Push from the South

On Wednesday, two gunmen entered the offices of France’s most popular satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed twelve people including two police officers. President Hollande called this a “terrorist attack, there is no doubt about it” (The Guardian, January 7, 2015). “Many feared for the long-term implications for a French society already witness to a steady rise in xenophobic and anti-Islam sentiment, and a political landscape increasingly polarized with the far-right Front National having steadily made large electoral gains” (ibid.). As of Thursday morning, Paris was in lockdown as a city-wide manhunt was underway to find the suspects (Reuters, January 8, 2015). 

Also on Thursday morning a police woman was killed and a street sweeper was shot by a different attacker who is still at large (News.com.au, January 8, 2015). In Germany this week, “18,000 people demonstrated in Dresden… against the supposed Islamization of Europe” (Deutsche Welle, January 8, 2015). Many worry the situation in France could feed anti-Islamic feelings across Europe (ibid.). 

These events appear to be playing into Bible prophecies about an end-time Islamic “king of the south” that will “push” against or attack a European “king of the north,” bringing retaliation from the European power (Daniel 11:40-43). The growing anti-Islamic sentiment across Europe could add to the political and economic pressures threatening to reform and reorient the current European Union.

For more on this topic, be sure to read our very informative booklet, The Middle East in Prophecy.