Revelation 17:8-11 The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is. And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition.

NEOM sits on 7 mountains. Mohammed bin Salman is the 8^th King and comes from the lineage or genetics of the seven (7) Saud kings who came before him.

Daniel 9:26-27 And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined. And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.

He = Prince = Confirmer = Beast = Future Antichrist. Beast now becomes the Antichrist future (Abomination of Desolation) at the midpoint of the tribulation.  One week = 7 years. Covenant = Peace/Security Agreement for Israel.

Revealing the Beast: Why the Saudi Crown Prince Needs Cyberweapons. It’s hard to overestimate just how much damage Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia has done to his country in the last 15 (5+5+5) months.

Eli Lake Bloomberg•January 23, 2020

(Bloomberg Opinion) — It’s hard to overestimate just how much damage Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia has done to his country in the last 15 (5+5+5) months. Yet it’s also difficult to see how the U.S. can defend its interests in the region without his cooperation.

The damage became visible on Oct. 2, 2018, when a Saudi hit team lured Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to murder him. The latest revelation is a hacking campaign against Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com Inc., who also owns the Washington Post. As a UN report released Wednesday notes: “The information we have received suggests the possible involvement of the Crown Prince in surveillance of Mr. Bezos, in an effort to influence, if not silence, The Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia.”

A security consultant for Bezos made a version of this claim last year. The UN report fills in more details. It says that Bezos and the crown prince, known as MBS, attended a dinner on April 4, 2018, where the two men exchanged their WhatsApp contact information. On May 1, a video was sent to Bezos from MBS’s account that included malware that allowed the Saudis to keep tabs on his phone. More than six months later, on Nov. 8, MBS trolled Bezos, sending him a photo of a woman that resembled his paramour. This was months before the National Enquirer published a story about Bezos and his extramarital affair.

UN reports are not always reliable, of course. The Wall Street Journal reported last March that the Enquirer got its scoop about the Bezos affair from his lover’s brother, to whom it paid $200,000. That said, the specifics of the report support what’s widely known about the Saudis’ extensive cyberespionage operation. In November, for example, the Justice Department charged two former employees of Twitter and a Saudi national with spying for Saudi Arabia. In October, Facebook sued an Israeli company, alleging it had compromised the accounts of 1,400 users of WhatsApp, which Facebook owns. That company has also sold its products to Saudi Arabia.

The company, the NSO Group, issued a statement Wednesday saying its technology “cannot be used on U.S. phone numbers” and “was not used in this instance.” And the UN report, it should be noted, does not explicitly say that it was, noting that the hack “likely was undertaken” by the use of spyware “such as the NSO Group’s Pegasus-3 malware.”

It’s worth paying attention, however, to something else in the NSO Group’s statement. These kinds of hacks “put a strain on the ability to use legitimate tools to fight serious crime and terror.”

This is an understatement. Saudi Arabia has already shown that it cannot be trusted with powerful cybertools such as those developed by the NSO Group. Technology that is vital to combating jihadist groups should never be used to target dissidents — or the owners of U.S. newspapers, for that matter.

A straightforward response to the latest episode of this Saudi scandal would be to ban any exports of advanced cyberweapons to the regime. And it’s a tempting proposition.

Before Western governments take that step, they might recall that it took years after the Sept. 11 attacks to get Saudi Arabia to fully commit to fighting the jihadist groups its religious leaders had inspired and some of its wealthiest citizens had financed. MBS represents a departure from this double game. His reforms infuriate not just the liberal activists he jails and disappears, but the reactionaries who prospered under the previous system.

If it were just another dictatorship, it would be easy enough to quarantine Saudi Arabia until it reforms. Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia remains a vital partner against Iran and the jihadists in the Middle East. Its enemies are also the West’s enemies. For now, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Bobby Ghosh notes, the challenge is to press MBS to stop acting like the thugs he’s fighting.

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.