End Times author William Koenig has built a career out of chronicling the ways in which God allegedly sends natural disasters to America as punishment for failing to stand with Israel, so naturally he is trying to find a way to make the current COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak fit into his established narrative.
Despite the fact that the entire world has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 1 million cases and 80,000 deaths worldwide, Koenigh appeared on "The Jim Bakker Show" today to claim that America is being punished by God because of the Trump administration's efforts to work out a peace deal for the Middle East.
President Donald Trump has been widely praised by religious-right activists, Israeli activists, and Trump himself as the "best friend" Israel has ever had, and his administration's proposed peace deal was immediately embraced by many Christian Zionists. Yet Koenig insisted that the hundreds of thousands of coronavirus infections and deaths in America are the direct result of Trump having supposedly angered God by attempting to divide Israel.
"It's his son-in-law [Jared Kushner] that really pushed forward to develop a plan, and that plan was going to be the so-called 'deal of the century,'" Koenig said. "It was a plan on how to establish boundaries in Israel that would have created an Arab state in the heart of Israel."
"Wow. So this event [the coronavirus] could be God's reaction to America dividing Israel right now?" asked Bakker.
"It fits the pattern," Koenig responded, noting that the stock market had been at a record high in late February, but after Trump administration officials met with Israeli leaders in an effort to hammer out the details of the peace plan, the coronavirus outbreak began to spread and the stock market tanked.
"That week ... was the largest sell off in Wall Street history," Koenig said. "It was all during that week that his mapping people were in Israel working on establishing the boundaries of what Israel is going to keep."
