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Aug. 17, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
37:55
The Fight for Christian Refugees
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
It's Doug Collins.
Welcome back to the podcast.
You know, we've talked a lot recently about the issues going on around the world.
In fact, we just did a recent podcast on the Taliban coming back and wanting more out of Afghanistan.
We see the heartache and pain and suffering that's going on really after last year and the pullout that we've had.
We also, though, there's a lot still going on in the Middle East, a lot still going on around the world with Affected folks, and especially Christians in the Middle East.
And today, I'm excited to have Max Wood.
Max is a guy here from a good Georgia guy, an Air Force guy.
We're going to find out a lot, an attorney.
We share a lot in common in a lot of different ways, just in different circles of life.
But he's got a great thing that he works on in a forum and non-profit.
We want him to let him talk about that.
But this goes back to really the heart of what we deal with here, and that is, you know, Welcome to the podcast today.
Thank you for having me, Doug.
This is a real pleasure.
Well, let's start off on a little bit of background.
I always like to go as a how did you get here kind of thing.
And I just shared in our intro here that we share the Air Force.
You've retired, I think, as a colonel out of the Air Force Reserve, out of Robbins, where I'm actually stationed as well.
Sort of how did you get your background?
You're also a UGA law grad.
Go Dawgs.
We're all happy.
Still the national champions.
We've got 30-something days left.
We're happy.
Yeah.
Enjoy it while you can.
There we go.
Give us a little bit of the background for our listeners on who you are and just sort of where you come from.
I grew up in Clayton County, just south of Atlanta.
I went to LaGrange College, and then I went to the University of Georgia Law School.
I clerked for a judge up in Rome, Georgia, right out of law school, and then I decided to become an Air Force Judge Advocate and try to see a little bit of the world.
I was an Air Force Judge Advocate for A number of years, got out, stayed in the Reserve National Guard, went back and forth between the two, and ended up settling in Macon, Georgia.
I was in private practice in Macon, Georgia for a few years.
Then I was appointed by President George W. Bush to be the United States Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia.
In 2001, and that really changed my life.
I got involved in the federal prosecution.
I got involved in the political world.
And while there, I deployed to Iraq, Baghdad, Iraq, to represent the Department of Justice at the embassy.
There were very few United States attorneys who had military background.
They recognized I'd be an asset.
I said I would do it.
And that changed my life, too.
And while serving in Iraq at the embassy, overseeing all the Department of Justice, we had 250 people over there, Doug, at that time.
We were working in the court system, prison system, police system, training, all kinds of things.
Max, what year were you in Iraq?
2004, 2005. Okay, you're about two years ahead of me there.
Yeah, I was a young man.
You were right in the heart of it.
Well, I was right in the embassy, which was probably, as far as intrigue is concerned, where the most intrigue was, but it probably was a lot safer than some other places, quite candidly, so I thank the good Lord for that.
But I became exposed to the plight of Christians in Iraq, and I did not know The cultural history of Middle Eastern Christianity at all.
And it was very profound.
I am a Christian, and I was involved in the chapel program when time permitted.
And I became aware of the work of an English pastor at a church called St. George's Church in Baghdad.
And that just led to more and more engagement, trying to help the church financially.
And then when I came home from Iraq, I was contacted by another veteran who had similar experiences and dynamic impression of the plight of Christians.
He cobbled together a group of seven people.
Four of us had served in Iraq, including he and I, and he formed a charity.
It's called the American Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East.
It's a long title.
I didn't vote for that title, by the way, but that's the title.
We started in 2010. And have been doing various things for Iraqi Christians ever since.
And the big thing, Doug, that I kind of wanted to be on your show today for was in August of 2014, our charity had to pivot and help tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians who were forced to flee their homeland by ISIS. The summer of 2014, for those who remember, was the ISIS summer.
They ran roughshod in northern Iraq, northern Syria.
There was a power vacuum.
I'll stay away from the politics of it unless you want to go into it, but there was a power vacuum there.
We'll get into it.
It was a complete disaster.
It was a complete disaster.
I will exercise my First Amendment rights if you ask.
But, you know, there was a power vacuum.
ISIS took over a lot of areas, and they particularly targeted Christians.
And on August the 6th, which was Saturday, which was the 8th anniversary was this past Saturday, in 2014, they came to the town of Karakash, which was the biggest majority Christian town in Iraq.
50,000 estimated people.
And, uh, their modus operandi was to give you a few hours to leave town or be killed unless you want to convert to Islam.
And, uh, 50,000 people, that's hard to imagine, you know, that that's enough to fill the old Atlanta stadium that Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run in.
That's enough to fill that, that stadium.
And, and they left all at once.
And, uh, I've gotten to know some of those refugees, and it was totally chaotic, totally traumatic.
And so we began helping those refugees in a variety of ways.
And now, after almost eight years of help, eight years since the event, and then we've been helping for about seven years now, we have a center in Malabai, Jordan, which is just outside Amman, Jordan, where we work with refugees.
Most of the refugees fled to Jordan.
Some fled to Turkey.
Some fled to Syria.
Some fled north.
You know this.
You served over there.
Some fled north into Kurdistan, which is an autonomous region of Iraq.
But frankly, it's just Iraq in name only.
They run their own business up there.
And so a lot of them went up there.
But now keep in mind, that's a different culture.
They speak Kurdish, not Arabic.
And they were allowed to stay there unmolested, but it'd be like us going to Mexico.
And then some maneuvered their way around the ISIS forces and got into Baghdad, where you have all kinds of mix of people.
We work with the ones in Jordan.
If we had money, we'd work with more.
If we had more money, we'd work with more.
We built a center called an olive tree center.
It's just a building that we rent.
We didn't build it.
We rent it.
We offer classes, which sounds kind of mundane, but it's huge for these folks.
They are in Jordan.
They cannot work on the economy.
They are allowed to stay, but they have to be dependent on third parties.
They can get relief from the United Nations.
They can get relief from other charities.
The Catholic Charity, I believe it's Catholic, Kairos is over there.
There are a lot of charities over there, including us.
And they can get help from these charities, but they can't work.
And that, particularly for men and particularly in that culture, that's very difficult for them.
So they're physically safe, but they're dealing with all kinds of trauma.
They're dealing with economic challenges, emotional problems in the family.
You know, that culture, men aren't safe.
They're not schooled to go deal with their feelings.
They're not schooled to go see a counselor.
That's just totally foreign to them, to go to a pastor or a priest and talk about things.
So our activities in this place, in this auditory center, are very helpful for them.
We offer English lessons, which is a big, big popular program there.
They want to speak English.
They all want to come to the United States legally.
And we offer cooking classes for the women.
We offer art classes for the children.
We offer piano lessons, guitar lessons, and these children are just flocking to learn these things.
We offer, let's see, we offer some arts and crafts kind of thing.
And then every August the 6th, They have a commemoration event.
They had one this past Saturday, which was August the 6th, where they remind themselves of this day.
This is to them what September 11th is to you and I. It's a day that changed their country forever, changed their life forever.
It affected their freedoms forever.
It affected them economically forever.
And so they have, at Theology Center, they have a little commemoration.
It's bittersweet.
They want to honor those that were killed, that did not get out alive.
But they also want to be thankful to their Savior, the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, that brought them through this desert experience, if you will, literally for them, across the desert into Jordan.
And they want to celebrate their faith that has sustained them during very difficult years.
Particularly when they were sleeping on the side of the road when they were homeless and didn't have any food.
They were packing four families into a minivan.
It was just a nightmare scenario of evacuation.
Take Savannah evacuating for a hurricane and make it...
Ten times worse.
And that's what these people were going through.
And so that's what we do is help those folks out.
And that's why, frankly, Doug, I sought you out because I'd heard about your podcast.
And I thought that this might be a good vehicle to remind a Christian family, a Christian friendly audience of people.
What is out there?
The labor is plentiful, but the laborers are few.
And I appreciate the opportunity to talk about what we do.
Well, Max, that's what we're going to do.
And we'll have a chance later on to tell people how you're going to get involved in this and people who listen to the podcast all over the country and literally all over the world can be a part of this.
And if you have any questions, folks, I know you're listening to the podcast.
You can always go to the DougCollinsPodcast.com.
There's an email button right there.
You just hit that email button.
Uh, send me an email because it comes directly to me.
In fact, that's how Max and I actually got.
Although we're in the same state and know a lot of the same folks, that was the easiest way for him to get to me.
Max, let me go back to a few things that you talked about there because I really want to dive into this because one of the things, one quick question though, why in Jordan are they not allowed to work?
Jordan is a monarchy.
What the king says, everybody else does.
He's a good guy, but I would assume, Doug, that he doesn't want them taking jobs away from Jordan's citizens.
Clearly, they would undercut with wages and things like that.
Candidly, one or two will work On the wink-wink.
And that's not good, but if your family's starving, you know, it's a day labor kind of thing.
They'll go work a day for somebody and get some cash and be able to take care of their family, but we don't want them to do that because they risk being deported, and then they have to go back to Iraq.
So that's why.
That's why they can't work.
They're willing to work.
They were.
Hell yeah.
And look, from being there, I was in Balad.
So I was up north of...
I was in sort of in between the Kurdish area and Mosul and, of course, Baghdad.
We were in the triangle area up there where Saddam was from, actually.
And before we go any further, you said that you had an interesting...
We talked offline that there was your time in Iraq, which gets us back to a lot of things because I want to know, you know, what's the situation there?
You know, going back and also everybody to...
I want to have a good, frank discussion on why they had to leave, because people need to hear how a group like ISIS, with relatively few members, were able to control cities of 50,000.
And it's very brutal.
It's very graphic, but that's what happened.
In looking at that, tell us your Saddam story.
Okay, I have told this to many people.
I spoke at the graduation of my alma mater this spring.
I told this story.
This is a true story.
I was not involved in the Saddam trial, but I did oversee the U.S. Marshals who oversaw the security at the Saddam trial.
So that was my peripheral connection.
And so they invited me to come watch the trial for one day.
So I went and watched the trial.
And it was quite a show.
It was not a trial.
It was a circus.
So the circus ended that day after about four hours.
And I was watching from a kind of a VIP watching room elevated over the courtroom.
And, you know, Saddam had six other defendants, you may recall.
And so they brought them in one at a time.
They brought Saddam in last.
And, you know, Saddam would yell at the judge.
It wasn't an American-style trial by any means.
I felt like I was watching Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali boxing.
But when it was all over with, the chief of the security motioned me to follow him down onto the courtroom floor.
And I had been in the courthouse while it was under construction.
So I was in the courtroom in that period of time after the judges had left, but before the defendants had been taken out.
And so the last one they brought in was Saddam, and the first one they were going to take out was from Saddam because, you know, once Saddam left, everybody kind of relaxed, and when Saddam came in, everybody kind of got uptight.
So they were literally bringing Saddam out of the courtroom, and I realized they were going to bring him right by me.
I was standing at the doorway that they had brought the prisoners in, and I had about a 45-second debate with myself about whether to slug Saddam Hussein.
And I swear on the gospel.
I thought about it for no less than 30, no more than 45 seconds as he was walking toward me.
Because, Doug, when am I ever going to get a chance like this again?
You're right.
In fact, that was in February of 2006. And...
Or 2005. I may have my years off by one.
But that was in February.
He was executed the next December.
So I knew it was a dead man walking.
So I really thought about punching him when he came by.
And Doug, he came as close to me as my face is to this computer screen of mine on my desk when he walked by.
We were the same height.
I'm 6'2".
He was 6'2".
And he's very tall for an Iraqi.
And he walked by, and I wanted to make eye contact with him, and he would not make eye contact with me.
And, of course, I didn't hit him.
You would have heard about it if I had.
Yeah, you might still have a lot of repercussions on that one.
That's why I didn't do it.
I do tell people I would have become a B celebrity.
You know, I'd have been on reality shows as the guy that hits.
Or you could have thrown your shoe like the guy who threw it at Bush, you know?
But that's a true story, and I enjoy telling that.
And when I speak to young people, I tell it because I tell them that, you know, you're always making choices in life, and there are repercussions to your choices.
And there would have been negative and some positive repercussions, perhaps, if I had hit Saddam Hussein.
I know my brothers would have loved it.
But that's a true story.
I love it.
Well, let's get back.
It's funny to see the kind of things like that, especially because up where I was at in Balad, and I've shared this before, we were at a hospital.
That was the main hospital for Iraq, especially for our soldiers and airmen and sailors, all Marines are in there.
And so I was there a great deal.
And it was built in what was the, the hospital was an offshoot of what was the Air Force kind of academy, if you would, for the Iraqis.
And it was also, though, where Uday and Qusey, the sons of Saddam, who really terrorized a lot of the world, And a lot of Saddam's forces, they had their torture rooms there.
And I've talked about that if you went down in the basement there, you could actually feel General Boykin, Jerry Boykin, and I talked about this just the other day when he was on the podcast, about that feeling of evil, that just pervasiveness that you feel when you go in there.
And you could feel it.
And it was so interesting that we had turned it into a hospital.
I bring that up because I want to turn serious for just a minute as far as...
The refugees didn't just leave because they didn't like the conditions, the food.
It was because they were under threat of death.
And ISIS in particular, They could send literally 10 to 15 people in and can control thousands of people because of the brutality of what they would do.
And this dark day that they talk about, that they commemorate on August 6th, is literally they would kill people, they would rape, they would take families away.
Max, tell us, convey to the podcast listener how just...
This wasn't an option for them in a sense of staying and fighting.
They just wasn't in that position.
Right.
I mean, the word had already spread that they were coming.
And of course, they were all praying that they would go in another direction.
But they came.
But ISIS had incorporated a number of eschatological symbols of the Muslim faith.
The black flag was a symbol that's mentioned in the Koran when the final battle is had.
Two of the first villages that they took are two villages that are mentioned in the Koran as where great battles are going to happen during the final battle for Earth.
So they did this end of the world appeal and got some of the wackiest of the wacky of the Islamic radicals from all around the world.
And they would go into an area and just start killing people.
And they would kill Muslims that didn't agree with them.
We found our intelligence people, after we killed Osama bin Laden, we found, and Jay Sekulow covered this, I believe, in one of his books, That Osama bin Laden was criticizing ISIS for being too mean.
And when Osama bin Laden is criticizing you for being too evil, you are evil.
And they just were brutal.
And they would kill Christians.
They would leave their bodies in the street, put a sign on it, you know, saying, if anybody tries to move this body, we'll kill you too.
They would do massive rapes, kidnapping of women.
It was just evil in its most vicious personification.
And I got involved in helping these people partly because I feel American policy contributed to this.
Particularly the Obama administration.
You know, Bush going in there clearly disrupted the country.
And I didn't like everything that we did over there, even though I served in the Bush administration.
I still have a brain and I can make my own decisions.
And there were some things we did over there with 20-20 hindsight that I think were wrong.
But then the Obama administration came in and left way too soon.
I was a military lawyer for 30 years.
They left with an incredibly hapless status of forces agreement that was useless, that was drafted by the State Department.
It didn't allow us to really do anything to protect our own people, so we started taking our people out.
We got out too soon, and ISIS filled the vacuum.
ISIS was led by a very conservative, radical iman.
And Baghdadi had brothers who had been officers in the Iraqi military under Saddam.
And so they were able to access military savvy people to help run this organization.
And so they had people in there that knew how to operate a military organization and knew how to train people and knew how to Organized people, and they were quite a formidable force, particularly when they're going into areas of Iraq that have been peaceful ever since World War I. So, it was brutal.
And Max, I think that's something interesting to point out.
Everybody thinks about Iraq as just, you know, we think about Iraq and war.
It's as if every place in Iraq was in turmoil and war.
And the reality was, it was not.
It was around the bigger cities.
It was around, you know, you have Mosul, Tikrit.
You had, you know, around the places.
You had the attacks on the convoys, Baghdad.
You go down to the south, Al-Assad and the rest.
But there were a vast majority of people.
And this was, I think, interesting.
You alluded to this earlier.
A lot of the people...
I remember asking one of my interpreters one night, you know, did he ever have any contact with Saddam Hussein?
And he said...
And he made an interesting comment.
He said, none of us...
He said, it's like your president.
We don't know him.
I mean, it was like...
And he said...
He was working with us and he said, we appreciate America's help.
He said, but you have to understand...
We used to get in our car here in Balad and drive all the way to the coast and nothing would happen.
And he said, now we can't go anywhere without fear of being killed.
Max, did you experience that a little bit with some of the Iraqi, just normal citizenry?
Yes.
Before we went in, the radical Islamic groups did not have a toehold under Saddam.
And just like there are other secular autocrats in the Middle East, Syria being a good example, that keep the radical Islamists at bay, and Saddam did the same thing.
So when we took out Saddam, There was a power vacuum, and evil tends to fill that power vacuum.
The Nineveh province is the area that we're talking about.
That's a province of Iraq.
It's near the city of Mosul, and the city of Mosul, as you know, being a theologian, is across the Tigris River from the ancient city of Nineveh, where Jonah was called to preach.
So there is tons of biblical history there.
The Apostle Thomas came through that area in the first century AD and converted many of these locals into Christianity.
And there have been Christianity in what they call the Nineveh province or the Nineveh plain.
Ever since.
And this is an agricultural area.
It's kind of similar to Kansas.
It's kind of flat and doesn't get a lot of rain, but it can grow wheat.
It can grow other crops, and it's an agriculturally oriented community.
And they were very peaceful with all their neighbors, their Muslim neighbors.
Ethnically, it's a mix of Arabs, Kurds, and Turks, because this was part of the Ottoman Empire hundreds of years ago.
And then there's a group called Yazidis, which is an organic religious group of over a half a million people that are basically only found in the Kurdistan area.
They got along with everybody.
So they lived in peace, even under Saddam.
And Saddam didn't bother them because they were not political.
And so then we come along and we take out Saddam for good reason.
But for every action, some guy named Einstein said for every action, there's a reaction.
And the reaction was a power vacuum in the country.
And then when we pulled out, premature in my opinion, you had a situation where you had a Shia-led government in Baghdad.
And these areas were primarily governed by Sunni bureaucrats and Sunni military.
Well, the ISIS military was primarily Sunni.
So their allegiance to the Sunni religious sect was stronger than their allegiance to the country of Iraq.
That's hard for us to identify with.
But that was part of the problem.
So you didn't have much resistance going up in the northern areas of Iraq by the military because they were Sunni.
They had more in common with the Sunni Muslim Isis fighters than they did with their own country's army.
Part of that is because they realized the Isis military was stronger than the Iraqi military in those parts of Iraq.
There's a philosophy in the Middle East that everybody wants to ride the strongest horse.
They look at who's going to win and that's who they go for.
We contributed that with our policies, and so that weighs on me as an American, and it's one of the reasons I stick with working in the Middle East.
And frankly, you know this as a pastor.
I've spoken to a lot of pastors trying to get them to help us, and they don't want to have anything to do with the Middle East.
They say, this place is so messed up, it's not going to get fixed until Jesus comes back.
But I'm one of the few that hang in there, and there's others, and It dominates my spare time.
I've worked for the federal government.
I've taken leave today for this podcast, but in my spare time, I do as much for this group as I can, and there are many others also.
All right.
Well, you've been talking about this, and I've talked about it a great deal here on the podcast, about the two withdrawals.
You've got Obama's withdrawal out of Iraq and the Satisforces Agreement.
This just led to really the disaster of ISIS, and it's been repeated now, and I think Max, just, you know, not from the perspective of what we're looking at, but a perspective that Biden basically did the exact same thing in Afghanistan.
And I think, you know, as history will judge, no matter what the economics and everything else, Americans and the world lost a great deal of faith in the Biden administration by what has happened.
And like I said, we're a year, literally sitting here a year out of the Taliban being not just back in control of Afghanistan, but stronger than they were before 9-11 in many ways.
Why is it that we seem to be missing this withdrawal part?
I mean, and you saw it firsthand, you know, with these refugees you're working now.
I think we're going to have the same thing.
We are having the same thing in Afghanistan.
We get into things, but we've gotten really bad at leaving things.
Yeah.
You know, Andrew Breitbart said that politics follows culture.
And our culture is very much an instant gratification culture.
And it's part of the secularism that's coming into our country as opposed to Judeo-Christian ethics.
And so that's reflected in political leadership that has to deal or feels they have to deal with a situation overseas militarily.
And so they go for that instant gratification so that they can fix whatever the problem perceived or real is.
And they never consider how to get out.
You know, when I was in college, Doug, I was in charge of putting on concerts at our college.
And I had to work with these long haired hippie roadies, you know, kind of guys and stage managers.
And one of them said to me something that I wish Obama and President Bush and Biden had listened to.
He says, I never go into it because I said, do you need me to tell you how to get back to the interstate after the concert?
You know, he says, I never come into a town without knowing the way out.
That's a good point.
Because sometimes I have to get out in a hurry.
That's just a simple wisdom that I think we've got to learn as a body politic to figure out, to make sure that whether it's Republican or Democrat, when you go into a foreign country, You know, you have an exit plan.
And for some reason, the media and Congress, frankly, and the American people perhaps don't do a good enough job of demanding an exit plan.
And even if Biden or Trump President Obama had simply said, I'm waiting for the situation on the ground to be, you know, appropriate to exit.
I'm talking with my military advisors to see, you know, we will leave when the situation on the ground is conducive to us leaving.
That would be a huge improvement over what we saw in both Iraq and particularly Afghanistan.
I mean, I think, I never thought I'd see anything worse than the helicopters leaving the top of the embassy in Saigon.
When I was 13 years old, but this was worse.
Yeah, we just did.
Yeah, this was worse.
A couple of quick questions and a final sort of question.
Besides sort of the turmoil in Iraq and the things that are going on, what would...
Because if somebody's sitting there saying, well, why now?
Because ISIS has been pushed back.
ISIS has been, from its form of five or six years ago, after Trump gave new rules of engagement and the world started looking at it, What's keeping them from going back?
Good question.
And we're starting to ask them the same thing.
Now, 20,000 have gone back.
We estimate 20,000 have gone back to the Nineveh province.
So we're really down to about 20,000 to 30,000 in Jordan now that could go back.
They tell us there's not enough economic opportunity, so we're involved with working with other foundations to rebuild small businesses in the Nineveh province.
We've contributed to about a dozen of those provinces working with a British foundation, and now we're going to start working with a New York State foundation that does just agricultural projects in the Nineveh plain.
So that's one component.
But we are going to draw down our support for the food distribution because we are going to slowly encourage them to consider going back.
I don't want the Iraqi Christians to become like the Palestinian refugees are in Jordan, where they're in their fourth generation now.
And they have no concept of civil society and Jeffersonian democracy, and they never will because they're now the third generation of dependency and anger and frustration and lashing out.
And that is a ripe area for developing radical Islamic terrorists.
And those radical Islamic terrorists go into these refugee communities and get these suicide bombers because they have nothing else.
Unfortunately, there's not a lot of leeway for Christian evangelism in these areas, and that's unfortunate, but we take it one step at a time.
That's what we're trying to nudge this group toward.
They've been living for seven years.
They're trying to immigrate, Doug.
They're all trying to go to America.
And we were trying to tell them subtly, because we haven't lived what they've gone through, that you need to start considering going back to Iraq.
And that scares the you-know-what out of a lot of them, because they went through hell.
Well, they remember how they left.
And that is it.
If people want to get, Max, people want to get involved with the American Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, how do they do that?
Our website is the word American and then FRRME.org.
I'll say that again if I can.
The word American, then FRRME.org.
We use the acronym American Free Me today.
We've discussed shortening the title.
We just decided to shorten it to American Freemie.
But we have debates about that every year at our annual meeting.
But the word American, F-R-R-M-E dot O-R-G is our website.
You can donate on our website.
You can get more into the weeds and the details of what we do.
We don't just do work in Jordan.
We do work in Baghdad.
We need to work in the Nineveh province of Iraq also.
That is great.
Well, Max, you brought an attention of something that is a very painful history for many of these Iraqi Christians, but it's also something in the world that if you look around, that we are called to care about those.
And even in a place like the Middle East, which is always up and down politically, and then with the issues of war and things.
It is something where people can get involved, and I encourage you to go to that website.
I'll put it in the show notes, so if people want to click in to go to the show notes.
Max, a great conversation.
I appreciate you letting us know about this, and thanks for being part of the podcast.
Thank you for letting me.
Look forward to seeing you somewhere down the road.
Look forward to it.
All right, folks, this is a great way for you to get involved.
Also learning more about what's going on around the world.
And, you know, it just reminds us that the world is still a very upsetting and dangerous place and that there are people who don't like the freedoms that we have here.
Find your place.
Find your hope.
That's why we need to continue to be told about things that are going on in the Middle East so you can get involved.
We'll see you next time on Doug Collins Podcast.
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