Sunday, May 13, 2007

The Copper Scroll




I previously wrote about Joel C. Rosenberg's The Last Jihad, but haven't written about the other novels since then. I recently finished the 4th in the series, The Copper Scroll. Here are portions of Rosenberg's bio, speaking of each of the first three books in relation to current events:
The first page of his first novel-The Last Jihad-puts you inside the cockpit of a hijacked jet, coming in on a kamikaze attack into an American city, which leads to a war with Saddam Hussein over weapons of mass destruction. Yet it was written before 9/11, long before the actual war with Iraq. ...

His second thriller-The Last Days-opens with the death of Yasser Arafat and a U.S. diplomatic convoy ambushed in Gaza. Six days before The Last Days was published in hardcover, a U.S. diplomatic convoy was ambushed in Gaza. Thirteen months later, Yasser Arafat died. ...

The Ezekiel Option centers on a Russian dictator who forms a military alliance with the leaders of Iran who are feverishly pursuing nuclear weapons and threatening to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. On the very day it was published in June 2005, Iran elected a new leader who vowed to accelerate the country's nuclear program and later vowed to "wipe Israel off the map." Six months after the book was published, Moscow signed a $1 billion arms deal with Tehran. ...

Rosenberg's experience in Washington, D.C. and Jerusalem show throughout his novels, as they play out as if they were taken straight from the headlines. Near the end of The Copper Scroll, I got the chills reading this paragraph concerning Dr. Eliezer Mordechai, a former Israeli intelligence officer who had accurately identified the fulfillment of biblical prophecy from Ezekiel 38 & 39:
I supported the war in Iraq, Mordechai had written. I believed Saddam Hussein was a serious threat to the region and the world, and I believed in the cause of regime change. Removing Saddam was not as easy as we had hoped, nor as quick. But the question isn't whether we should have gone to war in Iraq. The real question is, what exactly are we building there? Are we making Iraq safe for democracy, or safe for the Antichrist?

1 comment:

Noah Braymen said...

So I finally got around to reading this post. Wow!