Are the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine part of the Great Game between the superpowers? And who benefited from the Gaza war, Iran, Turkey, Russia, China… or Charles III?

Did you know that the brutal terrorist attack in Israel on October 7, which triggered the biggest conflict in the Middle East since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and which is now threatening to escalate into a wider Middle East war between Iran and Israel after Iran sent hundreds of missiles and drones into Israel on April 13, was also Vladimir Putin’s birthday? Coincidence? Perhaps, but the outbreak of the Gaza war calls for a closer look at the geopolitics of the region and at the possible bigger players who may have been behind the conflict or who may have at least benefited from its outbreak. Geopolitics and the historical and strategic context in which conflicts arise has been one of my interests, as it helps us to understand the thinking of the leaders of the major powers in the East or the West when they justify their military actions, regardless of the cost of these wars.

I am not a historian, but my interest in history and the connections between historical events is linked to my interest in Bible prophecies – especially the visions of Daniel. You see, you have to understand history before you can say that prophecies predicted this or that event in history. In Chapter 13 of my book, for example, I systematically review Middle Eastern history over the last 15 centuries to show that Daniel Chapter 11, verses 1-20, predicted Middle Eastern history from the rise of Islam to the re-emergence of the state of Israel in 1948.

Prophetic imagery is often very general and symbolic, and therefore a certain amount of big picture thinking is required to make such a point. This historical overview is also important for understanding the contemporary tensions (and the prophetic connections between these events) that have brought the world to the brink of World War 3. For this reason, I will first take the reader ahead of World War 1 and into the colonialist competition for world power in the 19th Century called the Great Game.

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Why the Middle East has been a playground for the Great Powers?

If you read history as an isolated individual events, dates and battles, you might learn that in World War I, the central powers – Germany, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey – fought the allies of the WWI – Britain, France, Russia and Serbia – and the allies won the war, which resulted in the Middle East being divided between the British and the French, with the victorious powers dividing the lands of the defeated Ottoman Sultanate among themselves. But you will have no idea what interests the UK had in going to war with Turkey or occupying Palestine, thousands of miles from the British Isles. This is where geopolitics comes in and helps us better understand the historical context of such strategic decisions.

After the Napoleonic Wars, Britain became Europe’s leading colonial power, an empire “where the sun never set”, and by the end of the 19th century had grown into the greatest world power in history, controlling a quarter of the world’s land area. British India, of which Empress Queen Victoria was proclaimed in 1876, was known as the crown jewel of the empire because it was its most strategically important and economically productive overseas dominion, serving as a tangible and symbolic trophy for British colonial hegemony. For this reason, British foreign policy throughout the 19th Century was guided by the need to protect India’s integrity, mainly from the threat posed by the expansion of the Russian Empire, but also from other colonial rivals such as France and, in the early 20th Century, especially from Emperor Wilhelm II’s Germany.

Russia’s expansion in Central Asia towards India led to a historic episode called the Great Game where Britain and Russia eventually divided Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet into districts to protect their own geopolitical interests. Although the term “Great Game” is mainly associated with these Central Asian tensions, the same objective of protecting the Indian colony and its trade routes led the British to intervene in the wars of independence of the Greek Orthodox peoples in the Balkans from Ottoman rule (in which Russia also intervened to extend its own power) or to occupy Egypt in 1882. By the 1800s, the Ottoman Sultanate, which had fallen behind the times, had weakened to the point where its collapse – and its impact on the ‘balance of power’ – was constantly feared by the major European powers.

This map shows how the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, cut British trade routes to British India by almost half and was therefore strategically very important for the British to maintain their economic and military hegemony. This map explains why the British occupied Egypt and eventually Palestine.

The British strategy was to protect the Ottoman Empire from collapse, fearing that Russia would take over the Turkish-controlled lands in Asia Minor and the Middle East (which would have given Russia power in the Mediterranean and prevented British ships from reaching British India via the Suez Canal, completed in 1869). Thus the British tried to keep the already dying ‘sick man of Europe’ (as European leaders derisively called Turkey) on a ‘respirator’ by guaranteeing loans and supporting the Istanbul sultans militarily against the expanding Russian Empire. But while the British thus often fought on the Ottoman side, mainly against France or Russia, in the First World War they fought against each other. Why this U-turn? Because the Turkish Sultan allied himself in the run-up to the First World War with Germany’s power-hungry Emperor Wilhelm II – the cousin of Britain’s George V – who planned the railway linking Berlin and Baghdad, a project that created worldwide tensions between Britain, France, Germany and the Ottomans. According to Wikipedia:

The financing, design and construction were mainly the responsibility of the German Empire through the Deutsche Bank and Philipp Holzmann, who had built the Anatolian Railway (Anatolische Eisenbahn) in the 1890s, linking Istanbul, Ankara and Konya… If the railway had been completed, the Germans would have gained access to suspected oil fields in Mesopotamia and a link to the port of Basra in the Persian Gulf. The latter would have provided access to the eastern parts of the German colonial empire and avoided the Suez Canal, which was controlled by British and French interests.

The railway became a source of international controversy in the years immediately preceding the First World War. Although it has been argued that they were settled in 1914 before the war began, it has also been suggested that the railway was a manifestation of the imperial rivalry that was the main cause of the First World War… A recent history of this railway in the specific context of the First World War outlines the global interest of Germany in opposing the British Empire and the territorial interest of Ottoman Turkey in opposing its Russian, French and British rivals on all sides. As Morris Jastrow, a contemporary “on the ground” at the time, wrote:

“In England it was considered that if, as Napoleon is said to have pointed out, Antwerp in the hands of a great continental power was a pistol aimed at the English coast, Baghdad and the Persian Gulf in the hands of Germany (or any other strong power) would be a 42-centimetre gun aimed at India.”

Trade routes as shapers of historical breakpoints

This was not the first or the last time that a railway or a major commercial route linking civilisations sparked an international conflict. Indeed, these routes have played a surprisingly central role in shaping some of the most significant events in history. And perhaps it is not so surprising if we think of them as a kind of economic lifeline for which great powers fight for their existence and their world power. For example, many people may remember from their primary school history lessons the Silk Road linking Asia and Europe, a major global trade route connecting East and West from antiquity to the Middle Ages. This trade route collapsed when the Ottoman Empire closed it to European traders after the siege of Constantinople in 1453.

This forced the European states that had become dependent on trade with the East – especially Portugal and Spain – to seek alternative sea routes to Asia, which in turn led to an Age of Discovery and colonialism, when Columbus sailed west to reach Asia by circumnavigating the globe (note: in the Middle Ages, there was no belief in a flat earth with ships falling off the edges), but stumbled upon the American continent, unknown to Europeans, in 1492. The Portuguese Vasco de Gama was the first European to sail around Africa to India in 1498, creating a commercial sea route through the Cape of Good Hope to Asia (see previous image). This route was used by European sailing ships for trade with the East until the construction of the Suez Canal in 1869, which shortened it by several thousand kilometres. China, in partnership with several other Asian countries, is now planning a massive multi-trillion dollar project called the Belt and Road, which has also been dubbed the ‘New Silk Road’. This ‘road’ (or network of trade routes) would follow almost the same route as the original Silk Road and include railways, ports and other infrastructure designed for global trade in 65 countries.

Indian Silk Road versus Chinese Silk Road

The trade routes of a bygone era are now being brought back to life. And it’s not just China’s new Silk Road project. At the G20 meeting last September, Israel, India and a number of European countries presented a new transport route project called the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, which would link India to the Gulf countries and from there to Israel and Europe. It is part of ongoing negotiations between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Israel to normalise relations between the two countries. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech to the UN in September, hailed the historic importance of both the Saudi-Israel peace and the economic corridor linking India to Israel and Europe, which could bring peace and economic prosperity to the whole region.

India’s historic colonial corridors to the Middle East and Eurasia were severed with the partition and independence of India in 1947 . So Netanyahu and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are now aiming to revive these former trade relations. Such a corridor would at the same time strengthen the security state relations between India, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the European Union, as any national threat to Israel would also be a threat to the commercial interests of its partners. Dominika Urhová wrote on 16 November 2023 what the India-Middle-East Economic Corridor (IMEC) could mean for the EU’s international role.

With the intensifying superpower competition between the US and China and the global shift towards a more multipolar world, IMEC can serve as a platform for the EU to strengthen its position on the international stage, reinforce its ties with India and increase its influence in the Middle East. Strengthening EU-India relations has been on the EU agenda for some time and many European countries have made significant efforts to revitalise their relations with New Delhi. This has been particularly evident in recent efforts by France, Germany and Italy to bring their countries and India closer together.

Those who predict future events from Bible prophecy – including the author – have been teaching for decades that a united Europe should emerge as a force in international relations, overtaking the US as the sole world power, and move closer to Israel and the Middle East as the Antichrist, who will take over Europe, makes a seven-year covenant with Israel and re-establishes the Roman Empire on its former borders. Perhaps it is IMEC that will enable the EU to play such a role. Miryousef Alavi wrote:

One of the main beneficiaries of IMEC is Israel, which, in addition to contributing to the normalisation of relations with Arab and Islamic countries, is making the port of Haifa one of the main transit and maritime hubs through major investments by the Indian Adani Co. Greece, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Jordan and other countries along the route will significantly increase their importance and strategic weight by participating in the IMEC.

However, it must be remembered that not all nations are quite as enthusiastic about this project as Prime Minister Modi or Benjamin Netanyahu, because it will only further strengthen and legitimise Israel’s position. This would be unacceptable to regimes such as Iran, Syria or Turkey, which do not recognise the legitimacy of the Jewish State. The supporters of these regimes, such as Russia and China, will also suffer economically because it threatens the economic interests of the Chinese Belt and Road project in this anti-Western Eastern bloc. Alavi continues:

The confrontation between the opponents (China, Egypt, Russia, Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Qatar) and supporters (India, the United States, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Greece and Italy) of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) could influence the fate of the Gaza war. This configuration reflects the longevity of unrest in the resistance to the emergence of a new geopolitical environment in West Asia and beyond…

The IMEC is primarily an anti-China plan, directly or indirectly affecting not only China but also countries such as Egypt, Russia, Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Qatar, and its official or unofficial partners are a second group of countries, including America, India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Italy, France, Germany and the European Union.

This corridor is primarily a competitor to the Chinese Road and Belt (RB) initiative, whose maritime route runs through the Suez Canal and the land route follows almost the same historic route as the Silk Road. The US is seen as the main opponent of the Road and Belt (RB) initiative because of strategic competition and India because of deep border and political differences with China, and the IMEC is a joint initiative to contain China’s plan.

Moreover, over the past two decades, the United States has tried to encourage countries in the Middle East, Central Asia and other regions to expand their relations with India instead of China by presenting India as an emerging Asian power. Other corridors affected by IMEC include the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (a route from China to the Pakistani port of Gwadar), the Kuwait Canal (linking the Iraqi port of Al-Fawi via Turkey and possibly Syria to Europe), the North and Central China-Europe Corridors and, to some extent, the International North-South Transport Corridor.

Miryousef Alavi does not suggest in this article that these anti-IMEC powers had anything to do with the October 7 terrorist attack and believes it was an independent act by Hamas. But he believes that the clash of these alliances and economic interests will go a long way to determining which side they take in the war between Israel and Hamas. Still, it is legitimate to ask whether Hamas really planned the October 7 terrorist attack itself, or whether it was an act against Israeli civilians planned by Hamas’s state sponsors, Iran, Qatar or Turkey. The question could be taken even further: did Iran’s ally, Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China have anything to do with the terrorist attack?

Who benefited from the Gaza war?

This is the question that conspiracy theorists love, although they often look for answers in the wrong place. Indeed, many conspiracy theorists have a very anti-Western mindset where Western leaders are thought to be the root cause of all the chaos and instability in the world. In such thinking, for example, the war in Ukraine is solely the fault of the West or Zelensky and the war in Gaza is also the fault of the Israelis, while Russia, Iran and Hamas are merely innocent victims of the aggression of Western powers. My own worldview has always been pro-Israel and pro-West and that is why I have not gone out of my way to promote the propaganda of the enemies of the West.

At the same time, however, I have tried to understand the world as fairly as possible, and also to highlight the injustices committed by the West and its complicity in the origins of conflicts. Indeed, many in the West may live under the illusion of the virtue of our own civilisation and of our own leaders, who are concerned only with democracy and human rights. But as the theme of my latest YouTube video makes clear, my own understanding is that the cause of the wars in the world is not so much the aggression of Western powers, but the lack of it. By this I mean the weak foreign policy of Western leaders where it has tended to go along with the West’s enemies like Russia, Iran and China, without a credible deterrence policy to keep these undemocratic regimes in check.

Did the Biden government benefit from the Gaza war? We can approach the question with common sense. The war in Gaza has not boosted Biden’s approval ratings, but has made him look like a weaker world leader who lacks the ability to keep both US enemies and friends in check. Moreover, he has been caught between a rock and a hard place, trying to please the more traditional Democratic voters who see Israel as the main US ally in the Middle East on the one hand, and the younger and more radical Woke Left, allied with Hamas sympathisers, who are calling for the “liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea” on the other.

And did Benjamin Netanyahu’s government benefit from the war in Gaza? While criticising the Israeli government or its individual prime minister is not in itself anti-Semitism, such insinuation can easily lead to anti-Semitic images and medieval “blood libel” myths of Jews thirsting for the blood of Palestinian children to further their own geopolitical interests. But even such a theory is contrary to common sense in the light of the historical background to the Gaza war. The only thing we can say that the events of October 7 and the Gaza war benefited Netanyahu was the year-long mass protests of the Israeli left, which were interrupted by the events of October 7 and caused the people to unite briefly behind the Netanyahu government.

But this idea ignores the fact that the war in Gaza also interrupted the peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which Netanyahu had glorified at the UN just a few weeks before the October 7 terrorist attack. Before the war, Netanyahu mentioned in interviews and speeches how the Abrahamic peace agreement of 2020 was the result of his and Trump’s policies and how he had succeeded in bringing peace to the Middle East on the same “peace through strength” principle that President Trump followed.

Netanyahu thus hoped to unite the Israeli people with his historic peace agreement with Saudi Arabia, not with a new war against Hamas. With the October 7 massacre, the accusing fingers of many are now pointing in Netanyahu’s direction and the people are calling for his head on a pike for failing to prevent the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history. Few people who know Netanyahu a little better would also believe that he is some kind of psychopath who would allow Hamas to slaughter over thousand members of his own people and take hundreds hostage just because it would somehow benefit his political aims.

So when evaluating conspiracy theories, it is always worth considering first whether they really make common sense. On the other hand, many people cannot understand why Hamas would have attacked Israel, knowing that a much stronger and technologically more advanced Israeli army would respond to a terrorist attack with such force that it would mean the end of Hamas’ power in the Gaza Strip. However, Hamas may have made such a risk assessment in the belief that international pressure against Israel, combined with the weakness of the Biden administration and the support of Hamas’ Middle East allies, would make the strike worthwhile. Hamas perhaps hoped to provoke a wider Middle East war in which Israel would find it harder to fight Hamas, which controls Gaza, while at the same time other Iranian proxies such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah would attack it from the north and Syria and Iran would also come to the aid of their proxy fighters against Israel.

The role of Iran

Iran is Hamas’s main financier, making it one of the main suspects in the events of October 7. Initially, Iran sought to deny that it had any role in the Hamas terrorist attack, despite the public praise of Iran’s religious dictator Ayatollah Khamenei on his X account. In December, however, a spokesman for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps admitted Iran’s involvement, claiming that the October 7 attack was Iran’s revenge for the 2020 killing of General Qassam Soleiman. However, this claim makes little sense, since Qassam Soleiman was killed by the United States under President Trump and Trump has publicly slandered Netanyahu for not wanting to participate in his plans, even though Soleiman was the leading destabilising terrorist leader in the region.

Similarly, Hamas denied Iran’s allegations and said the events of October 7 were in response to provocations against the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount (including recent visits to the Temple Mount by Security Minister Ben-Gvir and attempts by certain Jewish groups to sacrifice a red heifer near the Temple Mount in preparation for the Third Temple). On April 13, Iran struck directly at Israel for the first time with hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles, most of which were successfully shot down by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system before they could harm the Israeli civilian population.

This was Iran’s response to Israel’s early April air strike in the city of Damascus, in which it killed several members of the Iranian government, among them General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who was involved in the planning and execution of the October 7 terrorist attack . This claim did not come from Israel, but the Coalition Council of Islamic Revolutionary Forces, which has close ties to Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, praised General Mohammad Reza Zahedi after his death for his “strategic role in forming and strengthening the resistance front and in planning and executing the Al-Aqsa storm”, the October massacre, the Jerusalem Post reported.

In my latest video, I explain how the Biden administration’s policy of appeasement with Iran and the $10 billion bribe to the mullahs has encouraged the Iranian Islamic theocracy to aggression against Israel. Indeed, Iran – like Hamas – does not want peace or coexistence with Israel, but its death, since its official foreign policy is ‘death to America and death to Israel’. Ayatollah Khamenei, who has often called the Jewish state the “cancer” of the Middle East, tweeted in Hebrew:

Al-Quds [the Muslim name for Jerusalem] will be in Muslim hands, and the Muslim world will celebrate the liberation of Palestine.

If Iran were strong enough militarily, it would wipe Israel off the map today. It has also been argued that once the Ayatollah has a nuclear weapon, he would not be afraid to start a nuclear war with Israel, because the principle of mutual destruction (the MAD doctrine) would not restrain the aggression of the mullahs, who believe their mission is to hasten the end of the world in order to open the door to the coming of the Messiah Mahdi, the Muslims are waiting for.

The role of Turkey

But Iran is not the only Islamist state in the region seeking the destruction of the Jewish state. Turkish Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rhetoric in recent years has also been increasingly hostile to the existence of Israel. General Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – whose role was also foretold in Daniel 11 – founded the secular Turkish Republic in 1923 after the collapse of the Ottoman Sultanate. Turkey has been an ally of the West and a member of NATO, but Erdogan, who became Turkey’s prime minister in 2003 and president in 2014, has taken his country further from west and closer to US enemies Russia, Iran and China under the leadership of the Islamist AKP party.

Erdogan’s relations between Turkey and Israel began on friendly terms, but deteriorated significantly during the first Gaza war (2009) and after the Gaza aid convoy incident in 2010. Erdogan has repeatedly accused Israel of “genocide” against Palestinians and called Zionism “a crime against humanity.” President Erdogan would have little room to criticize his neighbors for “crimes against humanity” when his regime is known to have assisted the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in burning Christians and Muslims alive and other atrocities. The New York Post reported on September 31 2019:

Since 2012, the Turkish intelligence service MIT, under Erdogan’s leadership, has provided resources and material assistance to ISIS, and Turkish customs authorities have turned a blind eye to ISIS recruits who have flowed across Turkish borders into Syria and Iraq. A number of ISIS fighters captured by pro-US Kurdish forces in northern Syria had Turkish exit stamps on their passports and boasted of receiving direct assistance from Turkish authorities.

“Turkish intelligence knows everything,” a captured ISIS fighter recently told his captors. Many former ISIS fighters have now joined the Turkish-backed forces that have occupied the Syrian Kurdish city of Afrin, where they have been carrying out ethnic cleansing. Two Turkish intelligence officers captured by Kurdish militants in northern Iraq in 2017 gave insider accounts of Turkish government assistance to ISIS and other jihadist groups operating in Syria and Iraq.

I blogged about Erdogan’s links to ISIS back in July 2016. I also reported that then US Vice President Joe Biden had accused Turkey of funding ISIS. Biden later apologised for these truthful comments, under pressure from his allies. If Erdogan had no compunction about aiding the beasts of ISIS who, according to one report, killed 250 children with an industrial dough machine and roasted six men alive in an oven, then he would hardly have had any compunction about aiding barbarism such as that of October 7.

Under Erdogan, Turkey and Iran have seen a warming of state relations. Turkey opposed President Trump’s Iran sanctions and condemned the killing of General Qassam Soleiman. Iran’s Shiite clerics do not seem to be concerned by the fact that Turkey-backed ISIS was a Sunni terrorist organisation which, alongside Christians, also killed Shiite Muslims in Iraq and Syria. In April 2023, Erdogan told Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a telephone conversation that “the Islamic world should unite against Israel” in response to unrest near the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount between Israeli police and Palestinian rioters.

A few days after the October 7 massacre, President Erdogan was the first to call Iranian President Raisi, and they discussed “possible steps that the countries can take to end the fighting between Israeli and Palestinian forces.” Sinan Ciddi writes:

This is visible in how Ankara openly supports Hamas. Since the attacks, the Turkish government has welcomed, and Erdogan personally encouraged, vitriol-filled pro-Hamas rallies in Turkey. The Israeli Consulate was surrounded by an angry mob of protestors, shooting a barrage of fireworks, with little attempt by Turkish law enforcement officials to ensure the security of the diplomatic outpost. Additionally, Huda-Par— a radical Islamist party and a partner in Erdogan’s governing coalition—also held a celebratory rally outside the Israeli Consulate in Istanbul, chanting “Israel be damned!”… As a leader schooled in Turkey’s Islamist movement, Erdogan is at his very core an anti-Semite and does not believe in the right of Israel to exist. Instead of standing with Israel in its darkest hour, along with Turkey’s Western allies, Erdogan is choosing to bandwagon with members of the Muslim world, who want to see Israel harmed.

So alongside Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, we also have another prime suspect in provoking the Gaza war, Turkish President Erdogan. I said in my blog back in October that the Israel-Hamas war was motivated by a peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel, which Hamas and Iran were trying to prevent (or at least delay) because it would have meant a greater consolidation and legitimisation of Israel in the Muslim world, something that the Islamists leading Iran did not want to see happen.

I also explained that the events of October 7 were not so much the fault of the agreement itself, but that the violence was also facilitated by President Biden’s weak foreign policy in favour of Iran and the fact that the Biden government, Prime Minister Netanyahu as well as the Saudi Crown Prince MBS made a public spectacle of this agreement, which was praised months in advance, instead of the negotiations being conducted in secret and announced to the world only at the time of the agreement. According to Jared Kushner, Trump’s Jewish son-in-law and special envoy to the Middle East, this was one reason for the events of October 7, because the public spectacle surrounding the agreement gave Israel’s enemies time to think of ways to torpedo it before it came into being.

Turkish leaders would also have had an economic interest in fomenting the war in Gaza. This returns to an earlier theme in the article about the new Silk Road to the East planned by Israel, India, the UAE and the EU, which the Gaza war has now made a less desirable option for investors. This ‘Silk Road’ threatens China and its partners’ own trillion-dollar Silk Road, the Belt and Road project, which would guarantee Chinese global hegemony until the end of the century. Sinan Tavsan wrote in October 2023:

ISTANBUL — At a logistics forum in Istanbul in mid-September, Alper Ozel, executive committee chairman at the International Transporters’ Association in the Turkish commercial hub, gave a stark warning. “We see others coming out and naming new corridors, so we need to move fast. One of the reasons for the Ottoman Empire’s downfall was the Silk Road route being forsaken after the opening of the Suez Canal,” which weakened its economy, he said. He called for a further strengthening of connectivity along what Turkey calls the Middle Corridor — a route aligned with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, passing through Turkic states between Europe in the West and China in the East.

Turkey, seen as a natural bridge between Asia and Europe, is perhaps one of the most sensitive countries to changes in trade routes, as Ottomans bitterly experienced during the Age of Discovery. Ozel’s alarm, and developments since, highlight Turkish discomfort with new plans like the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) announced on the sidelines of the Group of 20 last month, and Ankara’s determination to strengthen routes that place Turkey in an integral position. The proposed IMEC would run from India to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel to reach Europe — bypassing Turkey.

Competing trade routes that create international tensions. In brown, the West-backed trade route from India to Europe via the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel. In blue and green, the ‘Silk Road’, supported by Turkey and China, which would take China from Beijing all the way to Istanbul and London. A trade route from India would undermine the international role of China and Turkey in the post-oil New World Order and strengthen the international role of Israel, India, the Arab countries and the EU. Source of the image here.

The alliance of the German Emperor Wilhelm II – who, like Hitler, was at war with the God of the Bible and planned the genocide for the Jewish people – with Ottoman Turkey, who carried out the first genocide against Armenian Christians in the early 20th Century, and their plan to build a railroad linking Europe and Asia from Berlin to Baghdad, served as the spark for the First World War. Today, the same anti-Semitic and anti-Christian forces are united in Iran and Turkey against Israel. And likewise today, these competing trade routes now threaten to ignite the World War 3. And all its key players – India, China, Israel, Russia, France, Britain and the United States – are also nuclear powers and Iran is a nuclear power aspirant. Next, I will focus a little on Iran’s ally, Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Did the Bible predict Vladimir Putin’s rule?

Vladimir Putin’s Russia now publicly presents itself as a Christian country defending Christian values against the West’s anti-Christian liberalism and LGBTQ ideology. For this reason, some conservatives in the West may be much more sympathetic to Putin than, say, Canada’s “woke prime minister” Justin Trudeau. This “Christian” facade of Putin may also contribute to why many Christian conservatives are very suspicious of the Western mainstream media narrative on the war in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky. Personally, I have seen Putin in a very critical light since the beginning of his rule. I have never promoted a positive view of Putin on my blog, although I have also openly criticised the foreign policy of Western leaders, which has contributed to provoking Russia into an increasingly militant direction.

I have also shared the interpretation, supported by many evangelical Christians, of Russia as the land of the prince of Gog and Magog, prophesied in Ezekiel 38-39, “from the remote parts of the north”, who will attack the land of Israel, which “is restored from the sword, whose inhabitants have been gathered from many”. The Dispensationalist writer Hal Lindsey, who advocated this interpretation, predicted Putin’s rise in his 1998 book Planet Earth: The Final Chapter, on page 180:

There is every probability that the next president of Russia will be a military strongman who will be bent upon re-establishing Russia’s former super-power status. He will appeal to the people’s patriotism and love for Mother Russia in order to get their votes. He will promise to rid Russia of the Russian Mafia. He will raise up the demoralized military and rebuild it into a proud, combat-ready armed force. This will fit into the predicted role for the Russians. The cryptic name of the coming Russian strongman is Gog. He is probably a general whose name you have heard on CNN. I believe that this military strongman must come before the events of Ezekiel take place.

Who was to blame for the war in Ukraine?

Putin’s military action in Ukraine, which has destabilised global stability, has brought the world to the brink of World War 3, and future historians may see the war in Ukraine as the starting point for the World War III. But the war has a very complex history behind it. And again, the commercial corridors – the gas pipelines to be precise – played a central role in the outbreak of this conflict (I will come back to them later). The Ukrainian war did not actually start in February 2022, nor even eight years earlier with the occupation of Crimea, nor with the 2014 Ukrainian revolution that preceded it, but its beginning goes back to the Orange Revolution of 2004. Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, became the scene of a clash of forces between East and West at that time, with the disputed presidential elections.

Outgoing pro-Russian President Leonid Kuchman was accused of corruption, and Kuchman’s champion, presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych, had the backing of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who campaigned for him in Kiev and meddled in the internal politics of the post-Cold War Soviet republic. Opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko, on the other hand, had the backing of the Western powers for pursuing policies more favourable to European values and for Ukraine’s accession to the EU and NATO. Yanukovych had the support of a stronger state apparatus and Yushchenko was the subject of attempts to poison him by the country’s secret service, which left a permanent mark on his face.

After the first round of elections, Yanukovych declared himself the winner, but the results were considered fraudulent and after widespread protests and a rerun, Yushchenko won the election and was elected Ukraine’s third president. The whole of Ukraine was divided between the pro-Russian and pro-Western populations, with the western part of the country voting more for Yushchenko and the eastern part for Yanukovych, who was pro-Russian. These events infuriated Vladimir Putin, who then began to turn increasingly anti-Western in his rhetoric because, according to Putin, this Orange Revolution was a project orchestrated by the West against Russia.

Ten years later, in the Maidan Revolution, the people overthrew Putin’s minion Viktor Yanukovych, who had been elected in 2010, and for response to this “coup” – as Putin saw it – Putin occupied the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine and annexed it to the Russian Federation. In the same year, Ukraine’s war against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine began, which in turn escalated into a war between the Russian military and Ukraine when Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The war in Ukraine was thus motivated by Putin’s attempts to interfere and influence the internal politics of an independent state in an attempt to keep it as a vassal state close to Russian interests and to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and the EU.

I have said in my previous blogs that the revolutions in Ukraine have been financed by the left-wing stock market speculator George Soros, who has openly disclosed his involvement on CNN. Soros has certainly meddled on many revolutions in the world, but history is also too complex for us to attribute these events solely to Soros. There is also the background of Russia’s long history of oppression and colonialism in its neighbouring countries, Ukraine and Eastern Europe, first under the Russian Tsars and then under the Soviet Union. In Ukraine, for example, Stalin committed a crime known as the Holodomor, in which millions of Ukrainians were killed by starvation and which has been recognised as genocide by 20 nations.

However, Russia has never apologised or even acknowledged this crime. Genocide deniers include Putin and his ally Dmitry Medvedev, who claim that the West and Ukraine are using the genocide narrative for political ends against Russia. Vladimir Putin is now promoting the revisionist history that the Ukrainian nation is an artificial Slavic nation created after the collapse of the Soviet Union, even though Ukraine’s national identity, separate from the Russians, can be traced back to the Middle Ages (and by Putin’s logic, the United States could also be seen as an artificial country that should still belong to its former occupier, the United Kingdom). In a two-hour interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, Putin defended his actions in Ukraine and also implied that Poland was to blame for World War II, rather than Hitler or Stalin, whose invasion of Poland in September 1939 triggered World War II.

72 years old Putin, compared to President Biden, has an excellent memory, I have to admit. The first 30 minutes of the interview, Putin is lecturing to Tucker about the 1000 years history of Eastern Europe, mentioning the names of ancient rulers and the dates of battles like a “living encyclopaedia”.

In Carlson’s interview, Putin explains his actions in Ukraine in the light of NATO expansion to the East, the “CIA-backed” Ukrainian “coups”, its trade relations that have negatively affected Russia, its failure to honour treaties, and by many other complex historical events, which he begins with the history of Eastern Europe a thousand years ago. Even if Putin’s defence of his actions would be partly one-sided and propagandistic, his account is a good illustration of the fact that tensions leading to conflict often arise as a chain reaction of very complex historical events.

Russia has considered the former Soviet republics of Eastern Europe as its “backyard” and has sought to influence their internal politics to keep these nations close to Russia in order to secure its economic or security interests (to keep the East Europe as a neutral buffer zone between Russia and NATO). Russia’s neighbours to the west, which Russia has oppressed for the last 200 years, have in turn looked westwards to seek refuge in the EU and NATO against the ‘big bad bear’. This equation has fuelled confrontation and the escalation of relations between East and West, among many other factors. Of course, Putin’s nostalgic view of Russia’s lost days of greatness and the denial of the whole Ukrainian national identity have also contributed to Russian aggression.

While the post-Cold War expansion of NATO to Eastern European countries and the West’s support for the Maidan revolution and its openness to Ukraine’s NATO membership has been provocative for Russia against Ukraine, in my view, the problem has been rather that Ukraine was not accepted as a NATO member in time, as the country started actively applying for NATO membership already in 2017, when 69% of the citizens also supported membership in the defence alliance .

Putin would not have launched a war against a NATO country because it would have meant a Third World War and possible nuclear war. Putin often threatens the West with nuclear weapons, but he is not self-destructive. He would not have launched a war of aggression against a NATO country if it risked a mutually destructive global nuclear war. An attack on Ukraine was a much smaller risk because the nuclear-armed US is under no obligation to send its army onto non-NATO Ukrainian soil, even if it were to assist it militarily. It is possible, though, that Ukraine’s NATO membership would have provoked Russia to attack Finland, which was not a NATO member until 2023.

Although Putin mentions in his Tucker interview a number of historical factors that he believes contributed to the war in Ukraine, he fails to mention President Biden’s spineless foreign policy role. That is, the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan on the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, which encouraged other enemies of the United States to pursue their own geopolitical interests more boldly. Putin would not have dared to take such action under President Trump, who had threatened to bomb Moscow if Putin invaded Ukraine and often backed up his half-insane threats with bold actions such as the killing of Iran’s Qassam Soleiman. President Trump said of nuclear weapons:

I don’t want to exclude anything. I’m the last person who would use nuclear weapons. The use of nuclear weapons is an abomination. The power of weapons is the single biggest problem facing our world today. I am the last person to use them. I’m not going to be a happy launcher, as some people might be. I will be the last person, but I will never rule it out.

In other words, why should a rapist be afraid of a gun in a woman’s hand if he knows she will never dare pull the trigger. The best use of nuclear weapons is their deterrent power, which makes criminals back off from their evil intentions. Israel, for example, should have used this deterrent more to restrain Palestinian terrorists.

The impact of Russia’s energy monopoly on the war in Ukraine

In my new YouTube video President Trump’s peace through strength versus President Biden’s war through weakness, Senator Ted Cruz talks about the role of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline across the Gulf of Finland from Russia to Germany in the Ukraine war. President Trump had imposed sanctions on the construction of this pipeline because it was seen as a threat to Ukraine’s security. Biden lifted the sanctions to restore good US relations with Angela Merkel’s Germany and the EU. At the same time, the Polish and Ukrainian governments warned the Biden administration that lifting the sanctions would endanger Ukraine’s security and soon Russian troops were on the Ukrainian border. Why did Nord Stream 2 make Ukraine more vulnerable to Russian aggression? Because Russia had until then been dependent on the Druhzba pipeline through Ukraine to Europe for its gas supplies. Thus, the control of Druhzba gas supplies to Europe by a Ukrainian government hostile to Russia posed a security risk to Russia’s energy supremacy.

For Ukraine, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was a security threat because, once completed, Russia would no longer be dependent on gas supplies from Druhzba, making Ukraine more vulnerable to Russian aggression because the Kiev government could no longer use its control of Druhzba as leverage. For the same reason, the Ukrainian government would also have had the strongest motive to blow up Nord Stream 2. The Washington Post confirmed in November 2023 that Ukrainian Colonel Roman Chervinsky coordinated the sabotage of the pipeline and that the US government was aware of this plan by the Ukrainian regime. However, Russia was initially accused of environmental terrorism, even if Putin had the least motive to sabotage his own pipeline. Paola De Fraia wrote in April 2022:

Gazprom’s predominance on the gas market and its interests have been, since the beginning, a priority for Putin’s policy and diplomacy – that is finding profitable routes to export its natural gas into Europe, despite the opposition it might encounter from the former Soviet republics in the Caucasus.

With Soviet-era infrastructure, Ukraine has been one of the most important entry points for Russian gas into the European market. The Druhzba pipeline (also known as “The Friendship Pipeline”) that runs through Ukraine with its 40 billion cubic meters of gas per year, has important hubs in Crimea, in the port city of Odessa, in Kharkiv and in Western Ukraine near Poland. It is one of the longest gas pipelines, extending from Ukraine to Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany. While the old Yamal pipeline brings Russian gas to Europe mainly through Belarus.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has been at odds with Russia over the contract for gas transit and consumption rates: gas prices in post-Soviet Ukraine were still subsidised and below market value. According to Russia, Ukraine was already benefiting from years of major discounts in its domestic market and negotiations for new tariffs brought the two countries to war in the early 2000s, when the first major attempt by a government in Kyiv to openly oppose to Moscow’s wishes led to the so-called Orange Revolution.

Then it happened again in 2014, but the war turned into Russia’s unilateral annexation of Crimea and parts of the Donbass region. At the same time, from a mere geopolitical point of view, Moscow, at least initially, did not seem to consider the eastward enlargement of the European Union, that started in 2004, as such a threat to its interests as a NATO possible expansion in the same region. Russia has always seen a military presence of NATO, however big or small, at its eastern borders as an undue influence of the United States into its own backyard…

Nord Stream became operational in 2018 with a capacity of 55 billion cubic meters of gas per year, thus surpassing the export capacity of the Druhzba pipeline through Ukraine. Nord Stream 2, completed in September 2021, still needed regulatory approvals from the European Union and Germany. Once operational, with its adjoining 55 billion cubic meters per annum, Nord Stream 2 could have cancelled out any threat from Ukraine to block Russian gas transit over its territory.

The certification process suddenly came to a halt on February 22, 2022, just a few days before the invasion of Ukraine. Suddenly, Germany reversed its traditional favourable policy towards Russian gas and the Nord Stream projects. If Europe has had different views on this matter, the US and the UK have always pushed the argument that Nord Stream 2 would have further increased Europe’s dependence on Russian gas and denied Ukraine of transit revenues: thus “making it more vulnerable to a Russian invasion”, according to a Reuters agency report. This is where Putin might have escalated all his frustration towards Ukraine, and the NATO barrage that, in his view, Gazprom encounters on its way to the European market from the Baltic to the Bosporus.

The New Great Game, Prince Andrew, and King Charles III

Most wars in history have ultimately been about natural resources and the clash of commercial interests between nations. Wars do not arise because nations want to move their borders just for the fun of it. The war in Gaza is probably one of the few exceptions to this, as Hamas’ sole objective is the destruction of the Jewish state for religious reasons rooted in the end-time teachings of Islam. The 2011 Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war also have their roots in the clash between East and West in their competing oil and gas pipeline projects. Here is the response of the AI program ChatGPT on the subject:

There are many reasons behind the civil war in Syria, but one dimension that has attracted international attention has to do with energy resources, in particular gas pipeline projects. Here are a few key points:

Gas pipeline projects: before the start of the civil war, two major gas pipeline projects were planned in Syria, which would have crossed the country. The first was a pipeline agreed between Iran, Iraq and Syria that would have transported gas from Iran to the Mediterranean. The second, backed by Saudi Arabia, would have carried gas from the Gulf countries through Syria and Turkey to Europe. The two projects were competing and were motivated by both economic and geopolitical interests.
Geopolitical tensions: an Iranian-backed gas pipeline would have strengthened the position of Iran and its allies, such as the Syrian government and Hezbollah, in the region. A Saudi-backed project, on the other hand, would have promoted the Sunni-Muslim axis and increased their influence. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s decision to support the Iranian-proposed pipeline sparked discontent in Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states.
Deepening conflict: this energy dimension is one factor that has deepened regional tensions and drawn several foreign powers with their own economic and strategic interests into the Syrian conflict. For example, Russia’s support for the Assad regime is not only limited to political and military interests, but also to Russia’s desire to maintain its control over the European energy market.
Control of energy resources: in addition, Syria has its own oil and gas resources, particularly in the east of the country, and their control has been a major factor during the civil war. Both ISIS and other rebel groups, the Syrian government and foreign-backed forces have been fighting for control of these resources.

This was a key reason why Vladimir Putin supported his ally Bashar Al-Assad and the West in turn supported the Syrian rebels, some of them radical Islamists allied with ISIS, who were funded by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar with the tacit blessing of the West, until President Trump exposed the issue and stopped that support. What’s the Great Game? It is a struggle between the super powers for control of the Middle East and Central Asia for the resources of the region. Noble principles such as democracy and human rights are being used by these powers only as a tool for geopolitical interests. So Turkey may accuse Israel of crimes against humanity, but at the same time it pours money into ISIS fighters.

Putin says he is at war with the “neo-Nazis in Ukraine”, but at the same time he supports the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose anti-Semitic rhetoric is not very different from that of the neo-Nazis. The West is at war in the Middle East to bring democracy and human rights to Iraq or Syria, but is not nearly as concerned about the human rights of its allies in the Gulf countries. And the West also loudly condemns Iran’s state support for Islamic terrorism, but when it comes to Qatar or Turkey, their support for terrorism may be mentioned in passing, but it will soon be apologised for, as Vice-President Biden did under pressure from his Middle Eastern allies.

This inconsistency is simply because Western leaders are not interested in democracy and human rights, but in promoting their own economic and geopolitical interests under the pretext of these noble principles. At least it is not their first priority. In 2008, King Charles III’s younger brother Prince Andrew told the American ambassador to Kyrgyzstan: “The United Kingdom, Western Europe (and by extension you Americans) are back to play the Great Game now and this time we are going to win!”

According to the ambassador, the prince said this with great arrogance and rudeness, while raging about British anti-corruption investigators who had “idiotically” almost scuppered the Al-Yamama deal for British arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Both Prince Andrew and Charles III have had close links with some of the worst human rights abusers in the region. Although the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was ultimately due to the British Empire, the British ruling class of the 19th Century had no moral quandary in militarily supporting the sultans of Istanbul, who slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Christians in the Balkans while the ‘defenders of the faith’ Queen Victoria and Edward VII turned a blind eye.

Britain’s commercial interests in controlling India took precedence over the interests of Christians in the Balkans. Britain lost India in 1947, but the oil deposits in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf made the strategic and economic importance of the region all the more important for the post-World War II oil-dependent superpowers. This is why Britain became involved in the Suez crisis in 1956, when the Egyptian Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser tried to nationalise the Suez Canal, threatening British ships’ access to Gulf oil supplies through the canal. At the same time, Britain also began to support the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which opposed Nasser’s rule and from which Hamas, Al-Qaeda and other Islamist organisations later descended, as Mark Curtis explains in his 2010 book Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion With Radical Islam.

Elizabeth II never visited Israel during her entire 70-year reign. Perhaps because her father George VI’s secret service incited Arab countries to attack the country in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence “to liberate Palestine from the river to the sea”, as the King’s thousands of Muslim subjects are now demanding in London demonstrations and attacking Jews who defend Israel. Elizabeth II’s successor Charles III has certainly pretended to be a great friend of the Jews, and made an official state visit to Israel in 2020. But at the same time, he has cultivated close ties with Arab dictators in the region, including the Al-Than royal family, which rules Qatar and funds Hamas and the Arabic-language Al-Jazeera news channel, which incites hatred of Jews in the region . Phil Miller writes:

Research by Declassified UK has found that King Charles held 120 meetings with ruling families from eight Middle Eastern monarchies since popular protests rocked the region in 2011. The number of meetings has increased from 95 since our research was first published in 2021 and now average ten a year. More are expected to occur around the coronation, with invitations being sent to every head of state. Norman Baker, who served as a minister in David Cameron’s coalition government, told Declassified: “Charles’s obsession with meeting unelected monarchs from frequently dodgy regimes which show contempt for democracy and human rights is embarrassing and a stain on this country. But you can judge a man by the company he keeps.”

Qatar’s unelected deputy prime minister watched the cadets graduate, whose ranks included a member of Doha’s Al-Thani ruling family. Charles has previously received millions of pounds in cash from a Qatari royal. Another Arab autocracy to engage with Charles at Sandhurst was the Al Khalifa royal dynasty of Bahrain, a country where the largest opposition party is banned and critical newspapers shuttered.

Sayed Ahmed Al Wadaei, director of the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD) said it was “shocking” that “King Charles continues to maintain cosy relationships with autocratic Gulf monarchies, including King Hamad Al Khalifa.” BIRD’s director, who was tortured for taking part in the 2011 Arab Spring uprising, added: “This is despite the fact he has been one of the most repressive rulers in Bahrain’s history… including the murder of peaceful protestors, killing detainees under torture and executing his opponents.”

Charles’ brother Prince Andew is best known today for his friendship with the late paedophile and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, but Andrew has had many other questionable friendships over the years. The website declassifieduk.com, which investigates the corruption of Britain’s rulers, reports that he and British government ministers have close links to Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who supports Hamas and threatens Jerusalem with holy war along with the Ayatollah of Iran.

In the YouTube video Prince Andrew has ALWAYS Been Terrible, Andrew talks about his past friendship with Libya’s slain dictator Muammar Gaddafi and how he lobbied the British government on behalf of Gaddafi’s family in attempts to free Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, arrested in the Lockerbie bombing. The Gaddafi-engineered Lockerbie terror attack killed 270 people when a plane exploded and crashed into the village of Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988. Until the September 11 attacks in 2001, it was the second most devastating terrorist attack on civilians in an aircraft.

Conclusion

So when it comes to the October 7 terrorist attack in which 1,200 civilians were brutally killed and 250 taken hostage in the Gaza tunnel networks, and the ensuing Gaza war, we have both obvious suspects for provoking the war and less obvious ones. The obvious suspects are Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and Turkey’s autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who dreams of re-establishing the Ottoman Empire. Less obvious suspects are Russia’s equally autocratic President Putin and Charles III who wears the disguise of a ‘constitutional monarch’, or his brother Andrew. October 7 happened to be President Putin’s birthday. The war in Gaza has also conveniently diverted the world’s attention from Ukraine to the Middle East. “This was probably the best birthday present for Putin. A strike against Israel divides attention because the US naturally focuses on Israel,” an EU diplomat said, according to Politico . The same article states:

Does this mean that Russia was directly involved in the attacks? That seems unlikely. Russia is not nearly as important as Iran in terms of arms and funding for Hamas. Norman Roule, a former senior US intelligence official, claimed that Moscow’s political support for Hamas encouraged the group’s violence, but said any other role Russia might have played was likely to be modest. “This strategy allows the Russians to claim support for the peace process, but the ensuing violence will disrupt the region, distract policymakers from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and draw U.S. naval assets from the Black Sea to the eastern Mediterranean,” he told POLITICO.

In this light, one can understand why Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi has suggested that Putin had a hand in the events of October 7. CNN reported on October 12, 2023:

In an evening speech posted on social media on Monday, Zelensky also hinted that Moscow sees an advantage in the Israel-Gaza war. “Russia has an interest in starting a war in the Middle East so that a new source of pain and suffering could undermine world unity, increase discord and conflict and thus help Russia to destroy freedom in Europe,” he said.

According to Anna Borschevskaya, an expert on Russia-Middle East relations at the Washington Institute , “there is no evidence that Moscow knew about the October 7 attack, but it has given support to Hamas and is exploiting attacks against US interests.” Borshevskaya also describes decades of Soviet and Russian Federation support for Israel’s enemies, including Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. At the same time, the Gaza war has also benefited China and Turkey by making the Road and Belt project, which they support, a more viable option for investors than the Israeli-Indian-Western-backed India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, which Benjamin Netanyahu touted in his September UN speech a couple of weeks before the October 7 attacks. With their own ‘Silk Road’ to the East, China, Turkey and their partners can ensure their own geopolitical domination of the world, rather than that of Israel, India or Europe.

See the image at the top of the article for a picture of the two competing “silk roads”. You will see that the Chinese Silk Road leads all the way to London, while the Indian Silk Road leads to EU countries. This would argue why the UK would also benefit from sabotaging the Indian Silk Road along with Turkey and China. So the Gaza war would also benefit UK economic interests. While linking King Charles III and his government to the October 7 terrorist attacks may be too far-fetched a conclusion, we know of the King’s long-standing relationship with the rulers of Qatar, who are the main financiers of Hamas, along with Iran and Turkey. Britain’s ruling elite have played a dirty game before to preserve their own economic interests and the current King is known for his sympathy with Islam and the Arab rulers of the Gulf, who once wrote to his friend and spiritual guru Laurens Van Der Post that he understood their anti-Semitic views on Israel.

A prophetic perspective

Without going into the interpretation of Bible prophecies in depth, I have derived the following understanding of end-time events in the Middle East from the vision in Daniel 11: In the War of Armageddon, the “kings of the east”, i.e. China and its allies, will gather at the Megiddo in northern Israel as described in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 16. This plateau has been the site of decisive battles since the dawn of history, and the Middle East front of the First World War also culminated in the Battle of Megiddo. However, this Chinese invasion is going to be preceded by the wars of the Antichrist in the Middle East, which arose out of the British monarchy, as I have explained in my book in the light of Daniel’s prophecy. Daniel 11:24, 41-44 prophesy about those wars:

In a time of tranquility he will enter the richest parts of the realm, and he will accomplish what his fathers did not, nor his ancestors; he will distribute plunder, spoils, and possessions among them, and he will devise his schemes against strongholds, but only for a time… He will also enter the Beautiful Land [i.e. the land of Israel/Palestine], and many countries will fall; but these will be rescued out of his hand: Edom, Moab, and the foremost of the sons of Ammon [i.e. the land of modern Jordan]. Then he will reach out with his hand against other countries, and the land of Egypt will not escape. But he will gain control over the hidden treasures of gold and silver, and over all the precious things of Egypt; and Libyans and Ethiopians [means rather modern Libya and Sudan] will follow at his heels. But rumors from the East and from the North will terrify him, and he will go out with great wrath to eliminate and annihilate many.

In verse 30, the “ships of Kittim” are said to turn against him on one of their campaigns to the Holy Land. The “ships of Kittim” referred to Roman ships and so in today’s context would refer to the Italian navy. Why would Italian warships turn against the Antichrist’s forces if Italy is to be part of his European alliance of revived Roman Empire? Britain’s alliance with the Chinese-Turkish sponsored Road and Belt project and Italy’s alliance with the Israeli-Indian sponsored trade route could explain this.

According to Daniel’s prophecy, King Charles III would thus continue the colonial policy of his fathers in the Middle East and conquer Egypt and the land of Israel, just as the British Empire conquered Egypt in 1882 and Palestine in 1917 (which was also foretold in verses 6-20). This new British invasion of the Middle East would in turn provoke a backlash from China and Russia, and therefore these “rumors from the East and from the North will terrify him, and he will go out with great wrath to eliminate and annihilate many.”

The British Monarchy & King Charles III in Bible Prophecy?

The website of Samuel Tuominen, a Finnish student of eschatology