Bannon's War Room - WarRoom Battleground EP 978: Budapest Special: The Enemy Abroad; Radical Islam's Attempt To Conquer The West
Aired: 2026-03-31
Duration: 47:50


=== Pray for Our Enemies (14:10) ===

[00:00:02]  This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
[00:00:07]  Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on this people.
[00:00:12]  You're not got a free shot on all these networks lying about the people.
[00:00:17]  The people have had a belly full of it.
[00:00:19]  I know you don't like hearing that.
[00:00:20]  I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.
[00:00:23]  It's going to happen.
[00:00:24]  And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
[00:00:27]  MAGA Media.
[00:00:29]  I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
[00:00:34]  Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
[00:00:38]  If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
[00:00:45]  Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
[00:00:54]  Okay, welcome.
[00:00:56]  You're in the war room on our six o'clock show, which is always very special to us.
[00:01:02]  Raymond Ibrahim joins us from Budapest.
[00:01:05]  Raymond, I know you're just back from Oxford.
[00:01:08]  And in fact, we're going to play a talk you gave there.
[00:01:12]  It doesn't take very long.
[00:01:12]  I think it's 10 or 15 minutes.
[00:01:14]  We're going to play that.
[00:01:14]  And I want you to break it down for it.
[00:01:16]  It's about doormat Christianity.
[00:01:18]  The reason I want to have you on was, one, obviously, this, you kind of shocked them in Oxford, but you're, I believe, if not the best, one of the top two or three best writers that informs the West of this long struggle we've had with Islam.
[00:01:38]  And you've done it through a series of three books.
[00:01:40]  Talk about the books first.
[00:01:41]  I want to play the Oxford talk, and then we're going to break it down in a minute.
[00:01:45]  But in a time that we're in another Middle East war with a radical sect of Islam, the Shiite, you know, the 12th Imam sect in this kind of radical theology, which we've been in and out fighting for 47 years.
[00:02:04]  At the same time, I've been spending so much time in Texas in the show for good reason about the Islamic invasion.
[00:02:10]  And I've told people it's much farther advanced than I thought.
[00:02:14]  And this deals with the overwhelming victory we had on the Proposition 10 to ban or prohibit, let me be specific, prohibit Sharia law in the state of Texas.
[00:02:26]  To have your counsel on this and to put it in historical perspective is always important.
[00:02:32]  So before I play Oxford, do me a favor and just walk through your background and all three of the books.
[00:02:39]  One of them is out currently.
[00:02:40]  And I want as many people as possible to buy plus the other two.
[00:02:43]  They're fantastic and they kind of form a trilogy.
[00:02:48]  Thank you very much, Steve.
[00:02:49]  Yeah, to understand what we're talking about today, Islam in the West and all its different iterations, most recently what's happening with Iran.
[00:02:57]  I've always believed that there's been a complete vacuum in your average American and Westerner in general's knowledge of history.
[00:03:05]  And that's why so much of what we believe and accept and let get away happens, because we don't understand the full context of it.
[00:03:14]  And we just think it's about, oh, you know, people are being multicultural and open-minded and not bigoted towards Muslims, for example.
[00:03:22]  But if you really look into the history, which is what I've been doing for about 25 years now, actually, including in those three books, which I'll summarize, if you look at the history, you'll understand that this battle has been going on from day one, literally.
[00:03:36]  And it hasn't really changed in its manifestation, at least not from the Muslim side.
[00:03:41]  The Muslims are still preaching jihad amongst each other.
[00:03:44]  They're still practicing taqaya amongst the infidel.
[00:03:48]  And they're still engaged in all the various forms of jihad, which they've articulated.
[00:03:52]  Jihad, remember, just means to struggle.
[00:03:55]  And sure, its primary expression historically has been physical, military struggle, but it also has all these different forms, which we're seeing now, including the baby jihad, which is a demographic overwhelming of the West, for example.
[00:04:09]  The only discontinuity is from the Western side.
[00:04:12]  So, whereas Muslims today are really, you know, lockstop and barrel with their heritage, which comes out in all of these books, it's the West, and especially the Christians, who've completely lost touch with that long history.
[00:04:27]  So, in these books, we will see, for example, in Sword and Scimitar, we look at this long history.
[00:04:32]  That's the first book, which comes out in 201, came out in 2018.
[00:04:36]  I really focus on eight pivotal battles that changed the world forever, and they were between Christians and Muslims.
[00:04:42]  And these battles, you know, the first one or two saw the conquest of essentially three-quarters of what was once the Christian world, which very few Westerners still understand at this point.
[00:04:53]  They still think that countries like Egypt and Syria and Turkey and North Africa were just always Islamic somehow.
[00:05:01]  They don't understand that they were actually more Christian than Europe, and they were violently annexed.
[00:05:07]  And so, that there is a lesson that this could happen.
[00:05:10]  There's that famous quote I always talk about from Teddy Roosevelt, where he talks about if Christians did not fight constantly, and he mentions virtually every century against the Muslims, they would have been eliminated completely.
[00:05:24]  So, I think that's what people are forgetting.
[00:05:26]  So, from my vantage point, or anyone who reads these books, what you'll see is that the Muslims have been doing what they've been doing from day one.
[00:05:35]  Nothing has changed.
[00:05:36]  What has changed is the Western response.
[00:05:39]  Okay, and that actually, and the perfect, you know, that's a good segue for my second book, Defenders of the West: the Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam, where I look at another eight men this time, not battles, but actual men to see what drove them, Christians, Europeans, against Islam.
[00:05:55]  And, you know, these were guys who were really pious.
[00:05:59]  It's unfortunate because they get dismissed as, oh, these weren't true Christians, probably because they're all Catholic, because this is the pre-modern medieval era.
[00:06:07]  So, they had to, of course, be Catholic, and some are Orthodox.
[00:06:10]  But, you know, they had no qualms about fighting fire with fire.
[00:06:14]  They understood that, you know, that they were not what I refer to as doormat Christians.
[00:06:20]  They were quite the opposite.
[00:06:21]  They were immensely militant, but they were also immensely pious.
[00:06:25]  And that comes up to the third book, the most recent one that just came out in November, The Two Swords of Christ, which deals with the military orders.
[00:06:32]  And these were the creme de la creme of the defenders.
[00:06:35]  These were men who were essentially monks, who were engaged in such a rigorous form of essentially monasticism.
[00:06:42]  And at the same time, there were ferocious warriors.
[00:06:45]  Okay, so a very strange hybrid for the Western, especially Christian mind, to comprehend today.
[00:06:51]  But they did it actually from scripture.
[00:06:52]  So the title of the book, Two Swords of Christ, was one of the verses that they always would talk about that essentially justified their rationale.
[00:07:01]  And that's the verse where in Luke, Jesus says, sell your garment by a sword.
[00:07:07]  And they say, look, Lord, here are two swords.
[00:07:09]  And he says, that is enough.
[00:07:10]  That, of course, means absolutely nothing today to the doormat Christian mentality.
[00:07:15]  It's just, you know, more fuzzy talk.
[00:07:17]  But to medieval Christians, what it really meant is there's two forms of warfare that Christians are engaged in.
[00:07:23]  One, of course, is against spiritual forces, and one is against secular, material forces, humans.
[00:07:31]  And both need a sword to be resisted.
[00:07:33]  So that was the mentality of pre-modern Europe.
[00:07:36]  And that, so now bringing it all forward to today and coalescing, all that has been jettisoned.
[00:07:42]  Christians, as I argue, have adopted this sort of doormat Christianity, as I call it, which means they believe their faith begins and ends with doing nothing, but being passive, nice, forgiving, tolerant, and turning the other cheek.
[00:07:55]  All of which, by the way, are very easy.
[00:07:56]  Those are a lot easier to do than to actually stand up with a sword like their predecessors did.
[00:08:02]  But that's also why the jihad, after being stopped and on the retreat, basically that's what the colonial era was.
[00:08:10]  This was finally the rise of a confident West and the demise of Islam.
[00:08:16]  Now we are, it's reversing because the West has lost confidence, has lost the ability to resist, has lost its Christian rationale for just war, essentially.
[00:08:25]  And Islam is still continuing to do what it did from day one.
[00:08:31]  Raymond, hang on for one second.
[00:08:33]  I'll get into why you were invited.
[00:08:34]  Well, how did Oxford invite you?
[00:08:36]  Because I got a couple of minutes.
[00:08:37]  I want to play the play in its entirety.
[00:08:40]  How did Oxford invite you?
[00:08:43]  Well, I'm currently a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute in Hungary.
[00:08:47]  And this particular event was sort of a joint conference by the Pew C House of Oxford, as well as the Danube Institute.
[00:08:57]  So it was in that context.
[00:08:58]  And the event itself, Christian revival, was definitely applicable to my themes.
[00:09:07]  Unbelievable.
[00:09:08]  Okay, here's what we're going to do.
[00:09:09]  We're going to go now to the talk.
[00:09:11]  Takes about 15 minutes, and then Raymond and I will be back on the other side.
[00:09:16]  Everyone, very happy to be with you.
[00:09:19]  I'm generally seen as the Islam guy, and I talk about that big issue.
[00:09:23]  But seeing that this is a Christian revival conference and the fact that Islam and Christianity, there's something of a symbiotic relationship going on, I have to actually talk about both and because it's really all interrelated.
[00:09:38]  And so what I'd like to start off with when I think of problems is, well, what's the first things?
[00:09:44]  What's the first premise at the problem?
[00:09:46]  And I often think that many people don't really see it or don't talk about it.
[00:09:50]  We tend to talk about symptoms.
[00:09:52]  Islam itself in the West, in Europe, in the UK, I see it as a symptom.
[00:09:56]  I don't see it as an inherent or innate problem.
[00:09:59]  And it's a symptom of essentially the weakening or the dying of Christianity in the West.
[00:10:05]  So how did that happen?
[00:10:07]  And one of the thoughts that's been percolating in my mind and I've been thinking about and talking about quite often is the idea that one of the problems with Christianity in the modern era is that it has in very many ways adopted a materialist paradigm, not unlike atheists and secularists.
[00:10:26]  And by that, I don't mean materialistic, as in covetous.
[00:10:30]  I mean it in a more philosophical sense, a materialist paradigm in the sense that all that is real, let's say from an atheist point of view, all that is real is what?
[00:10:39]  It's the material, right?
[00:10:40]  It's the physical world.
[00:10:41]  It's what I can see, feel, touch, and measure.
[00:10:45]  And all this abstract talk about your morality and your religion and all this sort of thing is usually jettisoned.
[00:10:50]  And that's one of the problems.
[00:10:51]  But I fear, and I think, and I see that much of Christianity and all of its manifestations in the modern era has adopted this worldview, despite the theological veneer of what they say.
[00:11:04]  So in other words, a Christian can, of course, express profound theological truisms.
[00:11:10]  But at the same time, you know, as they say, the proof is in the pudding.
[00:11:14]  And what I'm seeing is, so how is a Christian becoming a materialist paradigm in a philosophical sense?
[00:11:21]  If you look at what, if I speak to a Christian, what is the greatest evil that you can engage in?
[00:11:26]  I think a lot of people will say what an atheist would say, which is physical harm, okay?
[00:11:31]  Physical, physically harming someone and much worse, of course, killing someone.
[00:11:36]  And I agree, of course, those are great evils.
[00:11:38]  No one would argue that.
[00:11:40]  But unbeknownst to most Christians, that was actually more of a minor aspect of the message of Christianity, the entire ethos, the morality that was created.
[00:11:52]  And in short, before I elaborate, the problem with materialist Christianity, which in many ways has, like I said, permeated the worldview of all Christians, is that it perfectly comports with secularism and atheism.
[00:12:03]  And that is why Christianity is still allowed to live side by side with a secular or even atheistic world environment, because it also agrees.
[00:12:14]  All that we want to do is make sure no one's physically hurt, there's no violence.
[00:12:18]  But the question now becomes: what happened to morality?
[00:12:21]  That was a word that used to be pivotal and important and fundamental to something like Christianity.
[00:12:26]  Where is what is there morality anymore?
[00:12:29]  And I'm not talking, of course, about individual Christians.
[00:12:31]  I'm sure there are many devout Christians still in the world.
[00:12:34]  But it's not something that is socially acknowledged or something much less that is socially pursued that we talk about.
[00:12:41]  Okay, so, and once one, I think, this is my realization when I think about it and how morality is not completely.
[00:12:51]  Western people and Christians will say they're moral, but again, it's through a materialist paradigm.
[00:12:55]  And you know that by simply looking at what used to be the greatest sins and the greatest evils for a society.
[00:13:02]  And all of them are to various degrees completely accepted by Christians today.
[00:13:08]  And all one has to do is look at the sexual mores of the West today.
[00:13:13]  And very few Christians will even argue or talk about it or even dispute it.
[00:13:18]  And they'd be, of course, scandalized to feel like they have to talk about it.
[00:13:22]  But if you look at historic Christianity, biblical Christianity, Christianity in all of its forms, something like sexual mores, sexual sins, that was one of the pinnacles and one of the most unquestioned aspects of Christianity.
[00:13:35]  So you see, this is why, why is it not being mentioned?
[00:13:38]  Because, well, no one's hurting anyone.
[00:13:40]  And so that's what I mean.
[00:13:41]  That's a perfect example of how a Christian adopts the materialist worldview.
[00:13:45]  Now, there used to be something, and just to make it simple, you may have heard, I'm sure you have, of course, many Catholics, Anglicans, of the seven deadly sins, which actually very much informed the worldview of Christians in the pre-modern era.
[00:14:02]  And they are, I often miss, but let's see, wrath, greed, gluttony, envy, lust, sloth.
[00:14:11]  And I always miss one.

=== Turning Vice Into Virtue (10:27) ===

[00:14:13]  Pride.
[00:14:14]  Oh, yeah, the worst one.
[00:14:17]  Yeah, I know.
[00:14:18]  The root of them all.
[00:14:19]  Yeah, you're right.
[00:14:20]  Okay.
[00:14:21]  So think about those seven things now.
[00:14:23]  Okay, that is what a Christian society thought about.
[00:14:25]  Now, these are all metaphysical.
[00:14:27]  They're not material.
[00:14:28]  Okay, these were metaphysical principles.
[00:14:31]  This is what Christianity was all about.
[00:14:33]  Notice, killing is not one of the seven deadly sins.
[00:14:36]  Why?
[00:14:36]  Because it's a byproduct.
[00:14:38]  Of course, it's evil and you shouldn't do it.
[00:14:40]  But it wasn't seen as a root cause.
[00:14:43]  Now, when I look at these, the seven deadly sins, which were fundamental to a Christian society, Christian to Christendom essentially for centuries, up until actually quite recently, not only are they not something that we talk about or something we condemn, they are in fact what we now celebrate, and a much of our economy is based on it.
[00:15:05]  And we call ourselves Christians and we live with it and we live in peace with this.
[00:15:08]  And I find that very interesting.
[00:15:10]  Pride, pride, of course, is exalted.
[00:15:12]  Pride, you know, is it Pride Month?
[00:15:14]  Think about that.
[00:15:16]  Lust, that's everywhere you look.
[00:15:18]  It's promoted, it's glamorized.
[00:15:22]  Envy, just think social media, okay?
[00:15:26]  Gluttony, turn TV on, everything's about putting images of food, sloth.
[00:15:32]  So it's kind of amazing that to me, these are the principal issues.
[00:15:36]  These are the first things that were actually at the heart of a Christian order, and they've just been completely so jettisoned, and very few Christians even understand this.
[00:15:45]  And that's the point.
[00:15:46]  This is so subtle and so incremental that, and the reason is, the best way I can put it is because Christians, one way or the other, over the decades and possibly centuries, have just adopted a very materialist worldview, which is that, yeah, we talk about the afterlife, we talk about sin, we talk about being saved, but in the end, when it comes to society, we begin and end with just not hurting people.
[00:16:11]  Okay, so that's become the ultimate Christian virtue.
[00:16:14]  And it is a virtue.
[00:16:14]  I'm not arguing that, but I'm trying to say there was so much more above it, which actually gave meaning to life.
[00:16:22]  Now, what happens when society, such as Western society, European society, jettisons what I'm talking about, which is essentially the metaphysical aspect of Christianity?
[00:16:33]  You can actually call it a spiritual aspect because the physical or material aspect, what's the corollary?
[00:16:40]  Is it metaphysical, the beyond the physical?
[00:16:42]  Well, that's the spiritual.
[00:16:44]  And I just think it's funny because a lot of Christians today, when they say the word spiritual, it means some sort of abstract, fuzzy feeling.
[00:16:51]  Actually, I think to be spiritual is to be engaged and to comprehend and try to exercise the metaphysical aspects of Christianity, the things that are beyond the physical, that are not measurable, that deal with morals and ethics and that sort of thing.
[00:17:06]  Now, when all that is jettisoned, as it has been in recent generations, a vacuum is created.
[00:17:12]  And that's, I think, where we are.
[00:17:13]  And what does nature abhor?
[00:17:15]  It abhors a vacuum.
[00:17:16]  Enter Islam.
[00:17:18]  Well, Islam, of course, is its own body system.
[00:17:21]  It's its own religion.
[00:17:23]  It has its own teachings.
[00:17:24]  You know, one can be very hostile to it or critical of it.
[00:17:28]  And I'm, of course, associated with those views.
[00:17:31]  But we have to be honest, it also brings a sort of traditional worldview.
[00:17:36]  It knows what a woman is, and it knows what a man is.
[00:17:38]  It's not confused about that, for example.
[00:17:41]  And it has all sorts of things that were very traditional that Europeans and Christians would have agreed with historically.
[00:17:47]  So I think that aspect, and it's confident.
[00:17:50]  So now you have a vacuum in Europe, in the West in general, because of the reasons I've outlined, dealing with the sort of slow melting away of Christianity based on these philosophical or epistemological underpinnings.
[00:18:04]  Now you have Islam coming in and it may have all its problems and all, but it's still very visceral, it's down to earth, and it does offer all of these things that are filling the vacuum.
[00:18:14]  Okay, and this is why you find Western people who are turned off and find no resonance in modern secular liberal culture, and they turn to something like Islam, which on the heart of it doesn't make any sense.
[00:18:29]  I wager if those people actually had a true Christian upbringing, or according to the way I'm trying to describe it, which is actually much more fused with a metaphysical understanding, they would not find Islam appealing.
[00:18:41]  But that's what I mean.
[00:18:42]  There's a vacuum now, so that even something that is inherently inferior, inasmuch as it offers something of a primordial, a conservative worldview that still resonates with all humans, then it becomes appealing.
[00:18:55]  And then it's all, especially in this country, it's coalescing in a very strange way.
[00:19:01]  As you all know, now there's a new blasphemy code about Islam, a new anti-Islamophobia or anti-Islam hostility thing.
[00:19:12]  And of course, this is just, this is one more way to help Islam to become more empowered, more entrenched.
[00:19:19]  You can't even criticize it.
[00:19:20]  And I haven't looked as closely as I'd like to the wording, but it seems it's very fuzzy, intentionally so, and vague, so that anything in it says things like encouraging hostility or, well, who's going to decide all that?
[00:19:35]  And all of this, so the kind of Christianity that I'd like to see go away, and I'd like to see it sort of bring back a more traditional form of Christianity that prevailed during Christendom.
[00:19:49]  Well, what I call, let's put it this way, I've tried to coin a word, I call it doormat Christianity, and I think this is the modern form of Christianity whereby Christians are taught, again, in keeping with what I'm saying, this materialist idea, to just be doormats.
[00:20:03]  Christianity begins and ends by you being a doormat.
[00:20:05]  You're non-confrontational, you lay down, everyone walks all over you, and then you get to pat yourself on the shoulder and say, hey, look, I'm virtuous, I'm good.
[00:20:13]  It's also a way to make, it's a way of make turning of vice, cowardice, into a virtue, I think.
[00:20:20]  And that's why it's become very prevalent, what I call doormat Christianity.
[00:20:24]  Dormat Christianity is not going to stand up against Islam.
[00:20:26]  And that's what we're seeing.
[00:20:28]  In fact, that kind of Christianity, which is completely about just being passive, who do you think benefits from it most of all?
[00:20:36]  It's probably the more of an enemy you are to Christianity, the more the prevalent form of doormat Christianity works and serves perfectly to empower the opposite forces.
[00:20:47]  So I think Christians need to recapture and reclaim a sense of morality and a sense of the metaphysical, because otherwise you don't, it's, and again, I'm going back to the first premises.
[00:21:00]  These are the building blocks.
[00:21:01]  Without these, I don't believe that, let's say, the Islam problem cannot necessarily be addressed in and of itself.
[00:21:07]  You can't maintain a sort of this current culture, which with all its confusions and sort of breakaway from Christianity, and then be able to resist something like Islam.
[00:21:18]  I think it's all very interconnected.
[00:21:20]  If you go back, and you can easily see this, go back a century to the way Western Europeans and Westerners thought and Christians thought, you wouldn't have this Islam problem at all.
[00:21:30]  Even if it existed, it would immediately be solved.
[00:21:33]  So I think there's a lot of paralysis going on amongst Christians because they just feel like, like I said, the best they can do is to just be what they've been taught and bred, including, like I said, by forces that don't like Christianity.
[00:21:47]  I saw a video in the Super Bowl a couple years ago, and as you know, Super Bowl commercials, Super Bowl commercials tend to, they're very prominent and very mainstream.
[00:21:59]  And all it was was images of people washing people's feet.
[00:22:03]  But for some reason, all the people who were washing the feet looked like white, traditional Christian people.
[00:22:08]  And all the people getting their feet washed were, well, one was a trans man.
[00:22:13]  One was obviously, it was like on a migrant border and it was an illegal migrant.
[00:22:17]  One was a woman committing an abortion or at an abortion center and people are protesting, but another woman's washing her feet.
[00:22:25]  And one was a criminal and a policeman was washing his feet.
[00:22:28]  And then it ended up by saying Jesus didn't hate, he washed feet.
[00:22:32]  And you can just see that kind of message, how it is completely geared to weakening Christianity by also, but making you think you're being a good Christian.
[00:22:41]  Because there's no balance.
[00:22:42]  Of course, Jesus washed feet.
[00:22:44]  That's not my argument.
[00:22:44]  But there is a balance.
[00:22:45]  Jesus also hurled tables and made a court of whips and drove people and livestock out.
[00:22:51]  So there is a room, I believe, for, well, the Bible says so, righteous indignation that is at least funneled in a proper way.
[00:22:59]  And all of that, I guess, is missing.
[00:23:01]  And inasmuch as people don't get that, I think a lot of this is futile.
[00:23:05]  And I'll end it by what I call the two swords theology.
[00:23:09]  I just wrote a book that came out a few months ago.
[00:23:11]  It's called The Two Swords of Christ.
[00:23:13]  And it deals with the military orders and their battles with Islam, the Templars and the Hospitallers.
[00:23:18]  But there's a second meaning to the title.
[00:23:20]  And it's basically in Luke, where Christ says, he doesn't have a garment, sell it and buy a sword.
[00:23:26]  And the disciples say, Lord, here are two swords.
[00:23:27]  And he says, that is enough.
[00:23:29]  Now, of course, to modern-day Christians, that means absolutely nothing.
[00:23:32]  It doesn't mean anything about a real sword.
[00:23:34]  But of course, there's a long and deep tradition, pre-modern, especially medieval understanding, which is the two swords.
[00:23:40]  One is spiritual, which I think modern Christians still accept, spiritual warfare, but one is secular warfare.
[00:23:46]  Okay.
[00:23:47]  And that was the whole rationale for just war.
[00:23:50]  That was the whole rationale for the Crusades, which I'm sure a lot of people think are not what they really were.
[00:23:58]  But so that kind of mentality, and again, it's not about physical, not necessarily literal.
[00:24:02]  It's just about being bold and militant, at least vocally and in your approach to what's happening.
[00:24:09]  Because if you look back, you zoom out and see what's been going on.
[00:24:12]  It's just been one incremental, slow degrade.
[00:24:15]  And no matter how many, no matter what people are saying or doing or books or conferences, if you look at the scale, it goes down a little, it's like one step forward, three steps back.
[00:24:25]  And that's how it's been going.
[00:24:27]  So I think in part with Christian revival and the Islam threat, Christians just need to, again, go to these first things and really recapture a sense of immorality that is above and beyond just physical considerations.

=== Times of Turbulence (02:04) ===

[00:24:41]  And once that is done, because like I said, it's all interconnected, the Islam question will become a lot easier to answer almost instinctively and very natively.
[00:24:51]  Okay, we're going to, I'm going to get Raymond back into the conversation in a moment.
[00:24:55]  We're going to take a short commercial break.
[00:24:56]  We're going to leave you with in a moment with Nicole Negrady's modern-day holy war.
[00:25:02]  I don't think any song could be better for today.
[00:25:06]  I want to remind you in turbulence, as you know, how this war is evolving, and particularly President Trump, pretty blunt today, early in the day when he had the Irish prime minister in the Oval Office talking about the lack of NATO, NATO not coming forward to really support us in the naval endeavor in the straits of her movies.
[00:25:27]  And that means they're not going to be there for the Red Sea, which is the Suez Canal.
[00:25:31]  So I think very, very disappointing.
[00:25:33]  Times of turbulence are going to be with us.
[00:25:36]  When I say turbulence and geopolitical risk, I mean war and the rumors of war.
[00:25:40]  We try to do our best to cover this every day for you.
[00:25:43]  One of the ways that you can protect yourself, particularly your financial downside in times of turbulence, is talk to the team at Birch Gold, Philip Patrick, and the team.
[00:25:52]  Birchgold.com, promo code Bannon, end of the dollar empire.
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[00:25:59]  One, number one, for a massive federal spending during Biden's time when it lost 20% of its purchasing power, and you had the rise of gold.
[00:26:09]  Understand all that.
[00:26:10]  It's not just talking about the price of gold.
[00:26:12]  It's talking about the process of actually how we got there.
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[00:26:36]  So check it out today.
[00:26:40]  Short commercial break.
[00:26:44]  Raymond Ibrahim is with us.

=== The West and Holy War (16:09) ===

[00:26:46]  Just gave an explosive talk at Oxford on doormat Christianity.
[00:26:51]  We'll break it all down next in War Room.
[00:27:00]  War Room.
[00:27:01]  Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance.
[00:27:08]  Raymond, you made a great point.
[00:27:10]  We say this all the time.
[00:27:11]  When Islam roared out of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, what, in the 7th century, for those hundred years, the great cultures, ancient cultures, and many of them had accepted Christianity, Egypt and Syria being the two most significant because the church was a desert church in those early years.
[00:27:34]  You had Egypt, Syria, Babylon, which is modern day Iraq, Persia, another ancient society had been at war with the Roman Empire forever.
[00:27:43]  And then Spain.
[00:27:46]  You had, and then eventually the Orthodox part of it, Constantinople, all that.
[00:27:50]  You had Byzantine culture, which is really the Roman East.
[00:27:56]  Unbelievable track record of overwhelming these societies and taking over their cultures.
[00:28:02]  Most people don't know that.
[00:28:03]  They thought they were Islamic.
[00:28:04]  No, they were either Zoroastrian as the Persians were, or they had very deep roots in Christianity.
[00:28:10]  North Africa, I tell people all the time, Saint Augustine, really, I think probably the greatest intellect we had in the early church, I think was Berber.
[00:28:18]  He was North African.
[00:28:21]  You had the desert fathers in Egypt and Syria.
[00:28:25]  It was the desert church.
[00:28:27]  And of course, you had all the saints that came out of the desert.
[00:28:30]  It really overwhelmed it.
[00:28:32]  And you really went to Oxford, which was set up, Cambridge and Oxford were set up as great centers of learning for Christianity when they were set up.
[00:28:40]  They've lost their way.
[00:28:41]  And you really hammered them on doormat Christianity.
[00:28:45]  Just explain to our audience what that means after they heard your talk.
[00:28:50]  And why did you come up with that topic to go to Oxford and really to throw down on?
[00:28:56]  Well, I think what they wanted was for me to primarily talk about Islam, and I did.
[00:29:00]  But I don't think it's useful to talk about Islam without the full context and understanding the vacuum within Christian civilization, which Islam is filling.
[00:29:10]  And so I decided to address the topic of doormat Christianity, by which I mean, again, this idea, that a real Christian is, you know, just completely passive, always turns the other cheek, never judges, is never confrontational, just is a doormat.
[00:29:27]  And, you know, the temptation of that sort of interpretation is, of course, there's verses in the Bible that would seem to support that sort of thing.
[00:29:34]  But there's also other verses and anecdotes from the New Testament, including Jesus' life, that don't.
[00:29:39]  And I find it interesting.
[00:29:42]  Why do Christians always like to focus on one without the other?
[00:29:45]  The same Jesus who said, turn the other cheek, didn't turn the other cheek when he was actually slapped.
[00:29:51]  He questioned and was confrontational with the person, the soldier who slapped him.
[00:29:55]  And he also, he engaged in violence.
[00:29:58]  I think hurling tables and making a court of whips and whipping both cattle and humans out of a temple is a violent expression.
[00:30:07]  So I just feel that Christians need to recapture and get a balance, a harmony.
[00:30:12]  Okay, what is a heresy?
[00:30:13]  A heresy is when you really focus on one aspect of the faith and to the exclusion of everything else.
[00:30:19]  And I believe that to a great extent is what doormat Christianity has become.
[00:30:23]  And that is why the greatest civilization born of Christian mores and ethos, the West, is completely crumbling because of this social paralysis that it's been infected by, which makes Christians think that all I have to do is just pray and wait and listen to God and just do nothing and it'll get better.
[00:30:43]  Well, that's kind of what's been going on for decades.
[00:30:47]  And look where the West is.
[00:30:48]  Look where Europe is right now.
[00:30:50]  Like I said, Islam hasn't changed.
[00:30:52]  It's been doing what it's been doing, swallowing up.
[00:30:56]  If it managed to swallow up the older, as you were mentioning, Egypt and Syria and in North Africa and all these nations that were the heart of the Christian world, this is where the theology was coming from.
[00:31:07]  This is where the church fathers were coming from.
[00:31:09]  And they were Christian for centuries.
[00:31:11]  And if they were able to be conquered and swallowed up, do you think?
[00:31:14]  And Europe, you know, it was the final bastion.
[00:31:17]  It's called the West for a reason.
[00:31:19]  It was the final Western appendage of Christendom that still didn't get conquered.
[00:31:23]  And portions of it did for long periods of time, such as Spain and the Balkans, the Mediterranean islands.
[00:31:30]  So, people have forgotten all this history, and the Muslim impetus has not changed whatsoever.
[00:31:36]  But the West and Christians have completely dropped their guard, and they don't feel like they can ever engage in violence or even be confrontational.
[00:31:44]  We're at a point where Christians don't even have to engage in violence.
[00:31:47]  That's the whole point.
[00:31:49]  But it's going to get to the point where if they don't do anything, it will be a matter of survival, you know, life or death, survival of the fittest.
[00:31:56]  But Christians can't even get to the point where they're assertive and confrontational about their own particular beliefs vis-a-vis the other, let's say, Islam.
[00:32:06]  And they always, you know, these churches in England that I visited, they frequently invite Muslim Imams to come and proclaim Quranic verses, often the ones that are antithetical to Christianity.
[00:32:19]  No Muslim would ever do that.
[00:32:20]  Okay.
[00:32:21]  And so it's that divide.
[00:32:23]  Have you ever heard?
[00:32:24]  Okay.
[00:32:24]  Have you ever heard when you talk about when you talk about this interfaith dialogue?
[00:32:28]  Have you ever heard?
[00:32:29]  You're an expert.
[00:32:30]  Have you ever heard of anywhere in the Muslim world where they've invited a Christian cleric, a Catholic priest or a Christian pastor into a mosque to claim the word of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, sir?
[00:32:46]  I've never heard.
[00:32:47]  I don't necessarily discount it because there could be some fringe, you know, small mosque that is trying to make, you know, win brownie points with some Westerner.
[00:32:55]  But on a on a large scale level, the way we see it.
[00:32:58]  No, but Raymond, if that had happened, if that had happened, the Muslim world, they'd be beheaded as apostates.
[00:33:07]  The one thing about the Muslim world, whether it's Sunni or Shia, they self-police, they self-police.
[00:33:13]  Do you see this happening in churches in England where this interfaith dialogue is what it's called is really just kowtowing to Islam?
[00:33:21]  But Islam doesn't do that.
[00:33:22]  It's one way.
[00:33:23]  It's a one-way dialogue.
[00:33:26]  One way, Doug.
[00:33:27]  I want to go back in history, though, with your writings and your books.
[00:33:31]  And if we get a chance while we talk, guys, put the covers of the books back up.
[00:33:36]  As it blew through Persia and it blew through Egypt and it blew through North Africa and it blew through Syria and it blew through Babylon, you know, the Tigris and Euphrates, and then started to blow through the Orthodox part, roaring out of Saudi Arabia.
[00:33:52]  It was stopped really in places like Vienna and places like Tours, which people don't realize how deep into France that was.
[00:34:02]  And then eventually it was reversed in Spain and Spain went back.
[00:34:08]  And as soon as Spain wanted back, they started the exploration of the new world.
[00:34:12]  All of really modern history is tied to this.
[00:34:15]  Its antecedents are tied into this struggle between the Christian West and Islam.
[00:34:22]  But in reading your books, whether I'm talking about different sieges or, you know, in the Mediterranean islands or in the Balkans or up in Europe, it was a confrontation.
[00:34:34]  If you had not confronted it with not just military power, but the internal fortification and formation of a religion that informed you, informed in your formation, told you that you must fight for this, that you cannot surrender.
[00:34:55]  If you surrender on this, then you're really not a Christian.
[00:34:57]  You're really not a believer in Christ.
[00:35:00]  And what it gave the inner energy of people is throughout your books.
[00:35:05]  And I think that's the most, the two most important lessons I think that are lost here is how these cultures and societies were very developed that they took over and had deep religious practices, particularly in Persia, Persia with what the Mithras religion and then Zoroasterism.
[00:35:26]  Also, up in Syria, had turned, had basically started to convert to Christianity, but they had other religions too.
[00:35:31]  Same with Egypt.
[00:35:32]  Egypt has an ancient religious faith, but it also had many, I think you're of Egyptian descent.
[00:35:39]  It also had a big Christian community until it was confronted by the Christian West in places like from Vienna to Tours, right?
[00:35:52]  And then later in Spain, until it was confronted, it was overwhelming everything.
[00:35:56]  And so the two lessons is it's a it and they kind of teach a warrior's philosophy.
[00:36:00]  I think that's why so many young men are attracted to Islam.
[00:36:04]  Your thoughts, Raymond Ibrahim.
[00:36:08]  Absolutely.
[00:36:09]  And you nailed it with that.
[00:36:10]  It is the warrior ethos is so embedded within Islam, and that makes it, has made it originally in its origins and in the now very attractive to men, including Western men who grow up being told they have to be women, essentially, and emasculated or doormat Christians.
[00:36:28]  They find that appealing, but little do they know that their own Christian tradition has a very rich tradition of standing up and fighting back.
[00:36:38]  Okay, the concept of just war.
[00:36:41]  All those, you know, you discussed all those battles and Vienna and Tours, and it goes on.
[00:36:47]  Even the United States of America, think about it.
[00:36:49]  This is how this was a constant thing.
[00:36:52]  Even the United States of America's very first war as a nation was with Muslims who were acting and speaking just like ISIS, the Barbary pirates of North Africa who were kidnapping American sailors and enslaving them and doing all sorts of vile things to them.
[00:37:09]  And when Jefferson and Adams finally met with the Barbary ambassador and they said, can't we just be friends?
[00:37:16]  Well, you know, we did nothing to you.
[00:37:17]  You can have your religion.
[00:37:18]  We'll just trade.
[00:37:20]  And he just said, according to our prophet Muhammad, according to the Quran, you are the infidel.
[00:37:25]  You are the enemy.
[00:37:25]  It's our job to lay in wait and plunder you and enslave you and so forth.
[00:37:29]  Okay.
[00:37:30]  So even America's very first experience as a nation put aside all those other, you know, what we were talking about, Vienna and all these major battles.
[00:37:38]  And, you know, you also made a good point about it's true, the entire exploration age, as it's called, was also a reflection of this nonstop, constant struggle coming primarily from Islam.
[00:37:51]  Christopher Columbus and even before him, the Portuguese Prince Henry, for example, the reason they were trying to navigate and go around Africa was always in the context of the crusade against Islam, including to recapture the Holy Land from Muslims.
[00:38:06]  This would be in the 1400s, Prince Henry, for example.
[00:38:09]  But then even later, Columbus, remember, Isabella and Ferdinand were avowed crusaders against Islam in Spain.
[00:38:18]  And they were the final, the culmination of the Reconquista getting rid of Islam after having dealt with it for seven, eight centuries.
[00:38:27]  Okay.
[00:38:27]  And why did they get Columbus in their employ?
[00:38:30]  It was in the context of continuing the crusade.
[00:38:33]  Now we've evicted them.
[00:38:34]  Now we have to go back to the Holy War.
[00:38:36]  And the reason they had to sail is because Christians could not travel by land to the east because that was where the Muslims, the Ottomans and the Mamluks in Egypt.
[00:38:45]  And once you enter there, you're killed or enslaved immediately.
[00:38:48]  So that's why they were looking for different passages.
[00:38:52]  So it's amazing when you think about that the very history of the founding, the existence of the West is so heavily shaped by Islam in a negative way, in a violent way.
[00:39:03]  One historian says Islam was a violent midwife that gave birth to the West.
[00:39:08]  Henry Perrin said the dark ages and the rise of feudalism and Charlemagne would have been impossible without Muhammad.
[00:39:15]  You know, they're very intertwined, but not in a good way.
[00:39:19]  And yet that's all been lost on so many Westerners, which is why I wrote these books, you know, to document all this and bring it back.
[00:39:26]  But it's so lost on Westerners who've been believing that, oh, Islam is peace.
[00:39:31]  And, you know, John Esposito, the professor from Georgetown, he says five centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed between Muslims and Christians until an imperial papal power play led to a series of so-called holy wars, which have left the legacy of enduring mistrust.
[00:39:48]  So basically, those centuries we're talking about when Muslims conquered the old Christian world and Persia, and we didn't even talk about further east conquering India and Pakistan, of course, were Indians who became Muslims after about 80 million of them were killed between 1100 and 1500, and further east and into sub-Saharan Africa, of course, where now we're seeing Muslims slaughtering and engaged in genocide against Christians.
[00:40:16]  So all this is just, you know, yesterday was yesterday, the day before was combat Islamophobia Day, according to the UN.
[00:40:25]  Okay, that's what we're talking about, not this.
[00:40:28]  No, this is ridiculous.
[00:40:30]  Can we, in the time we have left, given that we're in a kinetic war, driven by no realized, oh, it's the nuclear weapon, it's this and that, it's this and that.
[00:40:41]  It is at its essence, it's radical Islam.
[00:40:44]  I'm not saying that we should have gone at the time we went or how we went.
[00:40:48]  That's a discussion for another day.
[00:40:51]  But you cannot talk about what's happened in Persian Iran without getting to the core of it, that this is one of the most radical, if not the most radical part of Islam in this whole thing with the Mahdi and the Imam.
[00:41:06]  And it almost seems like people, oh my gosh, we got to go back after 9-11.
[00:41:09]  We have to go back after, you know, after the Iraq war, after during the Iraq war, or during the time President Trump put the travel ban in.
[00:41:19]  We have to go back and study it.
[00:41:20]  Yes, you have to, because a lot of Westerners, like people in London, the elites in London, people in Norway, people in Sweden, people in New York City, some people in Texas, they believe if you just don't confront it and you look the other way, it's going to take care of itself and everything is going to be fine.
[00:41:40]  I'm here to disabuse you of that.
[00:41:43]  And I can point to some of the smartest people in the world and some of the best researchers and writers in the world that give you a historical record where that is the exact, that definitely does not work.
[00:41:54]  In fact, it will lead you to be conquered.
[00:41:57]  Raymond, in the time we have left now, given your historical perspective of their previous invasions, do we have a fighting chance, given the weak-willed nature of our elites and our political systems in the Christian West, and particularly the United States of America, to combat this, to stop it, and then to reverse it, sir?
[00:42:18]  I think, you know, the West has definitely the material forces, the economy to do what needs to be done.
[00:42:26]  But it's, as you say, the question is the will.
[00:42:28]  And I don't know because the way I see it, I see things from a very kind of zoomed out, long view with historical continuities.
[00:42:40]  And if you look even at the West, just the last 50 years, 60, 70 years, it's a continuous downhill.
[00:42:46]  And there's, you know, it's locked, it's connected with its civilizational degradation, okay?
[00:42:52]  It's culture, its morals.
[00:42:54]  You know, this, it's funny.

=== Mystery of Seventh Century Conquests (02:40) ===

[00:42:56]  I don't know if I've mentioned this to you before, but the historical Islamic conquests that we know that we were talking about in the seventh century, you know, historians still really can't give you an answer how it happened because Eastern Roman Empire, the Persian Sasanians were very powerful.
[00:43:10]  And no one really, how can some, you know, just a small band of Arabs described even in Muslim sources as just having, you know, being naked and whatever weapons they can find, how could they conquer two empires and then overrun all these massive lands?
[00:43:24]  And, you know, today's historians can't give you a good answer, but they'll come up with something and I can give you what they say.
[00:43:29]  But the Christians of the time who lived there, they were convinced it was God's punishment, that God had raised these people up to chastise them for their sins.
[00:43:40]  And ironically, the most influential writing, it's known as the Apocalypse by Pseudo-Methodius.
[00:43:46]  And it was published around 690 at the height of the Arab conquests.
[00:43:50]  It came out in Syriac, but it continued influencing Christians.
[00:43:53]  Even in 1683 at the Siege of Vienna, it was being translated and published within Vienna to explain why Christians were being attacked by the Turks.
[00:44:01]  And that one says not only because Christians had lost their way, but it was due to sexual immorality.
[00:44:08]  And it actually talked about men cross-dressing, women acting like men.
[00:44:12]  Okay.
[00:44:12]  And it was very, very hugely popular.
[00:44:14]  Now, of course, from a secular historical point of view, that's nonsense.
[00:44:17]  That's not why, you know, Islam prevailed.
[00:44:20]  But when I look at the current situation today, and I see the West is so much more powerful than Byzantium and the Persians were vis-a-vis Arabia.
[00:44:29]  The West now is much more powerful vis-a-vis the Islamic world.
[00:44:33]  And yet, look at what's happening.
[00:44:34]  Muslims are overrunning Europe.
[00:44:37]  They're having their way.
[00:44:39]  Churches are allowing them to come in and proclaim the Shahada.
[00:44:42]  While like you said, it's a one-way sort of cultural or religious dialogue.
[00:44:48]  So I'm wondering to what extent is this the punishment of God?
[00:44:52]  Because you know, centuries down the line, you know, when the world completely changed, posterity will look back.
[00:44:58]  And this will be an even greater mystery than the original seventh century conquest, because all they'll know is, well, we know that Europe and the West was really, really powerful.
[00:45:06]  And we know that Muslim world wasn't and that there were migrants, but somehow or other they took over.
[00:45:12]  And it's really a mystery.
[00:45:13]  So I wonder if it's the same reason given by pseudo-Methodius in the apocalypse, which is, you know, complete immorality, turning away from God, highlighted and underscored, especially by sexual, gender-confused type of immorality.
[00:45:28]  Raymond, where is your institute now?
[00:45:31]  Where do they get you for your writings and where do they go for you, particularly for your books?

=== Recommended Books (02:13) ===

[00:45:36]  Thanks, Steve.
[00:45:37]  My books, you can probably get the easiest way to get them is on Amazon, Sword and Scimitar, Defenders of the West, Two Swords of Christ.
[00:45:44]  There's other books I've written as well.
[00:45:46]  And I also have a substack.
[00:45:48]  You can follow me there.
[00:45:49]  It's just my name, Raymond Ibrahim.
[00:45:51]  And I also have a YouTube station where you can see my talk that I gave at the Oxford and also the interesting question I was asked.
[00:46:02]  No, we didn't have a chance to put up the questions.
[00:46:05]  We're going to put that up on our live streams.
[00:46:07]  Questions were quite interesting.
[00:46:09]  Look forward to having you back and particularly updates as we work through this kinetic conflict in ancient Persia.
[00:46:16]  Raymond, thank you so much for joining us, sir.
[00:46:18]  Appreciate you always.
[00:46:20]  Thank you, Steve.
[00:46:23]  Can't recommend those books enough.
[00:46:25]  They're page turners.
[00:46:25]  You feel you're reading novels.
[00:46:27]  It's just really, really, really amazing.
[00:46:32]  We're going to be back at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time tomorrow.
[00:46:37]  There's absolutely so much going on.
[00:46:39]  We're trying to cover it all either on the show or during the live streams or up on Getter later.
[00:46:44]  So make sure that you stay there.
[00:46:46]  I can't recommend enough now taught in graduate schools at a major university in this country, The End of the Dollar Empire.
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[00:47:43]  Okay, short, not short commercial break, a long break.
[00:47:46]  We'll see you tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
[00:47:49]  Would be back in the war