The Danger Zone (DZ)

In a previous programme I talked about how Kaiser Wilhelm II, well before the Great War, has positively drooled at the thought of winning Jewish favour and support. The Kaiser was definitely anti-Semitic. He believed in the international Jewish conspiracy but vast amounts of money were waiting there to be tapped by a friend of the Jews – him for Germany. He had met with Sultan, Abdulhamed to plead...

Which of the great European powers offered the best chance for the Jews to realise their own homeland wasn’t clear. The Ottoman Empire was there, and the Holy Lands were part of that Empire. Any Jewish homeland inside the Ottoman Empire wouldn’t be a free independent country. Theodor Herzl, the head of the Zionist movement (the movement to win a homeland for the Jews) had travelled to the courts o...

The rich Muslims, the effendi, who owned a great deal of land in Palestine, whether they lived in Jerusalem or not, had a lot of influence with the local administrator of those lands. The most important of the local administrators, appointed by Constantinople, was the Sultan. There was also a lot of attention paid to Palestine in Constantinople the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The newly establis...

In my last programme I told you about the restrictions that the Muslim world started to impose to stop Jews who were living in other Muslim countries, or in European countries emigrating to the Holy Lands – the land given to them by God. They had been the native inhabitants of those lands since 1406BC, up until the time that the Arab invasion happed in 635AD. So there were no Muslim natives to tha...

For the longest time, there had been many Jewish leaders who had revived discussion in the Sephardic Jewish community – the Jews who lived under Muslim rule in North Africa and the Middle East, including the Ottoman Empire - about actually doing something about returning to the Promised Land. That was the land that God had promised Moses that the Jews would have forever – on one condition - that t...

On 13 November 1974 Yasser Arafat addressed the United Nations. He told them that from 1881 the Jewish invasion began of the verdant area inhabited mainly by an Arab people in the course of building its life and dynamically enriching its indigenous culture. Everything he said was true. Well not that there was a Jewish invasion. There was no Jewish state so how could they invade a part of the world...

What were things like for the peasant farmers, the fellahin, living and farming in Palestine after the Ottoman Empire took over from the Mamluks in the 1880s when the Zionist invasion began and the land was forcibly taken from those peasant farmers?  According to Yasser Arafat’s speech to the UN on 13 November 1974 it would have been thanks to an enlightened system of government that let to Palest...

Yasser Arafat, in his speech at the United Nations on 13 November 1974, declared that the Jewish invasion (his words not mine) of Israel began with Zionism in 1881. Then on 29 November 1947, the United Nations passed Resolution 181 for the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine, modern day Israel and Jordan, into Jewish and non-Jewish areas. This led to the creation of the modern states of...

The Jews have claimed, especially since 1881, that they needed their own separate homeland. The land they claim is the land that they have occupied since about 1406 BC when Joshua led the children of Israel into God’s Promised Land. The Jews have lived there continuously, and in large numbers ever since. All sorts of empires have conquered and ruled them. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Medo-P...

From 1917, but even before that, there was a lot of pressure in the West to create a state for the Jews as their homeland. In a secular way, to give back to them the Holy Lands that God had given them under Moses. On 14 May 1948 that happened. But it happened in part thanks to a new movement amongst the Jews, known as Zionism – a homeland for the Jews. That movement had started in Europe (particul...

By the 1800s and 1900s the Promised Land was neglected and run down. The prophetic description of what would happen to the God forsaken Promised Land by the Old Testament prophet, Isaiah, in Chapter 33 verse 9 had well and truly been realised. “The earth mourneth and languisheth: Lebanon is ashamed and hewn down: Sharon is like a wilderness; and Bashan and Carmel shake off their fruits.” The Jews...

Israel. It’s hardly ever out of the news. It’s either always doing something bad, or accused of doing something bad. Whatever is happening it’s always painted as the villain. In 1948 the modern state of Israel was carved out of the lands that had been part of the Ottoman Empire. The Arabs, and their sympathisers (of whom there are many) today say that that wasn’t fair because the United Nations ga...

I grew up in the 1950s and the 1960s. I remember when I was high school seeing the headlines in the newspapers in 1967 as the Arab nations united to go to war against Israel without Israel having done anything to provoke it, other than to exist. Graphics were shown, like I’m used to seeing in the military books I read all of the time. The balance of forces. The Israeli aircraft, tanks and men, com...

In this Danger Zone programme I’m going to talk about a cavalryman who was shot down – what was he doing? Riding a flying horse? Two planes that shot each other down. About what happened when those crews who shot each other down met on the ground after they’d each crashed? Did they become good friends and laugh about it? Or did the ones that had the guns kill the ones that didn’t have any? Why did...

You’ve probably heard of the Darwin Awards – a made up thing with stories about people who meet their deaths through their own unbelievable stupidity – Darwin – survival of the fittest etc. Well this Danger Zone programme is about the opposite. People, who in spite of everything, should have died – but didn’t. I tried to see if there was a name for the opposite of the Darwin Awards but there isn’t...

Have you ever been conned? I remember someone told me that they’d never met a conman they didn’t like. If you have been you probably felt all sorts of regrets that you should have seen it coming. That you shouldn’t have been so stupid. But you know something, it meant that you were a normal human being. In September and October 1938 the Prime Minister of England was conned when he met Adolf Hitler...

Yesterday, upon the stair,I met a man who wasn't thereHe wasn't there again todayI wish, I wish he'd go away... That poem was inspired by the real story of a haunting by a ghost supposedly seen on the stairs of a house in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. In 1899 American poet, Hughes Mearns wrote that poem, the words I just read to you. It ended up in a song and then a play. In the 1930’s it was g...

Slim Dusty’s famous song tells of one of the greatest fears that faced many an undoubtedly brave fighting man. The prospect of no grog. In the Pub with No Beer Slim says: Oh it’s a lonesome away from your kindred and all By the campfire at night we’ll hear the wild dingoes call But there’s-a nothing so lonesome, morbid or drear Than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer. This programme is goin...

Have you ever been to hell? Would you go there deliberately? Well some brave, or perhaps stupid, might be a better description, Greek heroes did. One who did was Theseus, helping his friend Pirithous. Both young men, after accomplishing their many amazing feats, decided they should take new wives for themselves. They decided they would help each other in finding their wives. They didn’t choose a p...

During a visit to Cape Canaveral, to inspect the Space Shuttle, Prince Philip was introduced to a young thirteen year old boy, Andrew Adams. Andrew told Prince Philip that it was his ambition to be an astronaut. Prince Philip looked him up and down and said to him:  “Well, you’ll never fly in it; you’re too fat to be an astronaut … You could do with losing a bit of weight.” Just the sort of remark...

On 9 April 2021, Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, the longest serving royal consort in British history, passed away at the age of 99. He was born on 10 June 1921 – so he very nearly reached the age of 100, which he had said he would rather not. He had undertaken his last official engagement on Tuesday 2 August 2017. For a man who had longed to pursue a military career this last ce...

In the Bible Jesus gave us this quote that is often used today, even by unbelievers –  John 15:13: Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Will I think today’s story tops that. Stay tuned and tell me what you think? Am I right? Tag words: Greater love has no one than this to lay down one’s life for one’s friends; 30th US Infantry Division; Frau von Reventlow; S...

On 20 December 1943, so close to Christmas, two men met – in mid-air, in two different aircraft. About 304 metres above the ground. One was a German by the name of Oberleutenant Fritz Stigler, fighter ace, flying a German, an Me-109G fighter, flying for Hitler’s Third Reich and the other was an American, 2nd Lieutenant Charles (Charlie) Brown, flying an American B-17 four engine bomber, well just...

Ever wondered why all those hard working Nazi scientists and doctors in the death camps never won a single Nobel Prize for medicine or science among the lot of them. They did so much hard work into all sorts of problems concerning the human body suffering battle injuries and terrible diseases. They were helped by Jews, Russians and all of the other unwilling prisoners who had their lives taken fro...

In April 1933, Annmarie Kohler, a doctor in the town of Pirna wrote about how ‘fanatical’ the staff at her hospital had become. Kohler said ‘They sit around the radio and when the “Horst Wessel Song” is played … they all stand up and perform the raised-arm Nazi salute.’ That salute became a part of every day life for many German families during the time Hitler was the leader. A letter was sent to...