language for Web pages.

The result:  Anyone could put up a Web page or launch a new service, and anyone could access it.  Google was born in a garage.  Facebook was born in Mark Zuckerberg ’s dorm room.

But app stores don’t work like that.  The lists of most-downloaded apps now drive consumer adoption of those apps.  Search on app stores is broken.

 

On phones, 86% of our time is spent in apps, and just 14% is spent on the Web, according to mobile-analytics company Flurry.  Bloomberg News

The Web is built of links, but apps don’t have a functional equivalent.  Facebook and Google are trying to fix this by creating a standard called “deep linking,” but there are fundamental technical barriers to making apps behave like websites.

The Web was intended to expose information.  It was so devoted to sharing above all else that it didn’t include any way to pay for things—something some of its early architects regret to this day, since it forced the Web to survive on advertising.

The Web wasn’t perfect, but it created a commons where people could exchange information and goods.  It forced companies to build technology that was explicitly designed to be compatible with competitors’ technology.  Microsoft’s Web browser had to faithfully render Apple’s website.  If it didn’t, consumers would use another one, such as Firefox or Google’s Chrome, which has since taken over.

Today, as apps take over, the Web’s architects are abandoning it.  Google’s newest experiment in email nirvana, called Inbox, is available for both Android and Apple’s iOS, but on the Web it doesn’t work in any browser except Chrome.  The process of creating new Web standards has slowed to a crawl.  Meanwhile, companies with app stores are devoted to making those stores better than—and entirely incompatible with—app stores built by competitors.

“In a lot of tech processes, as things decline a little bit, the way the world reacts is that it tends to accelerate that decline,” says Mr. Dixon.  “If you go to any Internet startup or large company, they have large teams focused on creating very high quality native apps, and they tend to de-prioritize the mobile Web by comparison.”

Many industry watchers think this is just fine.  Ben Thompson, an independent tech and mobile analyst, told me he sees the dominance of apps as the “natural state” for software.

Ruefully, I have to agree.  The history of computing is companies trying to use their market power to shut out rivals, even when it’s bad for innovation and the consumer.

That doesn’t mean the Web will disappear.  Facebook and Google still rely on it to furnish a stream of content that can be accessed from within their apps.  But even the Web of documents and news items could go away.  Facebook has announced plans to host publishers’ work within Facebook itself, leaving the Web nothing but a curiosity, a relic haunted by hobbyists.

I think the Web was a historical accident, an anomalous instance of a powerful new technology going almost directly from a publicly funded research lab to the public.  It caught existing juggernauts like Microsoft flat-footed, and it led to the kind of disruption today’s most powerful tech companies would prefer to avoid.

It isn’t that today’s kings of the app world want to quash innovation, per se.  It is that in the transition to a world in which services are delivered through apps, rather than the Web, we are graduating to a system that makes innovation, serendipity and experimentation that much harder for those who build things that rely on the Internet.  And today, that is pretty much everyone.

—Follow Christopher Mims on Twitter @Mims; write to him at christopher.mims@wsj.com.

Pope Francis to make first visit to America

MailOnline

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2837573/Pope-confirms-US-trip-Vatican-family-meeting.html

Coming to America: Pope Francis confirms his first visit to the U.S. as he announces trip to Philadelphia

• Today confirmed he will visit Philadelphia in September next year
• Catholic officials said papal mass in the city would attract up to a million 
• Trip is also expected to include visits to Washington DC and New York 

By Khaleda Rahman for MailOnline

Published: 05:01 EST, 17 November 2014 | Updated: 07:58 EST, 17 November 2014

Pope Francis has confirmed he will visit the United States next year in what will be his first trip as leader of the Catholic Church.

He told an inter-religious conference on marriage at the Vatican that he will be travelling to Philadelphia in September for the Roman Catholic Church’s World Meeting of Families.

Although not mentioned in his address, the trip is also expected to include stops at the White House and Congress in Washington DC and the United Nations in New York.

Pope Francis told a conference today that he will travel to Philadephia on his first trip to the U.S. next year

Pope Francis laughs with Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Mueller at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith About Marriage today

Earlier this summer, Francis had said he hoped to make the September meeting – but he confirmed it today.

He said:  ‘I wish to confirm according to the wishes of the Lord, that in September of 2015, I will go to Philadelphia for the World Meeting of Families.’

The official confirmation of the trip was keenly awaited in the United States after months of speculation.

Pope Francis and President Barack Obama exchanged gifts during a private audience in March this year at the Vatican

Pope Francis makes first visit to Asia… in the back of tiny Kia

[ For video, see:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2837573/Pope-confirms-US-trip-Vatican-family-meeting.html ]

He will be only the fourth reigning pontiff to visit the States.

In 1965, Pope Paul VI was the first ever pontiff to go to America followed by Pope John Paul II who visited seven times during his papacy.

Pope Benedict XVI went in April 2008, which included a meeting with President Bush, an address at the United Nations and a visit to Ground Zero and the Yankee Stadium in New York.

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, who is organizing the meeting, welcomed the news.

He said he ‘applauded the loudest’ after the Pope made the announcement.

His three-day visit to the city will include a public Sunday mass on the Ben Franklin Parkway on September 27 and officials estimated it would attract up to a million people.

The pope is due to visit Turkey and European institutions in Strasbourg, France in two separate trips later this month.

In January, he travels to the Philippines and Sri Lanka, in his second trip to Asia.

Pope Francis delivers his blessing during the Angelus noon prayer from his studio’s window overlooking St. Peter’s Square, at the Vatican on Sunday

Read more:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2837573/Pope-confirms-US-trip-Vatican-family-meeting.html#ixzz3JRjxIa9U
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Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock:” The 800th Lifetime

With the 45^th anniversary of this 1970 book approaching in 2015, it would be good to review the book’s still-intact relevance.  It remains today on my top-ten list of essential reads.  The following is the second installment of my condensation of favorite sections and passages. –SB

Toffler, Alvin.  Future Shock.  Random House, 1970.

http://www.abebooks.com/9780553277371/Future-Shock-Toffler-Alvin-0553277375/plp

THE 800^TH LIFETIME:  In the three short decades between now [1970] and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future.  Citizens of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them, will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time.  For them, the future will have arrived too soon.

This book is about change and how we adapt to it.  It is about those who seem to thrive on change, who crest its waves joyfully, as well as those multitudes of others who resist it or seek flight from it. . . . It is about the future and the shock that its arrival brings.

Western society for the past 300 years has been caught up in a fire storm of change.  This storm, far from abating, now appears to be gathering force.  Change sweeps through the highly industrialized countries with waves of ever accelerating speed and unprecedented impact. . . .

. . .

. . . A strange new society is apparently erupting in our midst.  Is there a way to understand it, to shape its development? . . .

Much that now strikes us as incomprehensible would be far less so if we took a fresh look at the racing rate of change that makes reality seem, sometimes, like a kaleidoscope run wild.  For the acceleration of change does not merely buffet industries or nations.  It is a concrete force that reaches deep into our personal lives, compels us to act out new roles, and confronts us with the danger of a new and powerfully upsetting psychological disease.  This new disease can be called “future shock,” and a knowledge of its sources and symptoms helps explain many things that otherwise defy rational analysis.

THE UNPREPARED VISITOR:

The parallel term “culture shock” has already begun to creep into the popular vocabulary.  Culture shock is the effect that immersion in a strange culture has on the unprepared visitor.  Peace Corps volunteers suffer from it in Borneo or Brazil.  Marco Polo probably suffered from it in Cathay. . . .

. . . culture shock is relatively mild in comparison with the much more serious malady, future shock.  Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.  It may well be the most important disease of tomorrow.

. . . unless intelligent steps are taken to combat it, millions of human beings will find themselves increasingly disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environments.  The malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality, and free-floating violence already apparent in contemporary life are merely a foretaste of what may lie ahead unless we come to understand and treat this disease.

Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society.  It arises from the super-imposition of a new culture on an old one.  It is culture shock in one’s own society. . . .

Take an individual out of his own culture and set him down suddenly in an environment sharply different from his own, with a different set of cues to react to—different conceptions of time, space, work, love, religion, sex, and everything else—then cut him off from any hope of retreat to a more familiar social landscape, and the dislocation he suffers is doubly severe.  Moreover, if this new culture is itself in constant turmoil, and if—worse yet—its values are incessantly changing, the sense of disorientation will be still further intensified.  Given few clues as to what kind of behavior is rational under the radically new circumstances, the victim may well become a hazard to himself and others.

Now imagine not merely an individual but an entire society, an entire generation—including its weakest, least intelligent, and most irrational members—suddenly transported into this new world.  The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale. . . .

BREAK WITH THE PAST:

. . . what is occurring now is, in all likelihood, bigger, deeper, and more important than the industrial revolution. . . . a growing body of reputable opinion asserts that the present moment represents nothing less than the second great divide in human history, comparable in magnitude only with that first great break in historic continuity, the shift from barbarism to civilization.

. . . Kurt W. Marek . . . observes that . . . “We open our eyes like prehistoric man, we see a world totally new.”

One of the most striking statements of this theme has come from Kenneth Boulding, an eminent economist and imaginative social thinker.  In justifying his view that the present moment represents a crucial turning point in human history, Boulding observes that . . . “The world of today . . . is as different from the world in which I was born as that world was from Julius Caesar’s. . . . Almost as much has happened since I was born as happened before.”

. . . It has been observed, for example, that if the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately sixty-two years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes.  Of these 800, fully 650 were spent in caves.

Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another—as writing made it possible to do.  Only during the last six lifetimes did masses of men ever see a printed word.  Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precision.  Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor.  And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800^th, lifetime.

. . .

. . . if agriculture is the first stage of economic development and industrialism the second, we can now see that still another stage—the third—has suddenly been reached.  In about 1956 the United States became the first major power in which more than 50 percent of the non-farm labor force ceased to wear the blue collar of factory or manual labor.  Blue collar workers were outnumbered by those in the so-called white-collar occupations—in retail trade, administration, communications, research, education, and other service categories.  Within the same lifetime a society for the first time in human history not only threw off the yoke of agriculture, but managed within a few brief decades to throw off the yoke of manual labor as well.  The world’s first service economy had been born.

. . . Ten thousand years for agriculture.  A century or two for industrialism.  And now, opening before us—super-industrialism.

. . . Perhaps U Thant, Secretary General of the United Nations [1970], came closest to summarizing the meaning of the shift to super-industrialism when he declared that “The central stupendous truth about developed economies today is that they can have—in anything but the shortest run—the kind and scale of resources they decide to have. . . . It is no longer resources that limit decisions.  It is the decision that makes the resources.  This is the fundamental revolutionary change—perhaps the most revolutionary man has ever known.” . . .

. . .

In our lifetime the boundaries have burst.  Today the network of social ties is so tightly woven that the consequences of contemporary events radiate instantaneously around the world . . . .

. . .

. . . the final, qualitative difference between this and all previous lifetimes is the one most easily overlooked.  For we have not merely extended the scope and scale of change, we have radically altered its pace.  We have in our time released a totally new social force—a stream of change so accelerated that it influences our sense of time, revolutionizes the tempo of daily life, and affects the very way we “feel” the world around us. . . . this acceleration lies behind the impermanence—the transience—that penetrates and tinctures our consciousness, radically affecting the way we relate to other people, to things, to the entire universe of ideas, art and values.

To understand what is happening to us as we move into the age of super-industrialism, we must analyze the processes of acceleration and confront the concept of transience.  If acceleration is a new social force, transience is its psychological counterpart, and without an understanding of the role it plays in contemporary human behavior, all our theories of personality, all our psychology, must remain pre-modern.  Psychology without the concept of transience cannot take account of precisely those phenomena that are peculiarly contemporary.

By changing our relationship to the resources that surround us, by violently expanding the scope of change, and, most crucially, by accelerating its pace, we have broken irretrievably with the past.  We have cut ourselves off from the old ways of thinking, of feeling, of adapting.  We have set the stage for a completely new society and we are now racing toward it.  This is the crux of the 800^th lifetime.  And it is this that calls into question man’s capacity for adaptation—how will he fare in this new society?  Can he adapt to its imperatives?  And if not, can he alter these imperatives?

Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock:” The Strategy of Social Futurism  31 October 2014

Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock:” Introduction  28 October 2014

Four Blood Moons: It’s theory explained: 4 of 5

Note:  Please see 1 of 5 for introduction.  –SB

CHAPTER 15

THE FOUR BLOOD MOONS OF 1967-68

Yet I have chosen Jerusalem,

that My name may be there

–2 CHRONICLES 6:6

The third occurrence of a Tetrad of Blood Moons significant to Jewish history, as reported by NASA, was in 1967-68.  Why was this significant to Jewish history?  1967 was the year the city of Jerusalem was reunited with the Jewish people for first time in nearly nineteen hundred years.

. . .

BLOOD MOONS OF 1967-68

The Tetrad of Blood Moons of 1967-68 occurred on the Jewish holidays of Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles:

. . .

This third Tetrad, beginning in 1967, occurred on the Jewish holidays of Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles with the total solar eclipse occurring on November 2, 1967, before Passover of 1968.

What was happening to the Jewish people during this time?

THE PRICE OF INDEPENDENCE

See how your enemies growl,

how your foes rear their heads.

With cunning they conspire against your people;

they plot against those your cherish.

“Come,” they say, “let us destroy them as a nation,

so that Israel’s name is remembered no more.”

(PSALM 83:2—4 NIV)

Israel was at war from the moment they declared statehood.

The War of Independence of May 15, 1948, through March 10, 1949, occurred the day after Israel’s rebirth. . . .  The war was fought along the entire length of the country’s border; against Lebanon and Syria in the north; Iraq and Transjordan in the east; Egypt, assisted by contingents from the Sudan, in the south; and Palestinians and volunteers from Arab countries in the interior of Israel.

It was the bloodiest of Israel’s wars with a total of 6,373 killed in action.  The jubilant celebration of the nation’s rebirth was over.  Sandwiched between the War of Independence and the Six-Day War was the Sinai War of October 29 through November 7, 1956, which was fought against Egypt over the control of the strategic Sinai Peninsula.

In 1967, the Arab nations, committed to driving the Jewish people into the sea, once again rallied against Israel.  On May 15, as Israel commemorated their Independence Day, the buildup of Egyptian troops began moving into the Sinai near the Israeli border. By May 18, Syrian troops were prepared for battle along the Golan Heights.

. . .

On May 18, 1967, The Voice of the Arabs radio station proclaimed:

 

As of today, there no longer exists an international

emergency force to protect Israel.  We shall exercise

patience no more.  We shall not complain any more to

the UN about Israel.  The sole method we shall apply

against Israel is total war, which will result in the ex-

termination of Zionist existence.  [Isi Leibler, The Case For Israel (Australia:  The Globe Press, 1972) 60.]

 

On May 20, Syrian Defense Minister Hafez Assad threatened Israel with the following declaration:

 

Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse

the aggression, but to initiate the act of liberation it-

self, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab

homeland.  The Syrian army, with its finger on the trig-

ger, is united. . . .  I, as a military man, believe that the

time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.  [Isi Leibler, The Case For Israel (Australia:  The Globe Press, 1972) 60.]

 

On May 27, Nasser of Egypt challenged Israel:

 

“Our basic objective will be the destruction of Isra-

el.  The Arab people want to fight,” he said.  [Isi Leibler, The Case For Israel (Australia:  The Globe Press, 1972) 60.]  The

following day, he added:  “We will not accept any . . .

coexistence with Israel.”  [Isi Leibler, The Case For Israel (Australia:  The Globe Press, 1972) 18.]

 

On May 30, King Hussein of Jordan signed a defense pact with Egypt.  Nasser then announced:

 

The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are

poised on the borders of Israel . . . to face the chal-

lenge, while standing behind us are the armies of Iraq,

Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan and the whole Arab nation.

This act will astound the world.  Today they will know

that the Arabs are arranged for battle, the critical hour

has arrived.  We have reached the stage of serious ac-

tion and not declarations.  [Isi Leibler, The Case For Israel (Australia:  The Globe Press, 1972) 60.]

 

President Abdur Rahman Aref of Iraq joined in the vicious war of words:

 

The existence of Israel is an error which must be recti-

fied.  This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy

which has been with us since 1948.  Our goal is clear—

to wipe Israel off the map.  [Isi Leibler, The Case For Israel (Australia:  The Globe Press, 1972) 18.]

 

On June 4, Iraq joined the military alliance of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

The Arab rhetoric was matched by the mobilization of hostile Arab forces.  Approximately 465,000 enemy troops, with more than 2,800 tanks, and 800 aircraft surrounded Israel.  [Chaim Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars (New York:  Random House, 1982), 149.]

THE HAND OF GOD

He did this so that all the peoples of the earth might

know that the hand of the LORD is powerful and so

that you might always fear the LORD your God.

(JOSHUA 4:24 NIV)

The Six-Day War was a war of miracles. . . .  There was no military reason for their victory; . . .

. . .

THE CONQUEST OF SHECHEM

Israel’s military commanders recognized that the taking of Shechem would be one of the toughest and bloodiest battles of the war.  The largest crossing of the Jordan River began in the country of Jordan and continued through the Samarian Mountains and into the city of Shechem.  Abraham used this very crossing as he entered into the land of Canaan (Genesis 12:6).

The Jordanian army assumed that Israel would enter Shechem through their coastal region so they placed their heavy artillery and tanks on the other side of the city overlooking the roads leading to Shechem from the west.  The IDF (Israel Defense Force) decided to outmaneuver the enemy by first fighting to the north and west and then coming back down to enter Shechem from the east, which was “the back door” of the city.

Colonel Uri Banari gives his eyewitness account:  [Original text on pages 215-19 from R. Menachem Mendel Kasher, The Great Era (Torah Shelemah Institute).]

 

At the entrance to Shechem stood thousands of Ar-

abs who waved white handkerchiefs and clapped

their hands.  In our naivete, we returned greetings and

smiles.  We entered the town and wondered:  We are

advancing and there is no disorder, no panic, the local

armed guards stand by with rifles in their hands keep-

ing order, and the crowds are cheering.

 

Suddenly something happened which changed the

entire picture in a moment.  One of our officers want-

ed to disarm an Arab guard.  When the latter refused,

our officer fired a shot in the air.  At that moment, all

the crowds disappeared and streets emptied out.  The

Arabs began sniper fire.

 

I didn’t comprehend what had transpired.  Only

later, did I understand.

 

The residents of Shechem thought that we were the

Iraqi forces who were due to arrive from the direction

of Jordan.  The numerous enemy tanks were situated

on the west side of Shechem.  They woke up to their

error very late.

 

The Arabs were surprised; the fear of the Jews fell

upon them.  In Hebron, and in Shechem, in Jenin and

in Jericho the Arabs were heavily armed.  There was

not even one small Arab village without arms.  With

great haste, the Arabs, however, hid their weapons and

didn’t consider using them.  They raised their hands up,

and flew white flags of surrender from every edifice.

 

The fear of G-d fell upon hundreds of thousands of

proud Arabs, who were filled with hatred and loathing

for Israel.  Only yesterday, they had sworn to fight until

their last drop of blood.

A DIRECT HIT

In the late hours of the night, an IDF truck loaded with arms and shells parked next to a building in Jerusalem.  Its mission was to bring a fresh supply of ammunition to the front line outposts.  The element of danger was great for if the truck was hit by enemy fire, the subsequent explosions of all the ammo would bring all the buildings in the area down on their inhabitants.

Suddenly the whistling of an approaching enemy shell was heard, and the shell, indeed, scored a direct hit on the vehicle.  But the Arab shell did not explode.  It remained perched atop the pile of Israeli shells in the truck.

EIGHTEEN AGAINST TWO

Yisrael, a cab driver who was drafted to fight in the Six-Day War as part of the paratroop unit assigned with conquering the Straits of Tiran, gave the following account upon his return:

 

The Israeli soldiers didn’t have to parachute out of

the Nord airplanes which took them to the Tiran

Straits.  They landed like spoiled tourists in the air-

port, because the Egyptian regiment which was on

guard there fled before the Israeli troops were visible

on the horizon.

 

After landing, I was sent with another reserve

soldier, and electrician, to patrol the area.  When we

had distanced ourselves two kilometers, an Egyptian

halftrack appeared before us filled with soldiers and

mounted with machine guns on every side.  We had

only light weapons with a few bullets that couldn’t stop

the halftrack for a second.  We couldn’t turn back, so

we stood there in despair, waited for the first shot, and

for lack of a better idea, aimed our guns at them.

 

But the shots didn’t come.

 

The halftrack came to a halt, and we decided to

cautiously approach it.  We found eighteen armed sol-

diers inside sitting with guns in hand, with a petrified

look on their faces.  They looked at us with great fear

as though begging for mercy.  I shouted “Hands up!”

 

As we were marching them and I had returned to a

state of calm, I asked the Egyptian sergeant next to me,

Tell me, why didn’t you shoot at us?”

 

He answered, “I don’t know. My arms froze—they

became paralyzed.  My whole body was paralyzed, and

I don’t know why.”

 

It turned out that these soldiers didn’t know that

the Straits of Tiran were already in Israeli hands; why

didn’t they eliminate us?

 

I don’t have an answer.  How can one say that G-d

didn’t help us.

THE FINGER OF GOD

IDF Director of Operations Maj. Gen. Ezer Weizmann was asked by Mr. Levanon, the father of a fallen pilot, how he explains the fact that for three straight hours, Israeli Air Force planes flew from one Egyptian airstrip to another destroying the enemy planes, yet the Egyptians did not radio ahead to inform their own forces of the oncoming Israeli attack.

Ezer Weizmann, who later served as president of the State of Israel, was silent.  He then lifted his head and exclaimed, “The finger of G-d.”

HA’ARETZ NEWSPAPER’S BOTTOM LINE

Following his blow-by-blow analysis, the military correspondent for the secular Ha’aretz newspaper summed up the Six-Day War with the admission:  “Even a non-religious person must admit this war was fought with help from heaven.”

A JOURNALIST’S EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT

A German journalist summarized:

 

Nothing like this has happened in history. A force in-

cluding 1,000 tanks, hundreds of artillery cannons,

many rockets and fighter jets, and a hundred thousand

soldiers armed from head to toe was destroyed in two

days in an area covering hundreds of kilometers filled

with reinforced outposts and installations.

 

And this victory was carried out by a force that

lost many soldiers and much equipment, positions,

and vehicles.  No military logic or natural cause can

explain this monumental occurrence.

. . .

King Hussein of Jordan proposed a cease-fire before the IDF could take back the Old City of Jerusalem.  World leaders put increasing political pressure on Israel, demanding that they accept the proposed truce.  Then suddenly, King Hussein changed his mind, refusing to submit to the very conditions of the cease-fire that he personally put in place! . . .

The Old City had been under Jordanian control since 1948.  For nineteen years the Jewish people had been prohibited from the Western Wall where they had prayed for thousands of years before.  It took just three days for Israeli forces to defeat the Jordanian army.  On the morning of June 7, the order was given to take back the Old City of Jerusalem.

Israeli paratroopers stormed the city and secured it.  Defense Minister Moshe Dayan arrived with Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin to formally mark the Jews’ return to their historic capital and their holiest site.  At the Western Wall, the IDF’s chaplain, Rabbi Shlomo Goren, blew a shofar to celebrate the event.

In total, 21,000 of Israel’s enemies were killed during the Six-Day War; Israel lost 779 soldiers.  Jerusalem became the capital of the Jewish people once again.  David Ben-Gurion was right when he declared, “In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.”

God’s signature was on the miraculous victory of the Six-Day War.  He signaled this historic event with the third series of Four Blood Moons.  The trials and tribulation of war finally brought forth triumph for the Jewish people—the unification of their beloved Jerusalem.

. . .

Four Blood Moons: It’s theory explained: 5 of 5  12 October 2014

Four Blood Moons: It’s theory explained: 3 of 5  10 October 2014

Four Blood Moons: It’s theory explained: 2 of 5  9 October 2014

Four Blood Moons: It’s theory explained: I of 5  8 October 2014

The Rapture: Common theories, sources, history and speculation  (1 October 2014)