Seismic activity is increasing again as we approach the lineup at the end of September of Comet Elenin with the Sun and Earth. Sunday night, Indian Time, Nepal, Sikkim parts of India and Tibet were rocked by a significant, widespread 6.9 magnitude quake in that Himalayan mountainous region. There was damage to roads, villages and bridges across the area as well as building collapses in Nepal’s capital, Katmandu. The death toll stands at 100 and expected to rise.

In my article about the Seven Temblors written at the beginning of September, I also mentioned quake activity would increase in my corner of the Pacific Rim, the Pacific Northwest. I have said from time to time that I expected a magnitude 5 or 6 and above here. Back on 8 September, I noticed the strange behavior of starlings flying about all out of flock formation as if they were swallows catching insects in the air. I never have seen the starlings play swallow around here. They looked more panicked than on the entomological prowl for bugs on the wing and remarked to my neighbor that there must be an earthquake coming. The following day a 6.4 magnitude quake shook the northern tip of Vancouver Island a few hundred miles northwest of my island in the northern Puget Sound. It was felt all the way south to Seattle.

Hopefully this is all the excitement we will have in September on the one quadrant of the highly active Pacific Rim that has not had a major quake and tsunami in the past few years like Chile with tsunami (February 2010), New Zealand (September 2010) and Japan with tsunami (March 2011) during the Comet Elenin line-ups.

Comet Elenin before the breakup.

I am hopeful of this because all signs are showing that Comet Elenin is breaking up as it gets blasted by solar flares on its gravitational sling shot around the Sun. Perhaps this will also end the unexplainable seismic threat. All three line-ups of Comet Elenin with the Sun and the Earth shook historic earthquakes (two of which unleashed historic tsunamis) along the Pacific Rim. Perhaps Los Angeles and San Diego will be spared a hit around 25-26 September and later in November when the next two line-ups are expected.

Actually if no further quake events happen Elenin’s breakup becomes just another reason to wonder what forces more subtle than what we know about gravity may be at work here. Astrologers would say there is a harmonic force that pushes and pulls beyond gravity and enables good forecasters using the stars to foresee potential of individuals, nations and the world. The astronomers poo poo this but what will they say if no more quakes come from Elenin after it has been turned into stellar rubble by the Sun? How does one explain away that?

It could equally get weirder for the astrologers to explain themselves if quakes on 25-26 September and 22 November “do” happen even after Elenin is rendered ice gravel by the powerful gravitational forces and solar flares of the Sun.

Typhoon Roke's waves hitting breakwaters along the east coast of Japan.

Coming back to Japan, the main island of Honshu had a 6.6 magnitude quake last weekend. A shake up of another kind happened while I was writing this article. One million three hundred thousand people were told to evacuate the eastern coast of Honshu Island. Many retreated from the areas devastated by the great Japanese quake and tsunami of March. They escaped the wrath of particularly powerful Typhoon Roke.

Before Roke, Japan in September was shaken by scandal and panic, concerning the burning of radioactive sludge transported from the Fukushima reactors damaged in the March quake and tsunami. It is not yet clear how much of this story is Internet hyperbole. There are those who claim that radiation levels across much of Japan have risen sharply because town smelters are burning radioactive ash plumes spreading the radiation around Japan. These ash trash burns may spread the radiation eventually to the West Coast of the US and Canada. More on that when I can confirm these claims.

Now to Palestine.

This Friday (23 September 2011), the Palestinian Authority led by its President Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) will press the UN Security Council to have a vote of the General Assembly to declare Palestine a sovereign country.

I wrote the following insert in the comments page today in answer to James’ comment. Here they are:

JAMES
Do you see peace coming anytime soon for the Israelis and Palestinians? I fear a great major conflict will rise between many nations unless peace takes hold.

HOGUE
This “push” generated by the Palestinians is a great opportunity rife with great dangers. The Peace Process has been an institutionalized joke ever since Yasser Arafat (the previous leader of the Palestinians) missed the opportunity to accept an agreement back in 1999 with the then Prime Minister and now Secretary of Defense, Ehud Barat. (It is interesting to me that the American president and Ehud both seem to have the Arabic and Hebrew versions of Baraka (blessing) in their names. Ehud “Barak” (Baraka) and Barack Obama. May they be blessed with peace.

The question really for me is this. The Arabs and the Israelis have the collective unconscious rage to fight one more big war. I would hope that they could channel that energy to doing something equally dangerous but perhaps less deadly, advance this process to the next and difficult step, a two-state solution. That is my hope come this Yom Kippur holiday (avenu malkenu…! That’s my favorite Jewish holy prayer song!)

There is a lot of discussion on my comments pages about the close approximation of the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (his PLO handle is Abu Mazen) to the code-name Nostradamus may apply to his third and final Antichrist: Mabus. I wrote a whole chapter in my book about Nostradamus’ third Antichrist looking at Palestinian candidates who see their name crunch into (M)Abu(s) or (M)Abbas (Mabas = Mabus). The chapter is called By the Infernal Gods of Hannibal – a cryptic hint left by Nostradamus to name the current Antichrist.

Abu Mazen (Mamoud Abbas).

Whether Mabus “is” the Third Antichrist or his victim is a topic discussed in detail in the book. Certainly, a war coming out of this precipitous push for statehood might lead to the death of Abu Mazen. As Mabus is first to fall in his war lasting 25 to 27 years, then Abu Mazen’s death could trigger this “great undoing of people and animals” as Century 2 Quatrain 62 implies. We shall have to watch this closely. In the meantime, I invite you to check out an overview of my book on the subject by clicking on Nostradamus. See you on the flip side of the UN vote.

John Hogue
(21 September 2011)

PS—If you are not already a member, you can be the first to know when such articles are posted by joining my free newsletter. Sign up here.

UPDATE INSERT, 23 September 2011: A Seismic Earthquake in the EU Debt Crisis Begins to Rumble

I wrote the above blog on Wednesday, the day US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke caused in part a 284 point drop in the Dow Jones with his inference to significant and depression-like downside risks and strains in the global financial markets requiring his Operation Twist — a new slight-of-hand economic card game from the FED. Most of you began reading this above blog on Thursday when the DOW dropped another 467 points making Wednesday-Thursday’s 751 point drop the largest two-day slide in 2008. Today the IMF meets in Washington DC to muddle through figuring out the Rubric’s Cube of the Euro debt crisis while a quiet and ongoing run on European banks goes on, mostly unreported by the corporate media. Two major banks in France are dumping 4 billion dollars so they will not be to big to save by the IMF. Moody’s degrades Greece’s credit further. The IMF yesterday warned that the entire world financial system is now more susceptible to collapse than at any time since the Great Recession began.

In my book Predictions for 2011, I coined a new label for our economic age, calling it a “Cold Depression” akin to a Cold War. We enter a period of decades where economic collapse is ever overshadowing stagnant economic growth. At any point the economic collapse could become suddenly hot and apocalyptic. In my seven quakes in September 2011 article published on 3 September, I foresaw  this week’s shake-ups or “Temblors” in the global economy:

***

Temblor Two – The Euro Bank Crisis: One of the reasons why this smoldering shock to the world economy did not happen burst into flame in August is because it was “August” — the time Europeans, leaders and led, all generally put business on the shelf and go “out to lunch,” off the wagon and into vacation mode for a month.

Then September comes. The tanned come home from the French, Italian and Spanish Riveras, Biarritz, the sunny spots on Aegean islands. The bronzed procrastinators park their sailboats and suntan lotion returning to their offices and financial institutions where a big bad Euro ass-a-dragon banking crisis is poised, claws clenched, waiting.

Temblor Three – The Return of the Great Recession: In August I listened to the talking heads of Bloomsburg and CNBC have bobble headed ideas about there not being a second recession coming to the US. Part of the problem is they selectively ignore Europe in the equation of a potential US downturn. They selectively ignore the consequences of climate change undermining food prices with crop failures. They ignore the consequences of Hurricane Irene flooding New York and Wall Street. They will have to face these shocks in the aftermath of Irene, in September and factor them into their calculus.

***

The economic vacationers are back at their banks in September faced with an economic default of Greece with debt slams in Italy and Spain lurking. France downsized in credit and shrinking its banks in a huge sell off and this had precipitated the third worse week on Wall Street so far in history, proving that when the Euro Zone sneezes, the US economy and Wall Street catches the cold, especially since 25 percent of all US exports go to Europe. Add to this a significant strain to the global insurance industry from mounting property and agriculture damage caused by worsening climate changes.

I would say the financial quake I predicted is on and it will lead to a double-dip global recession. We still have a lot of 2011 to soldier through and as cold winter comes the Cold Depression comes closer to growing  suddenly hot.

Nostradamus.

Friends,
Tempers in the Middle East, the intensity of world weather and prices, all rise. A number of you and a number of those who have recently had me as guests on blog talk and radio interviews have voiced wonder mixed equally with alarm at my oracle’s accurate assessments of world and ecological events recorded in Predictions for 2010 and Predictions for 2011 thus far.

With this in mind, I wanted to inform you that tonight, across North America (26 February 2011) the History Channel documentary Nostradamus 2012 will be rebroadcast. My interview took place in the inner sanctum of the vast Masonic Lodge in downtown San Antonio, Texas, on a hot and humid summer day in 2008. If you are able to watch the documentary, I wish concentrate on a segment in the first hour because it is the most important warning to make wrong by right actions born in the present.

I was grateful that unlike what recently happened to me in the Brad Melzer’s Decoded fiasco, the editors of 1080 Productions, subcontracted to produce Nostradamus 2012, appreciated what I had to say. They did not digitally delete me in the editing room (though they did choose to leave out what I had to say about the connection of Nostradamus to Mayan Prophecies and the Mayan Calendar purportedly ending time as we have known it on 21 December 2012). Be that as it may, what 1080 did not cut was, in my opinion, far more important than 2012, because it is something you are now directly feeling when you go to the market to buy your basic sustenance. It is impacting you long before the year 2012 arrives.

You all will continue to be feeling and dealing with this crisis long after that year and all the Chicken Littleism surrounding it is forgotten as we all plunge forward into history’s maelstrom of runaway events poised to unravel civilization in the 2020s — if we do not understand how to stop it.

Watch the show tonight, or get a CD from History Channel, or, if you are counting pennies so you can afford current food prices rising to the highest levels in modern history, watch the YouTube excerpts of the documentary. Look out for my short and pithy segment discussing how the danger of famine is the most immediate and least talked about potential apocalyptic event in everyone’s near future life.

A few more matters to discuss before we cover the main topic of this article today.

A day of rage demonstrations in Palestinian territories occupied by Israel did not make much of a stir in the news. It would seem the Arab Revolution has given Israel a respite from a direct confrontation. The shift in focus from Arabs taking down their kings and dictators to protesting what they see as the injustice of a hypocritically undemocratic occupation of Arab Palestinian lands by the only true democracy in the region, will skip this week, this month even. We will find the revolution’s focus erupting on Israel’s doorstep in the month of March.

There is a great opportunity in these dangerous times in the Middle East to see a significant withdrawal of American forces as I predicted in my forecasts for 2010 and 2011. I still hold to a prediction I made as far back as early 2009 on Coast to Coast AM, there will be a rapid withdrawal of US forces home from Iraq and Afghanistan much sooner than 2014. As I said years ago, whoever would be the next president after G.W. Bush, he or she would have to scale down US imperial reach around the world because predictably like all great superpowers, America has overextended itself can ill afford further sustaining its military reach. Economics, not Usama bin Laden, will see a US retreat and as I detailed in my forecast for 2011, this “insolationism” coming to the US has potentially positive consequences for its people.

This weekend, the day of greatest rage was in the streets of Iraq. Revolution can happen there as well, for the government experiment established by the grace of US occupation is at best dysfunctional and better serving corruption than the Iraqi people. I expect I will have to review Nostradamus’ clear allusions to Iraq in his prophecies, refreshing my interpretation as events come clearer as the times of their arrival into the present appear.

All civil wars have their lulls. This weekend, the Libyans draw a breath before the next wave of violence. Gaddafi entrenches in Tripoli, massacring dissenters in its streets, arming the pro-Gaddafi mob militias.

I am most concerned that Gaddafi will not shrink at using his vast stores of chemical and biological weapons if there be attacks on Tripoli. In addition, he has shot bomber pilots who declined to fly bombing runs on Benghazi and oil installations in rebel held eastern Libya. He replaced these with Algerian mercenary pilots who may not care what WMD they drop from their bomb bays. A NATO-US organized “no-fly” zone must be established if we possibly can prevent another Halabja massacre in Libya — the thousands killed in a Kurdish town gassed from the air by Nostradamus Antichrist candidate Saddam Hussein in 1988.

I expect that March will see my oracle’s prophecies for 2011 vindicated on the wild weather front as blizzards are replaced by tornadoes when a sudden and violent shift from winter to spring takes place in the eastern and central parts of the Untied States. The catchword for 2011 is a redoubling of everything you saw hurled at you from Mother Nature in the violent year of 2010. Christchurch, New Zealand is but a taste of the earthquakes I expect will come in the spring and summer months.

Washington DC politicians have, as predicted, played nicey-nicey with platitudinous, patronizing placations on the news about toning down their politically polarizing, violent rhetoric. It will not last. Watch it come apart in March when the budget debate begins. The legislative demonstrations you see in February move from Cairo Egypt to Madison Wisconsin and the capitol buildings of Ohio, New Jersey, etc., will come marching into the nation’s capitol building in March. You can read about what the next six months of riotous politics on the floor of the House and Senate will be like in two chapters in my 2011 e-Book: “Wattsington DC” and “Big GOPocalyptic Faustian Deal!”

Now I would like to at last share with you a reply I made back in October 2010 to a letter sent from a young Indian citizen named Suraj who saw a broadcast of Nostradamus 2012 in India.

***

SURAJ,
Hello sir. I am just a 14-year-old kid from India looking for answers and I’m eager for answers. I saw the documentary of yours about the prophecies of Nostradamus and am willing to study deeply about it. I am not a very bright child but I take a of interest in this subject. I have a very few questions sir and would be pleased if you answered them. My first question is … What do you think is my part in not letting these dark prophecies coming true?

HOGUE
Thank you for writing me and joining my newsletter list. When I look at what our part is in these prophecies, it is the darkness played out by us that is not our own. Our societies, religions, parents, priests, politicians and pedagogues (teachers) condition this darkness into us. One must forgive them for they do not know what they are doing. They too were programmed to automatically impart identifications and borrowed knowledge and they often did this with their sincere intent to love us, as far as they knew or thought they knew what love is. Nevertheless, all of us eventually are coated with other people’s ego habits and ego identities over that which can never be predictable. “That” which is eternal, that, which visits the realm of time (past-and-future) but lives in the eternity of the present moment, waking-sleeping, or living-dying.

The dark prophecies of Nostradamus are warnings, are pitfalls set before us that I believe the prophet wished us to be alert in avoiding, in finding new pathways to better futures. The only way I know how to do my part not to serve the dark destinies of these prophecies is to live and awaken each moment the light of my inner awareness. To do this, I must see into why I am living a habitual, unconscious, robotic identity.

You are fourteen. This is a crossroads moment. At fourteen new energies awaken and one can gain a knack of keeping the thread (the sutra) of soul untouched as you soon enter a more intense process of ego “education”.

Education is necessary. We need to learn how to live and relate in this world. The problem is, our educators are not wise. For the most part, they have only borrowed the wisdom of others. It is not their direct experience. Even authentic knowledge, if borrowed, is less valuable than your direct and existential experiences. So, the teachers being unaware of real wisdom teach us to identify with this “body-mind” vehicle we use in life.

In short, they teach us to think we are the car, not the “driver” of this car traveling the path of our destiny. So, learn all you can about how to drive the body and the mind through your life but remember that you are not this car and all of its labels of identity. You are far more than this. Your name, your mind, your body and senses, your language, and social training, etc., are only utilitarian. They are tools. But remember, you are not “the hammer” but the hand of soul that wields it.

You are wrong, Suraj, about not being very bright. I see wisdom in you. It is in your fundamental questions in this email. Keep that wisdom flame burning. Do not let education and the programming of identities suppress it.

Osho.

There are meditations from my teacher that you might find helpful. I lived in India for a time. Back in 1980, I began my spiritual journey in earnest. I had never been overseas before, yet I was compelled to travel across the planet into the unknown, seeking to lay down my junk filled head at the feet of my teacher, Osho. Meeting him was and ever is the best thing that happened to me in 1,000 lives. If you permit me, I can direct you to links and information about some of his meditations. Just click on Contact.

The most important thing is to not play a part in Nostradamus’ dark prophecies. These meditations may help.

SURAJ,
My other question is who is the Third Anti-Christ that Nostradamus talked about?

HOGUE
It is a complicated detective story. My full answer is 77,000 words long and these words comprise an e-Book called Nostradamus and the Antichrist. Click on Mabus.

There are four major candidates at this time: Barack Obama, G.W. Bush, Usama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The last and dead candidate has actually fulfilled more of the Third Antichrist prophecies than any other person to date. But more than this, I end the book with an essay about what I call the Antichrist Unconscious. To me in my experience, this is the Anti-Christ (Anti-Conscious) force driving all of us to be mechanical and predictable in our lives.

For the most part we can do little about any else’s ego personifications of anti-conscious behavior, but we can do something about the “Antichrist Unconscious” in ourselves. We can understand, transcend, and dispel this shadow by doing meditations that can re-light our forgotten inner witnessing awareness.

SURAJ,
And my last question… Is the world actually going to end in 2012? Because Nostradamus also predicted that there would be a World War 3 for 27 years but there is no world war going on right now, so how can the world end in 2012 if the war has not started yet?

HOGUE
Nostradamus never predicted anything for the year 2012. It is one of the biggest lies put out there by irresponsible so-called 2012 scholars. In the documentaries you see me currently in, my video spots are surrounded by these silly people who think their imaginations can trump this fact. In each show, I have countered their theories but my words are selectively cut out of these documentaries because it does not sell the show.

Nostradamus forecast the end of the world in the year 3797 A.D. We have almost 1,800 years of history yet to see ourselves through.

The Lost Book of Nostradamus that these 2012ers promote as their proof of his predicting the end of the world in 2012 is a forgery from the 17th century. Nostradamus never wrote it. Moreover, the colored images in the book are so vague that you could project anything that is in your mind as prophecy.

Nostradamus’ “2012″ was the year 1999 and it was meant to be the year when the great engine of the centuries would move again towards a new era. This process is gradual. That does not mean we are not heading for great upheavals after 1999 but the process could take another 50 to 100 years before it is through. In a few years we will all forget 2012 as just another year in a greater process of revolutionary change.

I am currently finishing an e-Book on 2012 and what Nostradamus actually wrote about our times. It also points to the inaccuracies of the Mayan Calendar which actually might place their change point in their 5,000 year cycle back between the winter solstices of 1998 and 1999, not the oncoming winter solstice of 2012.

SURAJ,
THAT is about all sir and please reply sir and these questions may seem small to you but are very helpful for me.

HOGUE
They are not small to me. They are important. So much so that I took time in my busy schedule that I cannot spare to answer them this morning.

SURAJ,
Consider me your student sir and thank you for your time. Hope to hear from you again as fast as possible sir.

HOGUE
You are lucky today. Most queries take me months and up to a year to answer. I was guided to reply to you as soon as possible. I cannot say when I will be able to answer you again, but if it is possible for you to look into the meditations and if you have a “yes” for that, then I will immediately send you that information.

It is the most valuable thing I can share with anyone.

***

If any of you wish to explore or have guidance about the meditation techniques I use, please Contact Me.

John Hogue

(26 February 2011)

Muhammar Gaddafi.

Nostradamus.

Friends,
The Muslim world has its own North Korean style hermit kingdom, virtually closed off from the world, from journalists and the Internet. Yet, just like a very positive variant of a virus, the spread of Arab revolution out of Tunisia to Libya’s west and out of Egypt to Libya’s east has infected the closed kingdom of strongman Muhammar Gaddafi with an information dis-ease. The vectors of this fever of openness with symptoms of democratic desires are cell phones, iPhones and laptops. It is a social disease of an electronic networked kind carried by Facebook and twittering software on electronic communication gadget “mosquitoes” that can infect even a starkly free-information quarantined country like Libya with a “malarial” wave of free speech contagious and fatal to dictators. Before Gaddafi’s regime came down with this “cold” a statement of the late Hafez al-Assad of Syria echoes again in the halls of Damascus, Teheran and down the totalitarian’s halls of Tripoli. Regimes in the Arab world with the guts to fire on their own rebellious people never fall. Now that totalitarian theory is being tested in Libya.

Word is getting out of a life-and-death struggle of the people of Libya with the Gaddafi regime. More “infections” of the truth buzz ring cell phones in and tweet out of Libya revealing cracks appearing in the cyber-hermetically sealed dictatorship.

I predict Gaddafi is going down violently, like Ceausescu in 1989, “Romanian-style”. The question is, how long will it take and how bloody will it be?

Comparisons have been drawn comparing the current regional revolution of Arabs to that of the fall of Eastern European communist regimes in 1989 when the Soviet Union gave up the standoff with the Western democracies as the Cold War began to end. The Berlin Wall fell, then the regime of East Germany collapsed. Where East Germany went so went the region, being the most influential satellite member of the Soviet Warsaw Pact alliance, just like Egypt in the Arab world today is a trendsetter.

The fall of the Erich Honeker regime in East Berlin caused a regional chain reaction across Eastern Europe with communist dictatorships falling mostly with a whimper except one: the eccentric strongman Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, every inch as daffy a dictator as Gaddafi. Relinquish power? Only over his dead body, like Gaddafi threatens today.

Romanian street demonstrations quickly turned into massacres then pitched battles between opposing regular and police military units for and against Ceausescu in a short, sharp, tank shell riddled and exceedingly bloody civil war, ending with support of Ceausescu rapidly — literally — draining out like blood poured over the cobble stones of Bucharest. Ceausescu tried to escape, was arrested, lined up against a wall and summarily shot with automatic weapons.

What happens in Libya will be similar but I fear it will take longer and be a far more bloody civil war. Unlike Romania’s civil war, Libya is among the most deeply entrenched tribal societies in the Arab world. This civil war will be won or lost by who can manage the complex alliances and promise patronage to key Libyan tribes. Western Libya mostly has tribes allied with Gaddafi, whose stronghold is Tripoli.

Most of the rebels who seized Benghazi and the eastern half of Libya are from tribes out of favor with Gaddafi. The oil profits from the world’s 17th largest oil producer go mostly to the western Libyan tribes. Western Libya has oil fields but they just lost the lion’s share located in the eastern provinces. Gaddafi will try to take them back, promise reward of the rich oil industry to those western tribes and sub-tribes leaders who support the crackdown.

People inside Libya phone the outside world about Gaddafi’s acts of genocide. Believe it. This civil war could descend into a Libyan tribal life struggle to control oil resources before and Gaddafi is gone.

At the time of this writing (22 February 2011), Gaddafi and his tribal allies in the secret police and armed forces are ruthlessly fighting with and liquidating rebels in Tripoli while air strikes on Benghazi continue.

I predict Gaddafi intends to launch his heavily armored forces against Benghazi, the heart of the revolution.

The main Libyan tribe, Warfallah, numbers one million people. They were the first tribe to support the current anti-government movement. Not a good sign for the future of Gaddafi’s regime, or his plans for a crackdown because they man much of the militia and regular army forces of the 120,000-man Libyan military. Nevertheless, the Libyan military continues to unleash jet bombers, helicopter gunships and naval gunships taking pot shots at Benghazi. That indicates both sides have a mix of military might. People are taking sides.

Gaddafi pays for an unknown number of ruthless sub-Saharan mercenaries numbering 7,000 operatives, including tank and armored units in what is known as Gaddafi’s Pan Islamic Legion. I sense because of his dwindling support from the Warfallah, he is calling in favors from many more guerilla and terrorist forces across Africa whose insurrections he bankrolled for four decades. These gathering mercenary forces flying in by transport are the spear point of a planned strike on Eastern Libya. It is because of them and the atrocities to come that Gaddafi will soon lose support from all of his people — East and West Libyans — and come to bloody ruin

Another reason why this could be far worse than the Romanian revolution of 1989, Ceausescu’s bloody fall did not rock oil prices across the world threatening high prices that could stall economic global recovery. Libyan oil fields have stopped pumping and exporting. Uncertainly hit the stock markets hard on Tuesday with the Dow Jones dropping -178.46 points. The Oil APR price today closed $96.92 a barrel, close to passing an ominous threshold, rising beyond the $100 mark. The last time that happened was in 2008. Then came the Great Recession.

The week is young, like the Libyan civil war. Prepare for triple digit per oil barrel prices sinking economic growth soon. What is coming is not a stock market correction of the DOW Jones by five or six percent. The next economic crisis begins. The one I foresaw in detail. Triggered by oil prices and dated in my predictions for 2010 and forecasts for 2011.

If I were you, reader, I would top my gas tank. The fall of Gaddafi is coming but this Jim Jones of Arab dictators could take the Libyan oil industry with him in a bloodbath stretching for weeks. That means Africa’s fourth largest oil exporter will be off line for a while. That means oil exports across Africa are disrupted. Expect this to bring fuel and food riots in South Africa. Europe is the biggest importer of Libyan oil. Expect this to trigger another EU financial crisis that will impact the US and Chinese economy, as I detail in Predictions for 2011.

Facebook shot from around 21 February. Celebration of freedom on beach in Benghazi under the tricolor of pre-Gaddafi regime. Source: Reuters.

The 16th-century French prophet, Michel Nostradamus (1503-1566) might have set down a verse or two about the fate of Muhammar Gaddafi.

Century 4 Quatrain 62 of his history of the future Les Propheties states:

Vn coronel machine ambition,
Se saisira de la plus grand’armée,
Contre son prince fainte inuention,
Et descouuert sera soubz sa ramée.

A colonel will through machinating (plotting) ambition.
He will seize the greatest part of the army,
Against his Prince through a false invention.
He will be discovered under his branches.

In 1995 I wrote the following interpretation that was published on p. 345 of my 1,000-page tome Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies:

***

In 1969 Colonel Gaddafi overthrew King Idris in the Libyan Revolution. He seized the greatest part of the Libyan army’s support in a secret coup (false invention). The final line of the quatrain may cryptically relate details of a notorious milestone in Gaddafi life to be reached 17 years later. On the night of 5 April 1986 … a terrorist bomb exploded in a Berlin disco, killing two people, including a US serviceman. The [US] Reagan government chose to find evidence suggesting that the order for the bombing came from Gaddafi. (Actually, other far more compelling evidence implicating the Syrians and Iranians in the bombing was ignored by Reagan. But I suppose an attack on the most vulnerable terrorist-sanctioning nation would suit his political movie script better than a military attack on the deep heartland of Islamic terrorism.) Nine days later…US bombers attacked terrorist-related targets in Libya. Bombs were also aimed at the Al Aziziya barracks in the desert outside of Tripoli where, it is said, Gaddafi and his family sometimes reside in a bedroom designed to look like a Bedouin tent. Gaddafi’s two sons were slightly injured by flying glass and his 15-month-old adopted daughter, along with 100 people, were killed in what was clearly an assassination bombing mission. Gaddafi survived unscathed.

A translation of line 4 is difficult. In earlier books I had taken the figurative meaning of ramée to deduce a green arbor or green flag symbolizing Gaddafi’s Libya. A more down-to-earth translation of ramée as branches might better describe Gaddafi the moment two bombs slammed into his tennis court and another took out his front door. One might have found him crouched beneath the branches (or legs) of his desk, hiding his face from the flying glass.

***

Rebooting my interpretation fourteen years later, let us take on the riddle of line four in the context of Gaddafi’s near future.

With the word ramie Nostradamus may describe the scene of his end. It means branches; arbor, green bows, green arbor. The etymology could mean by extension a green Bedouin tent, the green Libyan flag, or perhaps the scene of his end is such a tent pitched in an oasis. Although I do not personally believe he will leave Libya alive, I could be wrong. Gaddafi may escape to the green arbor, bows and luscious vegetation of the tropics. He could fly out of the desert living out his days a guest of dictator Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Perhaps it is there he will be killed when Chavez falls.

Another quatrain and famous anagram indexed Century 10 Quatrain 96 could describe the life and bloody fate of Gaddafi and his son:

Religion du nom des mers vaincra,
Contre le secte fils Adaluncatif,
Secte obstinee deploree craindra,
Des deux blessez par Aleph & Aleph.

The Religion named after the ocean will overcome,
Against the sect of the son Adaluncatif,
The obstinate, deplored sect will be afraid,
Of the two wounded Aleph (A) and Aleph (A).

The anagram Adaluncatif has baffled interpreters for the past several centuries. I take it to be a riddle about Gaddafi. Adaluncatif is an anagram. Reshuffle the letters and they form “Cadafi Luna.” Allowing for phonetic spelling changes, it is possible to get “Gaddafi Luna,” “Gaddafi of the Moon,” or “Gaddafi of the Crescent of Islam.”

Now the next riddle. What Religion is named after the ocean that will overcome the sect and son of Gaddafi?

The term “Oceanic religion” could be somewhat awkwardly describing Gaddafi’s bed on the night of the US bombing raid on his home in 1986.

Author and former British Parliament member George Tremlett has been one of the few Westerners invited into Gaddafi’s house in the center of a military barracks outside of Tripoli. The bombed bedroom is enclosed in glass, like a shrine, without one shard of shrapnel or piece of broken masonry disturbed since the night of the bombing. Tremlett’s book Gaddafi: The Desert Mystic contains a photograph of the bed; at the head we see an illuminated and vividly colored panoramic photo of ocean waves crashing on the rocks. Could this wall papered photo religiously bemuse the 16th-century prophet?

A number of religions, such as Tibetan Buddhism, describe themselves as oceanic.

We could go out on a limb a little further.

Around the same time in early 1986 that US jets bombed Gaddafi’s bedroom, the Oregon Commune of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh disbanded. Bhagwan was in the midst of a world tour seeing him thrown out of 21 countries by CIA and Reagan administration pressure until his meditation resort/university was reestablished in Pune, India in 1987.

Rajneesh changed his name to Osho before he died in early 1990 from what his followers and doctors claim was heart disease accelerated by being poisoned with the heavy metal Thallium in November 1985. He claimed to have been poisoned during the three days he disappeared from all contact by the press and his lawyers, while under the custody of US federal agents.

Rajneesh explained that the new name Osho was derived from William James’ word “oceanic,” which means dissolving into the ocean. Oceanic describes the experience of being simply religious without the limits of mafias of the soul or dead dogmas. You are it and it is an oceanic, blissful experience.

Osho is also used as a Zen salutation that can essentially be translated as “oceanic consciousness.”

Gaddafi gets bombed around the same time the guru of a new religion metaphorically named after the ocean is spreading its message on a world tour. Though this association of Gaddafi and Osho might sound far-fetched, it would not be the first time Nostradamus dated an incident in future history by chronicling two unrelated events happening at the same time only as a time clue rather than having any direct connection.

Nostradamus also hid more than one decodable meaning in his anagrams. (For instance, see Mabus.)

The anagram Adaluncatif gives us Cadafi Luna. Yet, remove “A(dal)u(n)cat(i)f” and we also get Nidal.

Gaddafi was once a close friend and patron to the notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal in the 1980s.

Drop the c and the remaining letters a-u-a-t-f can phonetically spell “fatau,” for Fatah, as in the Palestinian Fatah party.

Fatah now runs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank region under Israeli occupation. At one time it included a terrorist branch known at the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

In other words, Cadafi Luna is linked to Abu Nidal (terrorist) and the PLO of Fatah as it may relate to the near future.

The secular workweek begins with Gaddafi Luna threatened with overthrow. The workweek will soon end with Friday — (the Muslim holy day, church day, their “Sunday” according to their calendar).

This Friday watch the Fatah Party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank join the radical Palestinian party of Hamas, controlling the Gaza Strip for a “Day of Rage” demonstration across all Israeli occupied Palestinian territories.

Gaddafi, a patron of Hamas, will drag his country down into civil war this week while the Arab Revolution reaches the doorstep of Israel this Friday in a protest against the US veto that put a kibosh on a recent United Nations Security Council resolution to declare Israeli settlement construction illegal.

Watch Friday when the Arab Revolution amps up in intensity to a whole new dimension, shifting from an uprising against the oppression of its own Arab-born dictators to an rebellion against oppression of the US-backed Israelis in Palestine.

If these interpetated layers of the Adaluncatif anagram message are correct, Gaddafi’s civil war and fall is linked to the coming rage in Palestinian streets.

Where then do the clues walk us to next?

Solving the riddle of the last two lines of 10 Q96:

The obstinate, deplored sect will be afraid,
Of the two wounded Aleph (A) and Aleph (A).

The sect of Gaddafi is afraid of the two wounded A and A. How do we decode just what the Hebrew letter for A (Aleph) and its Arabic variant (Alif) represent?

Gaddafi intends to give his dictatorship to one of his sons, of which he has seven. The most likely grooms for dad’s dictatorship are Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi and Mutassim Gaddafi.

The prophecy might imply the two will be wounded, after the father is deposed.

Apparently, these Hebrew/Arabic letters are not the same as our letter A. Instead they correspond not to the vowel sound “ah” but to the glottal stop that precedes it. With that said, one cannot rule out that Nostradamus the obscurer would lead the idle seeker off the etymological trail. Perhaps he was more interested in the spelling of the word in Roman letters to hide a name consisting of two “A”-sounds when spoken?

Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi.

If so, then the first and second Alif could represent a kind of phonetic spelling of the most likely heir apparent’s name, Saif (a)l-Islam (a)l-Gaddafi (meaning Sword of Islam from Gaddafi)

He is the son of Adaluncatif. The designated successor to lead the obstinate and deplored sect of Gaddafi’s mutant Marxist-Socialist-Islamic system now rejected by the people of Libya.

Successor A and A will be mortally wounded?

A and A also could be Nostradamus hinting the most popular chant of the demonstrators in Libya: Allahu Akbar! (God is Great!) In this way the faith of Allah is the oceanic religion foreseen to succeed over this obstinate, deplored sect.

If we move beyond all the tangled speculation inherent in picking loose a line of clarity out of cryptic Nostradamus, the fires of revolution overtaking the Middle East could cleanse the way for a better and more democratic era.

My oracle’s forecasts for 2010 and those published for 2011 indicate sudden and unexpectedly positive breakthroughs in the Middle East are quite possible.

Israel in 2011 has an excellent opportunity to be a positive game changer, supporting Arab democratic aspirations while isolating radical Islam based in Iran. I wrote a chapter about this potential destiny in my prophecies for 2011.

John Hogue

(22 February 2011)

Friends,
Thank you for all the letters in response to my controversial entry about the Gaza Strip battles being a marriage of victims to victimizers.

I will take a short break from writing Predictions for 2009 (planned release date: 30 January) and respond to Kathleen and Chris.

KATHLEEN:
John, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

If I am being bullied, starved, held prisoner in my home with no running water, if all attempts to provide me with aid is being blocked by my imprisoners, do you not think that, given the means to do so, I would hire the biggest, baddest bully on the block to fight back for me when I couldn’t?

HOGUE REPLIED:
Hi Kathleen,

The Palestinians in Gaza overtly or passively did allow or directly choose the biggest bully on the block. Look what he’s done for them? He has brought full-scale fighting in their streets, in their homes.

The path of the sword is not the answer. Nor is the path to pacifism. War and peace are two sides of the same unconscious, reactive victimizer-victim mind set.

The path of consciousness shows another way to those ready to understand their mechanical and reactive minds conditioned into them by their societies from birth onwards. Until then, all that we do is done from an unconscious, reactive mind-set.

KATHLEEN:
This is why the Hamas was elected in Gaza – yes, they are extremists, however the Israeli’s have been more than extreme in their manner of dealing with both the Palestinians and Gaza for far too long.

HOGUE REPLIED:
Has Hamas helped? Except make the people of Gaza more victimized?

KATHLEEN:
And they have been able to act in this manner thanks to the full support of a self interested US government, a biased American media, the UN (which does not want to admit what a huge mistake was made and therefore accept responsiblity for that mistake). Is Hamas right? Of course not.

HOGUE REPLIED:
You are defending the right of people to pick a bully who can’t fight the bigger bully without destroying those who picked him. This kind of circular unconscious and reactive thinking is the very stuff in us that makes Gaza Strip tragedies.

KATHLEEN:
Is Israel right in its reaction? Absolutely not.

But children are dying. The blood of innocents is running in the streets. Isn’t that all that matters?

HOGUE REPLIED:
So the answer is we help those innocent children by picking the biggest baddest bully on the Gaza Street. He then lobs hundreds of rockets at the innocent children of the regional superpower bully neighbor. Our Israeli neighbor then has enough of that and in comes Hell, cranking on tank treads sending a rain of artillery and missile fire upon our children. Then comes along you, defending the bullies, who are absolutely wrong but worthy of your defense. The very same bullies who set this mess off and thus make our children bleed, and their suffering and bleeding is all that matters.

Don’t laugh at Kathleen, laugh at yourselves.

In this line of thinking hides the core of human misery to those who can look into themselves and see it with a witnessing consciousness.

I assure you, you all have the same programmed mind running around inside your heads to various degrees. Kathleen’s conditioned mind shows a reactive reasoning that exists in all our reactive minds so be compassionate to her and to yourselves. Understand this mind. That’s how you eventually stop the bleeding of children.

With some awareness and understanding, perhaps helped along by practicing a science of self-observation, perhaps you, me, Kathleen and all the other 6.5 billion sleepwalkers can understand their waking-nightmares, and with that understanding be changed into something wonderful.

*************

CHRIS (Quoted Hogue excerpt used by Chris to make his point):
“The state of Israel would have been a very different place if most of the Palestinians had risked staying as a sizable minority at nearly a parity in number with the Jews. Owning land is empowerment in the Middle East. All rationalizations aside, when a land owner becomes a refugee he has chosen disenfranchisement. Choose the path of a refugee and you choose the life of a victim.”

John imchallange you to show any proof of ownership of land of palestinians!!!

HOGUE REPLIED:
Sure thing, Chris. Go to the records departments of any Palestinian refugee camp. Go to the households of many Palestinian refugees and you will find the tattered deeds to lands they had evacuated from in 1948. Of course, you could perhaps find as many deeds of proof in the records and households of those East Prussians who vacated that region in the final terrible months of World War Two.

Much is risked when taking up the sword of war. The Germans under Hitler, if they had won would have taken other people’s lands all the way east to the Ural Mountains. Nevertheless, they lost, and completely. Those East Prussian lands to which deeds are established were lost on the path of war.

Palestinians hold deeds to lands they lost because they openly or passively supported the decisions of their leaders, primarily their chief religious elder, The Grand Mufti, to push the Jews to the sea and as the Mufti, a Nazi sympathizer liked to say, finish the job Hitler started.

Well, if they had won, we might be having Jewish survivors waving their deeds instead, but the Palestinians chose — or had chosen for them — the sword and it was struck from their hands by an enemy that proved to be no pushover. Those lands are lost and the deeds are worthless now, but they are testimony to land once owned by Palestinians.

CHRIS:
you are correct about the age old batle but simply cannot get by your own anti religious bias to see the root cause of this situation.
from the nile to the euphrates is israeli land -promised and written about 2500 years ago. i think we might be seeing thew beginnings of the reestablishment of this covenant.

HOGUE REPLIED:

The root cause of all of this tragic silliness is what people for the past 5,000 years have called “religion.” A great example is the above assumption, borrowed and hypnotized into each new generation from the distant past all the way down to believers of today. We are trained to drink these ideas up blindly, without question, no matter how poisoned laced. All the so-called religions do this.

In the name of religion, love, a Prince of Peace, etc, more blood has been spilled than for any other reason. They are doing it now in Arab Gaza. They are doing it now in Jewish towns and villages with their rockets. The mesmerized and mechanicalized minds of conditioned human beings are trained to borrow their revelations and doctrines from others. These priestly mafias are as unaware as ourselves, but more authoritarian, charismatic. They dream the nightmare of the “overlord” whilst we are programmed to dream the nightmare of the “overwelmed” rather than seek religious revelation alone, upon our own merit and the pure authority and power of our experience.

There is a New Humanity coming. Their religiousness will be grown up and free of all of this false dogma and holy hypocrisy.

When they will look back at us from that golden future, they will wonder at and feel pity for our eons of stupidity committed in the name of religion. They will understand something we as of yet cannot see in your hypnotic blindness: that the greatest curse befalling us, hindering our spiritual evolution, was our so-called religions. In the name of the noblest ideas of enlightenment, revelation, love, peace and forgiveness, our mafias of the soul, our religions and their priests and priestesses preached unconsciousness, hate, war and condemnation of our fellow man and woman.

John Hogue
(10 January 2009)

The Marriage of Victims and Victimizers

Friends
The pounding of Hamas government buildings, rocket armories and weapon caches by the Israeli air force is in its fifth day. Hamas keeps firing salvos of rockets at Israeli towns, though they are less in number, the larger rocket artillery has been rolled out and Israeli civilians as far away as 40 kilometers from Gaza are within firing range. Around a half-dozen Israeli citizens have been killed. The Palestinian death toll is far greater, in part because Hamas has hidden their weapon arsenals and military assets in the densest populated urban centers. No doubt, death will claim more than 400 victims by end of the first day of 2009 in the so-called “holy” land.

Worldwide mass demonstrations, especially from Arab populations, condemning Israel has been surprisingly swift and well organized. Even the mainstream US television media outlets usually biased in favor of Israeli actions pour out their sentimentality in these emotive times to the Palestinian victims of overwhelming Israeli air strikes in violence not seen in Gaza since the Six Day War of June 1967. At that time the Gaza Strip enclave of refugee camps-cum-crowded Palestinian ghettos became Israel’s burden to oversee when the soldiers of David and Solomon routed an invasion attempt by the Egyptians.

It is easy to feel sympathy for victims of air strikes. It is a predictable and even programmed response to sympathize with, and somehow ennoble, the role of the victim.

I’m going to say some things in the blog that are sure to shock and upset some of you. I do this in the spirit of compassion. I must do this because I too have all the faults and habitually programmed wounds of my brothers and sister human beings inside me. I have learned from direct experience that sometimes the scab of illusion must be cut hard to open deep wounds to the healing air.

My blog is dedicated not only to commenting on current events reflected in prophecy but it also stands as my testimony of experiences since my initiation into meditation in 1980. I aim to help readers understand and try to transcend what makes all of us human beings so “predictable” and therefore doomed to repeat the past and call it “the future.”

I propose that intelligent and loving solutions exist only in the clarity of living in the eternity of the present. By facing and understanding the mechanics of our predictable habits, we can see how these are unconsciously infected into us like a germ through mis-education of each new generation. Prophecy is mostly doom laden and functions because we are made to make our children as predictable as we have been. We mostly are trained to do this accidentally and unconsciously. Thus, the world muddles on from one misery to the next. This web blog is one small effort in the enlightening of people about this syndrome so that it might help people break free from a state of habitual behavior passed on by one miserable generation to the next. I call that syndrome The Antichrist Unconscious.

I propose to you, reader, that victims are equally responsible for a crime against humanity as are the victimizers. Neither is to be praised or vilified. Both sides of the same dysfunctional coin need to be understood. Understanding will bring transformation.

Because modern journalism is more “opinionism” than at any time before, and emotion sells advertisement, it is all too easy to forget what caused this current crisis in Gaza. Both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian battle of cousin brother descendants of the great Semite patriarch Abraham have fallen into a deep and unconscious mass-psychotic state wherein both sides play victim and victimizer. I will eventually write an entire book on this matter and for now, as I am deeply involved in finishing my newest digital book “Predictions for 2009″ can only give you a morsel, a falafel for thought on this complicated Middle Eastern mess. Very briefly, here’s the outline of this Semite marriage of victims and victimizers made in hell:

In 1947-48, the British overlords relinquishing their hold on Palestine and along with the United Nations, without much forethought or respect for the views of Jews and Arabs living in Palestine, partitioned the place into Jewish and Palestinian enclaves.

Once handed the mess, the Palestinians and fellow neighboring Arab tribes and countries chose a path to war rather than peaceful resolution with their Jewish neighbors in 1948. They tried to push the Jews into the sea and they lost the war.

Both sides had committed atrocities but a majority of Palestinians chose to become refugees. Upwards of 700,000 were scattered in their own Diaspora. They set up crowded refugee camps in Lebanon, in the Egyptian held Gaza Strip and camps mostly in the West Bank region governed by Jordan. A few hundred thousand Palestinians decided it was better to risk staying on their land, face their fears and face a future as citizens of the new Jewish state. There were no massacres waiting for those who didn’t run away. These Palestinians chose not to be victims, even if they risked persecution and death doing it.

The state of Israel would have been a very different place if most of the Palestinians had risked staying  as a sizable minority at nearly a parity in number with the Jews. Owning land is empowerment in the Middle East. All rationalizations aside, when a land owner becomes a refugee he has chosen disenfranchisement. Choose the path of a refugee and you choose the life of a victim.

Palestinians may have faced persecution and even atrocities if they had remained, but then again, there is political power in numbers, even under tyranny and with time the situation can improve. Take for instance South Africa. The whites in the end had to come to some understanding with the black majority and share their country. If most of the Palestinians had not abandoned their lands they would have enjoyed a near equal ratio of Arabs to Jewish citizens in Israel. If there had been a chance for a “two peoples one state” solution that was it. If most of the Palestinians had stood their ground the Jews at that time would not have had the power to force them off their lands for they barely won the war. A large and integrated Arab population would have compelled the founders of Israel to find some workable solution towards living together. Indeed proof of such an equitable solution is self-evident when one considers the treatment of Arabs who stayed on to become Israeli citizens. It’s not a perfect fit, but Arab Israelis do not live in the squalor of the camps, in hopelessness, in a climate rife with radicalization. This is the bitter legacy left to future generations by  those who choose the path of flight after fight in 1948.

An Arab rush to war created the state of Israel, rather than that of two peoples trying to live within one state that was once Palestine. Like it or not, the world rushed to a solution without consulting the parties and it is too late to return the clock to 1947-48. Because of the UN decision, the nations of the world are burdened with the karma of troubles from the Middle East as well. This problem in Palestine is the world’s problem. We are all in some way obligated to find a Palestinian-Jewish solution otherwise our sons and daughters will continue to be drawn into wars there. Perhaps even Armageddon.

The Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular keep choosing a path of militancy after 1948 that only magnifies defeat and victimization. Again in 1967, leagues of Arab armies threatened to push the Jews into the sea and they lost. Israel as a consequence expanded its territories to include large populations of the dispossessed Palestinians from 1948 living in what became the Israeli occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank. Victory now turned the Jews of Israel into victims and victimizers. Even to this day the sons and daughters of concentration camp survivors guard against and frequently re-occupy the vast concentration camps of Palestinian refugees they won in battle.

After 1967, it became the Jewish Israelis’ turn to play victim, because the occupation of further  territories to give them breathing space from their enemies brought them the burden of occupation. Conquest brought decades of terror in its wake from Palestinian guerrilla movements.

If there are rockets falling by the hundreds from Gaza, victimizing Jews in Israel it is because the Israeli Jews are in part responsible for the lethal rain. Occupation of peoples and lands has not brought more security as it was hoped in 1967, only more war. Only a new war for Issac’s sons and daughters of the Mogen David now amassing as I write this for a ground invasion into Gaza.

Right now, the sons and daughters of Ishmael, under Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip are earning far more sympathy as “victims” of an overwhelming retaliation of Israeli military might. These people may soon see Israeli tanks in their ruined streets and suffer being in the crossfire of an Arab-Israeli version of the Battle of Stalingrad.

It may sound cruel to say it. The truth is cruel to our illusions. The Palestinians of Gaza have brought this misery upon themselves.

It is about time someone stated a fact mostly overlooked by the media in these initially shocking days of the newest Arab-Israeli conflict: Arab leadership in the form of radical Hamas once again has chosen war over negotiation and the people of Gaza are now suffering for it. The long held cease-fire between Hamas and Israel was clearly broken by Hamas, not with one but 350 rockets launched at Israeli towns before the first Israeli jet responded. And once again, the Arabs miscalculate how complete and vigorous Israel’s military response can be. The war ending 2008 is 1948, is 1967 all over again.

There are certainly crimes committed by Arab and Jewish cousin brothers that could paint this blog black with righteous grievances; however, the unconscious habit of Palestinians to go to war with Jews just doesn’t work to their better interests. The Arab Palestinians collectively as a people have adopted political impotency as a habit. Just look at who they choose to lead them. They get our sympathies but they only dig more graves for their future and for peace. The jihadists of Hamas have  made their babies human shields putting their armaments, rocket factories and training camps in the densest populated areas. Who chose Hamas to rule over these poor Palestinian bystanders?

Back in elections held in 2007, Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian government. A vast majority of Palestinians currently being bombed had voted Hamas into power because for all their faults, the theocratic zealots of Hamas promised and “did” run Gaza better than the more secularized and corrupt Fatah Palestinian Party of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. Still, the price of voting for Hamas is now being paid in Israeli air strikes, hundreds killed, thousands injured and a ground invasion of Gaza imminent.

The vote for Hamas was a vote for further victimization. The Palestinians of Gaza chose a government that openly declares war as its chief policy against a country it doesn’t recognize. As long as Palestinians with their vote choose those who live by the sword rather than the olive branch of peace, they all will continue to live miserably and die by that sword.

John Hogue
(31 December 2008)

Israeli air strikes on Gaza City.

Friends,
The Gaza strip is on fire. This Palestinian refugee enclave-cum-failing attempt of a Palestinian State, run now by the Islamic fundamentalist organization HAMAS, has been lobbing  escalating volleys of rockets at neighboring Jewish settlements in Israel.

Israel’s long threatened full-scale response has come. It appears the Middle East has yet a new war to mark the New Year. Israeli F-16 bombers have infernally decorated the Gaza City skyline with a grove of mushrooming cloud columns as key Hamas police, government, rocket manufacturing centers and training centers were pulverized by 2,000 pound bombs, initially killing 225 people, local hospitals reported. Cramming those blood-soaked emergency rooms are another 700 wounded, mostly civilians, report Hamas officials.

This is unlike any Israeli surgical attack on Gaza in its long and sad history as a dumping ground for displaced Palestinians after they and other neighboring Arab armies tried to push the Jews into the sea and failed in their war gamble of 1948.

This refugee camp of tents has since become the squalid and vast string of slums crowding an area the size of Washington District of Columbia and teaming with 1.6 million Palestinians. Once a protectorate camp run by the Egyptians, the Israeli’s after the Six Day War of 1967, made it their burden. Some would say, their concentration camp to manage and police. After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, ill-conceived promptings in part by the Bush administration for democratic elections won the extremists of Hamas a majority control of the Gaza Strip over the more secular and Western-friendly Palestinian Fatah Party (winning a majority in the West Bank). Unlike Fatah, Hamas does not acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. Israel pulled out all settlements and policing of the Gaza Strip in 2005. However, most of the Palestinians within Gaza believe their jailers have only moved outside of the wall of the concentration camp, controlling their airspace and approaches to their ports. Even Palestinian money meant to finance basic government services has been withheld by Israel. Then again, why should the Israelis help a government function in Gaza that bombs its cities with rockets and blows up its civilians with suicide bombers?

Then again‚Äö?Ѭ?(there are far too many “then agains” when trying to unravel the ancient hatred of cousin-brother Semites — Arab and Jewish sons of biblical Abraham).

Then again, Israel took Gaza from Egypt in 1967 and didn’t give it back to Egypt when territories were returned with the Camp David Peace Accords in 1979. Then again‚Äö?Ѭ?Egypt probably didn’t want it back. Even for other Arabs, the Palestinians are often seen as a problem tribe.

There was a man born of Jews in 1503 who had recently converted to Christianity, so that they wouldn’t be banished from Provence. He may have named notorious “HAMAS” in the following prophecy written 4.5 centuries ago. I have inserted the “H” in the French word “amas” as it may have been purposely dropped to keep it in code:

La republique miserable infelice,
Sera vastee de nouueau magistrat:
Leur grand (H)amas de l’exile malefice,
Fera Sueue rauir leur grand contracts.

The miserable, unhappy, republic,
Will be devastated by the new magistrate:
Their great (H)amassing of wicked exile,
Will cause the Swiss to carry off their great contracts.

Nostradamus (1555)
Century 1 Quatrain 61

Is this a prophecy for the “miserable republic” that Hamas runs in the Gaza Strip? Are Gaza’s citizens suffering bombardment today decendants of the “wicked exile” of the Palestinian Diaspora? Is Nostradamus hiding the United Nations in a code for the Swiss who have within their borders, in Geneva, the main UN center outside of New York City, in Europe?

BBC reported today that Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the unprecedented military operation “may take some time” before it’s over — but he pledged to avoid a humanitarian crisis.

“It’s not going to last a few days,” he said on Israeli television, flanked by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

The prime minister is under the delusion of wishful thinking. We will see this in the next blog about the future of Hamas when we delve in detail into the secrets hidden in Nostradamus’ Hamas quatrain.

John Hogue
(27 December 2009)

The date of 6 June 2008, which saw the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaoul Mofaz openly threaten Iran with war, is sandwiched between two other significant Israeli anniversaries.  June 5 was the 41st anniversary of Israel’s overwhelming surprise air strikes destroying the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan launching the Six Day War — Israel’s most sweeping victory to date, a preemptive war fought to surprise and destroy Arab invasion forces gathering on its borders. In six days, the Israeli Defense Force occupied the Syrian Golan Heights, the Jordanian West Bank territories, the Gaza Strip and the Egyptian Sinai region up to the Suez Canal – including the fabled Mt. Sinai, where it is said Moses delivered Yahweh’s Ten Commandments to His Chosen People, the Hebrews.

The day after 6 June 2008 marks the 27-year anniversary of Israeli jet bombers obliterating Osirak, the name of a French-built nuclear test reactor built outside of Baghdad, on 7 June 1981 before it came online. Saddam Hussein had intended it to provide enough uranium to build twelve atomic bombs to use on Israel.

Few in the Middle East would overlook the symbolic timing. Shaoul Mofaz made his formal speech on a Friday, the Islamic Sabbath. Some might also recall the date as the anniversary of the Allied beach landings on   Normandy — D-Day, “decision” day — 64 years before.

The Israeli Cabinet certainly had decided something Friday, 6 June 2008, and what Mofaz said made oil prices make an unheard of jump of 11 dollars in a single day to sit at just under $140 a barrel. The US Stock Exchange plummeted nearly 400 points.

“Other options [other than war] are disappearing,” explained Mofaz. “The sanctions are not effective. There will be no alternative but to attack Iran in order to stop the Iranian nuclear program.”

A year ago (June 2007), I made the following prediction on page 112 of my digital book Nostradamus the War with Iran (click on  Nostradamus Iran) based on my study of the 16th-century French prophet. I wrote the following prophecy in a satirical tone playing holy Neo-Con roller and morale booster to those Neo-Conservative hawks disappointed with the less-than-satisfactory performance of their man in the White House, G.W. Bush, concerning their plans to democratize Iran by conquest and preemptive military action while time for their hold on the White House was running out. A Neo-Con plan, I might add, that has been in the works since they published their first manifesto in 1992, with the current Vice President and number one war hawk, Dick Cheney’s editorial help. The brackets are inserted for clarity:

We [Neo-Cons] have the faith in our plans, that even adversity cannot stop us from punishing Iran…

Fear not!

God bless Israel!

She will [attack Iran] if we at first cannot. Israel upon the wings of her heroic airmen will strike down Iran’s nuclear installations at Arak, Natanz and Esfahan. Our President [Bush] will make Americans come to their aid when Iran counterattacks and there will be nary a Democrat in Congress who will dare public scandal and bear the label “anti-Semite” by voting not to aid Israel in her greatest hour of need.

In January 2008, I posted the following prediction on page 52 of my digital book Predictions for 2008:

Israel will attack Iran in spring of 2008 at the earliest. Perhaps around Shavuot, a Hebrew celebration held in late May to early June each year. It marks the time after the Hebrews were liberated from Pharaoh when Moses gave the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai and they dedicated themselves as a nation committed to serving Yehovah, their God. In the history of the modern Jewish State, military strikes on perceived enemies of Israel have often happened on or around Shavuot, 50 days after Passover.

…The chess table is set. If Israel strikes Iran in 2008, America will be forced – accidentally on purpose – into the war. Unless the Iranians play possum and don’t counterattack Israel with their missiles. Overnight this crisis changes the gestalt of the US presidential campaigns.

…The next president will adopt Bush’s wars. They will become Hillary’s wars…Obama’s Wars…

There will be more US forces in the Middle East, South and Southwest Asia in the next president’s term than during the Bush era.

On this current celebration of Shavuot, it would seem the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister is adding an eleventh commandment to the ten brought down by Moses from Sinai:

Thou shall not make atomic weapons unless thou art an Israeli

It is the biggest open secret in the Middle East that Israel possesses between 200 to 500 nuclear weapons. In part, the arms race Israel dreads is a red dragon from the East, from Iran, she has in part conceived by being the first Middle Eastern nation to burden and threaten the region with nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The karma of making dreadful weapons first, brings the karma of a dreadful arms race. In a way, Israel has created the monster nuclear program she now threatens to destroy in Iran, because it has an overwhelming arsenal and there are no deterrents. Her enemies must go nuclear to bring balance to a deadly thing the descendants of the Hebrews have brought into the Holy Land.

John Hogue
(16 June 2008)

The miserable, unhappy, republic,
Will be devastated by the new magistrate:
Their great amassing of wicked exile,
Will cause the Swiss to carry off their great contracts.

Nostradamus (1555) Century 1 Quatrain 61

Friends,
Nostradamus grew up in a world captivated by word plays and cryptograms. In previous bulletins we explored the better known rules of anagram that decode names of leaders, combative countries and places involved in events transpiring in the widening war spreading across the Middle East. Today we look at more abstract forms of word puzzle used by Nostradamus. He may have sometimes disguised a subject as a verb.

Back when I last deciphered this quatrain in 1996 for my book Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies, mainstream opinion up to that time believed Catholic Nostradamus was prophetically attacking his contemporary, John Calvin, the shepherd to Protestant citizens of Geneva, Switzerland, and de facto “magistrate” or leader of that theocratic city-state. I was the first Nostradamian scholar to throw the quatrain’s interpretation forward in time with the theory that the verb “amas” could disguise the name of the radical Palestinian terrorist organization (H)amas:
“Rather than stay with the mainstream theory I will pin this quatrain on the near-future destiny of the Palestinian state, under its new (and first) president, Yasser Arafat. Those doing all the ‘amassing’ (or better, ‘Hamassing’) against Arafat are the anti-Zionist Palestinian faction, Hamas… With this said, I sense that Yasser Arafat’s presidency will be a bust. Perhaps he is assassinated. There seem to be few good leaders to replace him.”

Ten years have passed since I wrote those words. Yasser Arafat’s presidency ran its course plagued by urban war with Israel on the streets of Palestinian slums and cities. He could not rein in armed radical militias in his own Fatah Party. Certainly his chief political adversaries, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, did whatever they could to successfully undermine Arafat’s power from within Palestinian lands. He had not the political clout to stop Hamas from waging its terrorist bombing campaign in Israel without threatening a Palestinian civil war. Israel in turn punished and degraded Arafat’s feeble rule by systematically bombing his government’s offices and police stations across the Gaza Strip and the West Bank territories. Arafat spent his final years in Ramallah a prisoner in his own bombed out presidential complex, ringed by Israeli tanks. He had become scarcely more than a president of his ruined compound. The peace process with Israel was in stalemate for years. By 2004, even a majority of Palestinian leaders grudgingly came around to Israel’s position. As long as a defiant Arafat stubbornly hung onto power among the ruins of his de facto, Israeli tank imposed house arrest there would be no progress toward peace, or an independent Palestinian state.

Then, in the autumn of 2004, the legendary survivor of many battles and disasters suddenly fell ill. Arafat had a sickness of the blood his doctors in Palestine–and later in Paris where he was sent for emergency care–could not diagnose. Arafat died under the shadow of rumors that his party leadership poisoned their president.

It would seem that what I predicted ten years ago about his first successor at least has come true. Arafat’s heir designate, Mahmoud Abbas, was elected president by the Palestinians for a four-year term in January 2005. So far he was proven to be a weak and ineffectual leader. The frustrated Palestinian people used the ballot box exactly a year later to undermine Abbas further. Their vote threw his and the late Arafat’s Fatah party out of power, replacing it with a large parliamentary majority for Hamas. Now Abbas the moderate is a politically undermined president of Palestine, playing unwilling figurehead to a radical Islamist Palestinian government.

A decade ago I finished recording my take on Century 1 Quatrain 61 cautioning the following about turning a verb into a noun for Hamas with a prediction:
My decoding hinges on whether the French word for ‘amassing,’ ‘amas,’ is in fact a cryptogram for (H)amas, whose operatives may perform some act of terrorism so heinous that it derails the efforts of peacemakers from the Middle East all the way to the peace tables of Geneva.”

Geneva seems to represent a contemporary theme to Nostradamus’ time: the fate of John Calvin’s theocratic Calvinist state. At other times the wording sounds contemporary to the present. In other prophecies of Nostradamus, Geneva symbolizes some important place where diplomats draft peace treaties. It is a well-known fact that the League of Nations hailed Geneva as its world capital. The league’s successor, The United Nations, still uses Geneva as its secondary capital to New York. The UN compound in Geneva has been the location for the negotiation and signing of numerous international peace accords in the last 60 years, chief among these was the Palestinian peace accord drafted after the Gulf War of 1991. Since then, it has been the template for all contracts of peace put forth to solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Thus Geneva (Swiss) can be a symbolic reference to the fate of such peace efforts in Nostradamus’ prophecies.

Fortified with this information let us return to Century 1, Quatrain 61 to refresh our view of Nostradamus’ word plays line by line. Perhaps after ten years we might together discover new signs about the future of Hamas:

“The miserable, unhappy republic…”

The dreams of a Palestinian state are going up in the smoke of Islamist rockets and Israeli air and ground attacks across the Gaza Strip since Hamas came to power in Palestinian lands six months ago. An act of democracy touted by US president Bush as a panacea for bringing peace and people power in the Middle East brought a terrorist organization into power. A majority of Palestinians elected a party committed to continuing an armed conflict with Israel. The election result effectively ended peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis. Israel immediately worked to undermine Hamas as an effective governing party, withholding payment of border tariff taxes. These were a key source of income necessary to sustain any Palestinian government and pay its police force and state employees. A radical Iran stepped in to finance Palestinian state and humanitary needs bringing Hamas and Palestine into tighter embrace with Israel’s greatest enemy. Then, the abduction of an Israeli soldier at the end of June 2006 by Hamas guerillas infiltrating Israeli territory brought on a new war.

The people of Palestine are indeed miserable, unhappy as the prophecy says. The lights in the slums of the Gaza Strip have gone out after power stations were bombed by Israeli jets. A humanitary crisis looms as Palestinian guerillas fight Israeli tanks ringing Palestinian settlements and dodge Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City killing and wounding scores of civilians. It would seem that the Palestinian dream of an independent state has, in the case of 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza, yet again transformed into the nightmare of a vast Palestinian concentration camp besieged by Israeli guns and missiles. Worse, says Nostradamus, may be coming to this miserable and unhappy republic in the near future.

“[It]…will be devastated by the new magistrate…”

In the 16th century, a magistrate was elected or appointed by vote. The inference here is not a king but an elected leader, a new party in power. I read Hamas and its appointed Prime Minister, Ismail Haniya, as the “magistrate.” So my prediction is this: While Hamas is in power, Palestine will face a devastation it has never before endured. My interpretation, by the way, does not rule out the new magistrate being the recently elected prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert. One could say the Israeli leader is a magistrate of Palestinian lands under Israeli occupation..

Now to the last two lines of the quatrain:

“…Their great amassing (Hamas) of wicked exile will cause the Swiss to carry off their great contracts.”

As I said earlier, the Swiss could stand symbolically for Geneva, the second capital of the United Nations. The “contracts” are peace treaties, UN resolutions and the like. The Hamas Party’s prime minister in Palestine is not the real leader of Hamas but a facilitator of Khaled Meshaal who lives in exile in Damascus, Syria. It is said he receives his orders from Tehran, a place he frequently flies to from Damascus. The Israeli secret services believe it was Meshaal who ordered the attack into Israel for hostages. The incursion jump started the new Hamas-Israeli conflict. More abductions of Israeli troops by Hezbullah along the Lebanese border tripwired the explosion of a larger war in mid July between Hezbullah and Israel.

The next escalation could draw Syria, then finally Iran into the mounting conflagration. If my interpretation is right, the Swiss–read Geneva and the UN–will not succeed in stabilizing a buffer zone between Hezbullah and Israel in Southern Lebanon with a robust peace enforcing army. UN negotiations cannot stop this war. It will run its course. Perhaps the gathering of “wicked exile(s)” include Hamas “amassing” terrorist cells in Europe to strike at Israeli embassies, synagogues and businesses. Maybe Nostradamus, back in the 16th century, misread his vision and amalgamated Sunni Muslim Hamas with Shia Hezbullah. The latter does have terrorist cells in Europe who may spring to action any moment. Sunni-centered Al-Qaeda might launch attacks in Europe in the name of Hamas and the Sunni Palestinian people. Such a terrorist attack in Europe–whoever the Sunni or Shia source–may precipitate the retreat of peacemakers back to Geneva with their offers of contracts for peace until war in the Middle East has run its apocalyptic course.

John Hogue
(28 July 2006)