George Bush has received an outpouring of prayers, affection, and support as he recovers in a Houston hospital from a blood infection. Meanwhile, British bureaucrats are trying to kill a two year old baby. We analyze the modern West’s bizarre take on life, death, and expertise. Then, is there a terrorism double standard when it comes to reporting on attacks by Muslim radicals versus lunatic non-Muslims? Finally, on this day in history: the Armenian Genocide!
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93-year-old former President George Bush has received an outpouring of prayers, affection, and support as he recovers in a Houston hospital from a blood infection.
Meanwhile, the callous bureaucrats of Britain's socialist health care regime are doing everything in their power to kill a two-year-old baby, even stationing a police guard by his crib to ensure that nobody gives baby Alfie any oxygen.
We will analyze the modern West's bizarre take on life, death, and expertise.
Then, Is there a terrorism double standard when it comes to reporting on attacks by Muslim radicals versus attacks by lunatic non-Muslims?
We'll analyze that.
Finally, on this day in history, the Armenian Genocide.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show.
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Okay, that's fine.
Look, we needed something to balance out Kanye West becoming a conservative Republican yesterday.
That was too good.
That was so covfefe and exciting that we needed just a day of pure death and misery.
But there's a lot to learn from all of that death and misery about us as a culture, about how we treat...
Life and death and expertise, and a lot of misconceptions, too, about the Armenian genocide.
I've been being yelled at on Twitter all day for apparently controversial historical evidence that I'm citing, but we'll get to that toward the end of the show.
George Bush is in the hospital.
George Bush Sr., 93 years old.
Apparently he was in intensive care.
He may still be there.
George Bush is 93 years old.
Last year he was in the hospital for pneumonia.
And then a few months later he was in the hospital again for pneumonia.
In 2014 I think he was hospitalized twice for pneumonia.
He's been in and out of the hospital a lot.
In 2015 he broke a bone in his neck.
Not from jumping out of airplanes, even though he was still doing that up until age 90, I think.
You know, jumping out of airplanes.
And he's a really vigorous guy, war hero.
But he has a disease called vascular Parkinsonism, which is a form of Parkinson's disease.
It makes him wheelchair-bound.
And look, he's had a rough couple weeks.
His wife died.
His wife of 73 years has just died.
And so that's a lot of stress on a person, especially when, could you imagine your wife of 73 years dies?
You get married at age 20 or something.
And, you know, you write letters to each other.
You raise all these kids.
You have a child die.
You go through all of this together.
And you become an elected official.
You become the head of the CIA. You become the vice president and the president.
All of this together.
Your son becomes president.
You go through all of this together.
And when your wife dies, it's an international news event.
That's a lot of pressure, so it's not surprising.
We know, by the way, that spouses who have been together for a very long time, when one of them dies, the other frequently follows shortly thereafter.
And this is commonly attributed to broken heart syndrome.
So there was a 2007 study out of the University of Glasgow that I think tracked 4,000 married couples between the ages of 45 and 64.
And they wanted to see what happens when the spouse dies, what does that do to the living spouse.
And the risk of death increases 30% in the six months following the spouse's death.
And that's for young people, relatively young people, 45 to 64.
And you gotta figure that some of these guys don't like their spouses that much.
You know, not every marriage can be the Bush marriage.
They seem to really love each other.
George Bush spent the last day of his wife's life holding her hand beside her.
They really seem to get along very well.
So 30% among even young and healthy people.
For older couples, this manifests usually in preexisting conditions.
So if you have a heart condition or you have a lung condition or whatever, that'll just accelerate that.
Your immune system is down because of the stress.
For younger couples, it's more interesting because it actually is broken heart syndrome.
It simulates a heart attack.
So when you have a heart attack, there's usually blockage in an artery.
And that causes the symptoms of a heart attack and death.
With broken heart syndrome, there's so much stress that it actually simulates the symptoms of a heart attack and also can kill you.
So who knows what caused this?
Presumably it was a lot of stress bringing down his immune system.
Now, former President Bush has this blood disease.
Hopefully he'll pull through this.
I mean, everybody is pulling for this guy.
Everybody's cheering him on.
All of Twitter is writing about him.
All of these news articles.
And I really hope he makes it through.
Some people are saying, well, he's going to go back to Barbara.
And their child who died when they were younger and living in Texas.
But I hope he makes it through.
If you make it through the first six months, then usually things stabilize.
He says he wants to get back to his family's home in Kennebunkport, Maine.
I hope he can do that.
That said, everyone's pulling for him.
The life expectancy in the United States is a little over 78 years.
78.4 years.
And this guy's lived a good life.
He's outlived life expectancy by a lot.
He's done everything a person could possibly want to do.
He was the youngest pilot during World War II. He...
Survived getting shot down and was just on a raft for hours in the blazing hot sun in the Pacific.
Then he went to Yale, was captain of the baseball team, had a kid while he was there, was tapped for Skull and Bones, the secret society there.
He then had this wonderful career.
He didn't go straight to Wall Street.
He went, became his own man out in West Texas.
He was an oil man.
He ran for office.
He was going to be a An elected official to do his public service.
He makes it all the way up to become the head of the Republican National Committee and the head of the CIA, the vice president for the greatest president of our lifetimes, and the president of the United States for a spell, and his son got to be president.
That's pretty good.
That's a good life.
If you die after all of that and your loving wife is beside you for 93 years or, you know, up until your 93rd year, that's a life well lived.
You can't hope for much more than that.
He was jumping out of airplanes at age 90.
Look, we hope he survives.
If he has lived a life well lived, good for him.
We should celebrate that wonderful life.
When Barbara Bush died, it was even stranger because she gave an announcement.
She said, I'm in terminal decline, basically, and I'm only going to focus on comfort care now.
I'm going to turn down medical interventions.
And people on Twitter were saying, we're pulling for you.
You'll survive, Barbara.
You're strong.
You'll survive.
And you think, no, she's made peace with this.
She's made peace with her death.
I mean, they have that Bush waspy reserve, so they didn't say, Barbara is dying, get ready for the obituaries.
But she's made peace with that.
George W. Bush mentioned this.
He said he talked to his mother and said, you know, Mom, are you ready to die?
And she said, I believe in Jesus.
I'm ready to go to my eternal reward.
And that's a healthy attitude.
You don't live forever.
You can hope for eternal life, but you can't live forever on this earth, and I don't know really who would want to do that.
In this culture, though, we're in a materialist culture, and so all we care about is just surviving, surviving, surviving.
But then it gets really strange, because in Britain, right now in Britain, there is a little baby who is struggling for life, and the government is doing everything they can to kill him.
Here's a news clip.
The parents of the terminally ill toddler Alfie Evans have lost the latest stage of their legal battle over his life support.
Tom Evans and Kate James failed to persuade the Supreme Court that their son was being unlawfully detained at Alderhey Children's Hospital in Liverpool.
The court also refused permission for the parents to appeal the decision.
The couple say they will now make an urgent application to the European Court of Human Rights.
That's 23-month-old Alfie Evans.
And first of all, you get a real sense of socialism there, right?
The parents have basically no rights to their kids.
The government controls the health care and basically owns you.
And so we saw this again.
There was that little baby Charlie Gord.
The parents wanted to take him out and get medical care, and the socialist government said, nope.
It's ours.
Sorry, parents.
Get the parents away.
Get the parents away from that kid.
So the doctors are arguing in this case that little Alfie has been in a semi-vegetative state for a year.
And I don't know what that means, by the way.
What is a semi-vegetative state?
Either you're in a vegetative state or you're not.
If you're a vegetable, you're just there kind of slack-jawed, not doing anything.
If you're in a semi-vegetative state, that means you're not in a vegetative state.
And photos of Alfie have come out of Alfie hugging his mother off of life support, by the way.
The government forced...
Him off of life support, and yet he's still moving around and hugging his mother and somehow surviving.
Now the doctors are shocked by this.
They are shocked that little Alfie has continued to breathe for 18 hours at last check after life support was turned off.
These are the same doctors, by the way, who say, listen, we know best for the kid.
We know what's going to happen.
Take him off of life support.
It's better for him.
We know exactly what's going on.
Oh, gosh, we're shocked when nothing we said was right.
And yet they're the experts.
They're the experts that we need to trust.
We'll get back to the experts in a little bit.
The parents want for Alfie to be able to travel to Rome for treatment.
The Italians, good Catholic country, Rome, city of the Pope, they say, send him over here, we'll give him treatment.
If the British socialists don't want to do it, we will give him treatment.
The doctors said, we're not going to do it.
They've left him without food, water, or oxygen for six hours.
This little baby, this very ill little baby, doesn't have food, water, or oxygen in six hours, he's still alive.
So the Pope tweets out, He says, quote, Not just that, not just a tweet from the Pope, which is pretty good.
Italy granted Alfie citizenship on Monday.
So just yesterday, they give Alfie citizenship so that they can make a case to have this baby transported out of the cold, murderous grip of these socialist bureaucrats and brought to Italy where he can get some care.
The Italian embassy actually said, if you remove the ventilator from Alfie Evans, we will file a complaint against This hospital against Britain for the murder of an Italian citizen, because that's what this is.
Now, what is the prognosis for Alfie?
He has a neurodegenerative disorder.
He is quite sick, and that's what's at stake here.
He's got this disorder, and should he be allowed to live, or should the doctors kill him?
These specialists, the experts, say it's better to let him die.
Now what does that mean?
They say, oh, it's better to let him die.
But that's a philosophical question and a theological question.
That's not a scientific question or a medical question.
But they say, look, we're the medical experts.
We're the scientific experts, so let us tell you how you should view life and the true goals and end of man.
So that has nothing to do with medicine.
You're technicians, practically.
You work on the body like an instrument, but we're talking about matters of life.
What is the purpose of life?
When should life be ended?
When should it be vigorously protected?
This speaks to our bizarre view of experts and medicine and life.
We trust the experts.
In this technocratic, bureaucratic age, we just love to trust the experts.
The writer G.K. Chesterton had an excellent point on this.
He wrote, quote, Wherever he is not exceptionally learned, he is quite casually ignorant.
This is the great fallacy in the case of what is called the impartiality of men of science.
If scientific men had no idea beyond their scientific work, it might be all very well.
That is to say all very well for everybody except for them, because they continue to be ignorant.
But the truth is that beyond their scientific ideas, they have not the absence of ideas, but the presence of the most vulgar and sentimental ideas that happen to be common to their social clique.
If a biologist had no views on art and morals, it might be all very well.
The truth is that the biologist has all the wrong views of art and morals that happen to be going about in the smart set of his time.
And this has always been true.
The doctor has absolutely no say over whether it is kinder to let a baby die or to try to save his life.
He doesn't know what kind is.
He doesn't know if kind is the purpose of life.
Parents perhaps ought to have some say over this.
They ought to have some say and say, you know, we view the world in this way and we have a Christian point of view.
We direct our life in a Christian way or in an Aristotelian way or in a modern way or whatever.
And this is the end of life.
And what the UK government is saying is, we don't care what you think.
We have our own view of life and we're going to force it on you.
And we're going to have people who know absolutely nothing about philosophy or morals or theology.
They're just going to tell you.
This has always been the case.
You could see this...
Do you remember the new atheists?
That was Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
And they were these guys who decided to become fake philosophers overnight in the 2000s.
So you had a magazine writer like Christopher Hitchens, very good magazine writer, a really fun guy to listen to and to read.
And he was pretending to be a philosopher.
And he was pretending to be a theologian.
And he pretended to make arguments against religion, even though he didn't make any arguments against religion, because he doesn't know anything about religion.
Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called God is Not Great.
At no point in the book did he ever even suggest that God is not great.
He didn't make any argument that God is not great.
He just insinuated it all over the place.
But this was a publishing fad, basically, as David Bentley Hart pointed out on this show.
A guy like Richard Dawkins Pretends that he has some great philosophical and theological light, but he's a biologist.
He is actually Chesterton's example.
G.K. Chesterton, as with so many other things, is predicting all of these idiots, these brilliant idiots.
You know, they're smart in one field and totally dummies in all of the other fields.
And they're worse than dummies because they're given to whatever the fashionable thing is at the time.
That's just what they believe.
So this biologist, Richard Dawkins, thinks it's fashionable to be an atheist, and so he pretends that his credentials in one area somehow lead into credentials in another area or lead into expertise in another area.
You see this with climate scientists, people who are physicists or atmospheric scientists.
They say, I know a lot about this very narrow thing, so let me tell you how you should run your economy.
Let me tell you how you should run your government.
Let me tell you how the government should relate to the governed in the United States or around the world.
No, no, no.
Listen, I'm a climate scientist.
I study, I don't even know what they study, like the temperature of balloons above the Arctic or something.
Who knows?
You know, they study like they put a little thermometer in a penguin's mouth and they say, look, I know how to put a thermometer in a penguin's mouth.
So that's why American citizens should not be able to govern themselves anymore.
I'm an expert.
I put the thermometer in the penguin's mouth.
Stop trying to govern yourselves, because now I'm apparently an expert on politics and philosophy and economics and history.
Absolutely not.
And this gets to a really important point.
Which is, we have this notion in modern culture, in a fairly decadent culture, in a very specialized culture, that the experts should govern.
This is very prominent on the left in particular.
They say, what we should do for climate science is put the, in terms of government, we should put the most specialized climate person in charge of the EPA, in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency.
He's the expert, so he should do, he should run the government agency that's related to that.
But really, that expert is the last guy who should ever be in charge of that.
He is the last person we should ask to be the head of that agency, because all he thinks about is that one area.
All he's focused on is that one narrow field to the exclusion of all of the others.
Actually, we should have the guy who's not an expert on climate science.
He should be the one running it because he has a more general view of how that department relates to the rest of the government and the private sector and the people who are being governed.
This is exactly true in the case of little Alfie.
The doctors, the technocrats who say, look, we're the experts on this particular brain disease, so we're going to have a decision over what parents can do to their kids and where this kid can be taken for other possibly life-saving help.
We're going to decide that because we're the experts.
Put us in charge.
No, you're the experts on this one narrow subset of a brain disease.
Or the technocrats, you're the experts on this one narrow bureaucratic function of government.
And you think you ought to run everybody's lives and you think you ought to tell everybody what to do and what the purpose of life is.
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
And this comparison here...
Between how we relate to George Bush's sickness or Barbara Bush's terminal decline and this little baby is so bizarre.
We're weeping for grandparents and we're murdering babies.
We're sobbing.
We're wrenching our garments.
We're rending our garments and gnashing our teeth over people who have lived good lives and we're trying to kill this little baby and say you can't live.
And it's because our view of life in this era is utilitarian.
It's a very utilitarian view.
We value some people over others.
We value some people over others.
This is the whole argument for abortion, by the way.
The whole argument is, well, you know, the convenience of the mother is much more important than the life of the child because we like the mother more.
The mother has a job.
Maybe she went to college.
And, you know, that baby hasn't really done anything.
What's that baby ever done for me?
What's that baby ever going to do for society?
This is the Freakonomics argument for abortion.
They say, yeah, those kids who aren't wanted, they become a nuisance to society.
They don't have a lot of value.
They're not worth a whole lot.
So let's just get rid of them in the womb.
That'll make it easier.
And the mother will have a better time too.
Let's do that.
George Bush, Barbara Bush, those are good people.
Those are the good people who really matter.
We like having them around.
We need to save them.
They really matter, even though they've lived wonderful lives, really, really admirable lives, and maybe it's coming to the end and they're going to go to their eternal reward.
No, we need them.
We want them around.
We really like them.
But that little baby, oh, you know, that little baby with the brain disease, he's probably going to cost the government a lot of money.
And he doesn't, he's not even that cute because he's, you know, a little disfigured from this disease.
It just, no, no, let's get rid of him.
And the parents say, please, let us save the baby.
The Pope says, let us save the baby.
They say, no, no, he's not.
He doesn't have as much value as George Bush does, so no, we're not going to do it.
It's really bizarre, because that isn't the normal view of life.
That isn't the traditional view.
The traditional view is that life has a purpose.
It has a narrative.
It has a beginning and a middle and an end.
And the Christian view is that we're all children of God and all life is valuable.
And even if you have the 99 sheep who are taking care of themselves and behaving well and that one sheep goes astray, the good shepherd goes and saves that sheep.
That's the Christian view.
That's the traditional Western view.
And we've lost it.
We're losing that view and it's totally incoherent and bizarre, even among libertarians, even among right-wing coalitions.
I had Jason Stapleton on the show a couple weeks ago, and he said, the libertarian position is that you own your body.
We own our bodies.
But that doesn't make any sense.
Why do you own your body?
His whole argument was that we own our property because we make it.
It comes from us.
You didn't create your own life.
Your life doesn't come from you.
Your life is a gift from somebody else.
Your life is a gift from God.
You don't own your life.
And the life that is lived...
For the good, the life that is lived, in the Christian terminology, to give glory to God and enjoy Him forever, that's a good life.
Or in the Aristotelian, the ancient terminology, to do the good, to pursue the good, to pursue the virtues and practice the virtues, that's a different life.
But the one that's just lived for you, you say, I own my life and I'm just going to give me pleasure.
Me, me, me, me, me.
That's the modern view and it's shared by the left and the right and it just isn't true and it leads to a hollow life and it leads to moral It doesn't make a lot of sense.
Before we cut to the break, a word on terrorism.
This is another one causing a lot of trouble.
You saw the news story yesterday.
A young, apparently crazy guy in Toronto named Alec Minassian killed 10 and injured 15.
And I mention his name only because it's not, you know, Abu Muhammad Muhammad.
It isn't a name, an Islamic name that we hear so much.
And so at the moment, it appears that this guy isn't Muslim.
They aren't really releasing a lot of information about him, but it doesn't seem to be a religiously inspired...
And he does seem really crazy.
He praised that woman-hating mass killer from California, Elliot Rodger.
His classmates said that when he was in school he didn't have any friends.
The guy, Alec, attended a special needs high school.
Apparently he would walk down the hallways with his heads down and his hands together making meowing sounds.
Sounds like a crazy person.
And the left objects.
They object.
They say, you know, when it's a Muslim perpetrator, you call him a terrorist.
But when it's just some white guy, you say he's crazy.
You say, frequently that's true because frequently the Muslim attackers are terrorists and frequently the white guys are a bit crazy.
Not all the time.
Sometimes the white guys are actual racists.
Sometimes they are terrorists like the one who shot up that black church.
But this guy was crazy.
This guy seems very crazy.
The Orlando terrorist, the Muslim terrorist who shot up that gay nightclub in Orlando, he didn't seem crazy.
He seemed to have his life sort of together.
He had a wife and he called the police and he said, I... I pledge allegiance to ISIS. I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and I'm committing this crime in the name of Islam.
So you call that guy a Muslim terrorist.
You point that out.
But the guy who's crazy and meows to himself and doesn't have any friends, maybe that guy's just a little mentally ill or deficient.
The left calls this a double standard.
It was reported in The Guardian.
The headline was, We must end the terror double standards.
And the piece went on.
In their rush to connect this attack to international terrorism, journalists and politicians are missing a key fact.
It takes no special training to run people over with a vehicle.
You don't need to be a dangerous foreigner to buy fake weapons like a paint gun or a pellet gun.
Anyone can shout, Allahu Akbar.
It's easy to say you claim allegiance to ISIS. This was in response to a New York terrorist attack by a Muslim terrorist.
Say, yeah, anyone can say...
Allah is greater.
They can say Allahu Akbar.
Anyone can claim allegiance to ISIS, but when they do that, they're claiming allegiance to ISIS. And that is a terrorist act, right?
They are carrying out this act in the name of Islam, a political act against civilians in the name of Islam.
That's terrorism.
USA Today has another one and another attack.
They say Trump's double standard on guns and terrorism.
No politics unless he says so.
What they're really saying is he doesn't call it terrorism unless it's terrorism.
I'll give them.
Well, it's central to the coverage, right?
So if we look back at how Orlando was covered, immediately, without any investigation to him, he had a motive simply because he was a Muslim.
We find out later that it was much more complicated, that he had identity issues and all these other things.
But the media jumps out right away, right, and gives usually white shooters the privilege of acting as an individual, as not acting on behalf of a race or group.
That doesn't happen to any other people, especially Muslims or Arabs.
First of all, he did have identity issues.
He identified as a Muslim terrorist.
That was the main identity issue.
That's what made him commit the attack.
And you see what they do.
They try to blur these things.
And they say, oh, it's just race.
You're being racist.
But that radical Islam isn't a race.
It's not a race at all.
It's an idea.
It's a religious ideology.
There is a difference here between when a crazy person goes and shoots up a place and when someone does it for a purpose, when they target civilians for a purpose.
Terrorism has a definition.
Now, there are a lot of definitions of terrorism floating around.
I don't know what Merriam-Webster says, but terrorism does have a definition.
It is...
When you target civilians to achieve a political purpose, it's when you attack civilians for a political end.
That is the broad definition of terrorism.
And so Islamic terrorism fits that definition.
The 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center fits that definition.
It was targeting civilians to achieve a political end.
Now, the left hates drawing this distinction.
They hate it.
They hate it.
They try to blur and they try to obfuscate because they want to avoid responsibility.
Here's Hillary Clinton giving the example par excellence of this blurring.
With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans.
Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans?
What difference at this point does it make?
It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.
What difference at this point does it make?
It only makes a difference if you want to identify and solve the problem.
Hillary Clinton doesn't want to do any of that because she was responsible for these things.
Well, rather, she wasn't responsible for the attack.
She was irresponsible, and her irresponsibility led to the attack.
She was reckless in advocating an intervention in Libya, which helped to lead to the attack and help facilitate it.
She doesn't want to identify the problem.
you can only solve a problem if you identify the problem.
But the left does not want to identify the problem.
They want to say, oh, it's all the same.
It's all, who knows?
It's senseless.
They always use this.
They say, these crimes are senseless.
And some crimes are senseless.
When a crazy person thinks that his armoire is speaking to him and telling him to go drive a bus into people, that is senseless.
That's irrational.
Something has misfired in his brain.
And so he's senseless.
But when somebody does it for a purpose and they say, look, my religious faith tells me that we need to go kill these people and we need to do it to affect this political goal and this religious goal, that's not senseless.
That has perfect sense.
There is a logic to it.
It's a bizarre logic.
It's an evil logic.
But it is a logic.
A few more words on this, but I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But a few more words on this because it's happening right now and people are being hurt because we won't identify that problem.
But...
If you want to stick around and see that, you have to go to dailywire.com.
Thank you to those who help keep the lights on.
We really appreciate it.
It keeps covefe in my Leftist Tears Tumblr.
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It's $10 a month or $100 for an annual membership.
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Before we get to the Armenian genocide, that's like a big...
Before we get to one of the worst events of the century, let me...
Yeah, I know you're all excited for it, but really, people are abusing language when it comes to the Armenian Genocide, and just as in this example, it's not helping us to identify the problem.
So you can take the example of a recent series of attacks in New York.
Here's what's been going on in New York the last week.
Bandaged and badly bruised, 42-year-old Ariella stands with his Brooklyn community just days after he was attacked on Eastern Parkway.
I don't understand why, you know, They had to pick me.
Police say the orthodox Jewish man was punched in the face repeatedly about a week and a half ago, left with broken ribs and a broken nose.
I wonder, do people realize this is anti-Semitism?
At the Crown Heights intersection, another Jewish man was assaulted Saturday afternoon while walking home from synagogue.
Magritte to my law and go and continue.
The next thing I know is that he says, I don't like Jews.
Who are you talking to?
I don't talk to Jews.
He put me in a headlock and I'm trying to maneuver out of him.
And in the meantime, I'm screaming, help, help, help.
And the next thing, he says, you don't need help.
We're going to kill you right here.
It looks awful.
The guy's got a big black eye.
And what's the motive?
What's the motive?
You know, if this were Hillary Clinton, she would say, hey, what difference does it make?
What difference if a guy, you know, he just randomly doesn't like, I don't know, nice hats or something, or he goes and he hates Jews and he hits them.
What difference does it make?
Makes a big difference.
Anti-Jewish attacks rose 92% last year in New York City and rose 90% in New York State over the last year.
That matters.
It isn't just random crime that rose, although Bill de Blasio hasn't done a great job on that either, but it does matter because in order to solve the problem, you have to identify it.
If there's a surge in anti-Jewish attacks, then we need to find out why that is.
Who is perpetrating it?
Which groups of people are perpetrating it?
Which neighborhoods is it happening in?
Why is it happening?
How can we Punish the perpetrators and make sure this doesn't keep happening.
If it's just random violence, then you could make a bunch of initiatives that wouldn't have any effect on anti-Jewish crime.
You have to identify the problem, then you can solve the problem.
The left doesn't want to do either.
They're totally uninterested in either.
That brings us to this day in history.
Today is the 99th annual Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.
And the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day commemorates the Armenian Genocide, as you might imagine, in which the Muslim Ottoman Empire murdered around 2.5 million of its Christian subjects, including not just 1.5 million Armenian Christians, but also upwards of 3.5 million Greek Christians and 300,000 Assyrian Christians.
And nobody is allowed to talk about this.
They're not, you know, there are a lot of places in the world right now, a lot of countries who don't even admit that the Armenian genocide happened, including Turkey, including the state that perpetrated it or the successor state of the Ottoman Turks, which continues to deny that genocide.
A lot of other countries deny it, too.
The last U.S. president to talk about it explicitly and to state explicitly that it happened was Ronald Reagan.
Though various congresses and people have talked about it, they simply don't want to anger the Turks, who are occasionally our allies.
So, the Armenian genocide happened during World War I, and there were two phases.
There was the wholesale killing of able-bodied Christian men and then the deportation of the remaining Armenian women and children and elderly and disabled to death marches to the Syrian desert.
There was no food or water on these death marches and all of the Armenians were regularly robbed and raped and slaughtered en route.
This wasn't ancient history, by the way.
This wasn't, you know, 400 years ago, 600 years ago.
This was just a century ago during and after World War II. One, and I got in a bit of trouble on Twitter today because a bunch of illiterates didn't read what I said.
I pointed out that the Armenian Genocide is not primarily a genocide.
It's not primarily a genocide.
It is a genocide.
The Armenians were targeted, but they weren't targeted for their race.
Genocide means race killing.
It comes from geno, like your genes, you know, G-E-N, and it targets a race.
Now, what you might say, you say, well, you know, I read the 2017 Merriam-Webster definition.
Right, whatever.
Well, you know, the people who use the term use it to...
Right, again, I don't care.
Gene, genos, has a meaning, and it's a race, a race of people, a group of people.
And the Armenians were not targeted only because they were Armenian.
They weren't even targeted primarily because they were Armenian.
They were targeted because they were Christian.
They were targeted by Muslim Turks, and they were the subjects of those Muslim Turks, and they were targeted for being Christian.
That's why, by the way, Greek Christians and Assyrian Christians were gathered up in this persecution.
There were 300,000, I think, Assyrian Christians who were killed.
Three quarters of a million Greek Christians who were killed.
It wasn't just because those three races were the ones that the Turks hated.
It's because they were targeting Christianity.
This is an important distinction.
What you'll hear is, oh, what does it matter?
Oh, what does it matter if it was the people, the race, or the religion?
It matters because if you want to solve the problem, you have to identify the problem.
And this is not just ancient history and not just 100 years ago.
It's happening today.
According to a study this year, 2018, by Aid to the Church in Need, Christian persecution and genocide in the Middle East is now worse than any time in history.
The study writes, not only are Christians more persecuted than any other faith group, But ever increasing numbers are experiencing the very worst forms of persecution.
In the Middle East, Christian babies are hanged from trees.
Christian teenagers are crucified.
The study found that the only country that didn't get worse in its treatment of Christians was Saudi Arabia.
And the only reason that it didn't get any worse is because it couldn't get any worse.
When you're at the bottom, there's not very far to go.
Now, that isn't genocide.
There are racial groups and ethnic groups that are lumped in with that because they're mostly or almost entirely Christian.
But this is about religion, not race.
This is a religious persecution.
This is Muslim regimes and Muslim groups persecuting Christians.
That's not the same as race.
Ideas are not passed in the bloodstream.
Certain peoples are not just naturally one religious group or another religious group.
They're ideas.
Ideas are passed in the brain and in the tradition.
They're not passed in the bloodstream.
Syria was a Christian country or a Christian area.
St.
Paul was converted on the road to Damascus.
And it was only in the seventh century that Syria became, or eighth century even, that Syria became a Muslim rather than Christian.
Now, to discuss these things, to talk about it in religious terms, that's considered Islamophobic.
We can only talk in the racial terms.
If we talk in the racial terms, maybe that's okay.
Some countries still won't deal with it, but we can do that.
But we're not allowed to talk about the Armenian genocide for what it really was, a religious persecution.
That's Islamophobic, the irrational fear of Islam.
I wonder, was that fear irrational for the two and a half million Christians who were slaughtered by Muslim Turks a hundred years ago?
Was it irrational for the countless Christians who are persecuted by Muslim terrorists and regimes today?
I wonder if those who have been slaughtered could accuse the West of Islamophobia-phobia.
We're not allowed to talk about these things, though.
We can't talk about them as they really are, so what we're going to continue to do is blur and obfuscate.
Even on an important point, yes, there was a genocide, but what was it more broadly?
Why were the Greeks and the Assyrians brought in to that awful slaughter, too?
What is this really about?
If you want to solve the problem, you have to identify the problem.
But nobody wants to solve those problems.
It's just not politically correct.
Alright, that's our show.
Maybe we'll have to do something that's less grim tomorrow.
Maybe we'll need, like, some streamers and balloons or something.
I don't know.
Smoking cigars and drinking on set to get over this grim, dismal, death-laden podcast.
But, you know, very important to talk about these things.
Really says a lot about the culture.
Okay, get your mailbag questions in.
I will see you tomorrow.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you then.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
