All of us at the Christian Security Network have prided ourselves as being very “balanced” when it comes to the training and information about security and emergency planning we provide for the Christian community.

We do not want people to live in fear (we have God, why would we be afraid?), but we want them to be prepared, protect the innocent, and combat evil at every opportunity.

There is the reality of the world we live in and where this world is headed.

Towards the end of my training in Israel several years ago, a former Israel Defense Force (IDF) Commander who was one of our instructors, sat with me and said “Now you see what we have faced over the last 40 plus years and how we have had to learn to deal with it. The challenge for you is not going to be a matter of ‘if’ you will be dealing with this in the states, it is a matter of ‘when’…”

He was of course, referring to terrorist attacks on the daily lives of the Israeli citizens. Over the years it has affected their every day existence and caused many deaths and much bloodshed. There is no area of the Israeli life that has not been attacked: hotels, malls, schools, markets, restaurants, synagogues, neighborhoods, and business districts…the list goes on and on.

In our training at the Christian Security Network, we speak about the different levels of risks the Christian community faces, levels I and II being what we are dealing with today with crime, emergencies, and deliberate acts of violence.

But level III risks are those risks the church in this country has not faced yet, and that is the planned, coordinated attacks of terrorists.

And there are many indicators that this will become a reality, probably sooner than later.

Again, as we have said before, this is not a “scare tactic’, this is reality.

The problem that we face in this country, and especially in the Christian community, is that we have a hard enough time dealing with the level I and II type incidents. When the level III terrorist attacks do hit the US again and directly affect the Christian church, we will not be prepared, mentally or tactically.

The US and foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies have done an outstanding job since the 9/11 attacks in stopping many planned attacks against the US, more than most Americans will ever realize.

We have a very good law enforcement community that is becoming better trained every day to deal with the threat of terrorist attacks, but we have a long way to go.

Plus, the one thing that the Israeli’s have learned over the years is that the police cannot stop all attacks. They cannot be everywhere at once. The responsibility has been shifted and shared with the individual organizations for providing their own layers of security to stop these attacks.

When you travel Israel. Even in the big cities like Tel Aviv, you see armed security at the front of every fast food restaurant, hotel lobby, shopping malls and schools. The Israeli officials know that there is a responsibility that each business and organization must take in protecting themselves.

This is one of the reasons that the Israeli’s now stop over 90% of terrorist attacks before they occur – they have “hardened the targets”.

These seem like foreign concepts to the every day US citizen; it is hard for most to even fathom that we will someday have to live like this. But we saw what one incident like 9/11 will do to the American psyche…imagine if we had multiple, continued attacks on a smaller scale throughout the US.

What measures will we want taken to safeguard our families then and how far will we be willing to go in terms of security?

Now is the time to lay the foundations of good security; it easy to “ramp up” proper security that is already in place than it is to scramble to put measures in place from nothing after an incident happens.

The key is being ready beforehand.

Anyone that does not believe that there are already plans in place to attack this country once again is living in denial.

I’ll leave you with an intelligence bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security that came out in 2005:

In March, 2004 US Intelligence translated an al-Qaeda message intercepted from a series of articles for their "members" and other jihadis around the world entitled "The Targets Inside the Cities".

Under the section entitled "Human Targets" it reads: "We have to target the Jews and Christians. We have to let anybody that fights God, his prophet, or believers, know that we will be killing them. There should be no limits and no geographical boarders. We have to turn the land of the infidels into hell as they have done to the land of the Muslims."
In the same section, it lists targets in order of priority namely: "America, British, Spanish, Australians, Canadians, Italians."

Being informed is the first step in being prepared.

In Christ,
Jeff Hawkins
Executive Director