The Palestinian Delusion

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:23):
Welcome to another edition of the hand Gunplugged podcast, a
podcast that is absolutely, completely, totally committed to bringing the
most interesting, informative and inspirational people directly to your earbuds,
and today will be no exception. I absolutely promise you

(00:43):
that if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe, rate review.
It helps a lot. My guest today is an amazing
human being. He's been a friend of mine for a
long time. I'm going to introduce him in just a
few moments, but I want to set the stage by
talking a little bit about the subject at hand, and

(01:08):
perhaps I should start by saying that the people of
Palestine are caught in the crosshairs of the only significant
religious system in the history of the human race with
a geopolitical structure, a structure of laws that mandate violence

(01:31):
against the infidel. And while so much has been made
about the state of Israel and several stages and shades
of Zionism, stages that play a role in the complicated
history of Zionism, it is impossible to accurately assess the

(01:52):
Israeli Palestinian conflict if you don't understand the most important
factor of them all, and that factor is Islam. A
factor that my guest, as you'll see, knows a great
deal about. And for all the debate about Islam, about

(02:17):
the growing presence of Islam in the world, there's one
thing that is so often overlooked. And I've said this
in various forms. I've written about this, and that is
the fact that Islam is not a religion in the
sanitized Western sense. It's an all encompassing socio political legal matrix,

(02:45):
a legal matrix that has bread a worldview antagonistic to
anything but itself. And while and I've said this many times,
there might be millions of peaceful and tolerant Muslims, many
of them are neighbors, Islam itself is hardly peaceful and

(03:06):
hardly tolerant. Now, there are people of other faiths, like
Christians that live in the land called Palestine. In fact,
I have close personal friends among them. The majority of
the people occupying that territory, however, are Muslims, and all

(03:29):
of the citizens are led by Hamas, Hamas being a
militant Islamic organization, an organization with connections throughout the Islamic
world that undoubtedly and unabashedly desire the destruction of all Jews,
and not only that, but the death of America itself

(03:53):
ultimately the death of the West. And I don't think
that can be overstated. And any intentions of a peaceful
resolution to this conflict in the Middle East are in
direct contradiction with the ideology of Islam, most notably Jehad
against the infidels. The conflict in the Middle East might

(04:20):
actually end up playing a pretty decisive role and who
becomes president of the United States of America. So what
we're talking about is not tangentle, it's not insignificance. It's
at the epicenter of what's going on in the world
right now. The Democratic Party is doing a dance with
the devil to satisfy an increasingly hostile group of protesters

(04:43):
who are uncritically characterizing anyone who sides with Israel. Well,
how they characterize them as accomplices to genocide and is
striking to see pro Palestinian protests that are erupting across
the US. Maybe I should say not surprising, because you

(05:03):
only have to look at the self stultifying support of
the group Queer for Palestine as evidence that the protesters
often have little understanding of the ideologies at play. When
it comes to this particular conflict, and that, unfortunately is
par for the course concerning a civilization that seeks to

(05:24):
cut off or saw off the branch upon which it
sits at every opportunity, and tragically, eventually that civilization I'm
talking about Western civilization will fall. The peace process, or
the lack thereof within Palestine points to a far greater problem, however,

(05:51):
Islamic immigration internationally and the millions of Muslims who have
no intention what's however, of assimilating into Western culture. What
role does immigration play in all of this, Well, perhaps
the greatest role of all. All you need to do
is look at the unmitigated disaster occurring in European countries,

(06:16):
countries like France and Germany and the United Kingdom, and
when you look at those countries, you understand the dangers
of migration without assimilation. It's often been called I don't
know who said this, but I love the phrase. It's
the python swallowing its prey with a long and slow digestion.

(06:37):
I also think of something I wrote about in my
book Muslim, the words of the late Libyan leader Mark Goadaffi,
who said, we don't need to fly planes into buildings,
because with time, those buildings are going to belong to us.
And he was alluding to his understanding that the migration
and growth of Muslim populations of the West would eventually

(06:59):
lead to significificant influence and control over Western society's period.
Almost fifteen years after his death. Maybe it's a little
more now, I can't remember. I feel pretty confident saying
that he would be shocked at the success of his
own purported strategies, especially when it comes to the increasingly

(07:22):
self loathing state of Western societies, and we're in a
bad state. Most shocking of all of this is Western
elites who happen to be more concerned with censuring their
citizenry than taking an honest assessment or examination of Islam

(07:43):
in line with the illiberal liberalism invoked in the face
of impending accusations of and here's the keyword, islama phobia.
You know the men you start talking like this, and
my guest knows this better than nobody else. That label
is attached to your name. So make no mistake. In

(08:05):
a time of a civilizational crisis, Islam is at the
heart of this clash of civilizations and times like these,
in times where honest information is in short supply. It's
imperative that we learn to lean on the council of

(08:28):
experts if we're going to pursue discernment, and the key
is discernment. This is why I've invited one of the
world's leading experts on Islam to discuss what he deems
to be and this is the title of his book,

(08:49):
The Palestinian Delusion. His name is Robert Spencer. He's a friend.
He is director of Jahadwatch. He's a shi Fellow at
the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and his list of accomplishments
and his importance to our society cannot be overstated. He

(09:13):
has led seminars on Islam and Jahad for the FBI,
for the United States Central Command, for the United States
Army Command, for the General Staff College, the US Army's
Asymmetric Warfare Group, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Justice

(09:38):
Department's Anti Terrorism Advisory Council, the US Intelligence Community. He
has discussed Jahad, Islam and terrorism at a workshop sponsored
by the US State Department and the German Foreign Ministry,
and he's a consultant with the Center for Secure Policy.

(10:02):
Robert Spencer is the author of more than twenty books.
He's an incredible writer. He's got an incredible mind. And
included in those books is a New York Times bestseller
titled The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam. It's one of
the first books that I ever read by Robert Spencer.

(10:23):
And by the way, it is properly titled The Politically
Incorrect Guide to Islam and in parentheses and the Crusades.
He's also written a book called The History of Jahad
from Muhammad to Isis And you know, one of the
great privileges I had personally is he wrote the four
to my book, Muslim What you Need to Know about

(10:44):
the world's fastest growing religion. He has been my guest
on many occasions on the Bible Instrument broadcast in the
hand Unplugged podcast. I haven't had him on the podcast
for a long time, so it's long overdue. Robert's I
am just delighted to have you back in the handk
Unplugged podcast studios.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
It's very good to see again, Hank.

Speaker 1 (11:07):
Thank you, and you look absolutely amazing. You've got a
beautiful blue I mean, we're doing this on video as
well as audio, but if you're only listening on audio,
he's got a beautiful blue suit on and a red
tie and just looks as amazing as ever.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
Robert that I can tie a tie again. I broke
in June and couldn't do it for a few months,
and so I was just able to tie a tie
again now, So now I do it every time I can.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
I don't know of anyone who has received more flak
in the twenty first century than you have. I mean,
you are a guy that is willing to take the.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
Hits, yes, no doubt about that.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
Talk about that a little bit. I mean the controversy
and the things that you have gone through to try
to get your message across one of the most important.
We could say controversial, but it's a very important message.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
I'll tell you, Hank, though you said it in the
prologue there, that the label Islamophobia gets attached to you
as soon as you go into the motivating ideology of
jihad terrorism. And that started very early on. Actually I
was doing this before they had invented the word islamophobia.
So I was called a hate monger for speaking about

(12:23):
the contents of the Koran and the contents of the
teachings of Mohammed. And I always thought that was kind
of ironic because they didn't say that Mohammed's teachings or
the Koran were hateful, but I was just hateful for
quoting them. And it's unfortunately the Koran says what it says,
no matter what I do. But there has been a

(12:45):
tremendous societal stigma placed upon speaking honestly about Islam. The
whole idea of Islamophobia is to intimidate people into thinking
that there's something wrong or bigoted or hateful about opposing
jihad terror, and so you even have nowadays, we have
elected officials if they say the slightest critical thing about

(13:09):
Islam or even about Jihattis, they end up having to apologize,
they end up resigning in disgrace, and it's considered to
be something you just don't do. You don't ever say
anything negative or critical regarding Islam. Now, I've striven all
through all the books that I've written and everything that
I've done, to be scrupulously accurate. And that is why

(13:33):
I've been able to stand up to all this, all
these charges, because I know that what I'm saying is true.
And it's if anybody who reads the Koran, anybody who
studies the life of Mohammed. Anybody who looks at Ghat
activity around the world, they're going to see that it's true.
And so I'm sorry that it's unpopular nowadays to say.

(13:54):
But well, as a very famous man once said, here
I stand, I can do no other.

Speaker 1 (14:00):
Yeah, you mentioned the Qoran, Robert, and I'm wondering if
it's fair to say that when you talk about the Koran,
you're really, in essence talking about two books rather than one.
There's a book that seems to be very peaceful and
loving and kind when Mohammad was an itinerant prophet in Mecca,

(14:21):
and there's a book that is very warlike and a
cerbic and dangerous. Is that a fair assessment?

Speaker 2 (14:31):
Well, to some degree. I wouldn't go all the way
is to say that the first book, as you put it,
is loving. It's not in the least loving. It is
relatively peaceful. But I'll give you an example. What you're
talking about is the distinction between the Mecca and A
surah is a chapter of the Koran, and there are

(14:53):
one hundred and fourteen chapters, and they're divided into surahs
that were revealed to Mohammad. Suppose in Mecca during the
first twelve years of his careers of prophet, or those
that were revealed to him in Medina in the second
ten years of his careers of prophet, which comprised twenty

(15:13):
three years altogether. So we're talking twelve years give and take,
and ten years give and take. And actually in another
book Muhammad, a Critical Biography, I show that even the
chronology is disputed. But that's the most widely accepted version.
Twelve years in Mecca and ten ten and a half
in Medina, though he returned to Mecca towards the end. Anyway,

(15:36):
the Meccan passages, the earlier revealed ones, generally do not
call for warfare, but they are not loving. For example,
you have chapter one hundred and nine of the Qur'an,
which says, say to the unbelievers, I do not worship
what you worship, and you do not worship what I worship.
I'm not going to worship what you worship, and you

(15:56):
are not going to worship what I worship. To you
religion and to me mine. Now that's not actually a
very loving statement. There's no statement of respect or regard,
much less love for the unbelievers. But there is a
recognition that the unbelievers do not worship a lot and
are not going to, and that likewise, Mohammed and the

(16:19):
Muslims do not worship what the unbelievers worship, and they're
not going to. And so he says, essentially, let's leave
each other alone. The Meccan passages enjoin what is generally,
I think accurately stated as tolerance, that let's leave each
other alone and each can practice his religion as he
sees fit. But then when he moved to Medina, he

(16:43):
became for the first time the head of state and
the head of an army, and that led to the
revelation according to Islamic tradition, of passages that call for warfare,
first defensive warfare, but also offensive warfare. For example, Chapter eight,
verse thirty nine, which says fight them until persecution is

(17:04):
no more and religion is all for a law. Now,
if I'm going to fight you, if you're persecuting me,
then you have obviously started it and I'm defending myself.
But if I must continue the fighting until your religion
is for a law, then you might be minding your
own business and going about the various details of your life.

(17:25):
And then I have to come and fight you. So
that's an offensive warfare and an open ended declaration of
war against the nominalsome community, the entire nonmalsome world. And
so throughout the history of Islam we see warfare against
unbelievers being pursued because Islamic theologians from the beginning have

(17:46):
taught that what comes chronologically later, if there's any contradiction
or disagreement between those passages and what comes earlier, the
later passages superseded the earlier. That principle is also in
the Quran itself in two verse one hundred and six.
When we abrogate a passage or cause it to be forgotten,
we will give you one that is just as good

(18:06):
or better. So if it's considered to come later in
Mohammad's life, then it takes precedence. Unfortunately, the violent passages
come later in Mohammad's life and thus take precedence. So
standard mainstream Islamic theology, across the sects, across the schools
of jurisprudence, teach that warfare against unbelievers is something that

(18:29):
the Islamic community is obliged to pursue whenever and wherever it.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
Can brilliant answer. I want you to start the embryonic
stages of this podcast by talking about a chant that
we're hearing all the time on our television screens, on radios,
we see on the internet, from the river to the sea,
Palestine will be free. What does that really entail?

Speaker 2 (18:54):
Well, the river in question is the Jordan River and
the Mediterranean Sea is the sea, and that's where it is,
is between the river and the sea. So what they're
saying is we want to see Israel destroyed and a
twenty third Arab state established. And so the idea is

(19:14):
that not just that Israel will be destroyed, but you're
talking about seven million Jews and two million Arabs who
live in Israel today, where are they going to go?
The Palestinian authority, President Mahmudabas and the leaders of Hamas
have both stated repeatedly that they are not going to

(19:35):
allow a single Jew to live in the Arab Muslim
state that they want to establish. And so consequently, we're
talking about what is likely to be a new genocide
of the Jews, millions of people killed in order to
establish a Palestinian state from the river to the sea.
It is a frankly genocidal call that very few people

(19:57):
recognize as such.

Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah, I was just going to ask you that, Robert.
When people mouth these slogans, do they really know what
they're talking about?

Speaker 2 (20:05):
Well, you know, there are a lot of men on
the street interviews around these days that are ludicrous because
they show that these people have no idea what they're
talking about. The guy with the microphone goes up and says, Okay,
which river and which sea are you talking about? And
they don't have any idea, and so it's very clear
that these people are indoctrinated, they're propagandized, but they don't

(20:28):
know the history of the region. They don't know the
legal claim that Israel has to the land, and so
they're just being manipulated.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
Talk about how important you just mentioned region, How important
the levant is. I've often said that this is the
geographical center of the Middle East. It's the crossroads of
human history. It's a land bridge linking three continents Europe,
Asia and Africa. That that only tells part of the story.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
Well so much really. For one thing, I think that
one of the reasons why there's so much conflict right
now is because it is the area in which Judaism,
Christianity in Islam all originated. Now Islam is supposed to
have originated in Arabia, a little farther to the south.
I tend to favor the historical investigations of more recent

(21:23):
period that indicate that it actually did originate closer to Jerusalem,
closer to the area of the Levant in general than
is ordinarily recognized. But in any case, quite aside from that,
Islam claims Jerusalem as the third holiest city in Islam.
It is of course the city in which the Lord

(21:46):
Jesus lived and preached and so on, and died and
rose from the dead. And of course it is the
city of the Jews from time immemorial, going back three
thousand years. More than that, in the Jewish prayers for Passover,
you have the statement next year in Jerusalem. The Jews
all over the world have said century after century, focusing

(22:09):
on one day returning to their homeland. And so this
makes for in itself a kind of an explosive situation
where Islam claims the land, Christianity doesn't claimed the land,
but wants to have a presence there, And of course
the Jews have reclaimed the land as their homeland since
nineteen forty eight, creating a great deal of friction with

(22:33):
the Muslims in the area. So it's kind of a
tinder box. At the same time, it is indeed quite
literally across roads, because you've got Europe very close by
on one side and the Middle East very close by
on the other, and it's sort of at the fault
line between the Western world and the Islamic world, and
so that also creates tensions and difficulties. It's interesting that

(22:59):
it's a relatively inhospitable piece of territory with value in
an objective sense that isn't very high in terms of
land that can be cultivated or land that is attractive
or appealing to live on. But it's nonetheless, probably I think,
without an exaggeration, the most hotly contested piece of real

(23:19):
estate on earth, because of its religious significance for all
three religions, its cultural significance, and of course its location.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
Yeah. So I remember speaking at the University of Tehran
in Iran in twenty twelve, and I heard over and
over again when I was in Iran the three Abrahamic religions,
you know, peaceful coexistence between the three Abrahamic religions but
if you understand Islam like you understand Islam, I think

(23:49):
you have to, in all fairness say that Islam is
at its core anti Semitic and anti Christian. Is that
a fair statement?

Speaker 2 (24:00):
Agree?

Speaker 1 (24:00):
More?

Speaker 2 (24:00):
Absolutely? Yeah. I mean you hear this talk about Abrahamic religions,
but really I think the key to understanding what that
really means, particularly for Muslims, is to look at chapter three,
verse sixty seven of the Qur'an where it says that
the Jews and Christians argue about Abraham, but Abraham was

(24:21):
neither a Jew nor Christian. Abraham was a Muslim. And
people laugh, you know, when I'm out speaking sometimes and
I quote that. People think it's ludicrous because how could
Abraham be a Muslim when he's before Mohammed and Mohammed
is the originator of Islam. But you have to understand
that Islam teaches that all the biblical prophets and Jesus

(24:44):
as well were Muslims who taught Islam, and that it
was their followers who twisted their teachings to create Judaism
and Christianity as we know them. And so as a result,
you have no legitimate seed of Judaism and Christianity at all,
they are twisted in hijacked versions of the original Islamic faith.

(25:07):
That's the Muslim view. And consequently, when people talk about
the three Abrahamic religions, that might be how ecumenists among
Jews and Christians think, but that's not how Muslims generally
think of it. They think of Islam as the Abrahamic
religion and the other two as illegitimate renegade versions of

(25:32):
the Abrahamic religion.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
It's so interesting when you read Galatians. Galatians tells us
that Abraham only had one seed, and that seed is
Jesus Christ. And then the double entundra at the end
of Galatians chapter three is that if you are in
Jesus Christ, you are the seed of Abraham. Whether you're

(25:54):
Jew or gentile, whether you're slave or free, whether rich
or poor, does have anything to do with your station
in life. It doesn't have anything to do with your gender,
doesn't have anything to do with your nationality. If you
are in Christ, you are abraham seed in an error
according to the promise. At any rate, talk about the
end times in Muslim lure. A lot of people in

(26:17):
the Christian community are talking about the end of the
world dispensationless, which is a broad swath of Christianity, or
talking about the fact that the rapture's going to happen.
We're going to get out of here, and then two
thirds of the Jews are going to die in a
bloody holocaust, exceeding anything that's ever happened to them in
their history. But in Muslim lure, there's also a perspective

(26:42):
on the end times, and I don't think people are
familiar with their perspective.

Speaker 2 (26:46):
It's very illuminating, as a matter of fact, and I
think if more Christians were aware of this, they wouldn't
be so sanguine and be mouthing all these platitudes about
Abrahamic religions. For one thing, there is a a deeth
in which which Mohammed is quoted as saying that there
will be no one more repugnant in the sight of
Allah on the day of Judgment than he who calls

(27:08):
himself the king of kings. It seems to me that's
very clear that what the Islamic eschatology is setting up
is that Jesus is the villainous figure, that is, the
Jesus of Christianity on the day of judgment, and so
it's just the opposite of the Christian view of the

(27:29):
end times. You take also, for example, a better known
Kadid in which Mohammad says that at the last day,
Jesus will return, will break the cross, kill the pig,
and abolish the jisia. Now, this is Jesus, the Muslim prophet,
and he's going to come back to earth at the
end of the world. It's interesting to note that he

(27:51):
comes back, not Mohammed, and that's just one of many
indications that Jesus is more than what Islam makes of him,
and that Islamic theology regarding Jesus doesn't really make sense
on its face. It's a half baked reinterpretation and adaptation
of Christian theology that doesn't hold ang together of itself.

(28:13):
But anyway, Jesus will come back, break the cross, kill
the pig, and abolish the jisia. He will break the
cross because, of course, the Koran says in chapter four,
verse one hundred and seventy one, they did not kill
or crucify him, but it appeared so to them. They
thought they were crucifying Jesus. This is the Jews, of course,
but they were not actually doing so. And the cross.

(28:37):
According to Islamic theologians and apologists to this day, the
cross is an insult. The cross is an affront. It's
a challenge to the power of a law that Allah
would not allow one of his prophets to suffer the
humiliation and the indignity of being killed on the cross.
And so Jesus did not die on the cross. This

(29:01):
is an insult to say about Jesus. So when Jesus,
the Muslim prophet returns, the first thing he will do
is break the cross. Presumably that will mean the destruction
of all the churches, the destruction of Christianity as we
know it, because they the churches have crosses in them
and they preach Christ crucified, or at least they ought to,

(29:23):
and so well, you know, that's a whole other discussion.
But anyway, that means that Christianity is destroyed at the
hands of Jesus himself. He will kill the pig because
the Christians eat pork, because they don't obey the food
laws that are mandated in the Torah and also in Islam.

(29:46):
And so it's the Christians who are ignoring the food
laws that a law has given and that will be ended.
Jesus will make it end by killing all the pigs
so the Christians can't eat them anymore, and he will
abolish the The jizia is the tax that is specified
chapter nine, verse twenty nine of the Quran that the
Muslims should fight even against the people of the book,

(30:09):
who are mainly Jews and Christians, until they pay the jizia,
which is a tax with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.
The tax is an allowance that makes it possible for
Jews and Christians to live in the Islamic society without
becoming Muslims. They're freedom remain Jews and Christians, but they

(30:30):
have to accept a second class, inferior status all manner
of institutionalized discrimination, and they have to pay this special
tax that the Muslims don't have to pay. And that's
something that's been collected in Islamic societies throughout history. But
Jesus will come back. He'll put an end to that,
and that means there will be no more demitude, there

(30:51):
will be no more of this enforced second class status
for the Christians and the Jews, and they'll be allowed
to remain in their religions. At that point, the Christians
will have to either become Muslim or be killed by
Jesus himself. So Jesus himself is envisioned as destroying Christianity
at the end of the world. This is an eschatology

(31:13):
very few people, very few Christians today are aware of,
and certainly even fewer have pondered its implications for inter
religious dialogue and cooperation with Muslims.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
So a lot of people listening in might be thinking,
that's fringe Islam you're talking about, But what you're saying
is no, it's not fringe, it's mainstream.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
Oh that's quite right. Yeah. The hidiths that I quoted
about nobody being more repugnant in the sight of a
law on the day of judgment than the King of kings,
and Jesus will come back and break the cross, kill
the pig, and abolish the jisia. Those are both in
the hidith collections that are considered most reliable by Islamic scholars.

(31:54):
There's six death collections that are called the Saki Sita.
That is, the real liable collections that are generally considered
to be trustworthy and when it comes to matters of
Islamic law normative for that law, and the most trustworthy
of those are those of the Imam's, Bukhari and Muslim

(32:14):
and these stories appear in those and so you would
be hard pressed to find a Muslim who would say, no,
these are fake and and authentic if he was being honest.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
I got to tell you a little story here and
get your reaction to the story. I oftentimes say that
there are many, many peace loving Muslims, but Islam is
not a religion of peace, and sometimes I get some
pushback on that. But the story involves when I was
in Tehran. I remember the first day I was in Tehran.

(32:47):
I went to my hotel in the epicenter of the city,
and I never came out of my room because I
was pretty intimidated. And the next morning, my interpreter was
a woman named Vadima, and she said to me, how
was your evening? And I said, well, I didn't really
go anywhere. I just stayed in my room. And she
said why, and I said to her, quite honestly, well,
I was kind of intimidated. And she said to me, Hank,

(33:08):
you can walk the streets of Tehran in the middle
of the night and no one will harm you and
Robert I can tell you I did that, and people
were kind and generous. They made change for me because
I was you know, you couldn't use your cell phone,
you couldn't use your computer, you couldn't use credit cards,
you know, so you know, I had the currency that
I didn't I'm familiar with, and people had to make

(33:30):
change for me. And all that talk about that very notion.
I mean, the Persians are very hospitable people. I found
them to be gracious and loving and kind. I mean
we had a different even in the University of tron
element to Bettebaus spoke there as well. I was treated
with dignity and respect by the students. Where's the disjuncture there?

Speaker 2 (33:52):
Yeah, you know, there are a lot of things that
are going on there. One of them is that one
of the glories, one of the real positive acts of
both Persian culture and Arab culture, you could say, of
the cultures in that part of the world in general,
is a very strong emphasis on hospitality and welcoming the stranger.

(34:13):
This is something I think that we've kind of forgotten
about in the West, maybe because our own societies. You know,
you couldn't say that in any American city, Hank, you
can walk around at night and nobody's going to harm you.
I have to go to New York in a few weeks,
and I'm not looking forward to it, even in the
middle of the day, and I wouldn't hesitate where I

(34:34):
to go to Tehran to walk around. I might not
go because I would be afraid that, having criticized Mohammed,
I might end up in prison. But I certainly wouldn't
be afraid of street thuggery or crime. And the hospitality
towards the stranger. That is a very strong cultural tendency.
That's one thing. Another is also it should be noted

(34:57):
that that is also reinforced in the Koran itself. Even
in chapter nine, which is the most fierce chapter that
calls for warfare against unbelievers, it says at the beginning
of the chapter that you should welcome these people and
give them a chance to convert, and let them stay
around for a while. And so this can lead also

(35:19):
to hospitality and kindness on a personal level. When we
talk about the doctrines of Islam, we're talking about the
doctrines of Islam. We are not talking about what any
given person believes or acts upon also these doctrines, it
should be noted that even if they do teach that
Christianity is an illegitimate, false religion and a twisting of

(35:41):
Jesus's actual words, that that doesn't mean that the Quran
ever says to be mean and nasty and rude to Christians.
It says to work to convert people, and it certainly
says to subjugate them and hold political hegemony over them
in an ideal Islamic society. But this is not the

(36:02):
same as being nasty to them. On the other side,
you do have the hideth where Mohammad says, when you
see the Jews and Christians, force them to the narrowest
part of the road. And it was part of the
Demi laws up through the nineteenth century through the middle
of the nineteenth century that if you were walking down
a sidewalk and you saw Muslim coming and you were

(36:23):
non Muslim, you had to get off and let him pass.
And so there was a certain hierarchy embedded in the society.
But nonetheless, these things don't necessarily mean that everybody is
going to be treating you terribly at all times. The
theology is one thing and human behavior is another. Every
individual Muslim has a variety of perspectives and priorities and influences,

(36:47):
and so also whatever Islam may teach, he's going to
be kind to you or unkind to you based on
what is going on in his own life. Also, it
must be noted that in Iran on there's a great
falling away from Islam because people have lived under the
Islamic Republic since nineteen seventy nine and they have had

(37:10):
their fill of it. If Iran is officially ninety nine
percent Muslim, but there was a survey just a year
or so ago that showed that only forty percent of
Iranians today will still identify as Muslim. And I'm not
saying in the slightest degree that this is why they
were nice to you, or that there's any connection necessarily

(37:32):
at all, but just to say that it's extremely unlikely
that you encountered anyone who had any of the teachings
of Islam that we are discussing today on this program
in his mind when he had you face to face
and thinking this is a Christian, so I have to
treat him in some disrespectful way or something of that nature.

Speaker 1 (37:55):
Yeah, I want to get right to one of the
similar issues that you deal within your book, and that
is the issue of a two state solution. And I
suppose the most obvious question I can ask you, is
there any real possibility for a two state solution in
the Middle East.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
There's a possibility for two states, but it's not a solution.
That is, we could end up with a Palestinian state.
Everybody wants one, even the Israelis have said, although they've
retreated from this since October seventh, and so it depends
on how much they can be forced. But the European
Union wants a Palestinian state, the United Nations wants a

(38:38):
Palestinian state. Many of the countries of the world already
recognize a Palestinian state, even though one does not actually exist.
The United States State Department and the Biden administration they
want a Palestinian state. Everybody in the world wants a
Palestinian state, except the Palestinian They have rejected offers for

(39:01):
a state on numerous occasions, starting in nineteen forty seven.
Actually there was an earlier offer from the British in
the thirties that they rejected, and then the United Nations
partitioned the territory that was the mandate for Palestine for
the establishment of a Jewish National Home, and they partitioned
that to create a twenty third Arab state and a

(39:24):
single Jewish state, and the Arab said no. And then
the Israelis offered it to them again after nineteen sixty
seven and they said no. The Oslo Accords in the
nineteen nineties were designed to establish the framework for the
establishment of a Palestinian state, and that's why we have
the Palestinian Authority today. But it was Ehud Barak, the

(39:48):
Prime Minister of Israel, made a very generous offer in
the year two thousand. I believe it was of meeting
ninety eight percent of the demands of the Palestinians for
various territories and offering them compensatory territory that was part
of Israel for the other two percent, so that they
ended up with more than what they asked for, and

(40:10):
they said no. Ahud Olmahr, another Prime Minister of Israel,
renewed the offer in two thousand and seven, was likewise rejected.
Why did the Palestinians always rejected a state because the
condition was that they had to accept there being a
Jewish state next door and they would never accept that

(40:31):
because of the Islamic imperative embedded in the Koran in
Chapter two, verse one hundred and ninety one, very simply
hank drive them out from where they drove you out.
This was Muslim land under the Ottomans and under the
Arabs before that. And so they believed that any land
that was Muslim land at any time belongs by right

(40:52):
to the Muslims forever, because the Koran says drive them
out from where they drove you out. If a land
was Muslim and is no longer, then the Muslims have
the responsibility, before a law, a divine command, to drive
out those who displaced them and re establish the hegemony
of Islam in the land. So the Palestinians could never

(41:13):
accept a Jewish state. Nowadays, it may be that for
tactical reasons they will agree. But even if they do
agree and a Palestinian state is established and Israel still exists,
and even if the Palestinian leaders pay lip service to
accepting the existence of Israel, they will continue to make

(41:34):
war on Israel and continue to try to destroy it
until they succeed. There's no way they can stop doing that,
because it's a kuronic imperative.

Speaker 1 (41:45):
Tell me a little bit about the Palestinian flag. I've
been watching television because of the conventions and so forth,
and when I watch television, I see so many people
draped in Palestinian flags, and I oftentimes, upon looking at them,
I wondered to myself, do they have any idea of
the history of that flag and really how recent that

(42:09):
history is.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
Yeah, I think they probably don't. They probably think this
is the flag of the old state of Palestine that
was displaced by the Israelis when the Israelis stole the land.
This is a historical fiction. There was never a Palestinian state,
and so there was no Palestinian flag because there was

(42:30):
no Palestinian people. If you go back before nineteen sixty four,
there was plenty of controversy, and there was extraordinary controversy,
an often armed conflict between the Zionists and the Arabs
who were there in the area, and they had the

(42:52):
partition that I was just talking about that the UN
tried to effect in nineteen forty seven, and so much
discussion about this issue and nobody ever mentions the Palestinians.
It's extraordinary because the Palestinians are on the tip of
everyone's tongue today, but you find zero, absolutely no mention
of the Palestinian people before in nineteen sixty four. They

(43:15):
were invented in nineteen sixty four as a rhetorical weapon
to beat the Israelis with, and it's been a remarkably
successful invention. They are actually Leventine Arabs who are no
different culturally, linguistically or religiously from the Arabs of Lebanon,
Syria and Jordan. And they've never been ethnically distinct, never

(43:36):
been a nationality or an ethnicity at all. So they
never had a flag. It was a British colonel, Colonel Sykes,
who was responsible for the Sikes Pico Agreement that actually
Islamic supremacists and Jiades tend to hate because it was
drawing borders in the Middle East in the area that
they thought of should be the United Umah, the United

(43:59):
Islamic Community. Colonel Sites developed that flag as a flag
for one of the Arab kingdoms that the British were
setting up in some of the land that they controlled
after World War One in the Middle East, and so
it's not even originally the Palestinian flag. It was invented

(44:21):
by a British man, and it was originally the flag
of a defunct Arab kingdom. And then in the sixties,
when the Palestinian nationality was invented, it wasn't being used
and it was appropriated by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which
renamed itself the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Very important distinction, a

(44:45):
hardly noticeable distinction. In fact, it was not at all
noticed at the time that the change was made. But
there was always the land of Palestine. The Romans renamed
the land of Judea, which means land of the Jews,
Palestine to taunt the Jews in the year one thirty
four AD, and they chose that word out of the

(45:06):
Bible as the name of the Philistines, the name of
the ancient enemies of the Israelites who had long since
died out. There's no connection between the Philistines and the
Palestinians or Palestine. But anyway, they called the place Palestine.
They called Judea Palestine, but it was always the name
of a region, it was never the name of a people.
It's like Staten Island. Staten Island is a real place

(45:28):
and there are people who live there, but they don't
have a special ethnicity or nationality. There's not a staten
Islandish people. They're just New Yorkers or whatever they may be.
And so it's the same thing with the Palestinians. They
were the local Arabs, they became the Palestinians in the sixties.
This flag was taken up by them, and the PLO

(45:51):
became instead of the Palestine Liberation Organization to free this area,
it became the Palestinian Liberation Organization. And this tiny people
that are supposedly the indigenous people of the land who
are fighting against the massive Israeli war machine. But it's
all mythology and propaganda.

Speaker 1 (46:09):
You know. Just listening to you, I didn't think about
a question. You know. I often talk about how dangerous
it is to be biblically illiterate, but it seems to
me that it is equally dangerous, or certainly very dangerous,
to be historically illiterate. And I think even our politicians
are historically illiterate. For example, yes, Air Airfat was he

(46:34):
really born as a Palestinian.

Speaker 2 (46:37):
He was an Egyptian and he became a Palestinian later on.
A lot of the Palestinians, as a matter of fact,
come from somewhere else, because one of the things that
happened was the area of the Holy Land or of
Palestine was almost uninhabited. It was, it was desolate and empty.
In the nineteenth century, many they're speaking travelers actually went

(47:01):
through there, and in the book The Palestinian Delusion, I
quote a lot of them, and they talk about it,
going for miles and not seeing another human being and
so on. Mark Twain went there. He's one of them.
He's the most famous who spoke about the desolation of
this land. And so what happened was the Zionist movement

(47:22):
became the impetus for a lot of Jews to move
back to this area. There were Jews who were already there,
the Jews who always were there, called the yeshuv in
the Jewish community, and they were always in the area
of Palestine or what is now Israel, from time immemorial.
They never left. They didn't leave when the Romans expelled them,

(47:44):
they didn't leave when the Arabs came in. They always stayed.
But others started to come in the nineteenth century. And
what happened was this became the impetus for a lot
of Arabs to move to Palestine because they realized in
the first place, the Jews are moving there, They're going

(48:05):
to open businesses, They're going to need employees. This is
going to be a place where I can earn some
real money, and so it actually it's interesting to note
that a lot of the people who are calling themselves
Palestinians today only moved to Palestine in the first place
because of Zionism. They weren't always there, and they didn't

(48:28):
move there in spite of Zionism. They moved there because
of Zionism. Also, the Ottomans who ruled the territory in
the nineteenth century, they were alarmed by Zionism because they
were Muslims and they believed that this land was Islamic.
They didn't want to see it become a Jewish territory
as it did, and so they also started to forcibly

(48:51):
move people into the area who were from elsewhere. And
so even to this day you have a lot of
surnames among the Palestinians like Alcourdi, that's the Kurd, you know,
and names of that kind that showed these people are
from somewhere else. They're not really indigenous at all. And

(49:12):
our ifat was one of them.

Speaker 1 (49:14):
Yeah. So one of the things that I found intriguing
about reading your book is the history of the peace process,
or so called peace process, and I wonder if you
can give us some kind of an overview of that,
starting with a Camp David Accords back in I think
nineteen seventy eight.

Speaker 2 (49:33):
Yeah, you know, that was as far as I was
concerned doing the research on that book. That was the
wildest stuff to discover. I hadn't realized all these things about,
for example, on Mar Sadat. On Mar Sadat is revered
today as a hero all over the world, mart piece,
a martyr for peace, no less, you know, somebody who

(49:56):
gave his life for trying to bring about peace between
each of in Israel and peace in the world. He's
right up there with all the secular saints of our
modern age, you know, Gandhi and Martin Luther King and RFK,
you know, all the people that seventh grade socialists, both
of them.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
But yeah, I guess both, but.

Speaker 2 (50:19):
Yeah JFK first, certainly. Yeah, And anyway, the whole idea
of what I mean is that these people are the
heroes of the civic religion that we live under, and
the general outlook of the world is that this was
a great man. I remember, actually I was in Jerusalem
and I was surprised to see I should have not
been surprised, but I was surprised to see the Saddat

(50:42):
Bagan center in Jerusalem. That's this big center to try
to bring about peace. And they revere Saddat along with
Monak and Began, who was the Israeli Prime minister at
Camp David, as great peacemakers. Now the reality is quite different,
as I show in the book, Sadat actually was a

(51:02):
Soviet client to start with, and the story of the
Middle East peace process really begins with his failure to
destroy Israel in the nineteen seventy three Yom Kippur War.
He invaded Israel on Yom Kipur and it looked as
if the Israelis had been caught off guard. They were

(51:23):
caught off guard, and it looked as if they could
lose and the country would be destroyed, because of course
it's a very tiny country. And miraculously, against all odds,
they were able to beat the Egyptians and all the others,
the Syrians and all the rest back and when another
improbable victory only six years after the Sixth Day War,

(51:47):
and Sadat was furious and appalled. And we know this
because of the minutes of a Politbureau meeting in Moscow
and at Breshnev is saying that Saddat is calling me
in the middle of the night and pleading and saying,
you have to send us better weapons. You have to

(52:10):
send us Soviet troops. And he said, they already have
bet the best weapons. We sent them better weapons, and
we're sending to the Vietnamese and we're not going to
send troops there. If he can't win with what he's got,
then forget about him. And Gromiko the Foreign Ministry says,
what are you going to do? And he said, I'm

(52:30):
gonna make peace with Israel and he can get in
line or he can go his own way, but I
don't care. I've had enough of it. Now. This is
you never hear this. You never hear about Sadat wanting
to destroy Israel and he can't and he's failed, and
he goes pleading to Breshnev. But this is straight from

(52:53):
the Soviet archives. It's all in there, and it only
came out much later. You know, when Sadat was dead.
Brezhnev was dead, the Soviet Union had fallen, the whole
thing was over. It was history. But what happened was
Saddat was not a dumb guy. He was very, very brilliant,
and so when he saw that the Soviets were not

(53:16):
going to back him, he realized that the best way
he could get what he wanted was not via war,
but via diplomacy, and that the best way to pursue
the diplomacy was not to be a Soviet client against Israel,
but to switch sides in the height of the Cold War,

(53:39):
allied with the United States, and then get the United
States in gratitude to pressure Israel to give Egypt what
it wanted. And it was a brilliant idea. It worked perfectly.
Saddat announced that he was going to go visit Jerusalem.
The whole world was thrilled and delighted that he was

(54:01):
going to be so generous and so far seeing and
so courageous as to visit the capital. Well, in those
days it wasn't recognized as the capital, but to visit
the major city of the country that he had so
recently tried to destroy. And he went there and he

(54:23):
reached out in friendship, and it was all because Israel
was occupying Sinai that it had occupied after the Six
Day War in nineteen sixty seven, and he wanted to
get the Sinai back. That was what it was all about.
And he tried to get it back by invading Israel again.
He lost again, and so he was going to go

(54:46):
about it this way. So Jimmy Carter becomes president in
January nineteen seventy seven, and he wants a big foreign
policy achievement to cement his legacy as a great president.
So he calls for Saddad and began to come to
Camp David and talk it all out with just the

(55:06):
three of them. Because Jimmy Carter had a supreme confidence
in his own abilities to solve any conflict, any conflict really,
and to help people see that they had common interests
and to see eye to eye where they had previously disagreed.

(55:26):
The problem with Carter was that he was extraordinarily naive,
and he was enthralled with Saddad, but he also had
contempt for Began. He despised Began, and he disliked Israel.
So Beagan sent people over to try to teach Jimmy
Carter about the history of the region, about the fact,

(55:49):
for example, that there were no Palestinians, that these were
the local Arabs, that the countries surrounding Israel had refused
to give them citizenship, even though they were no different
from the citizens of those countries ethnically, linguistically, or culturally
or religiously. As I explained before, they wouldn't give them
citizenship because they wanted to keep them as refugees so

(56:10):
they could use them as weapons against Israel. Tried to
explain all that to Carter. Carter got impatient, got angry,
waved them away, and at Camp David, he told Saddad
that I'm with you. I will get everything you want
out of Began, and he was borderline hostile to Began.
He was very friendly to Saddad. It was kind of

(56:31):
an overloaded two against one situation. Began was trying to
ingratiate himself, trying to be treated with mutual respect by
these men, and so he was willing to make concessions,
but there were no concessions on the other side forthcoming,
and he ended up giving back the Sinai for a
bunch of promises that have not been kept. The Egyptians

(56:55):
have not invaded Israel since the seventies. That is true
that they have kept but they've been paid by the
Americans every year. But they have not done anything to
stop the spread of anti Jewish and anti Israel propaganda
in Egypt, where even mind comp for Adolf Hitler is
a bestseller every year and so on, and they haven't

(57:16):
done a thing to stop all that, which is contrary
to the Camp David Accords. But in any case, Sadat
got the Sinai back, He got everything he wanted for
just a few platitudes and promises. They all went down
in history as peacemakers. They won the Nobel Prize. Everybody
lives happily ever after. But it's not the way people think.

Speaker 1 (57:39):
You know, I want to get back to this whole
idea of the peace process in just a moment. But
there's another phrase that I caught in your book, and
it's not out of the blue by any stretch of
the imagination, but I do way you to elaborate on
this phrase a little bit. It's the phrase the right
of conquest? What does that entail?

Speaker 2 (58:01):
In history, there has always been recognized that if you
are in a war, that you did not start. If
you are attacked by an aggressor nation and you win
the war and defeat the aggressornation, then you have a

(58:23):
perfect right to seize territory from the aggressornation and hold
it by the right of conquest so that you can
minimize the threat from the aggressornation in the future. So
take for example, World War two. If you look at
the maps of Europe before World War Two and after

(58:44):
World War Two, they're quite different, and Germany is much
smaller after World War Two. Why because the Soviet Union
took territory, Poland took territory Denmark, France, although those territories
were disputed a little bit longer, and Germany ended up
substantially diminished. Germany did not contest to this and was

(59:07):
not in a position to do so because it was
the aggressor nation, it had started the war, and it
was a universally recognized rule of warfare that an aggressor
nation that loses a war that it started, particularly one
that has no conceivable justification, has no right to object

(59:29):
if its territory is reduced. The only time this has
not been respected as a rule of warfare is when
Israel took territories after the Six Day War. Now, the
territories that it took were called the West Bank and Gaza.
If you look in the Bible, there are innumerable mentions

(59:51):
of Gaza, and it is Jewish territories, not the territory
of the Philistines, much less the Palestinians, who are never
mentioned in the Bible. And I'm talking about just the
Bible is a historical record. Even if you're not a believer,
the fact is that it's very clear that Gaza is
part of the territory of the Jews. The West Bank,

(01:00:12):
what is that? It's the west bank of the River Jordan,
the west bank of the River Jordan. The River Jordan
has been there, I guess since the creation of the world.
But the West Bank was never called this until nineteen fifty.
What was it called before nineteen fifty? Judaea, Judea and Samaria.
What does Judea mean? The land of the Jews. The Jordanians,

(01:00:34):
who had occupied that territory during the nineteen forty eight
war to destroy Israel, they renamed it the West Bank
precisely in order to loosen and weaken the obvious connection
of the Jews to that land. The historical connection. So
what happened was the land of Gaza in the land

(01:00:55):
of the West Bank or Judea and Samaria were part
of the original mandate for Pallatarn that had been set
aside by the League of Nations in nineteen twenty for
a Jewish national home, and so that was supposed to
be part of the Land of Israel. But during the
nineteen forty eight war, in which the Arab states surrounding
Israel tried to destroy it solely because it existed and

(01:01:19):
was a Jewish state, they were totally the aggressors. At
the end of the war in nineteen forty nine or
when an armistice was signed, Jordan was occupying Judaea and
Samaria and Egypt was occupying Gaza, so that occupation continued
for nineteen years. It's also worth noting bank that during

(01:01:41):
those nineteen years, nobody in Gaza and nobody in Judea
and Samaria or the West Bank ever complained about occupation.
They complained about occupation all the time now, But what
they really don't like is that it's the Jews. When
it was Muslim Arabs who were occupying the territory, they
had no problem with it, and you never heard a

(01:02:01):
peep about occupation. But anyway, the Israelis recaptured those territories
in nineteen sixty seven. They are considered the occupied territories.
Those are essential to Israeli security. Maybe not Gaza, but
certainly the West Bank or Judea and Samaria, because if
you don't have Judea and Samaria, or at least part

(01:02:23):
of it, then Israel is nine miles wide at its
weakest point. So you just have a bad day on
the battlefield, you cut the nation in half and the
whole thing could be destroyed. So as a matter of
its own security, Israel has a claim to the West Bank.
As a matter of the laws of nations, the rules

(01:02:45):
of warfare from time immemorial, Israel has a claim to
the West Bank, and yet it's still always called occupied territory. Well,
whose territory actually is at occupying? It never belonged to Jordan,
and there was never a Palestinian state. The Ottomantive, which
was the last country to own it, no longer exists
and actually ceded the territories. You can't say it belongs

(01:03:07):
to the Turkish Republic because the Ottomans, in one of
their last Acts ceded the territory to the League of Nations,
which then set it aside for the Jewish National Home.
So who's land do they occupy? It's their land.

Speaker 1 (01:03:22):
You know. This may be somewhat out of left field.
I don't know if it will be for you or not,
but probably not because you're so well read. But I
think of Christian Zionism, which predates secular Zionism and the
Zionists that are popular today. One of the prominent Zionists,
you see him on television all the time with his ads,

(01:03:42):
John Hagey. He's also a prosperity preacher. This is what
he says, and the prologue to this is he is
convinced that Israel will soon control not only the West Bank,
Gaza and Golon, but Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. And I'll
read a direct quote from him. He says, the royal

(01:04:03):
land grant that God, the original owner, gave to Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob and their seat forever includes the following
territory which is presently occupied by Israel, and that is
the West Bank, all of Lebanon, one half of Syria,
two thirds of Jordan, all of Iraq, and the cream

(01:04:27):
of the crop northern portion of Saudi Arabia. Now, basically
what they're saying is that Israel, according to God, should
have a land mass thirty times his present size, and
if God does not give Israel that land, then God

(01:04:48):
is going to be proved to be a liar because
he promised that land to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but
that promise was never realized and for God to be true,
this is the argument. It's not a true argument, you see,
it's not an biblical argument because the land was actually
part of the Solomonic Kingdom. But apart from that, the dispensationalists,

(01:05:09):
the Christian Zionist is saying, unless Israel gets that amount
of land thirty times its present size, God's going to
be proved a liar. God won't be approved a liar.
So this has to happen in the end times, probably
before the rapture. All that land has to go to Israel.
So you have the Christian Zionists really fomenting a lot

(01:05:30):
of problems in the Middle East there as well with
their particular unbiblical prescription of Zionism. And then I would argue, too,
you have people that are in the Israeli government that
are using that very language, saying, yeah, that's the biblical
deed to the land. And you know, I'm just saying

(01:05:51):
that for some looking at this, they're saying, this is
a great opportunity for an Israeli land grab, sanctioned by
Christian and sanctioned by the Bible.

Speaker 2 (01:06:02):
Well in the first place, in terms of the Israeli government,
there may be some people who are saying that that
should be done, but that's not the policy of the
Israeli state. And I would be extraordinarily surprised. I would
be surprised beyond belief. Really, I don't know. I would
be shocked more than I've ever been shocked in my

(01:06:22):
life were Israel to pursue that as a vision and
a foreign policy, because I don't think that they have
the resources, they don't have the personnel. It's just not
a big enough population to be able to subdue and
hold all those territories. But quite aside from that, this
is a religious vision, and I don't believe it's a

(01:06:44):
correct one, as you noted, but I think it would
be foolish in the extreme if the Israelis or anyone
else were to be getting the Israeli foreign policy or
the Israeli goals for the next few years out of
That's not what scripture is ultimately for It's not a
policy manual for political action. We're not Muslims. Islam is

(01:07:08):
a political religion. And the Lord said render unto Caesar
the things which are Caesar, and to God the things
that are God, which I think is a reflection of
a legitimate distinction between the political realm and the religious
And you'll notice that while I am a Christian, an
Orthodox Christian, at the same time, I don't base anything

(01:07:31):
that I defend Israel on scripture or on Christian teachings.
I do not believe that because Israel is written about
in the Bible, or because the Bible says various things
about it, that therefore the Jews today have a right
to the land and others must be displaced, or something
of that kind. I believe that Israel has a right

(01:07:54):
to that territory on historical grounds and on the grounds
of the political situation that I was just outlining to
you that land doesn't belong to anybody but to the
State of Israel, that it was essentially uninhabited, it was
sparsely inhabited at a time when there was tremendous Jewish settlement.

(01:08:15):
The people who owned the land set it aside for
Jewish settlement in recognition of their historical connection to the land.
And there are twenty two Arab states right next door
that could easily have absorbed the refugee population, should there
have been people who I don't believe also in the

(01:08:38):
propaganda about the Israelis driving the Arabs out, because there
is too much evidence, and I've got it in the book.
You probably saw it. There's abundant evidence that the Arabs themselves,
the Arab Higher Committee and others told the Arabs to
leave when the State of Israel was founded, because they
thought that the Arab states were going to destroy Israel

(01:09:00):
and they wanted the Arabs out of the line of
fire and then they'd be able to come back. Didn't
work out that way. They lost the war. But the
point is that they did not get driven out. They
fled of their own accord, and they could have settled
in any of these countries that were completely compatible simpatico
with them on a cultural, linguistic and religious level, and

(01:09:23):
they didn't because those countries wanted to keep use them,
manipulate them, and use them as tools and as weapons
against the Israeli state. So this is a historical case
and a legal case. It is not a religious case.
I'm not saying there can't be a religious case that
can be made, but I think it's very dangerous what

(01:09:45):
Pastor Hagy is doing if he's saying that this is
some inevitability or some responsibility that the Israelis have to
make war against these surrounding states, because it only fuels
the Jihat propaganda, which is often cast in a defensive mode.
You see, Hey, only the Caliph, the successor of Mohammad,

(01:10:07):
as political, military and spiritual leader of the Muslims. Only
the Caliph can declare offensive jihad. I spoke about offensive
jihad way back at the beginning of the show. But
only the Caliph can declare offensive jihad by law, according
to the Sunni Islamic law. So there's no caliph. There's
been no caliph since nineteen twenty four, so nobody can

(01:10:29):
declare offensive jihad, which means not that there's no jihad.
Every jihad today has to be defensive, which means it
has to be based on grievances. If you read Osamobin
Lawden's declarations of Jihad against the United States in the
late nineteen nineties. He lists all these grievances, all these
terrible things the Americans have supposedly done, and those justify

(01:10:54):
his jihad against America. He has to cast it as
defensive because otherwise it's got no justification according to Islamic theology.
So when people in the Israeli government or John Hagey
or anybody else start saying, well, you know, Israel has
a divine right to Iraq and northern Saudi Arabia and

(01:11:16):
all these other territories that you mentioned, that just goes
right on the grievance list for the Jihadis. And they say,
you see, the Israelis, they want to destroy Iraq, they
want to make war against all these Islamic lands, so
we have to defend ourselves, and it just incites more
jihad violence. So it's extremely irresponsible as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 1 (01:11:40):
I want to move on to some detail that you
provide in the book, and you are very articulate in
communicating this verbally as well. Is some detail about the
Plo Hamas the Muslim brotherhood give us some kind of
a sense because for the average American, you hear those
mon occurs, but oftentimes you don't really understand what they

(01:12:03):
represent or how they're interconnected.

Speaker 2 (01:12:06):
Yeah, it's interesting. You know the PLO I was talking
about before, So I'll start with them because they're the oldest.
Actually the Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest group, but I'll
get to them in a minute. The PLO started in
the nineteen fifties, I believe, and it was the Palestine
Liberation Organization, a secular group that was actually aligned with

(01:12:28):
the Soviets, just as Anwar Sadat was aligned with the Soviets,
because the Israelis were aligned with the United States. And
in those days, this is the height of the Cold
War and the binary of the Cold War that you're
either with us or with them. You're either on the
Soviet side or on the American side. So the Israelis
are on the American side, the Arabs are on the

(01:12:50):
Soviet side. So the Palestine Liberation Organization started out as
a secular, even Marxist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel,
and it made it very clear in its charter that
it was not interested in diminishing Israel, in establishing a
Palestinian state that would live side by side with Israel,

(01:13:11):
you know, no two state solution, and all that it
was wanting to destroy Israel altogether renamed as I explained
before the Palestinian Liberation Organization in nineteen sixty four, when
the Palestinians were invented, and it became progressively more Islamic
as time went on, so that nowadays you've got Mahmudabas,

(01:13:35):
who's the successor of Yaser Arafat, as the head of
the PLO, and he of course as President of the
Palestinian Authority, he speaks much more in terms of Islam
and in terms of the right of the Islamic nation
to this land than he does about the oppressed people,

(01:13:56):
the Palestinians, throwing off the yoke of the oppressor, the Israelis.
The rhetoric has shifted markedly in an Islamic direction, just
as the whole Islamic world has become much less secular
over the last century and much more religious. So that's
one group that's the lead group actually, that controls the

(01:14:16):
Palestinian Authority, and it is the oldest, most venerable group
among the Palestinian so called Liberation organizations and the one
really from which all the others come to some degree,
or to which they all are related in some degree.
You know, some guy was originally in the PLO and

(01:14:38):
then he decides that he's gonna he wants to be
more radical and so on. The PLO are what I
call slow Jihaties. There's the slow Jihad and the fast Jihad.
There are all kinds of different giods, but this is
one distinction that my colleague at Jihadwatch, Hugh Fitzgerald, has formulated,
and I think it's very useful. The PLO is willing

(01:14:59):
to negotiate with Israel, and so you see the Palestinian
authority made the Oslo Accords in the nineties and the
road Map to Peace with George W. Bush in the
two thousands, and they're willing to talk. But their goal
is ultimately the same as that of the fast gee
hotties like Hamas. They want to destroy Israel altogether. AMAS

(01:15:21):
was founded in the late nineteen eighties, in eighty seven,
I believe it was eighty seven or eighty eight, and
they also want to destroy Israel. But they were from
the beginning a markedly Islamic group, as a matter of fact,
there is an epigraph on the Hamas Charter that says
Israel will arise and remain until Islam obliterates it. So

(01:15:45):
Hamas the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas is an acronym for
Islamic Resistance movement in Arabic. It is dedicated to the
destruction of Israel on Islamic grounds. That it is explicit
all about restoring what they see as the Islamic right
to this land. Now the PLO is really based on

(01:16:07):
that also ultimately, but as I said, they touched it
in Marxist rhetoric at the beginning because they wanted the
Soviet help. Now the Hamask group says that it is
part of the Muslim Brotherhood. It's the Muslim Brotherhood for Gaza.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in nineteen twenty eight.

(01:16:28):
The caliphate, I said, there was no caliph, and you
have to have a caliph to declare offensive war. There
were always caliphs in the Islamic world until nineteen twenty four,
when the secular Turkish government abolished the Ottoman Caliphate. The
empire was already gone, but the caliph had remained as
the nominal leader of the Islamic world and successor of Muhammad,

(01:16:50):
but the Caliphate was abolished in nineteen twenty four. As
a direct reaction to that, Hassan Albana, the founder of
the Muslim Brotherhood, started the Brotherhood in nineteen twenty eight
for the express purpose of reuniting the Islamic world, restoring
the Caliphate, and then resuming the jihad against the non

(01:17:10):
Muslim war. So Hamas says that it is the Muslim
Brotherhood for Palestine, and it is dedicated to exactly that,
destroying Israel, restoring Islamic rule in the region in service
of the ultimate restoration of the Caliphate. So you have
Hamas criticizing the PLO, both on Islamic grounds that the

(01:17:34):
PLO is not Islamic enough, but also on tactical grounds
that Hamas wants to go into Israel and do what
it did on October seventh. They would do October seventh
every day if they could, and just kill Israeli's wholesale.
The PLO is willing to sit down and talk. Hamas
does not want to sit down and talk. They lately

(01:17:56):
have been talking about truces. But that's also something that's
out in Islam, because Islamic lass stipulates if you're fighting
an Infidel and the infidel's winning, ask for a truce,
gather your strength, fight again more effectively. That's what a
truce is for. It's if you're losing, it's so that
you can strengthen yourself and start to win again. So

(01:18:18):
that's why Hamas calls for a ceasefire. But ultimately it's
not interested in talking, just wants to destroy Israel and
would do it if it could right away.

Speaker 1 (01:18:28):
So it's always just a lull in the storm.

Speaker 2 (01:18:30):
Yeah, a lull in the storm is exactly it. That's
what you'd get if there were a ceasefire today between
Israel and Hamas. Hamas would start fighting again as soon
as it could. And you know, you had a Hamas official.
I think it was Hamad who said right after October seventh,
it might have been on October eighth, if I recall correctly,

(01:18:51):
that we're going to have another October seventh, We're going
to have October one hundredth, We're going to have October
one millionth. We're going to just keep coming and carrying
out massacres on that scale as long as it takes
until Israel is completely destroyed.

Speaker 1 (01:19:05):
You have a subheading in your book. I read it
Barack Hussein Obama versus Israel, And in that piece you
talk about and also do in my book Muslim. But
some of the very anti Semitic positions that have been
taken by presidents of the United States, and most notably

(01:19:27):
some of the quotes by Barack Obama which have been
chilling quite frankly.

Speaker 2 (01:19:33):
Yeah, Well, Obama really was the first president to drive
a wedge between the US and Israel. Israel and the
US had always had a very close relationship. As a
matter of fact, the Democratic Party platform up until two
thousand and eight, when Obama was first nominated, spoke about
a special relationship between the US and Israel. Harry Truman

(01:19:58):
recognized the dependants of Israel just like about fifteen minutes
after Israel declared independence. He was ready in waiting, and
there was always a closeness, a kinship between the two
countries that was actually reinforced on nine to eleven when
the same Jihatis a lot of people don't recognize, but

(01:20:19):
the Jihadis of the same ideology as Hamas and the
Palestinian Liberation Organization hit New York and Washington, and so
we're facing the same Jihatist foe who wants to destroy
both America and Israel. But Obama changed all that, and
for the first time, the United States government became openly

(01:20:42):
critical of Israel, became actually abstained on a vote at
the UN. The Biden team did that recently, but they
weren't the first to do it. Obama in his reigning days.
I believe that Trump had already been elected president, but
it was before the inauguration, if I recall correctly, and

(01:21:02):
the Obama administration abstained on a motion at the UN
condemning Israel. Now this was a major thing because the
way the UN works, the Security Council, the permanent members
of the Security Council, the US, the Soviet Union, and
then Russia, China, the UK, I think there might be

(01:21:23):
one other, France maybe. Anyway, they have veto power that
they can exercise so that something doesn't pass if they
vote against it. So the UN could vote one hundred
and eighty to one for something, but if the one
is the United States, then it loses. It doesn't pass

(01:21:45):
because the United States, like these other Security Council permanent members,
has veto power. So if the US had voted no,
Israel would not have been condemned, but the US abstained,
allowing for the condemnation of Israel that had never happened before.
Barack Obama was the first president to allow that, and
Biden was the second. Then there were many indignities that

(01:22:08):
he subjected Net Yahoo too. As a matter of fact,
I have a news website, gi Hotwatch that I operate
every day, posting news and commentary about Jihat activity. And
of course, like all news sites, we have a stock
of photos that we use. And one photo that I
used to use quite often during the Obama administration when

(01:22:28):
there was news about the US and Israel was this
photo of Obama and net nyahou together. But Obama is
looking at net Nyahu with absolutely frightening, unconcealed hostility that
you never see at that level. You know, usually when
you see heads of state or a head of state

(01:22:49):
and the head of government talking, they're all smiles no
matter what goes on behind closed doors. But Obama is
just scowling at net Nyahoo. And I thought this is
a revealing and indicative picture of what he really thinks
about Israel, and so I used it a lot, and

(01:23:09):
there were plenty of occasions to use it because the
US formulated all kinds of policies, like, for example, the
whole hostility to the settlements. Israel is always in trouble
with the UN and now with the US State Department
for building or allowing Israeli citizens to build houses in

(01:23:31):
the West Bank. Now, the West Bank was divided up
by the Oslo Accords in the nineties, and there actually
is an area of it that is open to settlement
by the Israelis, but this is always ignored. At any
time the Israelis actually build there, it becomes the focus
of international condemnation, and it's said that they are building

(01:23:53):
on occupied territory, which, as I explained before, is not
even true to start with, but it was the Obama
administration started all that. Nobody was complaining about Israeli settlements
before that. Now they're this big flashpoint that Israel has
to stop building settlements or there can be no peace process.

(01:24:14):
And the whole thing is this one false assumption based
on another and building this giant house of cards.

Speaker 1 (01:24:20):
Why did he go so soft in Iran?

Speaker 2 (01:24:23):
It seems as if Obama had bought a foreign policy
analysis that saw Iran as replacing Iraq as the source
of stability in the region. Now, of course, the United
States was responsible for Iraq no longer being a source
of stability in the region by removing Saddam Hussain. Now,

(01:24:43):
Saddam Hussein was not a good guy, and he was
certainly a violent and repressive ruler. But you know, Hank,
the world is not perfect, and sin is everywhere. Sometimes
you have to make hard choices. The United States made
the hard choice remove Saddam Hussein. And it was like
lifting up a rock. And if you had just left

(01:25:04):
the rock alone, then the rock actually served a purpose.
And who knows what. I don't want to strain the
analogy over much, but you lift up the rock and
there are all these maggots and things that start coming out,
and it would have been better if you just left
them there. After Saddam Hussein was toppled, the Isis group

(01:25:25):
grew up as an opposing force of Sunnis to the
weak Shiai government that we installed in Baghdad, and all
manner of ills followed from that. The Christians were violently
persecuted and most of them left the country. The Azidis
were violently persecuted, killed in massive numbers. It was just

(01:25:48):
a terrible thing altogether. And it didn't have to happen
if Saddam Hussein had been left there. But once he
was gone and Iraq was destabilized, a lot of state
department wonks thought, this is the time where will empower
Iran and Iran will be the stabilizing force in the region.
And Iran was of course delighted because they're Shiites and

(01:26:12):
most of the Islamic world is Summi. The Shiahites are
only about fifteen percent, but the Iranians have long had
designs on creating a situation in which they control a
large swath of the Middle East, and they actually are
the leaders of the Islamic world, even though they're this
minority sect. So they already had a client state in

(01:26:35):
Assad Syria because Assad's and Alawite. The Alawites are only
twelve percent of the population of Syria, but they're a
Shiite offshoot, and they get the legitimacy from the Islamic
Republic of Iran. The Iranian Mullahs certified them as real Muslims,
and so they have a legitimacy from that that's enabled

(01:26:56):
them to stay in power. But this made Syria an
Iranian client. Then they filled Lebanon with sites and created
his ball Lah, and that has now made Lebanon essentially
a client state of Iran and a very dangerous rogue
state that's ruled by this terror group. And they had
designs on Jordan and certainly Iraq, which had a site majority,

(01:27:20):
wanting to establish this chaied crescent all the way across
the Middle East and then moved down south from Lebanon
and destroy Israel. They also fund Amas so they can
move up from both sides and destroy Israel. And so
the Obama administration thought, hey, this is great, We'll help
them do this and it'll stabilize the whole region, when
of course it's done just the opposite. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:27:41):
I want to start to sort of sum up this podcast,
but there are a number of very pertinent questions I
think that are still on the table. The first of
which is, from your perspective, why such a growing number
of people, a cascade number of people from all around

(01:28:02):
the world who seem to believe that Palestinian terrorism against
Israel is actually justified, And what's the catalyst all of that?

Speaker 2 (01:28:14):
Well, I think the seeds of it have been planted
decades ago. That you have to go back to the
long March through the institutions that started in the nineteen sixties.
That is, the hard left decision that instead of holding
sit ins and protests on campuses, they would actually take
over the campuses. They would take over the colleges and universities.

(01:28:36):
And they've done it. They've been extraordinarily successful, so that
the massive, the great majority, i should say, of colleges
and universities in the United States today are staffed by
professors who are Marxists. And the Marxists see the world
in terms of the oppressor and the oppressed, and they
see the world that in the Middle East that the

(01:28:59):
Israelis are the oppressors and the Palestinians are the oppressed. Moreover,
you add the whole racism narrative on top of that,
the Israelis are white oppressors and the Palestinians are brown oppressed.
This is a lot of nonsense, but this is the
mythology of our age, and so they buy this. They've
taught this to a generation of students. The control all

(01:29:21):
these universities that are getting millions of dollars from cutter
to teach exactly this kind of thing. And so you
have all these people who are miseducated, half educated, propagandized
and indoctrinated, and they think Israel is this usurper of
Europeans who came down and stole a land that was

(01:29:42):
indigenously the Palestinians land. It's not a historical fact, but
they don't know the historical facts. They know what they've
been taught in their universities, which is not true. But
this is the state of the world today.

Speaker 1 (01:29:56):
Wow. Is there a solution?

Speaker 2 (01:30:00):
Well, sure, you and I are being part of it
right now by having this conversation. And I thank you
for having such an in depth conversation about these issues
and having the courage to do it, because in the
first place, I know, I've been alarmed, as a matter
of fact, thank since October seventh, by the rise of
anti Semitism among Christians and a sort of irrational I think,

(01:30:24):
opposition to Israel among Christians, I mean Orthodox Christians, Catholic Christians,
and Protestant Christians. And I've been shocked to see the
recrudescence of ancient anti Semitic myths over the last few months,
to the degree that I actually wrote a book about
anti Semitism that will be coming out early next year.

(01:30:45):
So I applaud you for having this conversation to start with.
And I think the only thing we can do is
just tell the truth and trust in the Lord that
the truth will prevail over falsehood. The falsehood, however, has
all the megaphones and all the money, and so the
only thing we can do is just stand and keep
telling the truth and trust in the fact that truth

(01:31:07):
is reality. Truth is just what corresponds to what is real,
and so in so far as what we're saying is true,
it will ultimately prevail. Because it's going to be impossible
to sustain the war against reality that so much of
the world is pursuing these days. The evidence of their
senses will continue to show them. You know, they might

(01:31:28):
think the Palestinians are the noble people who are fighting
a defensive war against Israeli oppression. But the more October
seventh that they do carry out, the more they call
for genocide of the Jews, the more that they are
open about their bloodlust and their genocidal imperatives, the more
people will wake up to reality.

Speaker 1 (01:31:50):
You actually don't think that there is a real solution
to the Middle East crisis. You think that crisis can
only be managed to might correctly communicating your view.

Speaker 2 (01:32:02):
Yeah, Americans want solutions, you know. I think, especially nowadays,
people the vast majority of people grew up watching television
and they're used to all the problems being solved in
a half hour or an hour, and so they think
there ought to be a solution. There's got to be
a way to figure this out, and we'll go to
a commercial. There is no way to solve this because

(01:32:24):
as long as there are people who believe in Allah
and Muhammad and the Qur'an, there will be people who
think they have to wage jihat against Israel and against
the United States for that matter. And so the only
thing to do is to go by Islamic law in
that regard, which says you do not fight gi hat
against an enemy that has more than twice your strength,

(01:32:45):
and you have no chance of winning. And so if
we presented that kind of strength to them, they wouldn't fight.
And that was the situation that actually prevailed throughout much
of the nineteen fifties and up to the nineteen sixty
seven war, not entirely, but but it did to a
tremendous degree, and certainly even before the founding of the
State of Israel, that was the situation in a great

(01:33:06):
part of the Islamic world, that it was not strong,
could not pursue jihad, and didn't.

Speaker 1 (01:33:13):
I want to read something that you close your book with.
I don't think it's the last paragraph, but it's close
to the last paragraph, and have you comment. You write,
it is time for a new approach. The response of
Israel and that of the free world in general, should
not be fear or hatred, but a sober realism, a

(01:33:36):
determination to remain resolute against the Jahad, to defend Israel
as a legitimate state, as a free society, and that
to stand firm for humane values as well as the
principles of human rights.

Speaker 2 (01:33:55):
Well, I couldn't agree more. I think that that's basically
what we have to do right there. That's the only
thing we can do.

Speaker 1 (01:34:04):
Well said, it's just.

Speaker 2 (01:34:05):
A massive injustice. You know, I'm not Jewish, I'm not Israeli,
but this is a massive injustice that's being perpetrated against
people who are human beings, who are creations of God.
This is just a matter of standing for what is right,
to stand on the side of Israel.

Speaker 1 (01:34:21):
You're a man that I admire for a lot of reasons.
You do first rate primary research, for one thing. So
I have read your books, I have followed your organization
for a long period of time, and I always find
that you come down on the right side of the facts.
You do your homework, and I suppose this is probably
why you were in such demand by government agencies. My

(01:34:43):
question to you right now is, while you have led
seminars on Islam and Jahad for the FBI, for the
United States Central Command, for the United States Army Command,
et cetera, the whole list that I went through at
the beginning of the podcast, are you still welcome in
those circles?

Speaker 2 (01:35:02):
Oh no, oh no. It doesn't look good in a bio,
so I don't have it in there. But I've never
made a secret of it. I was fired in twenty
eleven October nineteenth twenty eleven, actually, fifty seven Muslim and
South Asian organizations wrote an open letter to John Brennan,
who at that time was in the Department of Homeland

(01:35:22):
Security and later he became head of the CIA, and
they actually demanded that I'd be fired by name. I
was kind of flattered on one side that heard me,
you know, But seriously, they said that I was teaching
this islamophobic material and had to be removed, and they
demanded that all mention of Islam and jihadi removed from

(01:35:45):
all counter terror training materials. And Brennan immediately wrote back.
Not only did he write back, he wrote back on
White House stationery, which I've always thought was significant because
you know, everybody in Washington, every petty office holder, has
his own stationary. Brennan certainly did, but he wrote back
on Barack Obama's stationary, as if to signal this is

(01:36:07):
coming from the very top. This is not just me talking,
it's also Barack. And what Brennan said was, yes, we'll
fire Spencer right away and will remove all mention of
Islam and Jihad from counter terror training. And at that time,
the Obama administration formulated its counter terror strategy, which was
called CVE Countering Violent Extremism CVE, and they never mentioned

(01:36:32):
Islam or jihad in any way. Ever since then, that's
been the policy of the US government. It still does
not acknowledge that there is any Islamic jihad. So no,
I'm not welcome in those circles and have not been
for many years. But I believe that that is part
of an abdication of responsibility on the part of the

(01:36:53):
US government and its wilful denial of a genuine threat.
Even more insidious, during the Biden administration, we saw the
term violent extremists being applied to people who are simply
critics of the administration, and I thought, oh, now the
other shoe is dropping. Not only did they stop talking

(01:37:14):
about Islamic gi hotties, but now they're going to use
this violent extremist language against just people they don't like
in want of silence. And I myself was put on
a violent extremist list by the Global Internet Forum for
counter Terrorism, which is the social media giant's counter terror
arm and I protested to them and they refused to

(01:37:38):
take me off, even though it's ludicrous because I've never
called for any violence. But this is where things are
tending now that they're going to weaponize these vague terms
against people who are saying things they don't want.

Speaker 1 (01:37:51):
Said well, Robert Spencer, I knew all of that, and
yet I asked you to write the forward to my
book Muslim, and I got to tell you I've never
said this to you publicly. I have said it to
you privately, but I'm deeply grateful that you did because
I respect you very much.

Speaker 2 (01:38:09):
Well likewise, and thank you, the honor was all.

Speaker 1 (01:38:12):
Mine, and thank you so much for the time you've
given us on this edition of the handcum Plug podcast.
You certainly live up to our mission statement. You're interesting,
your informative, and you are inspirational. I appreciate people that
know history, that do primary research, and that are true

(01:38:34):
to their convictions, meaning you're not one that is going
to ever be worried about the term politically correct. Robert
Spencer is politically correct. You're going to be correct on
the facts. And again, I appreciate people like you more
and more every day.

Speaker 2 (01:38:51):
Well, thank you, I appreciate that very much. And like
I said, you know, it's so rare to have somebody
willing to talk about these things on a large and
so rare that when you do that, we can have
this kind of in depth discussion instead of trying to
cover all this territory in fifteen minutes or whatever. And

(01:39:12):
so I'm very grateful to you and thank you well.

Speaker 1 (01:39:15):
The book The Palestinian Delusion, I enjoyed reading it. My
staff has enjoyed reading at The subtitle, by the way,
is the Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process.
The author again, Robert Spencer. He's my guest. He's my friend,
and I'm looking forward to your next book, so we'll
have to do a podcast on that as well. What's
the title of your upcoming book.

Speaker 2 (01:39:36):
Yeah, it's called Muhammad, A Critical Biography. It'll be out
in just a few weeks. It just got copies. It's
a biography of Muhammad, but it's a little different. It's
an investigation of the historical reliability of these various stories,
and when you go into Islamic tradition, you'll find that
it's full of contradictions. It's not what you'd expect from

(01:39:58):
historically accurate records. For example, we think we're talking about
a guy named Muhammad, but there are early Islamic traditions
that say, well, his name was actually Kutan and it
changed to Muhammad later. And we think that he got
visions or said he did, from the angel Gabriel who
gave him the Qur'an, and their early Islamic traditions say
it was the angel Sarahphel and later on Gabriel replaced him.

(01:40:22):
And this is all indication that these were stories, maybe
of other people, that were amalgamated into the Muhammad story,
competing stories, sometimes with contradictory elements between one version and
the other. And so what it amounts to is I
don't know how anybody could read this book and come
away thinking Muhammad was a historical figure. This is the

(01:40:43):
myths and legends.

Speaker 1 (01:40:44):
I can't wait to read that book. And I want
to thank everybody for tuning in to this edition of
the handk Unplugged podcast again. Our mission statement is to
have people who are interesting, informative, and inspirational. If you
enjoyed the podcast, subscribe, rate review. It helps a lot
and I want to thank everybody once again for your comments,

(01:41:05):
for your encouragement, and for your participation in a podcast
that is willing to tell the truth no matter what
the cost. Thanks for tuning in. Look forward to seeing
you next time with more of the handcu plug podcasts.
Long for now,

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