The Delingpod - James Delingpole - Firas Modad
Aired: 2026-04-14
Duration: 02:10:16


=== Brand Zero Naturals Sponsorship (02:44) ===

[00:00:01]  James.
[00:00:13]  Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpole.
[00:00:17]  And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but before we meet him, let's have a quick word from our sponsor.
[00:00:24]  If you're down the rabbit hole, which you probably are, otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this podcast, you've probably gone through your medicine cabinets and your bathroom cabinets and chucked out all the big pharma, evil products, and you've replaced them with natural products, like the stuff that I've got in my cabinets, which is from.
[00:00:46]  Brand Zero.
[00:00:47]  If you've been to any of my live events, you may even have seen the Brand Zero stool run by the lovely Sasha, and it sells all manner of stuff that you actually want in your home and to put on your skin pain balm, arnica gel, dagmus honey from Morocco.
[00:01:02]  Well, actually, that's more for eating than putting on your skin.
[00:01:04]  CBD hot chocolate, magnesium butter, organic bee pollen, beeswax balms.
[00:01:10]  Nice stuff.
[00:01:11]  There's a good story about how the company started.
[00:01:15]  It was during the pandemic, and all the people were having to put on these.
[00:01:20]  Horrible hand sanitizers were getting their skin all cracked and dry and horrible.
[00:01:25]  And Sasha had this great idea of having a sort of fundraiser to provide local nurses near Stroud, where she lives, with soothing beeswax balms.
[00:01:37]  So it was just a kind of altruistic gesture.
[00:01:39]  And over 1,000 nurses and carers across the Stroud area ended up getting these soothing beeswax balms.
[00:01:45]  And this developed into a business of massage oils, bath oils, shampoo bars, aromatherapy oils, organic.
[00:01:51]  Handmade soaps and so on.
[00:01:52]  All of it made with natural ingredients, no nasties, no cruelty to animals.
[00:01:57]  And now Brand Zero Naturals is going great guns.
[00:02:01]  So you can find them at BrandZeroNaturals.co.uk.
[00:02:05]  That's BrandZeroNaturals.co.uk.
[00:02:08]  I love their stuff and they're really popular as well.
[00:02:11]  Loads of people buy their stuff.
[00:02:12]  I think you'll like them if you don't use their stuff already.
[00:02:15]  BrandZeroNaturals.co.uk.
[00:02:18]  Welcome to the Delling Pod, Fearous Mardardard.
[00:02:24]  We have much to talk about.
[00:02:25]  I wish.
[00:02:26]  In a way, I wish we didn't have so much to talk about.
[00:02:28]  I wish things were just so boring that we were trying to work out what we might say.
[00:02:31]  Yes.
[00:02:32]  Yes.
[00:02:33]  That would be, that would be an improvement on the current status quo.
[00:02:37]  But, but God has decided in his wisdom that we're not going to get that relaxed, relaxed time.

=== Ottoman Secularization and Genocide (09:47) ===

[00:02:45]  Um, but before we start talking about geopolitics, I'd, I'd like to learn more about you.
[00:02:53]  Um, you're, you're Lebanese.
[00:02:55]  I'm Lebanese.
[00:02:57]  Um, so my first question to you would be, Are you old enough to remember the period when Lebanon was one of the most beautiful places on the Mediterranean and life was good?
[00:03:13]  No, I was born after the Civil War had started.
[00:03:17]  And I was born in Jordan, actually, because my family had to leave Lebanon.
[00:03:24]  So, yeah, I was born after the Civil War started when the decline was in full swing.
[00:03:31]  But your parents must have told you.
[00:03:34]  Yes.
[00:03:35]  About the glory days.
[00:03:36]  What was it?
[00:03:37]  What did they say?
[00:03:39]  I mean, the one thing that they missed most of all was just law and order and a state that people feared.
[00:03:47]  Um, it's, it's good to be afraid of the state.
[00:03:50]  It's good for there to be law and order.
[00:03:52]  It's good for there to be, uh, functioning institutions.
[00:03:57]  Um, you had an era where, unlike now, police were respected and, uh, the authorities were capable and the state was able to do what it wanted to do, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:04:11]  And, um, that was a much better time.
[00:04:17]  Was the, I don't know what period, when was the golden era, would you say?
[00:04:23]  So that would be the 60s, uh, for the most part.
[00:04:29]  But I mean, there's a bit of mythology about Lebanon's golden era.
[00:04:33]  Okay.
[00:04:33]  It was great, um, in a certain sense.
[00:04:38]  It was also a time of deep instability.
[00:04:42]  So Lebanon got independence in 1943.
[00:04:46]  The first election was in 1948, and that was rigged.
[00:04:51]  In 1952, there was a mini uprising.
[00:04:56]  In 1958, there was a mini civil war.
[00:05:01]  By the 60s, the Palestinians had become more powerful and become a bigger problem.
[00:05:08]  And so the Christians became arming themselves because they thought that they were being dispossessed.
[00:05:13]  By 1969, 70, the Palestinians had militarily entered into Lebanon.
[00:05:23]  And become a much bigger problem.
[00:05:25]  And in 75, the war broke out, but it was an accumulation of one thing after the other, which really all began in 1948 with the expulsion of the Palestinians from, uh, the nation state of Israel and then accelerated.
[00:05:45]  That's what sort of shifted the demographic balance.
[00:05:49]  And that's what, um, really created irreconcilable differences.
[00:05:56]  Between irreconcilable political differences between the Muslims and the Christians, because the Christians wanted to find a way to stay out of it, whereas the Muslims believed that this was their war.
[00:06:09]  Right, right.
[00:06:12]  I mean, ultimately, as with all Middle Eastern politics, it's really about power politics being played by, well, I suppose the French, the Americans, and the British, and obviously the Israelis.
[00:06:31]  I mean, they wanted to destabilize their neighbors, didn't they?
[00:06:36]  So there are layers to that.
[00:06:39]  All political differences are theological differences.
[00:06:43]  And you can't separate the religion from the power politics.
[00:06:47]  You're able to play power politics in a country if it's divided.
[00:06:51]  Usually if it's divided ethnically or religiously.
[00:06:54]  Yeah.
[00:06:55]  Religion can patch over ethnic differences.
[00:07:00]  Sometimes.
[00:07:01]  For certain periods.
[00:07:03]  But nothing can patch over religious differences.
[00:07:06]  And if you have a religious disagreement, it usually means that it will translate into a fight over Who gets to decide?
[00:07:18]  Because ultimately, what religion tells you is what is good.
[00:07:22]  Religion is the answer to the question, to many, many questions, but among them, what is good and what is right and what should we be doing, therefore, in light of what is right and good?
[00:07:37]  So, when you have a religious disagreement, it by definition translates into a political disagreement.
[00:07:45]  Yeah.
[00:07:46]  Well, I can see that.
[00:07:47]  So before the Civil War, Lebanon was predominantly Christian?
[00:07:55]  50 50 or 6 5 almost.
[00:08:02]  Because Mount Lebanon was always majority Christian.
[00:08:05]  Yeah.
[00:08:06]  But as part of the First World War, the Ottomans starved Mount Lebanon, which is one of the genocides that nobody speaks about.
[00:08:16]  Only a third of the population.
[00:08:21]  That was the Turks.
[00:08:22]  The Turks starved to death a third of Mount Lebanon's population.
[00:08:29]  Liming.
[00:08:30]  What numbers are we talking?
[00:08:32]  A few hundred thousand people?
[00:08:35]  A couple of hundred thousand people killed?
[00:08:38]  Right.
[00:08:39]  And they were never called to account for this?
[00:08:43]  No, no, no.
[00:08:43]  Of course not.
[00:08:44]  They're not held to account for the Armenian genocide.
[00:08:46]  They're not held to account for the Assyrian genocide.
[00:08:49]  And they're not held to account for the genocide of the Christians.
[00:08:52]  The strange part of that is that it was largely because the Ottoman state was trying to secularize and modernize.
[00:09:00]  But to secularize and modernize, you had to impose the same identity on everyone.
[00:09:05]  So previously, they'd been trying to impose Turkification and make everybody into a Turk, which obviously wouldn't work.
[00:09:12]  And they hanged a bunch of people for saying, actually, no, we're not Turks.
[00:09:19]  Then that escalated during the World War into the genocides of the Christians, the three main Christian populations.
[00:09:29]  It didn't happen in the cities.
[00:09:31]  For the, for the most part, although obviously with the Armenians it happened everywhere.
[00:09:35]  Um, but it was a very deliberate, engineered mass murder of Christians to get rid of elements that couldn't integrate into the Ottoman state.
[00:09:48]  And the Christians that have survived now in the Christian population of Lebanon, are they Orthodox?
[00:09:57]  They are a mix.
[00:09:59]  The majority of the Christians are Maronites.
[00:10:03]  Which is an Eastern Catholic church.
[00:10:06]  So it follows a different rite than Latin Catholics, but it is in full communion with Rome.
[00:10:14]  The second biggest group is the Orthodox.
[00:10:17]  And the Orthodox are, you know, they are not as much of a unified force, shall we say, as the Maronites.
[00:10:29]  But really, you can't speak about Lebanon without speaking about the Maronite Christians as the major founders of Lebanon.
[00:10:36]  Alongside the Druze, my original community before I converted, um, who were also, they are basically a heretical Muslim sect.
[00:10:49]  Yeah.
[00:10:50]  Um, originally Shia.
[00:10:53]  And they have their own different views, shall we say.
[00:10:57]  They don't follow the sort of five pillars of Islam, uh, fasting, uh, praying five times a day, uh, et cetera, going to Hajj to Mecca, all of that stuff.
[00:11:07]  They're monogamous.
[00:11:09]  Unlike other Muslims, so you only get one wife, which is an upgrade, I'd argue.
[00:11:14]  And, um, they, they were the only ones who stayed in, uh, who maintained some kind of philosophical tradition in Islam.
[00:11:27]  Uh, the Shia, the rest of the Shia do, to be totally fair, but the Sunnis broke any kind of relationship between Islam and philosophy.
[00:11:37]  And people don't appreciate the importance of that issue.
[00:11:44]  Because when you break the link with philosophy, you break the link with reason.
[00:11:51]  Right.
[00:11:51]  So when did the.
[00:11:52]  Sorry, I'm taking you in all sorts of directions here, but everything you say is interesting.
[00:11:57]  When did.
[00:11:59]  Islam makes that, when did it depart from philosophy?
[00:12:04]  Between 900 and 1000 AD, the last attempt to revive it was in around 1100 in what was then Andalusia to try to sort of maintain some connection by Aberrosus Ibn Rushd, who argued in defense of philosophy, but he was not successful in changing the mainstream view.
[00:12:29]  And that's largely because of the nature of Islamic scripture.

=== The Attack on Tradition (04:19) ===

[00:12:33]  So in the second century AD, the church said that you could read the Old Testament allegorically, which is very important because it means that you don't have to go around looking for Noah's ark.
[00:12:47]  You have to understand that what the story of Noah teaches you is that when the world rots with corruption, there will be a cataclysm, a flood, And your duty, therefore,
[00:13:01]  is to build an ark for yourself and your family, to be strong enough to build an ark, to defend those around you, and to save as much of life as you can, as part of your duty towards the world, towards God, towards what is good.
[00:13:20]  If you read it this way, well, you know, the whole science versus religion thing, okay, it has a much deeper meaning and it has a very layered meaning, and indeed everything in the Bible The best children's stories, shall we say, are the ones that teach a philosophical lesson at the mental capacity of children.
[00:13:45]  And, for example, Little Red Riding Hood, it's a story about the viciousness of female degeneracy and the consequences of it, and how it can only be fixed by a man with an axe.
[00:14:01]  That's how you read that story.
[00:14:04]  Did you say female degeneracy?
[00:14:06]  Female degeneracy.
[00:14:07]  Female degeneracy.
[00:14:09]  When women become corrupted.
[00:14:13]  Is Red Riding Hood the example of female degeneracy?
[00:14:17]  Yes.
[00:14:18]  So if you look at the story, um, what's the story?
[00:14:22]  She's given a task.
[00:14:24]  She's told to fulfill her duty towards the elderly by caring for past generations.
[00:14:31]  And her elderly grandmother lives just at the entrance of the woods.
[00:14:36]  Under three oak trees, a trinity, tradition.
[00:14:42]  And instead of obeying and staying on the straight and narrow, she listens to a whisperer, the devil, a snake, the wolf.
[00:14:53]  He tells her to go and have fun, go and enjoy yourself.
[00:14:57]  And there's this beautiful line in the story where she's going to find the prettiest flowers, but the prettiest flowers are always furthest away.
[00:15:06]  What does that mean?
[00:15:08]  What that means is that when you engage in perversity, it becomes unsatisfying.
[00:15:14]  And therefore, you must go further and further down the path of perversity and degeneracy.
[00:15:20]  Eventually, you realize that it's a pointless path.
[00:15:23]  Your conscience torments you.
[00:15:24]  She remembers her grandmother and she decides to go back down that route.
[00:15:29]  But she finds that the snake, the wolf, the whisperer, the one who invites you to evil has consumed tradition.
[00:15:39]  The wolf ate her grandmother.
[00:15:41]  And then he eats her because that's the purpose of people who try to lead you astray to destroy your past and destroy your future.
[00:15:50]  That's why Keir Starmer is attacking the lords and he's attacking the farmers because they are, in a very real sense, the heirs to tradition.
[00:15:58]  And the fox hunters.
[00:15:59]  Let's not forget the fox hunting people.
[00:16:02]  And the fox hunting.
[00:16:03]  The attack on tradition is a conscious attack, it aims to erase your past so that it can control your future.
[00:16:11]  And the answer to that, the solution, is the man with the axe.
[00:16:17]  He lives in a village on the edge of the woods.
[00:16:20]  He's a woodsman.
[00:16:22]  So he is engaged in both the violence of nature and in civilization, meaning that he understands the difference between the two and can navigate both.
[00:16:33]  He's tender to his daughter and wife and family, but for the wolf, the axe.
[00:16:43]  That is brilliant.
[00:16:45]  I never expected that this podcast was going to be discussing the significance of Little Red Riding Hood.

=== Christian Philosophy and Charity (03:04) ===

[00:16:52]  But you've all seen.
[00:16:54]  All of these children's stories are philosophical texts.
[00:16:57]  Yeah.
[00:16:58]  All of them.
[00:16:59]  All across.
[00:17:01]  But Red Riding Hood is so germane for now.
[00:17:04]  Yes.
[00:17:05]  Yes.
[00:17:06]  In the LGBT world, the answer is the man with the axe.
[00:17:11]  You need to get back to the straight and narrow.
[00:17:15]  Yeah, So when I knew you were a Christian, are you a Maronite now?
[00:17:24]  No, I'm Latin, Latin Catholic.
[00:17:27]  Latin Catholic.
[00:17:28]  Oh, right.
[00:17:28]  Okay.
[00:17:28]  Yes.
[00:17:29]  You've gone for the hardcore.
[00:17:33]  Why?
[00:17:34]  No haters.
[00:17:35]  Why wouldn't you?
[00:17:36]  I mean, frankly, you wouldn't want to be associated with the kind of liberal wing of the Catholic Church, I don't think.
[00:17:42]  I mean, you might as well just become a pagan.
[00:17:46]  I mean, What G.K. Chesterton says is that all heresy is truth taken to an extreme.
[00:17:58]  And so, yes, we owe people who are less fortunate concern and care and charity.
[00:18:08]  Not to the extent of having millions of people in Britain living on the dole, not to the extent of importing people to put them on the dole.
[00:18:18]  So it is true that we owe everyone something because Christ gave us everything.
[00:18:24]  But what we owe it must be placed in its proper proportion rather than being something that destroys society.
[00:18:36]  Yes, I think it's called, or it's sometimes been called pathological altruism.
[00:18:41]  And it's, it.
[00:18:44]  It's the direct result of separating Christianity from Christian philosophy.
[00:18:49]  It's a direct consequence of not being able to think properly of Christian vices and Christian virtues.
[00:18:57]  So, in this case, charity is one of the key virtues, but so is prudence and so is temperance and so is justice.
[00:19:07]  And prudence dictates that you don't import people who hate you to put them on welfare.
[00:19:13]  Temperance dictates that you do all things in a temperate way.
[00:19:20]  Which is to say, not to make charity a substitute for work.
[00:19:26]  And justice dictates that you take care of your own before you take care of the rest of the world.
[00:19:35]  So you can't have homeless veterans while importing Somalis to live on welfare.
[00:19:43]  When did Christianity cut loose from Christian philosophy?
[00:19:49]  It's been a while going.
[00:19:51]  It's been an issue for some time, but it's also a repeated cycle.

=== Stone Tablets and Co-Eternal Word (15:26) ===

[00:19:57]  Um, I'd argue that there was a real breakdown after the first world war because it was so atrocious and so evil that people couldn't process it properly.
[00:20:15]  And indeed, what is the correct answer to why the first world war happened?
[00:20:19]  We, you know.
[00:20:20]  I don't necessarily have one.
[00:20:22]  Oh, I do.
[00:20:23]  I've got some, I've done, I've written essays about it.
[00:20:26]  I mean, there's, for me, this was my actually.
[00:20:30]  I mean, spiritually.
[00:20:31]  I mean, spiritually.
[00:20:32]  Oh, well, again, my answer would be because the world is run by Satanists that ultimately.
[00:20:38]  Was it run by Satanists then?
[00:20:40]  I mean, I'm open to Wilson being fundamentally evil.
[00:20:43]  Yes, no, no, but I'm open to the war being.
[00:20:46]  Yeah.
[00:20:47]  I think at the highest levels, they are all basically Satanists.
[00:20:51]  Yeah.
[00:20:52]  Okay.
[00:20:54]  And there's a book, we won't talk about this now because obviously I've got an advantage over you in that I've read the book and you haven't.
[00:21:05]  There's a very good book you should read called Two World Wars and Hitler.
[00:21:11]  And it's written by these two amateur historians, which is frankly the only kind of trustworthy historians because the rest work for the establishment.
[00:21:20]  They're just lapdogs, court historians.
[00:21:25]  And they describe the origins of the Second World War was continuation First World War, really, just with a gap in between for the Versailles Treaty to kind of reinforce the damage.
[00:21:38]  But the First World War was planned and executed by an organization, loosely, a loose organization called the Milner Group, named after Lord Milner.
[00:21:55]  And it was a mix of politicians, upper class sort of grandees, financiers.
[00:22:06]  You know, obviously there was a Rothschild involved on both sides of the Atlantic.
[00:22:11]  And they started the Second, the First World War with a view primarily to destroy the German hegemony because they saw that as its land dominance, they saw it as a threat to their sort of.
[00:22:28]  Americans and British wanted to rule the world on the lines of the British Empire, and secondarily to destroy Russia.
[00:22:36]  And they achieved both those aims.
[00:22:40]  And communism, Bolshevism was also the creation of these same forces.
[00:22:44]  But ultimately, in my view, and I think maybe possible, I don't want to second guess you, but I would suspect that your Christian outlook would lead you to.
[00:22:57]  To the same conclusion that although humans are very, very devious and capable of great wickedness, to organize evil on that scale and get away with it, you kind of need some supernatural intervention from some really big hitters.
[00:23:17]  And nobody does evil better than Satan.
[00:23:19]  And I think that ultimately Satan was informing these people.
[00:23:23]  I mean, these people, anyway.
[00:23:28]  Participate in occult rituals and stuff.
[00:23:30]  I mean, it wasn't just Hitler and the SS who were doing this stuff.
[00:23:33]  Winston Churchill would have been, all these people would have gone to kind of participate in black magic rituals with the associated child sacrifice and stuff.
[00:23:47]  So, sorry, that's my long answer to your musing on where the First World War came from.
[00:23:53]  But I can see why people were shell shocked because before the.
[00:23:57]  I'll give you a chance to speak in a moment.
[00:24:01]  In the years running up to the first world war, Europe was prosperous.
[00:24:06]  People were happy.
[00:24:07]  They, I mean, they had problems, but they were not expected to be sideswiped by this event, which was going to wipe out millions of their, or disabled millions of their brightest and best.
[00:24:20]  And they didn't know what had hit them.
[00:24:23]  They couldn't make sense of it, not least because they had their clerics, like the Bishop of London, cheering on this, this bloodbath.
[00:24:32]  And it was Christians killing Christians mainly.
[00:24:35]  Yes.
[00:24:36]  Which again is satanic.
[00:24:38]  And the, you know, when you read that in the first year of the war, spontaneous truces broke out over Christmas.
[00:24:47]  Yes.
[00:24:48]  Yeah.
[00:24:49]  You understand what the European mind was like back then.
[00:24:55]  Because obviously you wouldn't kill people over Christmas.
[00:24:58]  That would be blasphemous.
[00:25:01]  That would be fundamentally evil.
[00:25:02]  And so the officers had to.
[00:25:04]  were quite hard to make sure that there wouldn't be a second and third spontaneous truce between the lines over Christmas.
[00:25:14]  And well, that is by definition satanic.
[00:25:18]  Why wouldn't you want a truce over Christmas?
[00:25:21]  I can understand why you wouldn't want a spontaneous one, but you should be arguing for one.
[00:25:27]  And weirdly enough, in the Russia-Ukraine war, the Russians offered truces over Christmas, but the Ukrainians said no.
[00:25:35]  And so you see this mindset that is set on destruction that fundamentally aims to ruin what is good and what is decent.
[00:25:47]  And the result of that is just complete chaos.
[00:25:51]  And so, going back to the Bible, when you read biblical stories, they are layered in a very deep philosophical way from the story of Adam and Eve, who Jordan Peterson spoke about beautifully.
[00:26:06]  Uh, through Cain and Abel, through pretty much all of the stories of the Bible, you see that there is deep philosophy and wisdom there.
[00:26:15]  And if you are only permitted to take it literally, that stumps a portion of your brain.
[00:26:26]  And that is why in Christianity, the Word of God becomes a living man.
[00:26:35]  The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us.
[00:26:39]  Whereas in Islam, the word of God is preserved in a stone tablet.
[00:26:45]  And God help you if the word, the logos, reason, is a piece of stone as opposed to something living.
[00:26:57]  And so that is the main difference between Christianity and, and, and Islam.
[00:27:02]  And everything I would argue is, is secondary to that.
[00:27:07]  Doesn't that problem also apply to Judaism insofar as it is?
[00:27:10]  Absolutely.
[00:27:11]  Absolutely.
[00:27:12]  And you see it in things like the, the wire that is supposed to, uh, surround Jewish neighborhoods so that they can carry things on the, on the Sabbath because you can only carry something on the Sabbath within the home.
[00:27:26]  Okay.
[00:27:26]  What do you do?
[00:27:27]  You make the entire neighborhood the home.
[00:27:30]  And the Jewish answer is we are so concerned with God's law that we don't want to break it, that we find these ways.
[00:27:36]  But you can't help feeling that this is cheating on God a little bit.
[00:27:40]  In the same way that some Jewish women believe that they are compelled to cover their hair.
[00:27:46]  And what do they do?
[00:27:47]  They wear very nice wigs.
[00:27:49]  Well, that's laughable.
[00:27:54]  And you see that kind of pattern of Pharisee legalism deeply ingrained.
[00:28:01]  Within modern Judaism, but also ingrained to a large extent within Islam.
[00:28:07]  Because the pattern of Islamic writing is Talmudic.
[00:28:14]  It's a narration of all of the different sources and what they say and what they believe, an endless, not even debate, just a sort of listing of them.
[00:28:25]  And you're supposed to memorize all of it.
[00:28:28]  So when you read the tafsir, the exegesis of the Quran, You'll get things like this word, this guy thought that it meant a star, and this other guy thought that it meant a deer, and God knows best.
[00:28:42]  Well, it can't be a star or a deer.
[00:28:45]  These are, you know, two slightly different things.
[00:28:50]  And instead of reaching for a philosophical explanation, what is done is that the whole thing is listed, and you're left in this miasma of ignorance.
[00:29:01]  So it's about the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law.
[00:29:07]  Precisely.
[00:29:08]  Which is exactly the main vector of Jesus' attack on the Pharisees was their concern with the letter of the law and giving tithes on mint and cumin rather than the spirit of the law, which is how to lead people to the kingdom of God.
[00:29:28]  I would imagine this is what drew you to Christianity in the end.
[00:29:31]  That insight.
[00:29:34]  It was a gradual process.
[00:29:37]  That was a big part of it.
[00:29:39]  That was certainly a big part of it.
[00:29:41]  Um, it was also a reaction to studying the Middle East for a decade or pretty much all of my life.
[00:29:50]  I've been obsessed with what's going on in the Middle East and why is it happening this way?
[00:29:55]  And when you look at the Middle East, what is the solution to the Israel Palestine conflict?
[00:30:01]  Well, it's Christianity.
[00:30:03]  It's not a line in the sand to demarcate a border.
[00:30:07]  It's not a voting pattern or a political party.
[00:30:11]  It's not a one state solution or a two state solution or a three state solution.
[00:30:17]  It's not any of these things.
[00:30:19]  It's these people being Christian towards one another on a basic human level.
[00:30:24]  And if they can't do that, all of the tinkering with rules isn't going to solve anything.
[00:30:32]  But they can't be Christian towards one another because they aren't Christian and they reject Christ in his fullness.
[00:30:39]  Yes.
[00:30:41]  What is the Muslim take on Christ is slightly more forgiving than the Jewish one, isn't it?
[00:30:48]  Yes.
[00:30:49]  In the Jewish one, he's boiling in a vat of excrement or something.
[00:30:53]  Yes.
[00:30:54]  Whereas in the Muslim one, he is just a prophet and he is sometimes referred to as the Word of God.
[00:31:02]  But not with that having any meaning, because the Quran is the, the Word of God.
[00:31:08]  Um, which is, in Islamic thinking, a stone tablet, essentially.
[00:31:15]  An eternal stone tablet.
[00:31:18]  Is that what the Kaaba, there?
[00:31:19]  What is the stone tablet?
[00:31:20]  No, no, it's a stone tablet in heaven in which the Quran is preserved, and the, they reached the same point as Christians, you see, because they came to the conclusion that the Word of God is co-eternal with God.
[00:31:35]  Which is the Christian position on the Son, on the Son of God.
[00:31:39]  Oh, see, so I am, yeah.
[00:31:41]  Yeah.
[00:31:42]  And so they came to that conclusion, but then they decided that that means that the Quran is not created, but that it is co eternal with God, preserved in a stone tablet as His Word.
[00:31:57]  And their real philosophical collapse came over that particular debate, because the.
[00:32:07]  The Muslims who wanted to subscribe to reason argued that the Quran cannot be co-eternal with God and is therefore created.
[00:32:18]  Whereas what became the mainstream argued that the Quran is uncreated and is in fact co-eternal with God.
[00:32:28]  Because if it's created, then you can work with it, you can adjust it, you can say this isn't correct, you can say that the, this actually means something different, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:32:39]  You can apply reason to it.
[00:32:44]  And the response from what became the mainstream, from Ahmed ibn Hanbal, the first of the four great Imams in the Muslim world, was not at all.
[00:32:55]  And the Caliph at the time imprisoned this gentleman and had him tortured to get him to say that the Quran is created, but he refused.
[00:33:07]  And when he was released and this became the mainstream idea, that was the beginning of the end.
[00:33:15]  in terms of Islam's relationship with philosophy.
[00:33:22]  Right.
[00:33:23]  Have you come across the theory that Islam was actually invented by the Jews as part of a kind of divide and rule mechanism?
[00:33:37]  Not really, nor do I lend it any credence, just on the face of it.
[00:33:43]  There is, you know, evidence as to how this worldview evolved.
[00:33:51]  What you can say about Islam.
[00:33:54]  Is that it is a compromise between Christianity and Judaism, essentially.
[00:33:59]  Right.
[00:34:01]  And that they tried to preserve bits of the kosher law, which is no pork, no blood, but they ignore the rest of the kosher regulations, the 600 and something laws relating to food.
[00:34:16]  So they ignore that you can't have milk and meat at the same time, for instance.
[00:34:26]  They preserved circumcision.
[00:34:29]  Whereas the Christians said, essentially, the old law has been completed in Jesus Christ, and now it is following in the footsteps of Christ and carrying your cross that saves you rather than blind obedience to the law.
[00:34:51]  And the Muslim position was no, you have to obey a lot of the law or some of the law, but you also have to recognize Jesus.
[00:35:01]  As a prophet rather than as God.
[00:35:06]  And it's a sort of understandable compromise in the same way that Mormonism is an understandable compromise between the beauty of America and Christianity.
[00:35:20]  But just like Mormonism, it makes no sense.

=== Druze Identity and Scams (03:55) ===

[00:35:24]  Right.
[00:35:24]  Right.
[00:35:27]  Do you.
[00:35:28]  When you were.
[00:35:32]  You would have called yourself Muslim?
[00:35:35]  Druze?
[00:35:36]  No.
[00:35:37]  I've given you a Druze.
[00:35:39]  The Druze would have been completely different.
[00:35:41]  They wouldn't, even Muslims don't recognize them as Druze.
[00:35:44]  The Druze historically pretended to be Muslims so that Muslims wouldn't continue to genocide them.
[00:35:51]  So Druze thinking emerged first in Egypt, but they do not exist in Egypt.
[00:35:58]  And the only place they exist is in the mountains of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon.
[00:36:04]  Because they went up to the mountains and said, I dare you to follow me.
[00:36:11]  So I would have never described myself as Muslim.
[00:36:14]  Okay.
[00:36:15]  So I suppose what I'm getting at is you're obviously a profoundly religious.
[00:36:22]  Is that the right word?
[00:36:23]  You're a man of faith anyway.
[00:36:25]  I try to be.
[00:36:26]  Yeah.
[00:36:26]  Yeah.
[00:36:28]  And you must have experienced, I imagine.
[00:36:34]  I mean, as I have, being a man of faith, you get sort of little moments where you're aware of God's presence and the reality of God.
[00:36:43]  And yeah.
[00:36:45]  Yes.
[00:36:46]  Did you get that when you were a Druze?
[00:36:52]  Global warming is a massive con.
[00:36:56]  There is no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
[00:37:07]  It's a non-existent problem.
[00:37:09]  But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
[00:37:14]  Well, I've just brought out the revised edition of my 2012 classic book, Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
[00:37:37]  It's a shocking story.
[00:37:39]  I wrote it, as I say, in 2011, actually, the first edition came out.
[00:37:44]  And it's a snapshot of a particular era.
[00:37:48]  The era when the people behind the climate change scam got caught red-handed, tinkering with the data, torturing till it screamed.
[00:37:59]  In a scandal that I helped christen ClimateGate.
[00:38:03]  So I give you the background to the skullduggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us.
[00:38:11]  We've got to act now.
[00:38:13]  I rumbled their scam.
[00:38:15]  I then asked the question okay, if it is a scam, who's doing this and why?
[00:38:22]  It's a good story.
[00:38:23]  I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two.
[00:38:29]  New chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
[00:38:38]  I think it still stands out.
[00:38:38]  I think it's a good read.
[00:38:40]  Obviously I'm biased but I'd recommend it.
[00:38:43]  You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk forward slash shop.
[00:38:48]  You'll probably find it.
[00:38:49]  Just go to my website and look for it jamesdellingpole.co.uk and I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring round all those people who are still persuaded that, oh, it's a disaster.
[00:39:05]  We must amend our ways and appease the gods, appease Mother Gaia.
[00:39:09]  No we don't.
[00:39:10]  It's a scam.
[00:39:15]  Right.
[00:39:15]  Right.
[00:39:18]  Do you.

=== ISIS Origins and Vatican Architecture (15:07) ===

[00:39:19]  When you were.
[00:39:23]  Would you.
[00:39:23]  You would have called yourself Muslim?
[00:39:26]  Druze?
[00:39:27]  No.
[00:39:28]  I've never been Druze.
[00:39:30]  The Druze would have been completely different.
[00:39:31]  They wouldn't.
[00:39:32]  Even Muslims don't recognize them as Druze.
[00:39:35]  The Druze historically pretended to be Muslims.
[00:39:38]  Right.
[00:39:39]  So that Muslims wouldn't continue to genocide them.
[00:39:42]  So Druze thinking.
[00:39:45]  Emerged first in Egypt, but they do not exist in Egypt.
[00:39:49]  And the only place they exist is in the mountains of Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon because they went up to the mountains and said, I dare you to follow me.
[00:40:02]  So I would have never described myself as Muslim.
[00:40:05]  Okay.
[00:40:06]  So I suppose what I'm getting at is you're obviously profoundly religious.
[00:40:13]  Is that the right word?
[00:40:14]  You're a man of faith anyway.
[00:40:16]  I try to be.
[00:40:17]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:19]  And you must have experienced, I imagine, I mean, as I have, being a man of faith, you get sort of little moments where you're aware of God's presence and the reality of God.
[00:40:33]  And yeah.
[00:40:36]  Yes.
[00:40:37]  Did you get that when you were a Druze?
[00:40:42]  Uh, well, for most of my life, from my teenage years, I was an atheist.
[00:40:52]  All right.
[00:40:53]  From around my teenage years, I was an atheist.
[00:40:55]  There were moments where I did feel that there's something there, but I could quickly put that sentiment down.
[00:41:02]  And, um, at some point, I began reading the Bible and reading some Christian thinkers and I visited Rome and Rome broke me completely.
[00:41:14]  That's when I realized actually, I'm an idiot.
[00:41:18]  I need to follow Christ.
[00:41:21]  Yeah.
[00:41:22]  Rome does speak to some people in that way.
[00:41:25]  I have a friend, the friend who started me on my journey down many rabbit holes, one being the Christian one and one being all the others.
[00:41:35]  Right.
[00:41:38]  He was called Jonathan and he's dead now.
[00:41:42]  He was dying of cancer when he.
[00:41:45]  But he loved Rome.
[00:41:50]  And so he had a.
[00:41:52]  In the end, in his last days, he had a Catholic.
[00:41:54]  He wasn't sort of really affiliated with any particular branch of Christianity until the end of his life when he sort of.
[00:42:03]  But he definitely loved going to St. Peter's and stuff and kissing that foot of the statue and all this stuff.
[00:42:14]  Whereas it doesn't have that effect on me.
[00:42:17]  I mean, I love Rome, the city, but I don't particularly.
[00:42:22]  When I do the Vatican, I'm not really.
[00:42:24]  Thinking this is the.
[00:42:28]  It wasn't the Vatican.
[00:42:30]  It was, firstly, walking into any random church and just seeing the blend of architecture, statue making, painting, that made me think, okay, how is this even real?
[00:42:55]  And secondly, Something really hit me.
[00:42:59]  You go to a random church and you see that there are these names of leading Italian families dedicated to certain chapels and so on within one church.
[00:43:13]  Yeah.
[00:43:14]  And then you think about it and you realize, wait a minute, these guys are competing with each other politically in the creation of beauty.
[00:43:26]  So think about this.
[00:43:27]  You walk into a church and you're.
[00:43:29]  You, you, you, you kneel in, in one chapel or the other and whatever.
[00:43:34]  It's got the name Orsini on it or something.
[00:43:38]  Orsini.
[00:43:39]  Um, and right next door or right next to it is a different chapel, different Italian family, uh, enemies.
[00:43:51]  And you see the art of the architecture and then you understand suddenly it hit me.
[00:43:58]  These guys who hate each other.
[00:44:00]  Decided that one of the ways in which they were going to channel their competition is in building this overwhelming beauty where through architecture, uh, statue making, painting, et cetera, they created a glimpse of the divine in, in stone and in paint.
[00:44:28]  They did that because they were believers.
[00:44:31]  Of course, but they also did it as a way of their political competition.
[00:44:37]  And when I went there was at the same time that I was deeply involved in studying ISIS and looking at ISIS.
[00:44:45]  And then the possibilities hit me that you can compete with each other through creating chaos and suicide bombings and these kinds of extremism.
[00:45:00]  You can also go down a different extremism.
[00:45:04]  And literally create an image of heaven in stone in the church so that the poor people of Rome can have a better Easter.
[00:45:13]  I'm totally with you on that, Firas, but I'm looking at, you mentioned ISIS and you're presumably a lot better versed in ISIS's history than, and, and actions than I am.
[00:45:27]  But ISIS was the creation of a notionally Christian country, or at least the, the intelligence services of a Christian country.
[00:45:40]  I mean, America, the US.
[00:45:43]  Up to a point.
[00:45:46]  Up to a point.
[00:45:48]  You don't think they were?
[00:45:51]  I think they were supported.
[00:45:53]  I don't think they were only a creation of the West.
[00:45:57]  I tend to see.
[00:46:00]  I don't mean the West like me.
[00:46:04]  I understand.
[00:46:05]  Of Western intelligence agencies.
[00:46:06]  The deep state.
[00:46:07]  Yeah, the deep state.
[00:46:08]  I understand.
[00:46:09]  But only up to a point in the following sense.
[00:46:13]  If you were to try to create a Christian ISIS, You really would have no theological foundation for it.
[00:46:23]  But because Islam provides a pretty good theological foundation for ISIS, it is possible to create it in the Muslim world.
[00:46:32]  Let me explain.
[00:46:34]  In every single atrocity that Islamic State did, they would then send out a newsletter explaining what they have done and why it was righteous.
[00:46:48]  And part of my job.
[00:46:50]  was to go through their media productions and to dig, to try to dig holes in their religious narratives.
[00:47:00]  What they did was that for pretty much everything that they did, they quoted two of the four main imams in, in Muslim thinking, in Sunni Muslim thinking, because you have Sunni Islam and Shia Islam.
[00:47:14]  They quoted every single time at least two of the four saying this is a permissible act and that this act is Islamically legitimate.
[00:47:28]  And they were so good at their stuff that I believe they translated the Quran themselves.
[00:47:34]  There's only maybe seven, ten translations of the Quran.
[00:47:38]  It's an incredibly difficult book to process and to translate accurately.
[00:47:44]  But in the English language verses that they provided, the translation that they used was exceptional.
[00:47:54]  Some of the Christian priests who were taken hostage by Islamic State, Tell you, we were told that these were a bunch of barbarians.
[00:48:03]  When we went there, we met incredibly educated and capable people who were genuinely brilliant and who were truly devout believers.
[00:48:16]  So you can't deny the role of the West in arming ISIS and in supporting it.
[00:48:21]  And it's not a coincidence that Abu Muhammad al Jolani, or whatever you want to call him now, Ahmad al Shara, who was just visiting Keir Starmer in Downing Street, Um, was released a few days before the Syrian revolution kicked off and then quickly went to Syria with a pile of cash and with a few men to organize his forces there.
[00:48:46]  You can't deny that this was supported and you can't ignore reporting from Al Jazeera early on during the civil war saying that there were armed men coming out of Lebanon to attack in Syria.
[00:49:02]  So, yes, there was this external agitation and support.
[00:49:09]  But the bottom line is, you can't have a Jewish ISIS or a Christian ISIS.
[00:49:18]  With Jewish terrorism, what you get is the hilltop youth and the attacks that they're conducting on the Palestinians, and the explanation being that we're going to do to the Palestinians what Joshua bin Noon did to the Canaanites.
[00:49:36]  With Christianity, you can get a crusade, but ISIS is uniquely Islamic because it follows a certain pattern that predates them.
[00:49:50]  Um, explain.
[00:49:55]  Okay.
[00:49:56]  So when Muhammad came, he gave himself the permission to attack Christians and Jews on the basis that they weren't religious enough and that they weren't actual proper people of the book.
[00:50:17]  Muhammad came claiming to be a Jewish prophet or a prophet sent to Israel.
[00:50:23]  That's why the first few chapters of the Quran repeatedly mention, Ya Bani Israel, O people of Israel, O children of Israel.
[00:50:34]  So they were the party that is being addressed in the Quran and in what Muhammad said.
[00:50:42]  They were the target audience.
[00:50:44]  And the justification for Muhammad was that these people had strayed.
[00:50:53]  Including the pagans, but also including the Jews, and that they were no longer properly following their scriptures, and that they were no longer properly applying the commands of God.
[00:51:07]  And so, a new prophet to correct the people was necessary.
[00:51:12]  And Muhammad tries to contextualize himself in that way.
[00:51:18]  However, he also gave himself the right to Abrogate Quranic laws when it suited him by taking at the same time either nine or eleven wives rather than the four mandated by the Quran.
[00:51:36]  And he gave himself the right to say to the Christians and the Jews that I am more Christian and more Jewish than you are.
[00:51:43]  And you get the verse in the Quran that says that, um, Abraham and Moses weren't Jews and Christ wasn't Christian.
[00:51:53]  They were all Muslims or something like that.
[00:51:58]  And this sort of gave him license to just go against anything and everyone and to do whatever he wanted, including massacring the Jews who were with him in Medina,
[00:52:14]  according to mainstream Islamic history, for being treacherous, supposedly, for not agreeing to his role as a prophet, for not listening to him.
[00:52:29]  For siding with his enemies, but he gave himself the right to massacre them and expel them.
[00:52:37]  And then you saw the Islamic conquests, which were legitimized in the same way that the Christians around the Muslims in greater Syria, including Palestine, and the Jews in that area, and in Egypt, and so on, which were all majority Christian territories by that time.
[00:53:00]  We weren't applying the law of God rigorously enough, and therefore, they were legitimate targets to attack them and enslave their women and children and kill their men.
[00:53:12]  And this was justified using, in part, the actions of Joshua bin Noon.
[00:53:23]  So this permission for violence and for enslaving women and children and for, uh, conquering people and imposing the law of God on them, whether they liked it or not, is a pre-existing pattern in Islam.
[00:53:39]  Now, the mainstream response is that ISIS are a kind of Khawarij, the people who, uh, killed the fourth caliph of Islam and therefore paved the way for dynastic rule, who had dissented from the mainstream, Of Islam early on after Muhammad died and slowly became more radical, saying that the rest of the Muslim world wasn't being Muslim enough.
[00:54:06]  But if you look at what Muhammad did, he was the first of these people to say that the believers around him weren't sufficient in their faith.
[00:54:18]  Right.
[00:54:19]  So you're saying it's really, really built into the religion that violence is baked into it.
[00:54:26]  It's baked into it.

=== Pride, Vengeance, and Weak People (15:21) ===

[00:54:27]  Exactly.
[00:54:28]  Although, I mean, I don't at all dispute that point, but I'm looking across at Judah.
[00:54:36]  It's interesting that Muhammad considered himself a Jew at one point.
[00:54:39]  Yes.
[00:54:44]  When I see Netanyahu invoking Amalek and stuff and looking at what he's done in Gaza, I'm thinking, well, that's not any better than ISIS.
[00:55:01]  No.
[00:55:03]  I mean, it's worse actually, because ISIS didn't have access to all that air power and artillery.
[00:55:09]  Yes.
[00:55:10]  Correct.
[00:55:12]  Absolutely.
[00:55:14]  Absolutely.
[00:55:15]  So it, they both go to a point.
[00:55:21]  The fundamental question that religion answers is what are you going to do with your suffering?
[00:55:28]  And so if you're a Buddhist or you're a Hindu, you're going to insulate yourself and focus on meditation.
[00:55:35]  And have no attachments to anything.
[00:55:39]  And by doing that, you release yourself from the bonds of this world and you attain nirvana.
[00:55:48]  If you're a Christian, the correct answer is to love even your enemies, let alone the people around you.
[00:55:55]  And we all fail at this.
[00:55:56]  None of us are good enough, none of us merit salvation.
[00:56:03]  The Muslim and Jewish answer is a combination of pride and vengeance.
[00:56:09]  Yeah, that's, that's so true.
[00:56:13]  That's their answer to suffering.
[00:56:14]  That's, and it's so unattractive, isn't it?
[00:56:17]  I mean, pride, which is the devil's, the devil's sin.
[00:56:21]  Satan, Lucifer himself.
[00:56:23]  Yes.
[00:56:25]  Which is why they compete in their victim Olympics.
[00:56:28]  Like, what happened in Gaza was atrocious, but can't be separated from the atrocity of 7 October, regardless of whether or not you think the Israelis look the other way to allow it to happen.
[00:56:41]  Or what?
[00:56:43]  You know, and obviously they did fund Hamas and, and, and.
[00:56:48]  However, their reaction from Palestinians across the board was to celebrate.
[00:56:56]  There was nobody who said essentially, no, we are supposed to love our enemies and we're not supposed to, uh, fight evil with evil.
[00:57:08]  And when Christ tells us, do not resist evil, what he means is do not resist evil by adopting the means of evil men and becoming like them.
[00:57:20]  Resist evil by being good.
[00:57:22]  That is the Christian command.
[00:57:24]  Nobody in the Muslim world said this.
[00:57:27]  No one.
[00:57:29]  And in Gaza, people celebrated and were cheering.
[00:57:35]  And to the extent that they weren't, it was out of fear of the consequences, not because the actions that happened on that day were atrocious.
[00:57:43]  And there were obviously atrocities on that day.
[00:57:47]  And this came from pride and vengeance.
[00:57:52]  And the Israeli reaction was exactly the same.
[00:57:56]  So you see the Palestinians saying, well, the Israelis are starving us, the Israelis are bombing us.
[00:58:01]  Yes, they are exercising their pride and their vengeance against you in the same way that you have done.
[00:58:14]  And you could say that the chain begins with the conquest of Palestine by the Jews, which is true.
[00:58:20]  That is where this chain begins.
[00:58:23]  But it's not like the Jews had a wonderful time before that, because everybody living under Muslim rule understood that they were second class citizens.
[00:58:32]  Which is in a way understandable from a practical perspective.
[00:58:36]  If people don't share your faith, you shouldn't make them equal.
[00:58:42]  But that is the reality of it.
[00:58:45]  So, all you see there is the Jews and the Muslims trying to tug at the heartstrings of the Christians by saying, no, we are the bigger victims.
[00:59:03]  Oh, willingly.
[00:59:05]  Exactly, exactly.
[00:59:07]  But in their view, being a victim gains you no merit, whereas in Christianity it does.
[00:59:17]  In Christianity, if you are a victim and you forgive the aggressor and you forgive the oppressor, you are obeying Christ, who willingly entered into his passion.
[00:59:31]  If you're a Muslim and you do that, you're weak.
[00:59:35]  And if you're a Jew and you're not taking vengeance, you're weak.
[00:59:40]  So the difference here is very theological, and people don't appreciate that because both the Jews and the Muslims try to play the role of the victim.
[00:59:55]  But if you go to the Chinese and say, I'm a victim, you'll get indifference.
[01:00:02]  If you go to the Indians and say that you're a victim, well, congratulations, join the 250 million untouchables.
[01:00:09]  We don't care.
[01:00:12]  So, in a way, the debate is being had in a Christian moral framework, but neither side, in any shape, way, or form, genuinely respects Christian morality.
[01:00:25]  And the only people who you could argue do to some extent theologically are actually the Shia, the Persians, and Lebanon's Hezbollah.
[01:00:34]  These guys, they have a place for holy victims in their mind, but it's a holy victim carrying a sword, dying as a martyr.
[01:00:44]  In battle, as opposed to a willing martyr who accepts death because of the love of God.
[01:00:55]  We should not because I don't find this conversation fascinating, but I think we ought to, we ought to do what's happening in Iran right now.
[01:01:04]  We were supposed to speak about that.
[01:01:05]  I thought, yes.
[01:01:06]  Well, well, yeah.
[01:01:08]  So consider this a really long, a really long and interesting and erudite preamble.
[01:01:13]  But so what do you reckon is going on?
[01:01:17]  I mean, it, it seems to me insanity that Trump has embarked on this.
[01:01:27]  Adventurism.
[01:01:29]  And he seems to be getting his arse spanked.
[01:01:34]  Yes.
[01:01:35]  Now, I've heard various takes on this.
[01:01:38]  One is that, yeah, he's just an idiot, a tool of the Israelis, and he's run by his son in law, Jared Kushner, and that other guy.
[01:01:47]  Who's the other guy who went into the meeting with him?
[01:01:48]  Steve Witkoff.
[01:01:49]  Steve Witkoff.
[01:01:50]  I mean, they're clearly really, really bad people.
[01:01:54]  They're Israeli assets.
[01:01:55]  Yeah.
[01:01:56]  I mean, At the very least.
[01:01:58]  Jared Kushner is a donor to Chabad.
[01:02:01]  Chabad is the main Jewish supremacist organization, and they're genuinely insane.
[01:02:06]  They believe that other people don't have fully human souls.
[01:02:10]  So there's a problem.
[01:02:11]  There's a problem.
[01:02:13]  But on that particular point, just briefly, I have nothing against ordinary Jewish people.
[01:02:21]  I mean, I think a lot of Jews are as, most Jews, in fact, are as put upon as the rest of us.
[01:02:27]  Yes.
[01:02:28]  But I. Do you think they have a moral duty to face up to the fact that a significant chunk of Jewry is affiliated with this, frankly, evil sect?
[01:02:43]  And that they ought to acknowledge it more rather than going, well, nothing to do with us, governor.
[01:02:48]  Yeah.
[01:02:49]  I mean, look, we don't believe in guilt by association as Christians.
[01:02:57]  But the flip side of it is that whether you like it or not, and regardless of what you believe, Politics is a team sport and it's a tribal sport.
[01:03:06]  And in the same way that we demand from Muslims that they condemn terrorism, which I think is frankly a stupid thing to do, because they can't properly mean it where it matters, is what I'll say.
[01:03:28]  There should be similar pressure on the Jewish community saying you need to dissociate yourselves from people who believe that I have a Only an animal soul, and that I don't have a fully human soul.
[01:03:40]  Yeah.
[01:03:41]  That is fair.
[01:03:42]  That is absolutely fair.
[01:03:45]  But the problem is sort of deeper than that because that is just an extreme development of the perspective of chosenness.
[01:03:58]  So Daniel Prager, of all people, made the point that the Old Testament really makes the ancient Jews look terrible.
[01:04:09]  And the point being made there is that, and I think he articulates it that way, I think I'm quoting him correctly, that the point was that God chose this weak and terrible people who were not as great as the Egyptians or the Assyrians or the Persians or what have you, and he elevated them.
[01:04:36]  And so it's a sign of God's glory.
[01:04:39]  That the lowliest of the peoples in that area was chosen to be elevated.
[01:04:47]  I think that's an accurate reading, obviously, because it translates into Christianity, because we aren't saved by our merits, we aren't saved by faith alone, we are saved by the grace of God.
[01:05:02]  That's the only reason anybody's saved, none of us actually deserves it.
[01:05:07]  So I actually accept that interpretation.
[01:05:11]  But if you ignore that interpretation, then you believe that you are chosen because of your own merits.
[01:05:19]  Which is a stupid thing to believe on the face of it.
[01:05:23]  Not because the Jews are better or worse than anybody else, but because they are no better or worse than anybody else.
[01:05:30]  Nobody deserves salvation.
[01:05:34]  And so, if you end up with this mind frame that says, We're the chosen people, this is our land, God commanded us to take it, we must take it by any means necessary, look at what was done to Amalek, look at what Joshua ben Noon did.
[01:05:51]  Fair is fair.
[01:05:53]  Yeah, that's, that's, you end up killing 50, 40, 70, 100,000 civilians in Gaza and saying, eh, it doesn't matter, they had it coming.
[01:06:06]  That's a natural evolution of that thought.
[01:06:09]  And the reason why the Catholic Church was so vicious against heresy was because it understood that when you strayed from the path and from the straight and narrow path and you came up with interpretations that glorified you,
[01:06:26]  And your view of the world, rather than accepting your place as an awful sinner, which is true of me, obviously, and I'd argue true of everyone else, then that leads to further political developments that end badly.
[01:06:45]  The natural conclusion of heresy is civil war.
[01:06:50]  Because every religious disagreement is going to carry over into a political disagreement.
[01:06:57]  That is why Europe was at its greatest when it was united under Christian authority.
[01:07:03]  And then, when that broke down, the civil wars happened, the Muslims almost took Vienna, etc., etc.
[01:07:12]  So, there is a reason for being strict in your dogma.
[01:07:16]  But there is no point in being strict in your dogma if you're not strict in your personal practice.
[01:07:24]  Because that's just hypocrisy.
[01:07:26]  And I'm as guilty of that as anyone else.
[01:07:31]  So, this is why Christianity is such a burdensome religion because it is intentionally totalitarian in the best way possible.
[01:07:49]  I don't want to go on another tangent, but just briefly, can you explain why it's totalitarian?
[01:08:01]  Because if you're a good Christian, and I'm not, you're thinking of Christ in every word and in every interaction and in every.
[01:08:10]  When the Mass begins with a confession, right?
[01:08:19]  You say.
[01:08:22]  For my thoughts, for my words, for what I have done and for what I have failed to do.
[01:08:28]  What does that mean?
[01:08:30]  That means that in your thoughts, you should be a Christian.
[01:08:34]  In your words, you should be a Christian.
[01:08:37]  In your actions, you should be a Christian.
[01:08:40]  Yes.
[01:08:41]  In pretty much everything that you do, and it's no good to be a Christian on Sundays only.
[01:08:48]  I get that.
[01:08:50]  In that sense, You are commanded to be like Saint, we are commanded to be like Saint Paul, that you would empty yourself so that Christ would fill you, so that there would be less and less of you, so that Christ would be more and more within you.
[01:09:04]  These are, this is what Saint Paul argued.
[01:09:08]  And that means essentially personal erasure.
[01:09:14]  That is totalitarian.
[01:09:16]  There is no two ways about it.
[01:09:19]  But it's not the state being a totalitarian state and some bureaucrats In Whitehall telling you what to do with your life, it's God telling you, pick up your cross, be a good man.
[01:09:36]  Yeah, you see, I think where I was sort of quibbling with your term totalitarianism, I agree with what you just said, but God is not the state.
[01:09:46]  I mean, it's the state that's the problem.

=== Media Propaganda and Minsk Agreements (09:44) ===

[01:09:49]  Yes, of course.
[01:09:52]  God is God.
[01:09:53]  Exactly, absolutely.
[01:09:55]  The state is a human construct, and there begins all the problems with it.
[01:09:59]  Correct.
[01:09:59]  I was reading a piece about it.
[01:10:00]  Somebody wrote a rather good essay.
[01:10:02]  You may have seen it on Substack, which was arguing that a lot of our problems go back to Locke and his definition of the social construct, which is a human made thing.
[01:10:14]  It rules God out of the.
[01:10:16]  You didn't write this piece, did you?
[01:10:17]  No.
[01:10:17]  No, no, no, I didn't.
[01:10:18]  I didn't.
[01:10:19]  But that's it.
[01:10:20]  The idea that no, government is just this human relationship and it's a kind of an agreement with.
[01:10:27]  And this piece was arguing what about God?
[01:10:30]  Yes.
[01:10:32]  No, I don't subscribe to any of the social construct, social contract, anything of that sort, because inherent within it is the assumption of blank slatism.
[01:10:44]  And inherent within it is the assumption that government is software rather than hardware.
[01:10:57]  And I don't agree with that assumption.
[01:11:02]  Wired in a certain way, and the only way to actually change your wiring properly is through Christianity.
[01:11:11]  That's the only thing that actually makes you change from being a murderous Viking to some of the nicest people in the world.
[01:11:26]  What is going on in Iran?
[01:11:32]  In three words.
[01:11:34]  In three words, massive overreach.
[01:11:41]  Trump dramatically overestimated what can be done with air power.
[01:11:48]  He dramatically underestimated the Iranians and he failed to understand.
[01:11:56]  How Shia think.
[01:11:59]  And if you don't understand how these people think, there's no point in fighting them.
[01:12:03]  You're going to lose anyway.
[01:12:05]  And you might win every single battle and still lose.
[01:12:11]  And he made this massive mistake.
[01:12:17]  I was going to ask you how Shia think, but I remember referring to earlier in our conversation, you said that to die in battle.
[01:12:27]  It's like the greatest thing.
[01:12:30]  Yes.
[01:12:31]  To die in battle against an injustice.
[01:12:35]  And this is a war of aggression.
[01:12:37]  This is a war of choice.
[01:12:40]  There was no imminent threat, contrary to what they were saying.
[01:12:43]  The Omanis and the British have gone on record and said, we were the negotiators.
[01:12:50]  We saw the kind of deal that was hammered out near the end.
[01:12:54]  We thought that the risk of war had been averted because a deal that fully satisfied the Americans had been reached.
[01:13:02]  And after that deal was reached, lo and behold, Trump attacks them in partnership with Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the most evil, twisted people in the world.
[01:13:15]  Just pause you there before we go on.
[01:13:17]  I see similarities here between this situation and the Minsk agreements.
[01:13:26]  The Minsk agreements, which were going to bring peace between Russia and Ukraine, and then.
[01:13:31]  Over goes Boris Johnson, sent on behalf of the.
[01:13:35]  You mean the Istanbul negotiations?
[01:13:36]  The Minsk agreements were the early ones once.
[01:13:38]  You mean, you mean, you mean the, the Istanbul negotiations?
[01:13:41]  Yes.
[01:13:41]  What I mean is Boris Johnson was sent in to sabotage the, to, to, to, by the, presumably by the industrial military complex in the West and whatever.
[01:13:51]  Possibly the Khazarian mafia, I don't know.
[01:13:55]  But yeah.
[01:13:56]  So the, so this same thing happened with, over Iran.
[01:14:03]  For us, I'm slightly gobsmacked that we know that Trump is erratic and like he makes a play of this and you don't know where he is and he's kind of, you don't know whether he knows the difference between Iraq and Iran or sometimes he does or, but surely, surely wiser councils might have told him that what Iran has four times the population of Iraq, is it?
[01:14:30]  That Iran is not Venezuela for one thing.
[01:14:34]  No.
[01:14:35]  It's huge.
[01:14:38]  And also, one more thing before you tell me more.
[01:14:43]  I went to Russia last year, and it's not like I had access to information that the CIA won't have or whatever.
[01:14:53]  And I learned about drone warfare.
[01:14:54]  I learned about how warfare has been transformed by drones.
[01:15:00]  Yes.
[01:15:01]  So the idea that the US president did not know that his conventional armory was going to get Trashed by these $7,000 drones, which I think is the same amount Israel pays for bloggers every time they put out a post in favor of Israel.
[01:15:17]  That's right.
[01:15:18]  Which is funny, isn't it?
[01:15:20]  Yes.
[01:15:21]  How can he not know this?
[01:15:22]  How could he?
[01:15:22]  Come on, somebody must have said to him, come on, Donald.
[01:15:26]  If you look at the picture that was painted by the media, and I don't know how accurate it is, but it seemed that, uh, General Dan Kane was trying to subtly tell him that this is a very Expansive, expensive operation that can't be easily contained and that it wouldn't necessarily work.
[01:15:53]  And it seems that the CIA were gently saying, hmm, you know, maybe the regime doesn't collapse with a few airstrikes.
[01:16:02]  So, but what you also see is that because Trump has been selecting for loyalty for so long, which is understandable given how disloyal everybody was in his first term.
[01:16:17]  There has developed a perception that if you disagree with Trump, you are disloyal.
[01:16:24]  Add to that the Adelson money and the role of Kushner and Witkoff, and the fact that they were telling the president that the negotiations weren't working when in fact they were.
[01:16:37]  And you see that he was drawn into this war by a combination of the agents of Israel that are around him, including people like Marco Rubio, who was vetted by the Israeli ambassador to Germany before Larry Ellison began paying him, and Trump himself being paid by the Edelsons, Vance being paid by Peter Thiel and funded by Peter Thiel.
[01:17:06]  So it's this combination of the network around him and his own vanity.
[01:17:12]  That led him to this.
[01:17:15]  And he seems to genuinely think that the American military is unbeatable.
[01:17:22]  Whereas reality shows otherwise, the American military is beatable only if you're willing to make great sacrifices, like the Vietnamese did, like the North Koreans and the Chinese did, like the Iraqis and the Afghans did.
[01:17:41]  And so he came to the conclusion that he could just win this from the air.
[01:17:46]  And now you're talking about a ground campaign.
[01:17:50]  And the latest iteration is that we are going to bomb them into the Stone Age until they open Hormuz.
[01:17:57]  But the reality is that even if you bomb them to the Stone Age, actually it suits the Russians to have European economies collapse and for Asia to be weaker and for China to pay more for energy.
[01:18:10]  And so the Russians will flood Iran with drones to make sure that Hormuz remains at risk.
[01:18:18]  Yeah.
[01:18:19]  So, this was a horrific miscalculation.
[01:18:24]  But when your defense secretary is someone like Peter Hegseth, why would a Christian want to build the third temple?
[01:18:32]  The temple is Jesus Christ.
[01:18:35]  Ah, you've just hinted at another big problem, which is Christian Zionism.
[01:18:41]  Which is an enormous problem.
[01:18:43]  It's a mental illness.
[01:18:45]  How many of them are there?
[01:18:48]  As a total population of Christians is a small group, but incredibly influential.
[01:18:54]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[01:18:56]  I mean, is it even the majority of Christians in America?
[01:19:00]  No, not by any means.
[01:19:02]  Oh, right.
[01:19:04]  I mean, you have a big Catholic population in the United States, which is by definition not Zionist.
[01:19:12]  And you have massive influence operations being conducted on American Christians to keep them sympathetic to Zionism.
[01:19:22]  But support for Zionism has never been lower in the United States.
[01:19:26]  Not, you know, in the last generation or two generations.

=== Nuclear Bases and Great Satan (04:25) ===

[01:19:34]  What actually is happening?
[01:19:35]  Sorry.
[01:19:37]  In terms of the actual conduct of the war?
[01:19:39]  Yeah.
[01:19:39]  Because I mean, I, I mean, I, I don't read the newspapers because I don't trust anything because they're all written by propagandists, Western propagandists.
[01:19:48]  But B, I have doubts about anything that happens in the news, whether it's alternative news or official news, because there's so much room for AI, so much room for misinformation.
[01:20:04]  I mean, what one hears, for example, that the Americans have been.
[01:20:09]  Bombing targets that turn out to be paintings of aeroplanes on the ground.
[01:20:15]  Yes.
[01:20:16]  And that also the Israelis have been taking out areas which have actually been already earmarked for the new 15 minute cities or whatever they're called, these new, in the same way they're planning for Gaza.
[01:20:32]  So, what is going on?
[01:20:35]  Look, to the best of my knowledge, I look at the media from the region for the most part.
[01:20:43]  Yeah.
[01:20:43]  And to the best of my knowledge, what's happened is that the first line of Iranian bases in the west of the country has been heavily poppled, the first line of Iranian missile bases.
[01:20:57]  These were equipped with missiles that were of shorter ranges and of older models, and they were placed there to be able to reach Israel from the west of the country because that's the shortest distance.
[01:21:13]  Now they're trying to attack the missile bases that are further in the center.
[01:21:18]  These are equipped with newer missiles with longer ranges, and the design of these bases has been massively improved to make sure that they are much less vulnerable to airstrikes.
[01:21:31]  And so, what you see happening is that the bases are being attacked, but they're not collapsing.
[01:21:40]  And instead the tunnels are being shut.
[01:21:44]  And in some cases, there is a big aerial presence over Iran to detect attempts at reopening tunnels.
[01:21:51]  But the Iranians are still succeeding in reopening the tunnels to these missile cities and in firing again.
[01:21:59]  And they've reached a stage where they can, where they are at a sustainable rate of fire of something like 30, 40 missiles a day and double that number in drones, which they are sending all over the region.
[01:22:16]  And the damage that they're causing to energy infrastructure, especially in Kuwait and in the UAE, and to a lesser extent in Qatar, but especially really Kuwait and the UAE, has been massive.
[01:22:33]  Bahrain has been hit very badly, very badly, and the bases across the Gulf have been severely damaged.
[01:22:44]  And if the war ends tonight, for example, We're speaking on the 1st of April.
[01:22:51]  Not sure when this comes out.
[01:22:52]  But if the war ends tonight, when the Americans try to rebuild their bases or deploy forces to them again, they're going to be attacked again.
[01:23:05]  Because the Iranians are of the view that we will not allow this to happen to us again.
[01:23:10]  Because it's the great Satan.
[01:23:12]  Not just because it's the great Satan, because in June 2025, they were negotiating and the negotiations were going well.
[01:23:20]  And they were scheduled to have a meeting on the Sunday, and the Israelis bombed them on the Friday.
[01:23:27]  And then in September 2025, Trump sends a peace offer to Hamas.
[01:23:32]  Hamas goes to meet in Qatar to discuss Trump's terms, and the Israelis try to kill them all.
[01:23:41]  And then this time, there were further meetings scheduled.
[01:23:45]  The Omanis and the British said, We had an agreement, and the Iranians had conceded everything conceivable.
[01:23:52]  That they could concede on the nuclear program except for not having one at all.

=== Religious Jewish Brigades in Israel (16:05) ===

[01:23:59]  So they gave up things like having any kind of nuclear stockpile.
[01:24:03]  If you don't have a nuclear stockpile, you can't build a nuclear weapon.
[01:24:07]  They accepted to have permanent monitoring of everything that they're doing in all of the facilities, meaning that if they were to try to build a nuclear weapon, they'd be detected.
[01:24:17]  And yet, in spite of agreeing to these things, they were attacked again.
[01:24:23]  And, you know, if, if this is accepted by the Iranians, they're guaranteed a third attack.
[01:24:35]  And the damage to their infrastructure and their industry has been quite extensive.
[01:24:41]  Iran over the years, because of the sanctions, had become self-reliant in steel, in medicine, in a lot of chemicals, in a lot of refining, in all kinds of things.
[01:24:53]  It isn't always the best quality, but it's enough for their market.
[01:24:59]  And the Americans and the Israelis are going around bombing these things.
[01:25:04]  They literally attacked a factory that produces, uh, Drugs to treat cancer.
[01:25:12]  Who does that?
[01:25:19]  What is the size of the, well, first of all, the Iranian population?
[01:25:24]  90 million and change.
[01:25:26]  90 million.
[01:25:28]  And what's the size of the Iranian military?
[01:25:33]  Depends on who you believe, right?
[01:25:36]  Officially, the IRGC is around 200,000 to 400,000 people.
[01:25:41]  Then you have the Basij, which are regime enforcement militias, largely volunteer, but they claim that they have 20 million volunteers.
[01:25:54]  They probably have 400,000 deployable people to 500,000 deployable people.
[01:26:01]  And then there's the army, which is, I think, in the high hundreds of thousands.
[01:26:08]  So in total, you're easily looking at a fighting force of 2 million men.
[01:26:15]  And how well equipped and well trained are they?
[01:26:19]  It really varies.
[01:26:20]  The IRGC gets to pick the best equipment and they have the best experience and the best training.
[01:26:26]  And their men regularly get sent around the region to help develop fighting capabilities.
[01:26:34]  But they have access to drones, to missiles, to.
[01:26:38]  They obviously have their own tanks, they have their own artillery.
[01:26:41]  Most of the conventional weaponry that they have is outdated and not that great.
[01:26:46]  But even their air defense, which is not very good, can hit an F 35 now and again, or can hit an F 18 now and again.
[01:26:56]  So they will definitely be able to give the Americans a run for their money.
[01:27:01]  If you look at the fighting in South Lebanon right now, the Israelis are struggling to advance a few kilometers along the border against Hezbollah, which is a much smaller force, but it is arguably a better trained force than the bulk of Iranian forces.
[01:27:22]  Yes, we should briefly detour into Lebanon.
[01:27:29]  Because I'd heard this.
[01:27:31]  I'd read reports from some senior bod in the Israeli military saying this is unsustainable.
[01:27:39]  The losses we are experiencing, we're not able to replace them unless there is even more mass conscription.
[01:27:48]  Is that right?
[01:27:49]  So basically, the chief of staff of the Israeli army, Yael Zamir, has been saying that he raised 10 flags at the cabinet because the Israeli military has a massive manpower shortage.
[01:28:03]  And now the Israeli government is about to recruit 400,000 reservists, but these wouldn't be all recruited at the same time.
[01:28:10]  It would be a sort of rolling thing.
[01:28:13]  And Zamir, the chief of staff of the Israeli forces, he's arguing for lengthening national service, lengthening reserve service, And recruiting the Haredi Jews, the Hasidic Jews, essentially.
[01:28:29]  Oh, they'll love that.
[01:28:29]  Uh, the, the, the ultra-Orthodox, who absolutely refuse to serve in the Israeli military and have some of their rabbis have said that if we have to choose between studying the Torah and the state of Israel, we will study the Torah.
[01:28:44]  We don't care about the state of Israel.
[01:28:48]  So there is this division within Israel between, uh, this community and pretty much everyone else.
[01:28:56]  But Netanyahu relies on them for their votes, and in exchange, he has to give them favors, and so he can't force them to join the army.
[01:29:05]  What?
[01:29:05]  So, the people who are let me get this right the people who are propping up this evil, evil man and his military ventures are at the same time saying, Yeah, but you go and fight this stuff.
[01:29:19]  We're going to hang on at home reading our scriptures.
[01:29:27]  Yes.
[01:29:29]  Yes.
[01:29:30]  That's great, isn't it?
[01:29:31]  And part of the problem is they had a, they've just recruited a brigade, or recently in the last few years, recruited a brigade of religious Jews.
[01:29:41]  And they sent them into the West Bank because they are the ones who want to expand settlements.
[01:29:47]  They are the ones who want to, uh, grow the territory of the state of Israel.
[01:29:54]  Their behavior is so atrocious that they had to be withdrawn.
[01:29:59]  Now, they had to be withdrawn partly because the scandal broke because they beat up some CNN journalists or roughed up some CNN journalists.
[01:30:08]  So it gained a lot of attention.
[01:30:10]  But even before that, the Israelis were saying, these guys are insane.
[01:30:17]  So it is perhaps a small mercy that these people are not being recruited into the Israeli military.
[01:30:26]  Because remember, the Israeli military pretends to operate under Western values.
[01:30:33]  These guys don't see any need for that pretense.
[01:30:38]  Right.
[01:30:39]  But it is interesting going back to your point that, that even in South Lebanon, the IDF, whom I believe to be one of the world's best military forces, Not on the ground.
[01:30:52]  Not on the ground.
[01:30:53]  They're having their asses kicked by.
[01:30:56]  I mean, but this is not unusual.
[01:31:00]  They tend to do poorly in ground campaigns.
[01:31:04]  But surely they're trained for nothing but urban warfare.
[01:31:08]  I mean.
[01:31:10]  But urban warfare is that tough.
[01:31:11]  That's why the Russia Ukraine war is moving so slowly.
[01:31:14]  I see.
[01:31:15]  Because in every single village, a small group of men can hold up a bigger group if they're well dug in and well entrenched.
[01:31:23]  And remember, Rubble provides cover.
[01:31:26]  So when the Israelis go around bombing everything, uh, well, that whatever structure survives, uh, in a collapsed state actually is now a new fortification.
[01:31:41]  And so they can keep on fighting.
[01:31:43]  Plus, Hezbollah's tactics have evolved.
[01:31:46]  They are now using a more mobile defense, a more flexible defense, uh, rather than, as in the past, relying very much on tunnels.
[01:31:54]  A lot of their tunnels have been blown up.
[01:31:57]  And they seem to be performing well enough to make the Israelis really struggle to the extent that they believe that they have a massive manpower shortage and they need 400,000 men.
[01:32:10]  But it's very unlikely that Hezbollah has deployed more than 40,000 men.
[01:32:15]  Who's arming them?
[01:32:17]  Hezbollah?
[01:32:18]  Yeah.
[01:32:20]  The Iranians and their own resources.
[01:32:23]  What the Iranians do is that they help all of these groups set up their own supply lines.
[01:32:28]  And some of their funding does come through drug smuggling.
[01:32:31]  Like this accusation has been repeated so many times that it does seem to be credible.
[01:32:36]  And even in Lebanon, I think the brother of one Hezbollah MP turned out to have been involved in some kind of amphetamine smuggling operation.
[01:32:49]  So they do some of that.
[01:32:51]  They also have groups of donors that support them.
[01:32:54]  They have social establishments, businesses, etc.
[01:32:59]  It's a very well institutionalized organization.
[01:33:05]  But the civilian arm of it is actually much bigger than the military arm because they provide welfare and they provide education and they get a lot of support from Iran.
[01:33:19]  When the Israelis fight, they don't see any distinction between civilian and military, and they just go around blowing up everything.
[01:33:27]  A bit like the Americans in the last stages of the Second World War.
[01:33:31]  Yeah.
[01:33:32]  Yeah.
[01:33:32]  They, they, I mean, the spiritual damage of the Second World War is enormous because now everybody believes that the only way to fight is total warfare.
[01:33:44]  When in reality, it isn't the only way to fight.
[01:33:49]  But the problem is that we can no longer compromise with each other.
[01:33:54]  And part of the problem is that the West is going to places that it doesn't understand, that have a completely different culture.
[01:34:03]  It must be difficult for you as a Lebanese, who presumably in the past has seen Hezbollah as a pain in the ass, not conducive to peace in Lebanon.
[01:34:19]  But you must be thinking when the Israelis are going in, you must be kind of half.
[01:34:24]  Half rooting for Hezbollah.
[01:34:29]  I became Christian because the only alternative was to hate everyone equally.
[01:34:39]  I don't hate the Israelis.
[01:34:40]  I don't hate Hezbollah.
[01:34:43]  I don't want to live under the Israeli boot.
[01:34:45]  I don't want to live under Hezbollah's boot.
[01:34:49]  But I think that I can compromise and reason with Hezbollah more than I can with the Israelis.
[01:34:56]  That's saying something, isn't it?
[01:34:58]  Do you know what, Firas?
[01:35:00]  One of my very first moments, I used to be virulently pro Israel.
[01:35:07]  I mean, militantly.
[01:35:08]  I used to think, go, Israeli.
[01:35:09]  You're great.
[01:35:11]  You're fighting for the West against these horrible towel heads who are evil and they're just like, you know, I bought into the propaganda.
[01:35:20]  And the first inkling I ever had that Israel might not be.
[01:35:26]  Totally perfect was the Shabra and Chatila camps, massacres.
[01:35:35]  And I thought I must have been misinformed here, but the impression I'm getting is that Israel, they must have been, must have been an accident or something, went into these refugee camps and actually killed loads of people.
[01:35:51]  It was Christian militias who did the killing under the supervision and protection of the Israelis.
[01:35:57]  Right.
[01:35:57]  And at their encouragement.
[01:36:00]  Because for the Israelis, it is always Amalek.
[01:36:09]  But they had to, at the time, there were big complications with the United States over the Lebanon invasion and what to do with it.
[01:36:19]  Because what was supposed to happen was a very limited operation in South Lebanon, and then the Israelis are in Beirut.
[01:36:27]  And the Americans sent the mediators to try to figure out a way. to get the Palestinians out and give the Israelis what they want and to spare the civilians.
[01:36:41]  The Israelis, I believe, concluded that similar to how they had behaved in the initial expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, where there was a bunch of limited massacres, the effect of which was to encourage more and more Palestinians to flee, I believe that someone somewhere thought if we did this here, it would encourage more Palestinians to leave,
[01:37:09]  including the civilians, because Just as with Gaza, even if you kill every fighting man in Hamas, within a decade, these people's relatives will be adults and they will fight again.
[01:37:27]  So I think someone somewhere thought along these lines.
[01:37:31]  But because back then the Americans were a lot more Christian and Reagan didn't want to be involved in this kind of thing, they had to outsource this murderousness.
[01:37:46]  And the Christian militias in Lebanon, God forgive them, had become incredibly vindictive towards the Palestinians because they thought that there was no way to get rid of them except by killing them.
[01:38:03]  And it didn't occur to anybody to try to convert them.
[01:38:08]  And maybe that's not something that you think about in this kind of conflict.
[01:38:13]  And maybe there's something in Islam that makes converting Muslims a lot harder.
[01:38:18]  Well, apostasy is punishable by death, for one.
[01:38:22]  For one thing, yes.
[01:38:26]  But I mean, like psychologically, when you attach yourself to this level of pride and when you attach yourself to this kind of artfulness in rules to sort of play around words and deceive God, it makes your life a little bit worse.
[01:38:46]  It makes your life a little bit worse.
[01:38:49]  And so.
[01:38:51]  The result was that a bunch of the Christians had concluded that we have to kill them.
[01:38:57]  And these guys were let loose by the Israelis.
[01:39:03]  And they were firing flares, according to Robert Fisk, who never lies about the facts, I believe.
[01:39:08]  He's got his own issues, but he doesn't lie about the facts.
[01:39:12]  And they were firing flares to help the Christians continue the massacre of the Palestinians.
[01:39:22]  Um, so that's what happened with Sabra and Shatima.
[01:39:27]  The Israelis always say, we were not involved.
[01:39:29]  We couldn't have known about it.
[01:39:31]  Nonsense.
[01:39:32]  They oversaw the operation.
[01:39:34]  They knew everything that was going on.
[01:39:36]  They, they, they, they were there.
[01:39:38]  They knew that this was happening and they could have stopped it.
[01:39:41]  But I believe that they wanted this kind of thing to happen.
[01:39:44]  It's like they knew nothing about October the 7th until it happened.
[01:39:46]  It was just, took them completely by surprise.
[01:39:49]  I mean, the intelligence warnings were there and they were there on the night of the attack.
[01:39:55]  And the units that were tasked with surveying Hamas said that they were conducting training operations to do this kind of major storming operation.

=== Sabra and Shatima Cover-Up (02:48) ===

[01:40:05]  And Hamas had been threatening that we are going to do something and we will show you and we will teach you.
[01:40:11]  But the official narrative is that we absolutely knew nothing.
[01:40:15]  We couldn't have known anything about this.
[01:40:18]  Uh, but hey, let's ethnically cleanse them.
[01:40:22]  Uh, now that it has happened, The only answer is to ethnically cleanse them.
[01:40:26]  And the irony is that a lot of the Jews living in that area are actually a bunch of weird leftists who won peace with Gaza and things like that.
[01:40:41]  The people who were killed at the Nova festival, these were all celebrating peace and things of that nature.
[01:40:48]  There is this divide in the Israeli personality where.
[01:41:00]  On one level, they want Western approval and they want to show that they're Western and they want to live with Western values, but they don't want to be Christian.
[01:41:12]  And that's where the divide comes from.
[01:41:16]  Because you can't talk about the West unless you're talking about Christians.
[01:41:21]  That's what makes the West different.
[01:41:24]  And people go into all kinds of pretzel twists to pretend otherwise.
[01:41:32]  But the reason that the West is based on conscience and honor rather than pride and shame is because of the Stations of the Cross prayer and because of Christianity as a whole.
[01:41:50]  When you pray the Stations of the Cross, you remind yourself that the crucifixion of Christ happened because of my individual sinfulness.
[01:42:03]  Because of my sins, because of my failings, because I wasn't as good of a Christian as I should be.
[01:42:13]  The natural tendency for everyone is to operate based on pride and shame.
[01:42:20]  The only way to transform that into conscience and honor is by taking the world as your cross and being responsible for it and showing that in your every action.
[01:42:36]  In this totalitarian Christian way.
[01:42:41]  And that's what's transformed the West.
[01:42:44]  So the Israelis have this split in their personality where they want to be Western, but they aren't.

=== End Times Force in Israel (15:02) ===

[01:42:53]  Yeah.
[01:42:56]  Yes.
[01:43:00]  Um, we could talk more about that.
[01:43:02]  I was, I was tempted for a moment, but I'm, I'm quite keen to get back to what's happening in Iran.
[01:43:09]  Are the Americans and the Israelis, um, experiencing any significant losses in any particular areas?
[01:43:17]  So the American bases in Bahrain and in Kuwait and prob, and in Saudi Arabia and in Qatar, in the UAE, we don't know as much, but these have been damaged.
[01:43:31]  And in Bahrain and Kuwait's case, they have been severely damaged.
[01:43:37]  Some people say that they've become uninhabitable.
[01:43:40]  I question that.
[01:43:42]  A lot of the radar systems in the region have been damaged.
[01:43:45]  There is a big debate over whether or not they are damaged to the extent that they're incapacitated, or they're still functioning.
[01:43:56]  That's why a lot of the missile defense is still working, even if imperfectly.
[01:44:03]  The Israelis do an excellent job of covering up what is going on in Israel.
[01:44:09]  But there is evidence that the Haifa refinery, that some of the industrial facilities in the south, uh, and that civilian areas in Tel Aviv have taken hits.
[01:44:18]  But if you send a camera crew into anywhere where there has been a hit, uh, the try, a Chinese TV station tried to do that.
[01:44:27]  And within five minutes, the Israeli police were there telling them, how dare you film here?
[01:44:31]  You're not allowed to film.
[01:44:33]  Meaning that if the Iranians hit the target that they say that they're aiming at, Which is a building linked to the government or the defense establishment?
[01:44:42]  Because the Israelis have all kinds of intelligence assets in urban areas or intelligence buildings, military buildings, etc., buildings linked to the war effort in urban areas.
[01:44:54]  But if you show up with a camera and try to film that, you don't get anywhere.
[01:44:59]  And now, I mean, TikTok is owned by the Allisons now, and Facebook is owned by Zuckerberg.
[01:45:08]  And, uh, Elon Musk had to go to the Gaza border and, you know, be escorted by Netanyahu and be told what a naughty boy he is.
[01:45:19]  And he suffered from the ADL boycott and all that stuff.
[01:45:24]  And so the social media space is somewhat constrained, but that is kind of normal in the fog of war.
[01:45:32]  What is unusual is to have full transparency, historically speaking.
[01:45:38]  So we don't really know how big their losses are.
[01:45:42]  We know that the energy infrastructure in the Gulf has been badly damaged, but not in an irrecoverable way.
[01:45:49]  Um, the UAE and Kuwait have taken the bulk of the punishment.
[01:45:54]  That's because Kuwait has the biggest American bases and the UAE is Israel's closest ally.
[01:46:01]  So, that, and, and Bahrain has, has been hammered because they host the main headquarters of the Fifth Fleet.
[01:46:10]  Um, Oman has been hit.
[01:46:12]  Saudi Arabia has been hit.
[01:46:14]  The Iranians have shown That they can't cause the same exact amount of damage, but they can hit similar targets when they want to.
[01:46:24]  Are not countries like Bahrain and the UAE, um, going to be thinking after all this, why do we even want these bloody Americans here?
[01:46:33]  What do they do?
[01:46:34]  Because if they don't have the Americans there, they become provinces of either Saudi Arabia or Iran.
[01:46:41]  And are those, are those presumably worse evils or what?
[01:46:46]  Or different evils?
[01:46:48]  Yeah, because they don't get to be kings anymore.
[01:46:50]  They don't get to be independent states anymore.
[01:46:52]  I see.
[01:46:54]  So if the Americans leave, Kuwait becomes a province of Iraq.
[01:47:00]  Bahrain might become a province of Iran.
[01:47:04]  The UAE might be taken by the Iranians or the Saudis, say for Qatar.
[01:47:09]  These entities are not natural states in a very real sense.
[01:47:16]  Although the ruling families there have old and historic roots, but in the same way that the Saud family eliminated, say, the Rashid family and kicked out.
[01:47:27]  All of the various rivals that were ruling small territories in Arabia, their plan was to go and continue and take over the entire region.
[01:47:37]  It was the British who stopped them and eventually Ibn Saud had to bomb his own forces with British planes to stop them from continuing the war for eternal conquest.
[01:47:53]  What?
[01:47:57]  How is Saudi going to emerge from this?
[01:48:00]  I mean, they're presumably.
[01:48:03]  Are they the enemies of Iran or not?
[01:48:07]  I mean, they're Sunni, aren't they?
[01:48:09]  Yes.
[01:48:10]  They are the enemies of Iran.
[01:48:12]  They're the enemies of Iran, and they are sandwiched between the Yemenis and the Iranians and the Iraqis.
[01:48:22]  So look at it this way Iran is stuck between Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.
[01:48:30]  Three major Sunni powers who really don't like Shia Muslims.
[01:48:36]  But Saudi Arabia is stuck between Yemen, and the north of Yemen is kind of Shia, a different branch of Shia, but allied with Iran.
[01:48:46]  Iraq, which is 60% Shia, maybe more.
[01:48:51]  Bahrain, also 60% Shia.
[01:48:54]  Iran itself.
[01:48:56]  And Kuwait, which is 30% Shia.
[01:49:00]  So.
[01:49:02]  Neither of them is in a great position.
[01:49:05]  No.
[01:49:07]  And the question is can order be preserved now that it has been proven that the Americans aren't the final arbiter in the region?
[01:49:22]  Because the reason this region exists in the shape that it does is because of British map makers and their legacy being passed on to the Americans.
[01:49:35]  That's why these countries look the way that they do.
[01:49:38]  They wouldn't remain in the borders that we now know if the Americans are shown to be incapable of doing basic things like keeping existential waterways open, which they are now demonstrably incapable of doing.
[01:49:57]  So when the American order falls apart, all of the borders change.
[01:50:05]  Right.
[01:50:07]  But how and who wins which battle?
[01:50:11]  That's what's going to determine it.
[01:50:13]  And the Yemenis have been in the process of building massive ground forces.
[01:50:19]  They say to liberate Jerusalem, but you can't get to Jerusalem from Yemen unless you go through Saudi Arabia.
[01:50:26]  But is Yemen a significant military force?
[01:50:32]  The Americans bombed them for 45 days to try to make them open Babel Mandab, to open the Red Sea, and they failed.
[01:50:44]  They're not a conventional military force, but they have a very large number of men, possibly up to a million men under arms.
[01:50:53]  Do they really?
[01:50:55]  Goodness.
[01:50:56]  And their ambition, they believe that a big chunk of Saudi Arabia is theirs by right.
[01:51:05]  They also don't believe that the Al Saud have the right to rule Makkah and Medina.
[01:51:14]  Goodness me.
[01:51:16]  So, when the American order falls, nobody knows how it plays out and who it could suck in, more importantly.
[01:51:28]  So, I mean, Trump didn't just sort of poke a hornet's nest.
[01:51:35]  I mean, no.
[01:51:45]  It takes a madman.
[01:51:47]  It does.
[01:51:48]  But a madman being controlled by people, I mean, Chabad, aren't they a kind of sort of.
[01:51:59]  What's the word?
[01:52:00]  I mean, they're a kind of death cult.
[01:52:01]  I mean, don't they want to bring on the end so that Armageddon and stuff?
[01:52:09]  So the old Rebbe Schneerson would always go on about the importance of rebuilding the temple and the sadness around the loss of the temple.
[01:52:20]  There's a debate over whether or not he meant literally rebuilding the third temple or, you know, whatever exactly he meant.
[01:52:30]  Um,.
[01:52:34]  There is a big, there is a growing force in Israel that wants to bring about the end times.
[01:52:42]  Yeah.
[01:52:43]  And so they recently made a sacrifice of a red heifer, which they believe is necessary to be able to rebuild the temple.
[01:52:53]  Um, I believe in the, I think it was in the nineties, they gave a UN official as a gift, a model of Jerusalem, but instead of the, Aqsa and all of that Islamic compound, they had the third temple on it.
[01:53:13]  The older, I believe, a mayor of Jerusalem had a painting of Jerusalem with the temple built instead.
[01:53:25]  And they believe that building the temple will bring the Messiah.
[01:53:29]  And they want the Messiah to come because that is a foundational part of their eschatology.
[01:53:38]  Rather than accepting that the Messiah has come.
[01:53:40]  He's already come.
[01:53:41]  Spoiler alert.
[01:53:42]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:53:44]  Exactly.
[01:53:46]  So this kind of end times ideology isn't limited to Chabad.
[01:53:54]  It extends to a decent section of Jewish society, including decision makers.
[01:54:01]  Are they all like this?
[01:54:03]  No.
[01:54:03]  In the same way that not all Iranians are fanatical.
[01:54:10]  Is it a big enough issue because it's an idea adopted by decision makers and could cause mad chaos if it were to occur?
[01:54:20]  Yes, it is something to be legitimately concerned about.
[01:54:26]  And so you see, I mean, Ahmadinejad, the former president of Iran, he said that chaos was good because it brings about the Mahdi, and that's how we see God.
[01:54:40]  Well, okay, that's dangerous.
[01:54:43]  You shouldn't have people like that in charge.
[01:54:46]  The issue is that it's easy to say it about Muslims, it's difficult to say it about Israelis and Jews.
[01:54:53]  And the objective reality is that if you are a Christian, you look at them equally.
[01:55:02]  You look at them as people you fundamentally disagree with for different reasons, but at the end of the day, equally.
[01:55:10]  And you see a problem here and you see a problem there.
[01:55:13]  Yes.
[01:55:15]  But I also, I have to say, I look at these situations and I think, well, who started this?
[01:55:24]  I have sympathies with the underdog.
[01:55:27]  Well, look, who started this is a real.
[01:55:34]  Issue when it, when, when, if you're trying to find a solution, it's a real issue because the argument can be made that this started with the emergence of Islam as a heresy coming out of Christianity.
[01:55:53]  And if you're Jewish, you believe that Christianity is also a heresy.
[01:55:58]  And so, who started this gets you, can take you back quite a while in time.
[01:56:06]  And if you're a Palestinian or Muslim, you say, well, the Jews lived peacefully under Islam, which they largely did.
[01:56:14]  And in some cases, they were given very important positions.
[01:56:20]  But they were never equals.
[01:56:22]  And you say, this started by the creation of the State of Israel, which led to the dispossession of the Palestinians.
[01:56:32]  And the leading Zionists knew that this was a recipe for eternal warfare, and they chose eternal warfare.
[01:56:41]  In order to have a state.
[01:56:44]  So, who started this doesn't get you anywhere.
[01:56:48]  Right.
[01:56:48]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:56:49]  Okay.
[01:56:50]  It doesn't solve anything.
[01:56:54]  But.
[01:56:58]  This war, this is a war of choice started by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.
[01:57:02]  Yeah, well, that's kind of what I was getting at.
[01:57:04]  But history doesn't begin here.
[01:57:06]  Okay.
[01:57:07]  Fair enough.
[01:57:08]  Fair enough.
[01:57:08]  Which is why it's important to love your enemy and to forgive and, and, and.
[01:57:14]  But you also want to be very open in your will to convert them.
[01:57:20]  Well, Ferris, I'm with you.
[01:57:24]  I'm team Jesus.
[01:57:26]  Right.
[01:57:28]  But I'm thinking that short of having the second coming, this is not going to resolve itself very easily.
[01:57:37]  I mean, do you think that.
[01:57:43]  Is America going to be stupid enough to commit ground troops?
[01:57:46]  And aren't they going to get.
[01:57:49]  It would be a disaster for the Americans.
[01:57:51]  It would be a disaster for the Americans on every level.

=== Europe Reaches Pre-Revolutionary State (09:56) ===

[01:57:56]  Starting with American self interest.
[01:57:58]  And, you know, if you are Christian, this is the most powerful, nominally Christian country in the world.
[01:58:06]  You should wish it well.
[01:58:10]  Starting with the Americans' own self interest.
[01:58:13]  This delivers the United States to Democrats who want to trash your children, who want to flood your country with, with, with immigrants who don't like you.
[01:58:22]  Do you think it does?
[01:58:23]  It, it, it's that, it's that much of a disaster that, that, yes, yes, yes.
[01:58:27]  Yeah.
[01:58:28]  Okay.
[01:58:28]  Yep.
[01:58:29]  Absolutely.
[01:58:29]  Absolutely.
[01:58:31]  Um, it causes all kind of damage.
[01:58:33]  It discredits nationalism and Christian nationalism in general.
[01:58:38]  And I would argue you should always put the Christian before the nationalism, but that's just me.
[01:58:46]  And to the extent that MAGA had a lot of good things to offer, which it did, it discredits those.
[01:58:53]  What do you mean?
[01:58:54]  I'm thinking of nice, distinctive baseball hats.
[01:58:57]  I'm not.
[01:58:58]  What else?
[01:58:59]  Okay.
[01:59:01]  Different conversation.
[01:59:02]  Going around the world, if you send ground forces into Iran, they're going to destroy a lot more energy assets.
[01:59:13]  And the cascade of events this will trigger will include a much worse fertilizer shortage.
[01:59:22]  And if yields drop enough, some portion of people will starve.
[01:59:30]  Some portion of people will starve to death.
[01:59:33]  Yes.
[01:59:34]  You will also have a broad industrial collapse.
[01:59:40]  China will go into Central Asia to secure its own energy needs, they can solve their problem.
[01:59:45]  And they don't care about losing some people.
[01:59:48]  They can still feed their people.
[01:59:50]  They're rich enough now.
[01:59:52]  Uhm, and it won't therefore harm China as much as others.
[01:59:58]  But in the West, it will cause total industrial collapse.
[02:00:05]  In Europe, this is the kind of thing that breaks governments.
[02:00:09]  Because if they try to say, we're going to shut you down again, we're going to lock you down again, we're going to stop you using your car, we're going to impose this, that and the other on you.
[02:00:19]  Europe is reaching a state that is pre-revolutionary.
[02:00:24]  Yeah.
[02:00:25]  And I favor peaceful political change over violent revolution because I know what civil wars actually look like.
[02:00:34]  And so.
[02:00:37]  The cascading effect of this is disastrous.
[02:00:41]  And it is better to resolve this through reason and words and compromise rather than through the consequences of what happens here.
[02:00:52]  But there isn't a single sector.
[02:00:54]  Computers, cars, chairs, clothing, heating oil, um, your ability to get around the world, tires for your car, uh, packaging for the food that you buy from the supermarket.
[02:01:11]  The food that you buy itself, nothing is spared if this war actually goes full tilt.
[02:01:19]  And the Iranians are still holding back in terms of how much of the world's energy supply they can destroy.
[02:01:27]  If you send ground forces, they will no longer be holding back.
[02:01:31]  And we will get to a stage where we don't come back from this, except through decades of violence and chaos.
[02:01:41]  And what have you done in recent years?
[02:01:44]  You flooded Europe with people who absolutely hate you, who can't exist in a society that you are familiar with, who are willing to use violence against you.
[02:01:55]  And now you've made yourself so poor that you could no longer pay them welfare or deport them.
[02:02:01]  You're going to have to fight them.
[02:02:05]  The cascading effects of this will be catastrophic.
[02:02:08]  And people aren't thinking that through.
[02:02:10]  So I really hope he doesn't do something that stupid.
[02:02:14]  But the Iranians are insanely stubborn and they don't want to give him an exit and they don't look like they're going to back down.
[02:02:25]  And his ego, Trump's ego, is too big for him to back down, which is why he's making these fabrications that they're coming and they're begging me for a ceasefire and they've accepted a ceasefire but are going to bomb them anyway.
[02:02:40]  Like, what kind of pagan bullshit is that?
[02:02:46]  Just so that we don't end this episode all wanting to kill ourselves instantly.
[02:02:55]  I mean, I'm thinking Witkoff, Kushner, Hegsith, Trump.
[02:03:09]  Who have we got?
[02:03:12]  What forces of moderation have we got that might?
[02:03:15]  Enable Trump to see.
[02:03:18]  Is it just the midterms, the hope of the midterms?
[02:03:22]  His own self interest, frankly.
[02:03:25]  But he doesn't know what his own self interest is, does he?
[02:03:29]  He thought this was going to be a quick war, he thought this was going to be easy.
[02:03:37]  He thought this was going to be easy, and there's nothing easy about it.
[02:03:40]  There's absolutely nothing easy about it.
[02:03:44]  And the Iranians want to break the system to make sure that this system doesn't come back for them.
[02:03:50]  Yeah.
[02:03:50]  I mean, if you look at Iranian propaganda, they write on their missiles revenge for the girls raped by Epstein.
[02:04:00]  They publicly say this is a war against the Epstein class that controls Trump.
[02:04:06]  And they're not completely wrong.
[02:04:09]  They're not completely wrong in saying that the Epstein class is ruling the world.
[02:04:13]  Yeah.
[02:04:14]  And these are dangerous people.
[02:04:16]  And so, how can you get rid of them if you don't break the system that enables them?
[02:04:24]  That's the real danger.
[02:04:25]  And that's their perspective.
[02:04:28]  And so, I hope I'm wrong.
[02:04:33]  I always hope that I'm wrong.
[02:04:36]  And I hope that they see some sense.
[02:04:40]  Both of them, and that we end up with peace.
[02:04:45]  But it's.
[02:04:48]  Unless the Americans just say, look, if we leave the Middle East now, it'll be total chaos in the Middle East, and that'll get us off our backs.
[02:04:58]  And Europe be damned, they can deal with the refugees.
[02:05:02]  That's the only way out.
[02:05:05]  But that means that the Americans are no longer a global power, they're just an Atlantic power.
[02:05:10]  With some global pretensions.
[02:05:13]  That's what it would imply.
[02:05:16]  And it's the kind of thing where if they leave, chaos follows.
[02:05:21]  The Turks, the Pakistanis, the Yemenis, the Iranians, they're all going to be fighting over who dominates this region.
[02:05:28]  And obviously, the Israelis, and obviously, the Egyptians.
[02:05:34]  So if they leave, they create total chaos behind them.
[02:05:38]  But if you're upholding order, you can't be insanely adventurous.
[02:05:44]  You have to uphold the order.
[02:05:51]  I'm thinking it's not going to be anytime soon, Firas, before I get to see all those beautiful Iranian cities.
[02:05:58]  Like, what are those ones in the East?
[02:06:02]  What are they called?
[02:06:02]  I mean, there's Isfahan.
[02:06:04]  Isfahan, yeah, that's what it is.
[02:06:08]  Isfahan.
[02:06:09]  And then I'm not sure that I need to go and see the pyramids again right immediately.
[02:06:17]  And Aden and Yemen.
[02:06:20]  That's a beautiful place.
[02:06:21]  Sana'a is a beautiful place.
[02:06:25]  What's the one with those very early skyscrapers?
[02:06:30]  I think Sana'a still has them.
[02:06:33]  I mean, and the Saudis bombed some of them.
[02:06:37]  I've enjoyed my travels in the Middle East.
[02:06:40]  Yes.
[02:06:41]  I mean, great culture of hospitality.
[02:06:45]  Yes, absolutely.
[02:06:47]  Absolutely.
[02:06:47]  And nice kahwa, and, you know.
[02:06:53]  Sorry, you cracked there for a second.
[02:06:56]  Yeah.
[02:06:57]  What's that?
[02:06:59]  I lost you there for a split second.
[02:07:00]  Oh, I was using my rudimentary Arabic.
[02:07:04]  I was saying, Kahwa.
[02:07:08]  Yes.
[02:07:11]  I traveled overland through Egypt and then the Sudan.
[02:07:17]  That's adventurous.
[02:07:18]  It was fantastic.
[02:07:20]  And as you got to more remote parts of the country, I mean, even though you were in the middle of nowhere, There would always be a little man by the road brewing a pot of coffee or chai, which you did pour from a great height.
[02:07:36]  And it was.
[02:07:38]  I love that.
[02:07:39]  I love that world.
[02:07:41]  It was great.
[02:07:43]  Yeah, it's gone now.
[02:07:50]  It's largely gone now.

=== Praying Through the End of an Era (02:24) ===

[02:07:52]  Let's see.
[02:07:54]  So much is gone, and so much is.
[02:07:56]  Could go yet, which is why I suppose I've just been writing a piece about this and we'll finish now.
[02:08:02]  I mean, it does feel a bit like the end of everything.
[02:08:07]  It's definitely the end of an era.
[02:08:11]  I think, you know, I just think we've just got to pray.
[02:08:15]  Yes.
[02:08:16]  I think the power of prayer is underestimated by fair weather Christians.
[02:08:22]  But I think true Christians understand that God, although he's omnipotent, his forces.
[02:08:31]  It's a sort of force multiplier, somehow, prayer.
[02:08:33]  It enables him to do things that.
[02:08:36]  I don't know.
[02:08:37]  I don't know how the mechanism works exactly, but it makes God free to do what he wants to do, which is to help us.
[02:08:49]  No one can help us if we're not willing to help ourselves.
[02:08:52]  And prayer is one of the few pieces of evidence that show that we are willing to help ourselves.
[02:08:58]  Yeah.
[02:08:59]  Amen.
[02:09:00]  Amen, as we say in England.
[02:09:01]  Amen is in America.
[02:09:04]  For us, it's been an absolute joy, tinged with moments of horror talking to you.
[02:09:13]  You're a lovely chap and terribly well informed.
[02:09:16]  Tell us where we can find you, where we can read your stuff.
[02:09:21]  I write on modadgeopolitics.com mainly, and obviously I'm on Twitter for my sins.
[02:09:32]  I will give you a free, just in case you're tempted, I'll give you a free thing on my Substack.
[02:09:38]  Oh, that's very kind of you.
[02:09:40]  That's very kind of you.
[02:09:42]  You can read my ramblings.
[02:09:45]  I haven't done it for, but I do some quite juicy podcasts.
[02:09:48]  I love this one.
[02:09:48]  It's been one of the best.
[02:09:51]  Thank you.
[02:09:51]  Thank you.
[02:09:52]  And everyone else, if you've enjoyed this, as obviously you have, um, do please continue to listen to my stuff.
[02:09:58]  A and B support me some financially if you can and become a paid subscriber.
[02:10:03]  Times are getting tough.
[02:10:04]  This is my sole source of income.
[02:10:05]  So, um, yeah, um, stick with me.
[02:10:09]  Thank you.
[02:10:10]  Thank you for being a listener and thank you again for us.
[02:10:14]  Thank you so much for hosting me.
[02:10:15]  It was a pleasure.
[02:10:16]  Thank you.