Hi, Gary Steerman, time for another update from Prophecy Watchers and Good News. In studio with me is our friend Avi Lipkin from Israel.

Avi, good to have you back. Good to be back. You know, every time we meet, you've got some hot news. And we talk for a while

and I get very excited. We need to share this with our audience. And our audience knows when

you've been absent for a while. They say, where's Avi? Well, he's here. And we're going to talk

about the Middle East.

I think in an important way, because we hear the American news media talking about the Middle East,

and it's not the same as when Avi talks about it. What's going on in the Middle East, Avi?

Well, we have been seeing the semi-demise of ISIS. In other words, the caliphate is pretty much gone as far as those areas in Syria and Iraq. But Sunni Islam is not gone. And ISIS, in my opinion, is really not very much different from Hamas or Islamic jihad or even

Hezbollah which is Shiite. It's a different form of Islam, an opposing form of Islam, but

the idea is Islamic conquest of the earth, defeat of the infidels and forced conversion to

Islam.

So we see that the caliphate is gone. We see Iran establishing a Shiite stranglehold on greater parts of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, even Yemen to the south.

So now the threat to Israel is Shiite. When the caliphate was at its

height, we saw like a big black cloud known as Sunni Islam coming against Israel. That's gone.

And the United States, an interesting point is that under George Herbert Walker Bush, you know, he didn't like Saddam and Saddam didn't like him. You had the desert storm. And so when George Herbert Walker Bush said, oh, we're going to bring democracy to Iraq. What that meant was, well, the Shiites are 60% of the majority.

So majority rule means Iraq becomes Shiite.

So Saddam Hussein was slaughtering the Shiites, slaughtering the Kurds.

When the Shiites wanted to rise up, George Herbert Walker Bush said, yes, go for it. We're with you.

And then Saddam Hussein slaughtered 100,000 Shiites,

and nobody came to the help of the Shiites. Then eventually, after Saddam was overthrown by George

Walker Bush, so he handed over the rule of Iraq to the majority, majority rule, who are Shiites,

backed by Iran. And so all the Sunnis who were with Saddam Hussein got fired from their jobs, and they are the ones who formed

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