I am reproducing an excerpt from this post in its entirety with the kind permission of Dymphna over at Gates of Vienna.( h/t to longtime Joshua's Army member Louie Louie) This, from 'MC' is what life on the front lines of jihad is like:
I live in Sderot, a small city in Israel about three miles from Gaza, there, my wife and I are volunteers at a charity that supplies supplemental food to poor and unemployed families in the city and surrounding area.
We hand out the food in supermarket bags which have to be packed the day before. Somehow it is usually doing these sessions that one hears “Sever Adom” on the loudspeaker system that covers the whole city. The internal alarm also triggers, and one’s blood pressure peaks. At this point we officially have fifteen seconds to get under cover. Often, however, it is more like four seconds.
S rushes to the lavatory at this point and locks herself in, I, her husband, go outside to see if there is anything to see. The rest of us stay out and wait for the bang. There is not enough time to get to a shelter (all the bus stops are bomb shelters),and being caught out in the open is not healthy.
Y knows this; he is permanently crippled from the one that exploded about a yard away from him. There was a brick wall in between, and he still carries some of it around with him, too deeply embedded to be removed safely.
Sderot was built in the 1950s when Jews had to flee from North Africa in the aftermath of the 1948 war. It started as a tent city on the periphery of the Negev desert. Later, rows of prefab housing were erected; they can still be seen.
S, the lady of the loo, was from North Africa, as a three-year-old she was doused in petrol and set alight. She survived, but grew up carrying the scars.
Bible scholars will remember that the Amalekites attacked the tail end of the Israelite column as they were leaving Egypt. In this rear part were the families, the old and the infirm. These are the soft targets, and there is little risk but great terror potential in attacking babies. Several hundred years later King Saul was commanded to wipe out the Amalekites, lock, stock etc. But the barrels proved too tempting and he failed so the problem of Amalekite hatred of the children of Israel continues to this day.[...}
It’s Sunday morning and I am just a bit on edge. I was woken up this morning to a chorus of “Sever Adom” echoing across the town. Our culture was about to be enhanced once more.
Last night there was a condition red, but nothing happened. This morning the explosions were too close for comfort. The house shook, the windows rattled, the town went silent — just the natural noises of the wind.
The “life-enhancing” qualities of Islam will be at work today while the emergency teams at Magen David Adom get to work on the inevitable victims, trying to save life and limb, but nobody can save mind and demeanour.
As usual it is school time, the children are on their way; and vulnerable. The shelters are about a hundred yards apart, twelve seconds for a six-year-old fifty yards from the shelter.
Me, I am crippled, so I cannot move fast. I stay put — if Yehovah wants to bring me home, then so be it, but I would rather not be maimed anymore. Abba, all I ask is make it fast.
This is a mind battle. We work for a small humanitarian aid organisation called “Hope for Sderot”. We mainly give out food to the now poor families in the area — our local cultural enhancement experts in Gaza have driven out many of the employers, and with them go the jobs and the wealth. The battle is to keep Sderot alive. The enemy wants to make life so uncomfortable that the town is abandoned and they have won. We work in the front line, doing what we can to make life in Sderot workable.
As we say goodbye to the jobs, so we say hello to debt crisis management. No job means that the mortgage does not get paid, the loans cannot be serviced, the gas, electricity and water have to be juggled; get it wrong and the children get their food cold.
To qualify for aid, our clients have to do a means test. This is a heart-rending process, made worse by bank and government inflexibility. Many clients see what little money they receive eaten up by compulsory repayments; clothing and equipping the children for school becomes a matter of scrounging what you can. We keep supplies of nappies (diapers) and unused children’s underwear so that if we see a need, we can fill it.
But it all costs money. When I flew in from Vienna a few months ago, girls’ knickers had been at half price in the local supermarket so I got a hundred euros’ worth. My bag was opened at the airport security, and there on top were all these packets of pants. The official gave me a very strange look!
Added to all the local cultural enhancement, The Joshua Fund (Christian) has just removed our $10,000 monthly grant after four years, we are too “Jewish” for them, they want our (Jewish) boss to go to church in Beersheva (forty kilometres away) on Saturday instead of keeping (Jewish) Sabbath. We thank the Joshua Fund for their past support, and we are slowly breaching the huge gap that their decision has left, but it is difficult not to be angry at the pettiness of it all.
If I might put in a ‘bleg’ here: you can contribute at our website. All money goes to counter the Jihad being waged directly against us.
We have enough supplies to keep distributing food into January, but our ability to ease the financial burdens is now severely restricted. We have to rely on contributions from our supporters, mainly in the USA with some local assistance. This income has dropped off by about 30% this year (excluding the above).
But above all we must trust in Yehovah to provide, He has His ways of overcoming the stupidity of mankind, and to support that which He deems to be GOOD.
In this we are very little different from our cousins over in Gaza about five kilometres away, but we do not need to defend Yehovah with our swords, and we do not expect everybody to love our Abba as we do. We love Him by looking after His Creation, not by destroying it. Islam is a religion of the desert, and desert is land that has been destroyed. Mark Twain described this land as:
“… A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds… a silent mournful expanse… a desolation… we never saw a human being on the whole route… hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.” (The Innocents Abroad, p. 361-362)
Another ‘sever Adom’ with accompanying whiz-bangs as I sit here writing this.
It is now productive, and even given the limitations and bias of Mr Twain, It has come alive only in the last hundred years or so.
Israel is the front line, and although it is not perfect, it is here as a bastion against Islamic encroachment. There is mounting resentment against Israel, from those same sources of cultural enrichment as we are all used to. I would only ask that the world remembers this as one by one, the nations of the world fall victim to Islamisation and begin to vilify Jews and Israel. Holocaust-denial has become rife, and yes, the Holocaust has been overplayed in some quarters, but my relatives, left behind in Lithuania and Russia all those years ago, have yet to turn up and make contact, so I can only assume that they all died before anyone could let us know what was happening. It is certainly unusual for a whole family of about twenty people to die in the course of a few years, and our family is by no means unique.
It is still eerily quiet outside. The schoolchildren are not singing and playing; they are behind the concrete and steel-reinforced structures that pass for school buildings here. Four civilians casualties are so far reported. I am sure there are more to come.
Here we go again, condition red, we had about four seconds warning of that one.
I think it is time to put the kettle on and resort to Mr Folger (very hard to get here, we have to ask visitors to bring us supplies).
Please remember us when the chips are down.
I'm going to leave this at the top for awhile. Those of you with websites please likewise feel free to reproduce it .
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