Robert Spencer’s new book, The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS (releasing August 7), debunks the myth that Islamic violence against non-Muslims is a modern reaction, tracing unprovoked jihad—from 17th-century Baltimore raids to the Barbary pirates’ Quranic attacks on the U.S.—back to Muhammad’s era. He highlights Sudan’s Mahdi revolt (1880s), Krakatoa’s eruption (1883) as a "divine sign" for jihad, and Sikhism’s defensive origins against Islamic expansion in India, contrasting it with today’s Brotherhood-aligned leaders. Western complacency risks repeating past failures like Constantinople’s fall, with Rotterdam or Malmö becoming potential "no-go zones," while Gaza’s Hamas tunnels mirror the need for physical and ideological defenses against enduring jihadist threats. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, the history of jihad, an in-depth discussion with jihad watches Robert Spencer on his new book.
It's June 29th, and you're watching The Ezra LeVant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do stuff.
Well, I don't think that most people in the world knew a lot about the word jihad until 9-11, September 11th, 2001.
We certainly didn't know words that are too familiar to us now, like Al-Jazeera.
We just didn't know these things, al-Qaeda or its successor, ISIS.
But the fact is, this jihad has been going on for a lot longer than just 17 years.
In fact, it's been going on for more than 1,000 years.
It is hardwired into the history of Islam.
And our next guest is not just an expert in jihad, but has written a new book about it called The History of Jihad from Muhammad to ISIS.
And Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, joins us now.
Robert, nice to see you again.
Always good to see you, Ezra.
Thank you.
Well, thank you.
Your book is coming out on August 7th.
I just read the blurb of it.
We forget that jihad against infidels, against the West, it's not a new thing.
It's not something that's just been invented by radicalized people who are disenfranchised.
This is part of the Islamic battle strategy since the beginning.
Yes, that's what this book shows, as a matter of fact.
This is the first and only book that actually contains the entire history of jihad, starting with Muhammad and going all over the world.
The first book that treats the jihad in India, along with the jihad in Europe and Africa, the Middle East, everywhere.
And the thing about it is, you're absolutely right.
A lot of people, they might say, well, yes, of course, jihad is part of Islamic theology or teaching, but they don't realize our entire foreign policy in the West is based on the idea that jihad is a new thing, that is a reaction to what the American government has done, or what European governments have done, or what Israel has done.
And if we can just adjust all those things, then it will go away and there will be peace.
But as I show in this book, there's never been peace.
This is something that is based on theological tenets within Islam that some Muslims in the world have always, for 1,400 years, acted upon.
And one of the reasons it's important to know that is you often hear the excuse by the left, well, we provoke that.
Western foreign policy in Iraq provoked that.
Western, you know, the CIA's shenanigans in Iran provoked it.
They have a very specific thing that they don't like for their own modern political reasons, and they ascribe to that one act.
They provide an excusology for jihad that jihadists often accept because, you know, there's an entitlement, there's an anger, and a sullen, you have wronged us, I think, at the root of jihad.
But it would exist whether or not, you know, Western powers had oil interests, whether or not Israel existed.
The jihad began before these excuses began, didn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
And see, the left plays into the jihadis' hands by claiming that it's all because of terrible things that the West has done or that Israel has done.
Because the jihadis operate according to a grievance mentality and are always blaming other people.
That's a common thread throughout the book.
You see that jihadis attack people in an entirely unprovoked fashion, but then claim victim status and blame the victim.
And we have this going on now on a pandemic scale.
And I think people fall, the left has completely fallen for it and is actually aiding and abetting it and spreading the idea that this is really all our fault.
But as you say in the book, I show that it's before there was Israel, before there was a United States, before any of the things that are blamed for jihad activity today, there was still jihad and that the infidels didn't do anything but be infidels to bring it on themselves.
Yeah.
You know, I read a book years ago by Bernard Lewis called What Went Wrong, which described how Islam was once geographically mighty.
It was in Spain and he was even nibbling Ireland.
Like there were hostage raids in the UK.
And Bernard Lewis, who is fascinated and I would say in many ways loves the Muslim world, said, well, what happened?
Why did they become so backward and closed?
And it's a great question, what went wrong.
And he suggests that it's not an Islamic question to ask what went wrong.
The Islamic question is, who did this to us?
That's sort of his thesis.
But what shocked me about that book, there were so many interesting things, it's an incredible book, is there's a map in that book I mentioned that shows the extent of the Muslim caliphate, I suppose, at its height.
And I want to talk about, because I read a little historical anecdote about Baltimore.
I didn't know that there was a place in Ireland called Baltimore.
I thought that was just the name of a city in Maryland.
And apparently, there was a Muslim slave raid on Ireland.
And they targeted this town of Baltimore, and they kidnapped white slaves.
And they went in and they just sort of grabbed them.
And the women were turned into rape slaves, and the men were killed or converted.
And I thought, now, I want to do more research in that because I was just shocked.
I mean, I didn't even know there was another city called Baltimore.
But I know from Bernard Lewis's book that these slave raids touched the United Kingdom, touched Ireland.
I don't think, I mean, I think I know a lot of stuff about Islam and jihad.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
Well, all that's in my book as well.
The raid in Baltimore in Ireland actually was on a church.
And the church was crowded with people.
It was during a worship service.
And the jihadis came in.
They just seized everybody in the church and enslaved them, carried them off.
And as you say, the women were made into sex slaves.
A lot of people think ISIS made that up or Boko Haram made that up.
That's another thing that's in the book that goes as a thread all the way through it.
Muhammad had sex slaves that were infidel women whom he had captured.
And all the early caliphs, the early raiders in Spain who conquered Spain in the 8th century, the raiders in India who conquered so much of India and were very brutal there.
And always, this is something that they did, made sex slaves out of the captive infidel women.
It's part of the theology they were working from, and this is why ISIS picked it up today.
Now, what year was that raid in Baltimore?
I was just reading it quickly.
I was so fascinated by it, and I just thought I'd put it to you.
Like, was that 500 years ago, 700 years ago?
How recent was that?
You know, off the top of my head, I don't recall exactly, but I think it was in the 17th century.
So that would be, yeah, four or five hundred years ago.
It wasn't all that long ago.
That's post-Shakespeare.
I mean, Shakespeare writes about Islam.
I mean, he talks about the Moor of Venice.
Moors were typically Muslim.
You know, I was thinking about, you know, there's an American song from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.
It's an American marching song.
It's a military song.
We'll fight our battles.
I think that might even be the song of the Marines.
I'd have to check.
And I was thinking, shores of Tripoli.
Well, that's Libya.
What were the American Marines doing in Tripoli, Libya?
They were fighting pirates, weren't they?
Yeah, and those pirates were avowedly jihadis.
I've got the communique of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson when they met with the emissary of those pirates who were actually, they were agents of the government in Morocco at the time, and they had an ambassador in London.
And John Adams and Thomas Jefferson actually met with this ambassador in London, and he told them, and they reported back to the U.S. Congress, that he told them, we are commanded in the Quran to fight against infidels and to capture them, kill them, enslave them, convert them.
And this is what we're doing.
And so this was the first jihad that the United States fought against.
It wasn't 9-11.
It was the wars against the so-called Barbary pirates in the late 18th century and the very beginning of the 19th century.
That's incredible.
I mean, it really goes back in history when Churchill, I mean, Churchill fought.
I mean, he fought in five different wars.
He fought at the Battle of Khartoum, I think.
I'm not sure if he was in that battle, but he fought in the Sudan.
Was that a jihadist war against the West as well?
Jihad in India00:14:48
Yeah, a little bit before Churchill, there was in Khartoum a figure who was known as the Mahdi, which is the savior figure in Islam.
He's going to come back at the end of the world and fighting the infidels.
And many, many people, another thing that I show in the book, they have proclaimed themselves the Mahdi throughout history.
And one of the most successful was this fellow in the Sudan in the 1880s.
And the famous British general who was known as Chinese Gordon because of his earlier heroic exploits in China was actually sent to the Sudan to fight against this man and was killed there by him.
And the Mahdi revolt was gaining incredible number of adherents in North Africa and spreading elsewhere with Muslims actually believing that he was the Mahdi because he had beaten the mighty British Empire and killed Chinese Gordon.
And then he died suddenly, and that took the wind out of the sails of the movement.
But there have been these kinds of apocalyptic revivalist movements.
ISIS is kind of akin to that throughout Islamic history.
There was one known as the Carmatians way back in the 11th century.
And they actually thought that the end of the world was imminent and that thus the aspects of Islamic worship that we're familiar with were no longer applicable.
And they actually raided Mecca and stole the black stone from the Kaaba that Muslims venerate and kiss when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca.
And they only brought it back years later when they were ordered to by the caliph and threw it into the Kaaba, broke it into nine pieces.
It's still, of course, in pieces today.
And in any case, these kinds of revivalist messianic apocalyptic movements that have been extremely violent are also a running theme throughout Islamic history.
And today, of course, we have Wahhabi Saudi Arabia that started with one of those founded by Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab in the 18th century.
And we have ISIS and al-Qaeda and groups like that.
These are not a new thing in Islam.
They go throughout history.
You know, I read a fascinating book about Krakatoa, which was this dramatic volcano about 130 odd years ago in Indonesia.
It's just, it's an amazing book.
I was talking about it for reasons of global warming and things like that.
It was such a huge eruption.
The soot it emanated cooled the earth for years.
Scientists say it was the loudest sound ever heard by man.
That it was, the explosion broke the eardrums of sailors 40 miles away.
It was heard 5,000 miles away.
People thought it was a cannon.
The loudest sound ever heard by a human was the explosion of Krakatoa.
And it so devastated Indonesia, killed tens of thousands of people, that it was taken by the Muslim Indonesian population as a sign from God himself, from Allah, that they should stop being subservient to the Dutch.
And that that sort of rekindled an Islamic extremist awakening.
I haven't read your book.
I've just read the news that it's coming.
It's not out yet.
Do you treat this issue in your book?
The Indonesia one?
Yeah.
Well, that's not strictly speaking jihad.
So that falls outside the realm of the book because the way that it proceeded in Indonesia was in a unique sense not violent.
And what I'm dealing with in the book is violent jihad primarily.
The thing is that what you're saying about that, though, is something that does run through the book, that there is in the Islamic consciousness.
And here again, we have to say, well, not all Muslims think this.
Not all anybody thinks anything.
But there is a common idea that the signs of the natural world, that natural occurrences like volcanic eruptions or earthquakes, these are signs of the displeasure of Allah.
And they call for a redoubling of one's Islamic commitment.
And they often lead, therefore, to jihad activity.
And if a group is successful, then it's considered to have the favor of Allah.
Like one of the reasons why ISIS was able to attract 30,000 jihadis for 30,000 Muslims from around the world to join it was because they were successful in gaining a large expanse of territory in Iraq and Syria, and they held it for several years until Trump became president and rolled them back.
And so people thought Allah is favoring them.
And so they must be the real caliphate.
We should go join up.
I want to run one more thing by you.
I've heard that the phrase run amok refers to a jihadist activity.
Can you tell me what run amok means?
Yeah, actually, that means running wild, killing people.
But it's not really, as we think of it in the West, just somebody who's going nuts.
It's not at all that.
It's somebody who is overflowing with zeal for Allah and is determined to wage jihad.
Remember, Ezra, that the Quran promises paradise.
It's the only promise of paradise in the entire Quran.
The Quran promises paradise to those who kill and are killed for Allah.
That is chapter 9, verse 111.
And so there are people throughout Islamic history who have run amok in this way.
They go and kill as many people as they can, and they are intending to be killed themselves so that they will attain this promise of paradise.
Where does that phrase come from?
Was there a particular Islamic uprising?
What's the etymology of that?
Where did that happen?
It's a South Asian phrase.
I believe it comes from an incident in the Philippines, and it has to do with one of the languages, Tagalog, or one of the languages that is spoken there.
Of course, we know that in the southern Philippines, there's a long-standing jihad in Mindanao to establish a separate Islamic state.
Just as really everywhere where there is a sizable Muslim population, there are attempts to separate the Muslims from the infidel government and establish their own.
The U.S. military has had a presence in the Philippines for a long time.
Were they involved in fighting against this in the past?
Yeah, you know, in 1898, when the United States government waged war against Spain and detached the Philippines from Spanish control, then they came up against this.
But of course, it was much more quiescent then than it is now, the jihad in the Philippines.
If you go back to the beginning of the 20th century, as a matter of fact, when I end the chapter on the 19th century in the book and am leading into the beginning of the 20th century, I say that it looks as if this problem is receding and that jihad is a thing of the past.
And even Muslim countries are looking to the West, looking to Europe for models.
Of course, the most famous example of this, but not the only one, is Turkey, where the Ottoman Empire fell and Kemal Ataturk established a government based on Western models with an explicit rejection of Islamic government.
And then Reza Shah in Iran followed him and did the same thing.
And so you get the beginning of the 20th century, it looked as if the whole thing was over, a thing of the past, a relic of history.
But because jihad is founded on Islamic texts and teachings, those texts and teachings haven't been changed or reformed or rejected.
So it recurs.
And with the Saudis striking oil, suddenly it became a big thing again.
Your book, I have a blurb in front of me about the 700-year struggle to conquer Constantinople.
Constantinople isn't even called that anymore.
It's called Istanbul.
And the marvelous Hajiya Sufiya, which was the mighty church, was conquered, turned into a mosque now.
I think it's a state museum.
You know, you learn about Constantinople and you learn that it was once the largest city in the world, the richest city in the world, and obviously a Christian city, the seat of Christendom in many ways.
And that's all dust now.
That's a rumor.
That's a closed chapter.
And I think of that often because I think that would be like our London or New York today, the biggest city, the richest city.
That would be like Rome.
And it's just a rumor now.
I think there's a sense in the West that these are just sort of insurgents.
They don't have, they're not a serious force.
They're backwards.
You say it took 700 years to conquer Constantinople, but once it was lost, you know, it's been lost.
It's never coming back.
Constantinople will never be a Christian city again.
Egypt will never be a Christian country again.
It once was.
These places once lost to jihad, they don't come back, do they?
Spain is really the only one in areas of India.
Spain, of course, it took another 700 years of the Reconquista.
And I trace all this in the book, as well as the 700-year jihad against Constantinople.
Spain was entirely conquered and was a Muslim country, except for one small band of Christians who were way up high on a mountaintop.
But it was that small band of Christians who the Muslims actually tried to conquer, but it was difficult because they were way up on an inaccessible mountaintop.
They've ultimately decided this is too much trouble.
And I quote one of the Muslim leaders saying, this band of savages on Iraq will soon perish, and that's it.
But it wasn't.
They fought, they won it back.
It took a century.
In Constantinople, it was just the opposite.
As I show in the book, the Muslims almost immediately began to besiege Constantinople in the 7th century when the religion was still forming and kept at it.
And you mentioned Rome.
There is a prophecy attributed to Muhammad that first the new Rome will fall and then the old Rome.
New Rome being Constantinople fell in 1453.
There are many Muslims today who cite that prophecy and say, now it's the turn of the old Rome and we're going to conquer it and conquer Europe.
Well, we've seen ISIS propaganda.
They have very sophisticated video propaganda.
They show Rome itself being attacked.
In fact, the slitting of the throats of those Coptic Christians in Egypt on the banks of the Mediterranean Sea, I think part of that symbology was that their blood would flow to Italy.
And like they had quite a dramatic history there.
This wasn't just some random killing.
This was a symbolic killing of Christians on the Mediterranean Sea, I think.
Yes, absolutely.
And the aspirations are very clear that that's exactly what they want to do.
That they're going to go from Libya to Italy.
And of course, the other migrant routes, the refugees, the jihadis have infiltrated the refugee stream and are coming into Europe from Eastern Europe, from Turkey, that is, through to Bosnia, and then from there into Western Europe.
And these are, many of these people are jihadis.
All eight of the attackers who murdered 130 people in Paris in November 2015 were refugees who had just come into Europe the month before and were approved as refugees.
And they mean to conquer Rome as one of the crowning achievements of Islam and conquer the rest of Europe as a result.
Now, you mentioned India, and I'm not as familiar with that.
I've started to learn a little bit more about Sikhism.
And my understanding is shallow, so I don't want to talk too much about it since I don't know.
But it seems to me that India, as you mentioned in your books, Blurb, was devastated by Islamic attacks, but you just mentioned they repelled some of them.
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, absolutely.
This was, I think, this is an extraordinary story and one of the most important aspects of the book, that it has an in-depth treatment of the jihad in India that people in the West don't know.
And it's amazing.
It was much more bloodthirsty than the jihads against Europe and the Middle East, because those people in Europe and the Middle East were Jews and Christians.
And that's the people of the book.
And the Quran directs that the people of the book can be given this second-class status and allowed to maintain their religion.
Now, in India, the Hindus were not people of the book.
And so for them, it was convert to Islam or die.
And I have the Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, who was one of the first Islamic commanders to send an army into India.
He instructed the general that he sent to not be lenient.
And he actually scolded him for granting protection and clemency to some people.
And he said, look, you have to be very harsh.
These people are infidels of the worst kind.
And ultimately, there was so much bloodshed and so much devastation.
But the Hindu population of India was so great that they had to be granted honorary people of the book status and allowed to live.
But even then, the Muslims were absolutely savage with the Hindu temples, which they destroyed utterly as many as possible.
And you see, as I go through the history, that this Muslim leader, that Muslim leader, and the next Muslim leader, and one of the main things that they made it a priority to do was destroy Hindu temples, to loot the place, to enslave the people there.
It was absolutely devastating, and it went on for century after century after century.
And how about Sikhism?
You mentioned Hindus.
Tell me a little bit about the Sikhs.
Yeah, the Sikhs actually were created.
They began as a reaction to Islamic jihad.
This was a group of Hindus.
Of course, they have their own gurus and their own belief system, but it comes out of Hinduism.
And they carry a dagger, as you may know, and have been given permission by some groups to carry daggers into places where ordinarily people wouldn't carry knives, because the Sikhs are generally not going to run amok and go around killing people.
They carry the dagger, as a matter of fact, because they were created as a defensive force to defend the Indian population against the Islamic jihadis.
So it's kind of ironic nowadays when you see Sikh leaders acting in concord with Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups in the United States and Canada.
Sikhism's Response to Islamic Jihad00:06:27
I think, don't you know your history?
Don't you know why Sikhism even exists?
And it's because of Islamic jihad in order to resist Islamic jihad.
Well, I know our friend Tommy Robinson in the UK always made common cause with Sikhs.
He has personal friends, Mohan Singh.
I met Mohan Singh through Tommy.
He doesn't just carry a little Kirpan dagger.
He has a full-out sword.
And I've seen Tommy at other Sikh events.
And they love him.
I tell the story, I was in a car with Tommy on the highway, and a family pulled up, and they sort of recognized Tommy in our car, and they started taking pictures of Tommy and waving.
It was just a Sikh family that saw him as a hero.
That's a little bit of an aside.
But I think some Sikhs are alive to the challenge.
But I think most people in the West, they want to hit the snooze button.
They want to ignore this.
They don't, either because they don't have time to study and learn the facts, or they're told it's racist to do so, or they're just nervous because they, you know, we were told that we reached the end of history and that we'll just enjoy our entertainment and our Big Macs and our, you know, music videos and everything will be fine for the rest of time.
And we sort of want to forget about 9-11 and that was an aberration.
What do you say to the mass of people in the West, in Europe and in North America, who say, that's not our problem.
The jihad is obscure.
It's foreign.
It's got nothing to do with us.
9-11 happened once, but that was an anomaly.
Stop making matters worse by obsessing over this.
What would you say to them?
I would say it's coming, whether you want to acknowledge it or not.
That that's actually one of the primary reasons as for why I wrote this book and why I think it's so important.
It's the most important book that I've ever written.
And I hope that people who can make a difference will read it because the thing is that it shows there was never a time of tolerance, never really a time of peaceful coexistence between non-Muslims and Muslims as equals in any society.
There's always been this conflict everywhere that large numbers of Muslims have been in contact with large numbers of non-Muslims.
There's been conflict started by the Muslims everywhere in the world for 14 centuries.
So why do we think we're going to be exempt?
This is not to say that every Muslim is a jihadi, of course, but unfortunately because we have not recognized this problem as a society, either in Canada or the U.S. or in Western Europe, we don't have any means to distinguish between jihadis and peaceful Muslims and are not calling upon Muslim advocacy groups and mosques in the West to make sure that they make it clear that if you adhere to the ideology of jihad, of al-Qaeda, of ISIS, then you're not welcome in those mosques and so on.
We haven't taken, in other words, basic steps, but the jihadis are still working, whether we want to just be content with our PlayStations and ignore it or not.
And so it's going to come upon us.
It's better to be prepared than to have it come upon us unawares.
Well, it's fascinating.
I look forward to the book.
It's called The History of Jihad from Mohammed to ISIS.
It's out on August 7th, and we'll have a link under this video where people can order it on Amazon.
We've been talking to Robert Spencer, the author of the book, and the director of Jihad Watch.
Let me close by asking you a modern day question.
You said that a lot of people are hitting the snooze button in the West.
We just want to amuse ourselves with our PlayStations.
I think there's a lot of truth to that.
But I see some people are waking up.
I see the governments of Austria and Hungary speaking clearly about this.
I see a new poll that suggests Sweden is finally perhaps waking up to it.
I think a part of the Brexit success was concern over this.
I think even a part of Donald Trump's campaign.
So is there a reason to have some hope?
Or do you think that there are some parts of the West that are just simply too far gone?
Like Mallenbeck in Belgium or Rotterdam?
Are there some cities that are the new Constantinople?
You just won't be able to get them back.
Well, you know, I tend to think that Yogi Berra was right.
It ain't over till it's over.
And it's never too late.
I don't even think it's too late for Constantinople, to tell you the truth.
Although, of course, the global situation would have to change dramatically, and I'm not calling for any violence or any uprising there, not at all.
But history shows one thing, and that is nothing is forever, nothing is constant.
There are great reasons to be hopeful now that weren't on the scene even just three years ago.
But I think that large numbers of people are indeed waking up.
I hope this book will help wake up many more people and help them to take concrete steps to deal with this problem before it becomes a matter of actual bloodshed in the streets, which it could very well.
And if you think that I'm being alarmist or hysterical, pick up the book and see.
This is something that has happened throughout history in country after country after country.
And the theology, the ideology of jihad has not changed, has not reformed, has not, it isn't any different.
In other words, the people who hit the Twin Towers on 9-11 had the same beliefs as the people who conquered Spain in the 8th century.
And that's something that non-Muslims are going to have to deal with one day, one way or the other.
Well, it sounds very interesting.
I look forward to reading it, especially the different geographies.
I mean, you just made me think about everything from Tripoli to Philippines to Indonesia.
I look forward to this book very much.
It's great to have you with us today.
Thanks for spending so much time with us.
Always a pleasure, Ezra.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Well, you're so welcome.
All right.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Isn't that interesting?
I tell you, sometimes I get nervous when I talk to authors about their books.
I think Yikes is going to be dry.
I am riveted by what Robert had to say.
I can hardly wait to read it.
A Defense That Burrows Deep00:01:51
And little anecdotes, little stories like Baltimore.
I didn't even know there was another Baltimore, let alone that it was raided.
And Irish women carted off to be rape slaves of Muslim invaders centuries ago.
Crazy.
I think that's going to be a very interesting book.
Speaking of jihads and holy lands and Muslim invaders and things of that sort, I actually pre-recorded this video.
I'm in Israel today with about 60 odd rebel supporters.
We're doing a fact-finding sightseeing tour, and it actually pays some of our bills here at the Rebel.
It's a bit of a moneymaker to pay our freight.
I hope you join us next time if you're not with us now.
Until then, here's a quick clip from the Holy Land.
I'm here on the Gazan border looking into Gaza.
And about a kilometre in the distance, there's smoke that you can see.
That's the result of the Palestinians and their kites.
They're launching them over into Israel in order to try and burn the crops and the fields of the farmers and also cause damage.
So, that's the smoke that you can see there.
In the foreground, there's a wall that you can make out, a cream wall that makes up the border between the Strip and Israel.
And interestingly, that wall not only acts as a defense in itself, but it goes down beneath the ground 40 meters.
So, 40 meters below the ground to the point where it meets the water.
And the point of that is to stop Hamas and the Palestinians tunneling through into Israeli territory.
So, I guess if there's a message for Donald Trump here, it's build the wall and don't just build the wall, build that wall down 40 meters also.