The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God

A story out of time for our time: The Prophet Isaiah wrote of Cyrus, King of the Persian Empire who knew not God but was chosen by God to restore freedom to Israel.

October 11, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

On October 7, 2023, the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, attacked the Nation of Israel with an ongoing barrage of long-range missiles. At this writing, the Israeli death toll exceeds 1,000 with thousands of others critically wounded or missing. Many Israeli citizens are being held hostage under Hamas death threats. Just weeks earlier, the Biden Adminstration “unfroze” $6 billion in Iran assets in exchange for Iran’s release of five prisoners.

Many believe that the payment of such ransom to belligerent regimes increases the likelihood of a rogue state continuing to take hostages and hold them in Iranian prisons. Many others believe that these funds were ultimately used to supply and help launch the Hamas attack on Israel. The Wall Street Journal has since reported that Iran is indeed behind this attack and plotted it along with Hamas for weeks.

Hamas is a Palestinian group that has grown dramatically in recent years. It seeks to create a single Islamic state in historic Palestine, which is now largely divided between Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Hamas in Arabic means “zealot,” and is an acronym for “Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya,” or “Islamic Resistance Movement.” The group was founded in 1988 as a militant segment of the Palestinian Arab national movement which became gradually radicalized.

Hamas openly seeks Israel’s destruction and this attack has the same impact in Israel that September 11, 2001 had on the United States. If the Islamic Republic of Iran is indeed behind the funding and/or arming of this attack, the free world has to investigate and come to a definitive conclusion.

Ironically, I began working on this post on the very day Israel was attacked. The irony is that my post is about Cyrus the Great, the Sixth Century BC King of the Persian Empire in what is now modern day Iran. King Cyrus is the subject of a reading from the Prophet Isaiah (45:1) at Sunday Mass on October 22, this year:

“Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him and ungird the loins of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed.”

Read on, please, because this Cyrus, pulled from the pages of Biblical history as the ancestor of contemporary Iran, was once the salvation of Israel.

In Defense of Religious Liberty

With only rare variations in any given week, between seventy and eighty percent of the readers of Beyond These Stone Walls are in the United States. Typically, until recently, readers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, comprised most of the remaining twenty to thirty percent. Most recently, this has changed, and the top countries visiting this blog now vary greatly.

I have noticed from weekly traffic reports that readers in other countries actually increase when I write about current events in the United States. It is hard for me to NOT write about some developments especially when they fall within the realm of human rights and religious freedom. If I fail to address what seems to capture the attention of an entire nation, then I feel as though I am overlooking the elephant in the sacristy. It may seem understandable, but nations that are emerging with large numbers of readers of this blog now include Thailand, Singapore, Ukraine (which greatly surprised me), Nepal, Germany and sometimes Israel.

I recently received a snail-mail letter from “Frances” writing from the United Kingdom. She is a long time reader who occasionally comments on my posts. Here is an interesting excerpt from her letter which gave me a bit of much needed perspective:

“A lot of your posts recently have been about the state of your country and upcoming elections. I often consider the differences between our two countries and sometimes I wonder why people are so surprised by public opposition in the USA to the Catholic Church. Here in England, we are still grateful not to be hanged, drawn and quartered, or crushed to death. A practicing Catholic here could not in reality serve as Prime Minister, and it would be very difficult for a Catholic to be a member of Parliament. I think they would have to make too many compromises.

“Some might claim to be Catholic, but looking at what they do and how they vote, that is questionable. We are used to this situation. We take it for granted that we are the ‘outsiders’ swimming against the tide of public opinion, patriotism, and respectability. With the help of God, we just persevere. But in your country now, the Church seems to have gone from being accepted and respected to being persecuted.”

The persecution is not as overt as it was in post-Reformation England. We will not see Catholics hanged, or drawn and quartered. What we will see — what we are about to see — is a shameless display of Catholic accommodations to the political left’s march further left. The present “Catholic” US President comes to mind. So does the current Bishop of San Diego. In a 2020 rebuttal to Father James Altman, that Bishop wrote that denying the Eucharist to a pro-choice Catholic politician means that we must also deny the Eucharist to anyone who does not accept climate change. That bishop has since been elevated by Pope Francis to Cardinal. Sometimes the most stinging assaults on our Faith come from within.

There are other Catholic leaders, however, who have stood out with courage and integrity in defense of Catholic moral teaching. One — though surprising to some — is Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, who penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal  in 2018 entitled, “The Democrats Abandon Catholics.” It was an honest and faithful assessment of the state of the Democratic Party and its betrayal of Catholics who embrace the Church’s traditional defense of life. Others who come immediately to mind are Cardinal Raymond Burke, and the immensely faithful leader, Bishop Joseph E. Strickland.

In Defense of Jerusalem

It was inspiring to see Cardinal Dolan defend the truth against an anti-Catholic onslaught of biased rhetoric from politicians who court Catholic votes while carrying out a frontal assault on Catholic beliefs. The greatest tragedy to befall the Catholic Church in the United States was to accommodate itself to the culture in which it lives. Church leaders became comfortable in America, then they amassed political power, then they tried to hide the corruption that always accompanies the quest to retain power. There is no more vivid example than the career path of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick whose distortion of the Church’s mandate for the culture of life was laid bare in my post, “Joe Biden, Cardinal McCarrick and the Betrayal of Life.”

The precarious state of religion in this culture, and especially the state of Catholicism in America, has an important historical precedent. As Pope Francis steers the Church into a Synod on Synodality, a controvery between Tradition and accommodation to culture is leaving us scattered. I raised an important question in my post, “Will Pope Francis Stand Against Catholic Schism?” The great cultural divide threatens to leave one side or the other in exile from this Church. The leadership needed in defense of our Faith does not appear to be coming from the sources we might hope for. When I looked at the Mass readings chosen long ago for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time in our liturgical cycle this year, the Prophet Isaiah left me wondering whether we are looking in the right place.

“Thus says the Lord to his anointed, Cyrus, whose right hand I grasp, subduing nations before him, and making kings run in his service, opening doors before him, and leaving the gates unbarred: For the sake of Jacob, my servant, of Israel, my chosen one, I have called you by your name, giving you a title, though you knew me not. I am the Lord and there is no other; there is no God besides me. It is I who arm you, though you know me not, so that toward the rising and the setting of the sun people may know that there is none besides me. I am the Lord. There is no other.”

— Isaiah 45:1, 4-6

The Scripture quote above is the First Reading for the Mass of Sunday October 22 this month. Ordinarily, I would have posted this analysis of it on the Wednesday before, which would be October 18. However, the Gospel Reading on that Sunday refers to a cornerstone of our Faith, so I am posting this a week ahead to accommodate the Gospel.

There is little known of the Prophet Isaiah except that he lived in Jerusalem and his prophetic activity extended from about 740 BC to 701 BC, a period of about forty years. In the passage above, the Lord, through Isaiah, is addressing a man named Cyrus who is called by God and given power and a title, “though you knew me not.” The power and authority given to Cyrus is not for Cyrus, but rather so that “the people may know that there is none besides me. I am the Lord.”

Two centuries after the prophesies of Isaiah, in 597 BC, Israel fell under the armies of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II. This account, told in the Second Book of Kings (Ch. 24ff) resulted in two waves of exile of the Jews into Babylon. In the first wave, in 597 BC, Israel’s leaders were compromised and taken away. This undermining of the leaders was for the purpose of destroying the religious identity of the people. Then, in 586 BC, the real devastation came. Babylon destroyed the Temple and the entire city of Jerusalem, and sent the remaining Jews into exile.

Then, some two centuries after first appearing in the prophecy of Isaiah, God took the right hand of a man named Cyrus, who knew not God, and subdued nations before him, placed kings in his service, opened doors and unbarred gates just as predicted. Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and all its surrounding regions to become first King of the Persian Empire — which again includes present day Iran. Cyrus did not live a lifestyle that the People of God had any reason to respect. He did not appear to believe in anything but himself.

But Cyrus had one quirky trait that seemed to have been instilled in him by a much Higher Authority. Despite his personally sinful lifestyle and quest for Earthly powers, Cyrus developed a deep respect for the Jews and their Faith, even though he personally shared in none of it. The Lord God had groomed him, knocked down kingdoms before him, so Cyrus did what only the Emperor of the Persian Empire could do. He issued an edict ordering the reconstruction of the city of Jerusalem and its Temple, and he returned the Chosen People from their fifty-year exile in 539 BC to the land of Israel earning him an honored place in Judaism and Salvation History.

The Prophet Ezra and the Decree of Cyrus

The Prophet Isaiah presents Cyrus as appearing in about 545 BC as the hope for Jerusalem. He is bestowed by Isaiah with a rather lofty title, “the anointed of Yahweh.” Such a title marked the beginning of the era of messianic prophecy for Israel. The title would have been seen as a great insult to the Jews, but they came to view Cyrus from his present actions and not his past lifestyle. Isaiah (44:28) expanded his title to “Shepherd of Israel,” in recognition of the strangest trait that was found in him: his almost obsessive insistence on the promotion of religious liberty and the establishment of laws that will guarantee and protect it for the Jewish People and for Israel.

In regard to the restoration of Israel, this hope was fulfilled in 538 BC when Cyrus ordered the protection of the Jews and their return to Jerusalem to oversee the rebuilding of their Temple from the treasury of the Persian Empire. The full text of the Decree of Cyrus appears in the Book of the Prophet Ezra (6:3-5), a passage once doubted for its authenticity but now accepted as authentic by modern Scripture scholars:

“In the first year of Cyrus the King, a decree concerning the House of God in Jerusalem: Let the House be rebuilt, the place where sacrifices are offered and burnt offerings are brought. Its height shall be sixty cubits and its breadth sixty cubits with three courses of great stone and one course of timber. Let the cost be paid from the royal treasury. And also let the gold and silver vessels of the House of God which Nebuchadnezzar took out of the Temple be brought to Babylon to be restored and then returned to the Temple in Jerusalem, each to its place in the House of God.”

— Ezra 6:3-5

The Prophet Ezra went on to describe that some of the restoration of Jerusalem was interrupted by local vassal kings who did not believe that the conquering tyrant, Cyrus, would issue such an order. A complaint was made by a local governor to Darius I, King of Hystaspis, that the Jews were rebuilding the city. Darius then found an authenticated copy of the Decree of Cyrus, and ordered that the Temple and reconstruction of the city will be continued with no further hindrance. This was the same King Darius, by the way, who threw Daniel into the lions’ den (Daniel 6:6ff).

Is there a point of understanding to be considered from all this in our present time? Only you can arrive at such a conclusion. I have already arrived at mine, and I must come down on the side of religious liberty. I am tired of seeing the Little Sisters of the Poor having to defend themselves in never ending court proceedings. I am tired of listening to hapless bishops equate the immorality of 70-million prenatal executions with “climate change.” I shuddered when the Pentagon announced in 2020 that the U.S. Navy would halt all Catholic Masses on Naval bases — a decision that was mercifully reversed from higher up. I shuddered, as should all of you, when I read the FBI memos calling for investigations of Traditional Catholics who were equated with radicalized groups. I was inspired when the immediate past President, in a Cyrus-like gesture, ordered that the United States Embassy to Israel must be restored to its rightful spiritual Capital, Jerusalem.

Our Temple is rebuilt from within ourselves. Catholics must not acquiesce to exile and accommodation to a culture turning from God. Our faith and our vote are not mutually exclusive.

+ + +

The Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great (Courtesy of the United States Military Academy, West Point)

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage

The Holy Spirit and the Book of Ruth at Pentecost

Qumran: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coming Apocalypse

Left in Afghanistan: Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS-K, Credibility

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

From Hong Kong to America Freedom Is under Siege

Is America ready to surrender free speech and other civil rights? A daring escape from Hong Kong and its encroaching Communist Chinese regime should raise alarms.

Just a few weeks before America shuddered in abhorrence over a post-election mob raid at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, something remarkable unfolded in Hong Kong. Two young Danes — Thomas Rohden, age 25, and Anders Storgaard, age 26 — choreographed a young democracy activist’s escape from Hong Kong. It’s a story worthy of a John le Carré novel. The story was first written in The Wall Street Journal as “A Hong Kong Dissident’s Daring Escape” (Jan. 13, 2021) by Editorial Page writer Jillian Kay Melchior, and it’s fascinating.

The two young Danes, in opposite political parties, belong to a group called the Danish China Critical Society. Its purpose is to raise awareness among Danish citizens about human rights abuses in Communist China. After meeting with some Hong Kong pro-democracy activists in Copenhagen last year, they remained in contact with Mr. Ted Rui, age 38, a Hong Kong legislator who has openly dared to protest legislation that threatens free expression for Hong Kong citizens.

Last summer, China imposed a new law on Hong Kong citizens that outlaws any form of dissent. Mr. Hui’s protests resulted in an arrest for which he was out on bail awaiting prosecution. He had begun to notice that he and some of his family were being followed since the arrest. Other members of the Hong Kong freedom movement have been assaulted. Though Mr. Rui had not yet been charged under China’s new dissent law, he knew that its penalty is life in prison.

A little history: Hong Kong island and the Kowloon Peninsula were ceded by China to become a British dependency in 1841 and 1860 respectively. Over the next 150 years, Hong Kong became a global financial center and one of the world’s largest trading ports.

An agreement signed by the British and Chinese governments in 1984 provided for China to resume sovereignty over Kong Kong and the region in 1997. The agreement was that Hong Kong would become a Special Administrative Region with its laws guaranteeing its citizens rights for a period of fifty years. The “One State - Two Systems” agreement remained in place until Beijing began to crack down on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in recent years. The massive pro-democracy protests were sparked by a bill introduced in the Hong Kong legislature giving Beijing arrest and extradition authority in Hong Kong.

After Ted Hui was released on bail, Thomas Rohden and Anders Storgaard concocted a bold plan to host a fake climate change conference in Copenhagen and invite Mr. Hui in an effort to get him and his family to safety. Fearing that his telephone might be monitored, they never told him that the planned conference was not real when they invited him. He had already been considering finding a way to go into exile when the invitation came.

Postponing the exile plan, he told the Danes that Hong Kong courts wanted to review the climate change conference before Mr. Hui could accept the invitation to Copenhagen. The Danes put something together in haste while Mr. Hui booked flights for his wife and two children to go to London. Ted Hui arrived in Copenhagen ready to address climate change without ever even suspecting that the conference was a ruse. He was relieved beyond words that he and his family had escaped Chinese communist tyranny.

Beijing and Hong Kong were not amused. Beijing has asserted that its anti-dissent laws also apply to citizens of other countries who conspire to free Chinese residents. Rohden and Storgaard now must avoid travel to or through any country that has an extradition agreement with Beijing. The most important part of this story is Ted Hui’s reaction to his freedom:

“The message I want to take for the Danish people is not to take freedom for granted. Freedom is very fragile. It can go away in months or weeks. The hand of tyranny can extend very quickly, and can influence the world.”

— Ted Hui

The Rise of Socialism

The United States has just witnessed firsthand the need for a warning like Ted Hui’s, formerly of Hong Kong, that “freedom is very fragile.” Exactly as he has warned, “it can go away in months or weeks.” In the month since the mob attack at the U.S. Capitol, forces in this nation have shamed Americans using progressive ideology and the “cancel culture” pandemic to accept without dissent the open suppression of three foundational civil liberties guaranteed in the First Amendment: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and religious freedom.

After years of denials by Facebook and Twitter that the platforms suppress conservative points of view, that suppression is now in the open and inflicted without apology. As information technology, these venues have also suppressed freedom of the press. Here is the example that comes most readily to mind: In October, 2020, the New York Post, this nation’s fourth largest daily newspaper, covered on its Front Page a potentially explosive story that has since emerged as both factual and with hard evidence and witnesses that back it up. That story was about the business practices of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, blocked the story from exposure through social media. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did so as well. The rest of the mainstream media, taking their marching orders from Twitter and Facebook, suppressed the story as fraudulent. It was not. The obvious reason for the suppression was the fact that the story emerged a month before an election, but it had little to do with the election. The business practice that was exposed in the story was an allegation that Hunter Biden had received millions in profit from foreign entities through “influence peddling” by selling access to his father during the administration of President Obama.

It was and is an ugly story involving three of the most politically contentious foreign enterprises now faced by President Biden’s administration: China, Russia, and the Ukraine.

My purpose in writing of this is not to denigrate the current president, nor is it to determine truth and falsehood. That is for the Justice Department to do. It turns out that the FBI has been investigating Hunter Biden for many months, and that investigation now includes allegations of multi-million dollar deals within China while his father was vice president. That said, Hunter Biden deserves, and should have, the full spectrum of due process rights afforded to him, but the suppression of news coverage is not one of those rights.

The arrogance of some in the mainstream media being what it is, admissions of culpability are as rare as the unnuanced truth. The story remains suppressed by most of the mainstream news media, but that is changing as the DOJ investigation can no longer be ignored or covered up. Under public pressure, Facebook and Twitter have finally stopped removing the story or suspending the accounts of those sharing it. U.S. foreign policy has been critical of the Chinese Communist government for its suppression of news, but I have been hard pressed to see the difference.

That is the real harm caused by media suppression of this story. Repressive regimes that balk at America’s claim of having a free press all know of it. The mob that attacked Washington all knew of it, and it lent fuel to their insistence that the election was not a free and fair election. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Adam Schiff both knew about it even as they dismissed it as “Russian disinformation.”

The greatest harm has been to President Biden himself. This story will not go away. The fact of its pre-election suppression will cause it to expand and fester. It will haunt his term in office for the next year as he is drawn further into it. Freedom of the press has been abdicated in favor of a deeply partisan bias about the news we should be allowed to see and hear. The institution in our society that should act as a bipartisan government oversight for and by the people has openly betrayed that role. Freedom itself will suffer for it. So will we all.

The Assault on Freedom of Speech

The mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 — purportedly Trump supporters all — inflicted far more damage on Donald Trump and his presidency than any of his political enemies could accomplish. This mob attack at the heart of democracy was not an example of freedom of expression, but it is one of the core rights of our democracy —freedom of speech — that now suffers for it. And, again, so will we all.

Back in 2016, I wrote a pre-election post entitled, “Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables.” That seems almost a reserved and innocent time when compared with the unfathomable chasm between left and right that the four years hence have wrought. I had no frame of reference then for just how relatively fair Mrs. Clinton was being when she relegated a mere half of Trump voters to “a basket of deplorables.” There is now a highly charged and partisan effort to lump all 74 million Trump voters into that basket, keep them there, and silence them.

Blacklists are now emerging among publishers. Simon & Schuster just cancelled a forthcoming book by Senator Josh Hawley entitled, “The Tyranny of Big Tech.” Remember Mike Lindell? He’s the contagiously happy guy who sells pillows and “Dream Sheets” on TV. Exposed now as a Trump campaign donor, several large U.S. retail outlets have ordered his products pulled from their shelves. I could fill pages with similar examples of political suppression.

It is a credit to Hillary Clinton that she only called half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables” in 2016. The other half, she said with candid honesty, “are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them; nobody worries about what happens to their lives and futures ... Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

President Biden should call upon Democrats to end this blood lust for Republicans who cannot in conscience embrace cancel culture, identity politics, and a partisan disregard for the most inherent civil right of all, the right to life. Our newly elected president did not get off to a good start when he called for unity and healing with the insistence that “We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue.” It seems clearly to me right now to be rather the other way around.

Catholics Still in the Basket of Deplorables

There have been some unfortunate — scandalous is a better word — examples of the suppression of free speech even among Catholic leaders since the mob scene of January 6. A reader sent me a very troubling article from America magazine by Father James Martin, SJ entitled, “How Catholic Leaders Helped Give Rise to Violence at the U.S. Capitol” (Jan. 12, 2021).

The article is little more than a shameful attempt to use the events of January 6 to score political points against the author’s perceived theological and ideological enemies. I found it to be profoundly sad. Father Martin singled out Father James Altman, Father Ed Meeks, Father John Zuhlsdorf, Father Richard Heilman, Father Kevin Cusick, Bishop Richard Stika, Bishop Joseph E. Strickland, among others, to be examples of “priests and bishops who count themselves as pro-life (but) helped spawn a hate-filled environment that led to mayhem, violence and, ultimately, death.”

These names, and others like them, are the heroes of traditional Catholics and the Catholic pro-life community. They are deeply respected for speaking openly and with fidelity to Church teaching about the Holocaust of our time, the infanticide of 60 million aborted Americans who have no free speech rights of their own. By denigrating and accusing them so duplicitously, Father Martin scored some ideological points, but only within his own tribe — far left Catholics who would likely be far more comfortable in the U.S. Episcopal church. Frankly, no one else would even be reading America.

In his unfortunate America article, Father James Martin contributes to the atmosphere of tribalism that has so separated Americans in recent years. And clearly, he separates Catholics along the same sad partisan lines.

President Joe Biden’s greatest challenge may not be the conversion of Republicans to more progressive ideologies. It may well be the conversion of the progressive left to the tolerance and unity he rightly calls for. Trump is gone. The Democrats control the House and the White House and have the deciding tie-breaker vote in the Senate. But Portland, Seattle, and other Democrat controlled cities are still rioting, as they did all last summer. CNN blamed it all on Donald Trump then, and is still calling these “peaceful protests.”

Portland, Oregon police reported that the “peaceful protesters came armed with pepper-ball guns, tasers and other electronic crowd control weapons, fireworks, rocks, and shields.” Some were armed with molotov cocktails, knives, batons, chemical spray, and crowbars. In Seattle, the January 20 peaceful protesters burned American flags and caused damage to an ICE headquarters. In Portland they carried signs reading, “We don’t want Biden. We want revenge!" They identified themselves as anarchists and antifa protesters responding to racism, fascism, and police brutality.

They also attacked the Democratic headquarters. Police made multiple arrests at the peaceful protests.

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like a related post that is mentioned in the text above:

Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables

And for an example of media duplicity and coverup:

Hitler's Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times.

Please share this post!