Rush Limbaugh Program - December 30, 2016, Friday, Hour #2

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Dec. 30, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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December 30, 2016, Friday, Hour #2

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	Buck Sexton here, InforRush on the EIB.
	Thank you very much for tuning in.
	Thanks for joining.
	It's Open Line Friday, so 800-282-2882 is the number.
	As I mentioned last hour, Russia, big action taken there by the, well, no, scratch that.
	Some action taken there by the Obama administration in response to hacking.
	But that's just one of two major issues that have come up in the last few days in the waning days of Obama's lame duck presidency and lame duck time in office.
	And what we have here is now Israel and the U.S. decision not to veto a resolution 2334 which condemns settlement activity and then some.
	We'll get into it now with our guest.
	We're joined by David Afoun.
	He is the editor-in-chief of Algaminer.
	You can read more of his work and all of his editors at algaminer.com.
	David, great to have you.
	Pleasure, Buck.
	Always.
	All right, so what's happened here?
	What's Obama?
	What's Kerry trying to accomplish?
	I mean, Kerry gave this sort of bloviating, hour-plus-long speech about how this is complicated and there's lots of stuff that makes it, you know, complicated, but they're going to solve it.
	But Israel, what's going on here?
	Well, I think the first important thing is this, that the speech itself is not relevant without the context of the vote at the UN last Friday.
	The speech was attempted, essentially a glorified attempt to justify the vote at the UN last Friday, which the U.S., in an unprecedented move, abstained from, angering the Israelis, betraying the Israelis.
	And I can tell you from where I stand, the mainstream Jewish community in this country is seething, outraged, furious across the board with this stab in the back, and as some have even defined it, a stab in the front.
	What was the purpose?
	Why would the Obama administration, as you pointed out, so actually, before I even get into the purpose, put a pin in that for a second.
	What did this do?
	Resolution 2334 said what?
	Why would the UN Security Council we've got a half a million dead in Syria and counting?
	I know there's sort of a temporary ceasefire.
	We'll see how long that lasts.
	But we've got geopolitical problems all over the world.
	You've got horrific violence in different parts of the Middle East.
	Israel is a peaceful, stable democracy, close ally to the United States.
	And Resolution 2334 in the United Nations says what, accomplishes what.
	Well, set aside the question of why they're focusing on Israel right now.
	And to be honest, this obsession with Israel is certainly suspect, especially in light of, as you mentioned, major issues that are happening around the world.
	Massacres in Syria, obviously the Iranian nuclear threat, all kinds of unbalances that warrant U.S. attention more than this.
	But set aside that question for a moment.
	Let's talk about what exactly took place.
	What happened here?
	What was different?
	What was unprecedented?
	For so long in this conflict, you have two sides who are claiming one piece of land, the Arab side and you have the Israeli side.
	The way that it has been understood until now in terms of American policy is that negotiations will decide in exchange for peace which territory will go to Palestinians, Arabs, or which ones will go to Israelis.
	That's how it's been until now.
	So the currency, the one currency that the Israelis have is the land that the Arabs are claiming.
	And the currency that the Palestinians have is the offer of peace, the carrot of peace, if you will.
	What this resolution has effectively done, it has taken out of Israel's hands the only card it has, which is the land.
	It said before these negotiations even start, we are declaring that that land belongs to the Arabs.
	They're taking the Arab position before the negotiations have even started.
	So it's tremendously hindered Israel's position to the point where they no longer have anything to give.
	And what the Palestinians or the Arabs are able to achieve is what they wanted, the land concessions, without having to give peace in return.
	And giving peace means an end to all claims.
	It means they're not going to continue the conflict and try and take even more land, which is the number one concern of all Israelis today.
	Now, the green line, by the way, I mean, the mention of the green line in this, and I know that one of the criticisms that was leveled against specifically the wording of the revolution was that it makes no distinctions about the status of Jerusalem versus outposts versus actually Israeli government-backed settlement activity.
	It's sweeping in the language that it uses.
	Yes, that's absolutely the case.
	It's sweeping and it's really unprecedented and the damage that it causes is permanent and it's extremely widespread.
	I have to tell you, you know, and maybe this is not something that people have thought of.
	But I don't know if any of your listeners have had a moment to have a look at the United States State Department definition of anti-Semitism.
	And if anyone's in front of a computer, I recommend that they pull it up.
	Have a look, Google State Department definition of anti-Semitism.
	Now, in that definition, posted on the State Department website, there is a whole section relating to Israel.
	And it includes, as anti-Semitic, the demonization of Israel, holding a double standard towards Israel, and the delegitimization of Israel.
	And I can say wholeheartedly that while I'm not going to say that Obama is necessarily an anti-Semite, according to this definition, Obama has given an incredible boost to the march of anti-Semitism taking on the form of anti-Israelism as defined by the U.S. State Department, definition of anti-Semitism.
	The demonization of Israel, the double standard for Israel, the delegitimization of Israel have been pushed forward tremendously by this move of the Obama administration.
	I know on your website, David Ethun joining me now.
	He is the editor of Algeminer, algeminer.com, so you can read their latest work.
	You've got to piece up.
	Barack Obama's anti-Semitic UN Act.
	You just described why those terms would be applicable in this circumstance.
	Let me ask you, David, why do you think the administration does this at this time in this way, despite years?
	I mean, Obama would, oh, he would take offense.
	Oh, I've got Israel's back, I think he even said.
	Or someone said, you know, no one doubts that this administration has Israel's back, which, if you have to say it, by the way, I mean, some people doubt it.
	But for years, they're telling us there's no daylight between the previous administration and this administration on Israel.
	Obama acted as though Israel could have no better friend.
	And in the waning weeks of his presidency, he does this.
	Why?
	Listen, this is to answer this question and to compute the motive of a president, you've got to get inside his head.
	And especially as a journalist, you know, it's something that you've got to be able to prove, which is going to be tough in this case.
	But I have to tell you that it's hugely suspect.
	It's hugely, hugely suspect.
	And people have explored all kinds of options, whether it's his history, his education, being in the church of Jeremiah Wright, growing up in Indonesia, whatever it is, something inside of him that takes this position against the Israeli position, the position of the Israeli government, and turns it into something of an obsession.
	I mean, there's no other way to describe it, to turn this into a central, central parting shot of everything that the guy's going to do as he's leaving office, to focus so much attention on this when the world is burning in so many places, it's a really suspect obsession.
	And I'm not sure how to explain it.
	Let's transition to perhaps a happier place for a moment here, David, and that is the incoming administration, Donald Trump, president-elect, has already gotten plenty of praise from Prime Minister Netanyahu, seems to have voiced his full-throated support both of the Israeli state's concerns, vis-à-vis this resolution, and his condemnation of what the Obama administration has done.
	He even went as far as to try to get the Egyptians, as I understand it, or rather the Israeli government, reached out to President-elect Trump to see if they could influence this from not happening.
	And Egypt backed off for a day, and then it went forward, or then rather the resolution went forward.
	But Trump, as president, can repair this damage?
	What steps can be taken here?
	Well, I don't think that the damage can be repaired.
	You know, as one of our experts we interviewed yesterday said, the bell can't be unrung.
	And he's right.
	The cat cannot go back in the bag.
	The damage is done here, and the extent of the damage will only be seen over a period of time.
	There are certain steps that could be taken to try and limit the damage.
	But how successful those steps are going to be remains to be seen.
	Maybe it's the threat of defunding the UN or certain parts of the UN.
	Maybe it's the threat of moving the UN to a different place, which is something that people have discussed, even though it's a major project and unlikely.
	Certainly threatening states in terms of where they're voting.
	I mean, you see the countries that have backed this resolution to say to them, listen, this is not acceptable behavior, and it's going to come at a price in terms of your relations with the United States.
	So, those, I think, are some of the steps that could be taken.
	In terms of what the Trump administration policy is likely to look like, it's still in the early days, and it's still being formulated, and we're still waiting to see who the major players are.
	Having said that, all indications are that there's going to be a complete 360 turnaround, and we're going to see a completely new approach to Israel, a completely new approach to the UN, a completely new approach to Iran.
	So, where I would say many in the Jewish community are cautiously optimistic, many in the pro-Israel community are cautiously optimistic.
	We're seeing a whole host of opportunities that the incoming administration presents to reset the policy, the very damaging policy that the Obama administration has put in place on a whole host of issues relating to the Middle East security and ultimately American security, because that's what it boils down to.
	David Ifoon is the editor-in-chief of Algaminer, A-L-G-E-M-E-I-N-E-R.
	You go to algaeminer.com.
	It's the fastest-growing Jewish newspaper in America.
	Great to have you, David.
	As always, my friend, we'll talk soon.
	Always a pleasure, Buck.
	Openline Friday continues.
	800-282-2882.
	Buck Sexton in for Rush.
	We'll be right back.
	Buck Sexton here, Infor Rush Limbaugh on the EIB.
	Appreciate you joining.
	800-282-2882.
	Let's take Attila in Wisconsin.
	Attila, cool name.
	Thank you for calling.
	Hello.
	Hello, Buck.
	How are you doing?
	How are you doing?
	Good, good.
	Thank you.
	Yes.
	What I was going to say is I think people forgot when in regards to Israel, Obama's been, he meddled in their election trying to unseat or prevent Net Nanyu from winning the election over there.
	And he's had a great thing against Israel, but he's sucked up to all the enemies like Iran and Cuba.
	I mean, he doesn't like democracies.
	So he's doing everything he can before he gets out.
	Let me just remind everyone, Attila, of what you mentioned in the start here.
	This is from the Washington Times, WashingtonTimes.com back in July of 2016.
	The State Department paid hundreds.
	This is a quote.
	State Department paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer grants to an Israeli group that used the money to build a campaign to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in last year's Israeli parliamentary elections.
	A congressional investigation concluded Tuesday.
	Some $350,000 sent to this one voice group.
	So that's meddling.
	When the State Department's giving money to an organization in a foreign country that's opposing one political candidate, I'd say that's meddling.
	Very much so.
	Attila, you agree or no?
	Where did Attila go?
	I'm sorry.
	Can you hear me?
	Yes, sir.
	We can.
	Everybody can.
	Okay.
	Yes.
	I think Trump should remind everybody about this.
	It's not petulant, but it should be, everyone should be reminded about that.
	The Russians had nothing to do with this election.
	The crooked Democrats had something to do with the election.
	And have people forgotten about Bernie Sanders, how Hillary put the screws to him?
	Yeah, look, we could also, first of all, you could say that Hillary, you could argue, and this is just sort of a fun thing to drive Democrats crazy, which just means it's a fun thing.
	You could argue that Hillary winning the primary was, in fact, illegitimate because now we know the DNC was totally the tank for her, and the Clinton machine and the Democratic Party's machine, the Democrat Party's machine, were one and the same.
	So you can argue that, you know, she was an illegitimate primary victor.
	Never mind the general election.
	I mean, this stuff, we can all do this till we're blue in the face.
	I'm not sure it's particularly useful, but like I said, it'll drive them a little crazy.
	So that's always fun.
	Attila in Wisconsin, great to talk to you.
	Thanks for calling in on the EIB.
	Let's talk to Brad in South Dakota.
	Brad, you're speaking to Buck in for Rush.
	What's up?
	Hey, Buck.
	Hey, Buck, how are you?
	I just had a question for you.
	I want to know who John Keery thinks he is telling the Israelis that they can be Jewish or Democratic, but not both.
	How does that work?
	Well, this is an old line that you'll hear.
	By the way, you hear this a lot on college campuses.
	And as somebody who spent a fair amount of his time on campus back in the day in college studying the Middle East, I was one of the very few, although I never got good at it, so I never pretend to, but who was studying Arabic before 9-11.
	As you can imagine, that was not a popular language course of study in the U.S., but I spent time around these sort of mid-East studies professors.
	And it's always that unless the Israelis change the numbers and do things to affect the demographics, unless they create two states, they'll be overwhelmed by the Palestinian population within their own state.
	And then you get into this discussion of Israeli apartheid and all that.
	So this is not sort of a new idea that he puts forward, but for reasons that I'm not going to be able to address in totality in about the next 20 seconds, but for reasons, including the fact that there's all of these negotiations ongoing, continuing, and the Palestinians, for example, haven't walked away from the right of return in the past and the final status talks of Jerusalem.
	These are the issues that are at hand.
	The Israelis are not saying that they're going to they've offered a state a few times.
	They've offered a two-state solution several times.
	And so to be lectured about how one state means apartheid or one state means it's non-democratic is sort of missing the point entirely, but it's one of the ways that the anti-Israeli left constantly undermines the Jewish state.
	So that's why when people heard John Kerry say that, look, it just exposed what a lot of us have known and I would point out have said for a long time about this administration and its senior most officials, that they speak a certain way, and yeah, they sort of keep the policies relatively in keeping with previous policies.
	But when you're talking about diplomacy and sensitive negotiations that'll have long-term ramifications, tone matters, words matter, and the way that the administration speaks about these things matters very, very deeply.
	And there's always been, to those of us paying attention, this sense that the Obama administration, because Obama is a man of the left in this country, let's just put it out there.
	It's been the case all along.
	We've all known it, has a certain built-in hostility towards the Israeli state.
	You look at some of the people he studied under in school, you look at his past statements on the issue, and that obviously filters down to the rest of the administration.
	So, I mean, I'm with you that John Kerry lecturing anybody on this.
	John Kerry, as a Secretary of State, wasn't able to get to first base on negotiating an Arab-Israeli or a Palestinian-Israeli settlement.
	They didn't even get to the table.
	So, for him to give this sort of bloviating hour-plus-long speech about Middle East peace and how to achieve it, it's not just laughable, it's kind of offensive, too.
	But John Kerry does, he doesn't care.
	Yeah, he's going to continue.
	He's going to continue being John Kerry, which, look, a deeply ineffectual, ineffective Secretary of State.
	I don't think there's any way around that.
	I mean, if you're going to hang your hat on the Iran deal, just wait until that thing blows up in our faces.
	And I know pardon the verbiage there.
	But thank you for calling in, Brad from South Dakota.
	Good to talk to you.
	All right.
	We've got a lot more to discuss, by the way, so on the issue of the Trump administration and what it's handling, what it's got coming up here.
	But the Obama administration's not done.
	They're trying to do everything in their power to make things more difficult.
	And there are some narratives out there that I want to attack.
	I want to attack some narratives that are meant to hobble this administration before it takes office on regulations, on Obamacare, on immigration.
	We'll hit that and more coming up.
	Buck in for Rush.
	Don't go anywhere.
	Buck Sexton here in for Rush.
	More on me at theblaze.com/slash BuckSexton.
	You can download my podcast there every day.
	Please check it out.
	Now, let's talk a bit.
	Oh, wait, first, let me just give you the number, in case you don't already know.
	800-282-2882.
	It's Open Line Friday.
	Gonna get a lot of calls in here.
	Let's do it.
	But I wanted to bring a couple things to your attention.
	There's sort of a two-pronged attack underway to Nek.
	Well, it's really probably, there's probably more prongs, actually.
	I'm leaving some progs off.
	But there's at least two avenues of attack the media is taking to undermine the sort of policy agenda of Donald Trump, right?
	They're undermining him as a candidate, or not as a candidate, as a president by saying he's illegitimate because of, what, fake news, the FBI director James Comey, and, of course, Russia hacking.
	So the not my president folks who are out there, it doesn't matter that he won the election.
	I bumped into some of them, I mean, kind of literally, because I had to walk through one of their childish profanity-laden protests in New York City, where I generally live down here in Palm Beach right now.
	So far, no angry Occupy Wall Street-style protesters on the beach.
	It's been nice.
	But the not my president meme that gained some traction the day after the election, of course, people saying that he's not their president.
	That's out there.
	So you have the delegitimization of Donald Trump occurring, and the media is still going with that.
	And understand that the Russian hacking thing, like I said, yeah, there's something to discuss there.
	I've been discussing it for a while, but it gets Democrats really excited because it can kind of implicate or can kind of indicate to them they can insinuate that he didn't really win the election.
	I mean, he didn't really win the election, right?
	I mean, that's what we're trying to say here.
	I mean, yeah, let's talk about cybersecurity.
	I mean, get Podesta not to do stupid things and get the DNC to actually pay attention to their email accounts.
	But I mean, he didn't really win the election.
	That's what that's all about.
	But there's other stuff, too.
	On the domestic policy front, the media is preparing the ground to make this as hard as possible, to make this just a long, slow slog in the mud for the Trump administration from day one right away.
	And the way they're doing that, of course, is on the one hand, saying that despite, and you have to love this.
	I mean, it's sort of cheeky.
	It's sort of, there's some chutzpah at work here.
	Despite Trump's victory and despite the Republicans having a majority in the House and in the Senate and despite all the governorships and all the state houses across the country, the fact that the Republicans are in their most powerful position as a party since many decades.
	Somebody give me the number.
	Very, very long time.
	Certainly in my lifetime.
	And I did just get one year older a couple of days ago, so that's exciting.
	But despite all of that, we are told that Donald Trump is unpopular and his agenda is unpopular.
	In fact, there's a piece on Slate.
	What is this?
	From today or from yesterday.
	Well, one or the other.
	From yesterday.
	Slate.com.
	If you want to know what the left thinks, there are these sites that are wonderful sort of repositories of left-wing whining and crying and nonsense.
	Slate and what's the nation?
	And there's great Huffington Post.
	I could do this all day.
	And you go and you read this and you're like, it's almost as though some of these authors live in another, not just country, but an alternative universe from the one that those of us who are sort of reality-based are accustomed to.
	But so that's part one.
	And you have to ask the question, if Donald Trump, the headline here, Donald Trump is unpopular and so is the GOP's agenda, right?
	Because that's an essential.
	They've already gone all in on Trump destruction.
	They threw everything they could at that, right?
	You know, grabbing women, it's a Trump university.
	He's a racist.
	He's a bigot.
	He's a sexist.
	I mean, they threw all of that at him.
	Didn't work.
	He won the election.
	And they're still bitter about that, by the way, because they really debased themselves.
	The media debased themselves in the process of trying to divert a Trump presidency or try to prevent a Trump presidency.
	They went all in and they lost.
	Now, they're still very powerful at shaping public perception, though.
	They know this, right?
	The mainstream out there still recognizes that they can influence people.
	The drive-bys, they can influence people by just running news coverage of a certain kind.
	And you can see the steady drumbeat already on the one hand that Donald Trump is unpopular.
	And the GOP agenda that he can now implement if he chooses to.
	On a number of fronts, it shouldn't be hard at all.
	And I think he will.
	There's no reason to believe that Donald Trump would back out or back off on some of his campaign promises, some of his most important ones.
	No reason to believe it.
	If he backs off, I'm going to be one of the people that's yelling and screaming about how we were lied to, and this is unacceptable, and there needs to be accountability.
	But, you know, you can expect that.
	And a lot of us will be doing that.
	And whether our yelling and screaming matters or not, you know, who knows?
	But in the meantime, you got to ask the question, okay, if the GOP agenda is so unpopular, why is the GOP doing so well across the country and why is Donald Trump the next president of the United States?
	If it's so bad, and if the future of this country is so terrifying that you have people who are holding these crying sessions and they need this sort of group therapy at universities and they need to create the safe spaces.
	Oh, it's so scary with Donald Trump out there.
	What do they see that the rest of us don't?
	They really believe that Trump is going to engage in sort of fascistic rounding up of people.
	What are the concerns?
	And, you know, I say these things, and I'm sure you've heard this too, and you might have even heard this recently at family dinner over the holidays.
	You say this stuff and you say it sarcastically, and there are people going, yes, yes, I am worried about Trump the fascist.
	Really?
	I was trying to be hyperbolic.
	I was trying to exaggerate.
	I thought we could at least agree that Trump is not going to become American Hitler, right?
	We all get that.
	Let's start with the Trump is not Hitler and we'll move from there.
	What's amazing is that some on the American left, some Democrats, I shouldn't just say some, it's not like here and there, a lot.
	When you start with the can we just go with Trump is not Hitler?
	They're like, no, I've unproven.
	You can't see the future.
	And he's very bad.
	He's very racist.
	He's very misogynistic.
	So, well, that's quite a place to start your perception of your yes, whether you like him or not, your next president, if you're an American.
	But that's where they are.
	So part of this is to convince people or to try to convince people that the GOP is terrible.
	It's just sort of one because, you know, whatever racism, man, or something like that.
	The GOP has done so well in so many places across the country because every dog has his day.
	I don't know.
	Everyone gets their day of the sun.
	They don't want to look at policies.
	They don't want to look at the legacy of the Obama administration.
	They don't want to look at what's promised, not just by President-elect Trump, but by the Republicans in Congress, who will have no excuses now.
	We can hold them to account in a way that was not really possible before because before they could always say, you know, the president's got the veto.
	It's tough.
	Even when you gave us a majority in the House and the Senate.
	Now, I know some of you are like, Buck, you're giving him way too much leeway on that.
	I understand, but that excuse is gone.
	They don't have that excuse anymore.
	They're going to have to get very creative.
	You know, I don't know how, I don't know how Mitch McConnell, I don't know how leaders in the House and the Senate are going to be able to look the American people in the eye and say, yeah, we know that we promised to work with the Trump presidency on tax reform, but yeah, we just can't, you know, we just can't do that.
	No.
	There will be a political revolt within the Republican Party, and there will be a shockwave.
	And anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself, though.
	We're not even at day one of the presidency.
	Well, we already have to fight over the broad strokes of the agenda because they're trying to condition the minds of the American people to think that the Republican agenda is bad and that nobody wants it.
	Yeah, they've won all these elections and they're in power because they've won all these elections, but nobody wants it.
	That's one step in this process.
	The other, so that's sort of part one of this.
	And I'll say what part two is and we'll have to return to it and we'll take some calls and just going to continue on for a little bit here.
	The other, though, is that it can't be done.
	And the, oh, the GOP agenda can't be done chorus is especially loud on Obamacare and on immigration, right?
	That's where we're just told cannot be done.
	And they keep, you know, the so-called smart set, the intelligentsia, the Twitterati, the blogginators.
	I don't know.
	I'm making this stuff up.
	They say it can't be done.
	Whatever happened to yes, we can.
	Yes, we can.
	I don't want to hear can't.
	There's no I in team.
	Buck Sexton here in for Rush.
	We'll get into this more.
	800-282-2882.
	Be right back.
	Buck Sexton here in for the one and only Rush Limbaugh on the EIB.
	Open Line Friday is underway, well underway.
	Going to the third hour here in just a few minutes.
	800-282-2882.
	If you want to call in, I'm going to take some calls now.
	But first, for more on me, go to theblaze.com/slash BuckSexton, or you can go to facebook.com/slash Buck Sexton and tell me your thoughts on the show.
	Let's go to, and Buck Sexton spelled just like it's just like it sounds.
	We've got Darla in Indiana.
	What's up, Darla?
	You're speaking to Buck.
	Hi, thanks for taking my call.
	I appreciate it.
	I am a pastor and a pastor's wife, and I would like to bring up an aspect of the consequences of the UN resolution that I haven't actually really heard mentioned hardly at all in the media.
	And that is Is that I'm a teacher of history and of world religions, and I've been to Israel multiple, multiple times.
	And it is a proven fact that when the Muslim countries go in and try to take over the land and reestablish, literally reestablish and rewrite history for an area, that my major concern, or at least one of the most important,
	is that in this last June resolution, it would actually be not only possible but probable that the Christian and Jewish religions are in a very serious threat of being completely annihilated when they are giving away the land to the Muslim hierarchy that be.
	And in every country where that has happened before, they try to destroy every vestige archaeologically of the historical origins of those religions so that their narrative can be that Islam was always first, it was always there, and that Christianity and Judaism will literally, within one or two generations, possibly lose the ability to the claim of our faith in the land and tracing it back.
	So I've heard a lot of the political fallout, the even religious fallout, but very little about what the proven agenda of the Muslim religion is.
	And I believe that it is seriously when Obama and Kerry were explaining that they believe that even the Western Wall, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem itself is occupied territory, that is the beginning of destroying the Christian and Jewish origins, trying to literally wipe them out in that area.
	Well, Darla, I've got a couple of thoughts come to mind, and thank you very much for calling in.
	A couple of thoughts come to mind.
	First off, the eradication of some of the oldest Christian communities in the world that has occurred really over the last decade or so, specifically in Iraq, but also the pressure that the Coptic Christian community in Egypt is under.
	Very sort of scant media coverage of the most recent attack on Copts in Egypt and the murders and the bombings of churches and the horrible things that happened to them there.
	The media just not as interested in it as they are many other stories.
	Never mind the continued usage of suicide bombers, even child suicide bombers, against Christian churches in Nigeria.
	I mean, this is completely underreported in the media, and the eradication of Chaldean and Assyrian Christians in places like Iraq, and really the genocide that's occurred against Christians in Iraq is just not much interest in the media and not a lot of help from the U.S. or the West for these communities, by the way.
	So there's that.
	And also, to your point about the sort of eradication of civilizations and religions that were there first, I mean, as part of the Muslim conquest, I mean, how many Americans even know that all of this territory that is currently sort of disputed, you know, at one point belonged to the Eastern Roman,
	which is how they thought of themselves as Romans, the Byzantine Empire, which the sort of the Ottoman conquest took this, and the initial waves of Islamic conquest and then eventually the Ottoman conquest, including the fall of Constantinople in, what was it, 1453?
	I might be getting the date wrong.
	That all happened.
	And then we're told, well, history sort of starts then.
	I mean, you see this in the jihadist rhetoric, by the way.
	I mean, when you're talking about expansionist colonialist Islam, which does exist, is a thing.
	I mean, jihadists are in fact colonial, and they're empire builders in their minds.
	They see Catalonia.
	I mean, they see, I'm sorry, Andalusia rather, not Catalonia.
	They see Andalusia as Muslim territory.
	This is, of course, the Iberian Peninsula and Spain.
	And so the historical memory that exists in the radicalized components of the Muslim world is always at work in these processes.
	And certainly for a group like Hamas and other extremists in the area, that is part of what motivates them, right?
	Creating, rewriting the history.
	And it's also why when ISIS comes in, whether it's Palmyra, which they've retaken, by the way, in Syria and destroyed ancient Roman ruins, very well preserved and not anymore, Roman ruins, or the Taliban in Afghanistan destroying the Buddhas of Bamiyan back in, I think it was 98.
	I mean, this is commonplace.
	They destroy churches.
	They destroy any religious symbolism, any religious edifices that existed before them, because certainly for the radicalized portion, the jihadists, they view it as a threat to Islamic supremacy, which is part of the ideology.
	So part of their ideology, I should say, those who have jihadized and those who are Islamists, who believe in the inextricable nature of Islam and day-to-day politics, and that Islam should rule all of your life.
	I went on a bit of a tear there.
	So we'll take some more calls.
	I was going to take more calls, but I think we're going to go to a break right now.
	800-282-2882.
	Buck Sex in InforRush Limbaugh.
	Excited about hour three.
	I'll be right back.
	Buck Sexton here in For Rush on the EIB.
	Let's take a call.
	Open Line Friday, of course, keeping with the tradition.
	Sharon in, where are you?
	Sharon in Sumral.
	I've never heard of it, but interesting.
	Thank you for calling in.
	Well, thank you, Buck, for taking my call.
	I have a question and a comment.
	My question is, what does this resolution mean for Israel?
	What is going to change?
	Are they going to do something to them?
	And I would like to remind everybody of in the 90s when the Clintons sent James Carville over to Israel to help Ehud Barak get elected.
	And he sat down with the Clintons and Arafat.
	He gave Arafat every single point and item that he wanted, including land.
	As I remember, it was about 10 different things.
	And when they all sat down at the table with the cameras on to sign those documents, Arafat got up and walked out.
	That's correct.
	The Israelis have already offered a two-state solution is what people keep talking about.
	The Israelis have offered a state.
	That's happened.
	They've offered the Palestinians states before and they are a state before, and they've rejected it.
	In terms of, Sharon, and by the way, Sumrall, Mississippi, first time I've heard of the town.
	Thank you for educating me a bit.
	In terms of the ramifications, look, the actual legal or immediate ramifications for it are limited in the sense that it's non-binding.
	There's no direct legal action from UN 2334.
	But it changes the sort of context of discussion.
	It's the first resolution to focus on settlement activity to get through the UN Security Council since 1980, I think.
	And it also could be encouraging because it talks about the illegal status of Israeli settlements.
	International Criminal Court could get more involved now.
	It's about the signaling and the sort of symbolism here more than anything else.
	I mean, it's not legally binding in the sense that, okay, A happens, now B must happen, but it puts the Israelis in a difficult position vis-a-vis negotiations with the Palestinians.
	But more to the point, I think, in this case, it will isolate them and create difficulties for them with the international community, which is the big problem.
	Sharon, thank you very much for calling in from Mississippi.
	I appreciate it.
	And thank you.
	Hour three coming up.
	Buck in for rush on the EIB.
	Back in just a few.

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