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Aug. 6, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:47
3779 The Ugly Truth About Christian Genocide | Ezra Levant and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine Radio, back with Ezra Levant.
He is a journalist and the founder of, and Rebel Commander, I believe, is the official title of the Rebel Media, Canada's largest independent news network.
He is the author of several books, including Shakedown, How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights, and We're going to be talking about the impetus behind the website that aims to raise a million dollars to help some of the most needy and neglected refugees in the world.
We're talking about SaveTheChristians.com.
Ezra, thanks so much for taking the time today.
It was my pleasure.
Thanks for talking to me about this I'm really excited about it.
It's very focused.
And we just got back from Iraq, where we spent a week looking at what I believe is an anti-Christian genocide.
Let's talk about that. This is something that is not emerging in the media, in the mainstream media at least, reasons we can get to shortly.
When did you first become aware of this hidden ethnic cleansing, these hidden attacks upon a persecuted minority in the Middle East?
Well, I mean, I suppose I've always known about them.
I mean, I know enough about the history of Islam and the history of the Middle East.
I mean, Egypt used to be a Christian country.
Now it's a 10% Coptic Christian remnant in a Muslim country.
Constantinople was once the largest city in the world, the richest city in the world, and the most Christian city in the world.
Now it's called Istanbul, and the Hagia Sophia Church was turned into a mosque.
Now it's a state museum. So the idea that a land...
That's Christian will always remain Christian.
It's false. It's historically not true.
Even the West should realize that.
When I was in Malmo, Sweden, I thought, this used to be a heartland, hardworking, blue-collar, shipbuilding Swedish town.
And now it's 45%, 50% Muslim, and that's not going to change.
It's a ratchet. It will not change, and one day it will not be called Malmo anymore.
It'll have... And if we look at Bethlehem itself...
Bethlehem itself, of course, the birthplace of Jesus, now less than 20% Christian and fairly Muslim in its political organization.
Oh, absolutely. Nazareth, too.
I mean, I was in Manger Square with Faith Goldie in March during the call to prayer in the massive mosque of Omar in Manger Square, and it's quite incredible.
There's something called the Pact of Omar.
I know we're getting a little bit off target, but I suppose this is a long answer to your question, when did I become aware of it?
Well, I guess when I first heard about the Crusades.
I guess when I first heard about Mohammed's jihads, they were to extirpate the Christian fact from the Middle East.
That's what the Crusades were about, going to reclaim The fact that the Church of the Nativity survived it all, I guess you could call it a miracle, but it was actually a contract.
The contract was called the Pact of Omar.
And the mosque right outside the Church of the Nativity is called the Mosque of Omar.
And it was really the Nuremberg laws for Christians.
And the Caliph said, you can keep your...
But, and then there were about 20 extreme rules.
Some of them were, like, for example, you cannot stop someone converting from Christianity to Islam.
You may not convert anyone from Islam to Christianity.
Your doorways must be a certain shortness, so you have to stoop to go in them.
You can't maintain or fix your church in this way.
You must be, like, it was basically a A litany of subservience, submission, taxes, limitations and restrictions that every single day and in every single act, the remnant residual Christians in Bethlehem had to bend the knee before Allah and the Caliph.
And it was extremely harsh, but I have to say, at least it survived.
The Hagia Sophia didn't survive.
Christian Egypt barely survived.
Christian Iraq barely survived.
So in answer to your question, a very long answer to your question, Christianity has been the target of Muslim ethnic cleansing for centuries.
And were it not for the, you know, the breaking of the siege of Vienna, I think much of Europe would have been de-Christianified too.
Yeah, and it's not just Christian.
We can talk to Zoroastrians as well for the same description in many ways.
So let's talk about the Christians in Iraq.
I was really surprised to look at your reportage to find that the seven different Christian denominations in Iraq are down to less than 1% in the country.
Can you put that in a historical perspective, Ezra, and give us a sense of where they started and where they're ending up now and where they may be heading?
I was really surprised, too.
I mean, I thought that the Christian minority there was much larger, but it has really been pushed out.
And can you blame them?
I mean, the Christian minority in Iraq was, I'm generalizing here, was better educated, was more wealthy, was more modern.
And so Wave after wave of terrorism, especially in the last three years when the Islamic State had a very particular ethnic cleansing, religious cleansing approach.
It wasn't just a war for territory.
It wasn't just squabbling clans.
There was a de-Christianification project.
And we were in some of these towns, some of these towns, these Christian towns, some of them, we were in a town, Batnaya, we were in Alkosh, we were in towns and cities that The first church in Al-Kash was in the year 612, if I'm not mistaken. So these were amongst the first Christians.
They pray in Aramaic, which is the language that Jesus spoke.
So these people were Christian for a millennium and a half.
And they were successful, and they were tied to the land, and they were the indigenous people.
They were there before Islam was founded.
So they were the aboriginals.
But over the centuries, they were purged and attacked.
And can you blame them, Stefan?
Let's say you're an educated, worldly, wealthy Christian.
You love your land.
You've lived in Iraq for centuries.
Can you blame them for getting out?
For either getting out of the Nineveh Plains, where we were, and going to a big city, just leaving your traditional ancestral homeland, or going to the West.
Because if it's not Al-Qaeda that gets you, it's ISIS. If it's not ISIS, it's the next force.
Hajj al-Shaabi is the new extremist Muslim militia we heard about.
I don't blame them for leaving.
How can you fight?
I mean, you have various governments around the world, including under Hillary and Obama, you have various governments around the world handing these radical groups high-tech weaponry.
How can you fight? I mean, you can only flee from that kind of weaponry.
What are you going to do, take out a spoon?
I mean, so the idea that there's some sort of stand that can be taken to me seems more suicidal than anything else.
Yeah. You know, we were in northern Iraq, the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.
They're having a referendum on independence in just under two months.
I didn't know what to think of that referendum, but I believe it's a good thing for the Christians because I believe the Kurdish people are more...
We met Kurdish Peshmerga, those are their militias, who were Muslim Kurds who had fought and died to liberate these Christian towns.
Listen, I wouldn't want to live in Kurdistan, but Considering the neighborhood there, that's probably the best Christians are going to do.
They have protection in Kurdistan.
Kurdistan, yes, we saw some niqabs and some hijabs, but frankly, fewer than I see in some neighborhoods in Canada.
We saw shirt-sleeved women walking unsupervised by male guardians.
We saw liquor stores throughout Erbil, which will be the capital city.
And, I mean, I'm Jewish myself, and at no time did I feel like I was in, like, a Saudi, Wahhabi place.
Even the facial hair, I mean, Peshmerga, man, they sort of have the cop mustache, like the, you know, the...
The soup strainer. Yeah, but even the look and the styles there are...
I think in contraposition to the ISIS look, which is the long beard, no mustache, desert garb.
Anyways, I'm going down a lot of tangents here.
No, no, this is, I think, let's talk a little bit about this Kurdish referendum that's coming up in September.
And I thought it was fascinating, the report that you got out of Mangesh, of course.
That is, you've got Kurdish Muslims who are living under a Christian mayor.
It is a bi-religious town where the frictions appear to be relatively low.
And to me, private beliefs are private beliefs.
It's when you hook them into the power of the state to impose those beliefs on others, as, of course, the embattled Christian Europe of many centuries of religious warfare found out that you need the separation of church and state in order for there to be the capacity for beliefs to live side by side.
Otherwise, it's everyone just grabbing for the gun of the state, using it to impose their beliefs on others.
And there you have something that's very interesting, which is The idea that an ethnostate, which is something that is coming up a lot these days, the idea that an ethnostate might be a solution to religious conflicts because people put their ethnicity, their language, their culture and their geography above fundamentalist religious edicts and that appears to calm some of the ferocity of religious disputes in the region.
That's exactly what I saw there.
And I'm still trying to figure out, is it civic nationalism?
Is it ethnic nationalism?
I think it's mainly ethnic nationalism.
Kurds are an ethnicity.
You can be a Muslim Kurd.
I think that's most of them.
You can be a Christian Kurd that's a minority.
I even met one guy who claimed he was a Jewish Kurd.
And who am I to tell him he wasn't?
And they love being Kurdish.
So what does it mean to be Kurdish?
Well, it's a geography.
It's a language.
They speak Kurdish. It's an ethnicity.
It's a shared history.
I mean, they're surrounded by people who don't like them much, whether it's the Turks or Iran or Syria.
So they have this common history.
And now, I mean, in Erbil, their capital, you can feel the common purpose.
I mean, just even flying in and flying out.
We flew through Germany and Austria going in and out.
You see so many Kurds from the Kurdish diaspora who maybe went to school in Washington, D.C. or London, England, and are coming back to the mother country to help build this Kurdish nation.
So there's a larger Kurdish purpose.
And being Muslim or being Christian is subordinate.
I thought to myself, you know, that's a lot better than having the Koran as your central fundamental identity.
Having a peoplehood, a geography, a history, a language, a culture, a food, a style, a fashion, a common story that people can be a part of.
And in this town of Mangesh, I mean, maybe everyone was putting on a show for us, but they claimed that they lived in harmony, haven't had a quarrel in a century.
And who am I to dispute it?
I mean, we spent a day there and it looked fairly harmonious.
If that's what a Kurdish ethno-state is, I'll take that over the Islamic State or the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
I'll take it over that any day.
And I think... To see Christians and Muslims forging a country together and not fighting all the time gave me a flicker of hope, but it's a pretty hopeless place, let me tell you.
I'm glad I don't live there. Right.
Well, this idea that, I mean, a lot of the states in the Middle East have a lot to do with leftover, you know, lots of brandy at lunch, after lunch drawings of lines on a map and so on.
The idea that more peace can be engendered in the region by allowing for a sort of self-segregation along cultural and ethnic lines rather than, you know, what we think that this is strategically advantageous to us to get access to resources as a lot of the colonial powers did.
The idea that you're not going to talk everyone through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, you know, within a generation, but the idea that the certain self-segregation along ethnic lines might be the path to peace is really fascinating because, of course, if you have this ethnicity or this nationalism in common with somebody else in your region, then the religious differences are subsumed to the tribal cohesiveness, and that means less infighting.
It's a fascinating idea and something that is kind of new to me, but I'm really tracking it with great interest.
Well, I mean, I'm a Jew, and I couldn't help but think of the analogy because, of course, the Jews have an ethnic state in Israel.
And they have Ashkenazi Jews of the European extraction.
You have Sephardi Jews from Arab countries and from Spain.
And you even have some Ethiopian Jews.
There is an ethnic solidarity.
And here's the difference between the Jewish state and Christians in Kurdistan.
And here's what made me so sad for the Christians.
Let me say what Israel has going for.
In Israel itself, the Jews are a majority.
In no place in Iraq are the Christians a majority.
In no place. There were small towns or villages, a few thousand people that were Christian, but those were dotted amongst the Muslim majority.
So there was no geographic contiguity.
There's no Christian land.
Second of all, the Christians in Iraq, they did not seem to be a warlike or a military people.
They seemed to be more like lambs than like lions, and certainly in a country full of wolves, you need to at least be a lion if you're going to survive.
I did, you know, the Peshmerga, the Kurdish military tradition, I didn't see a Christian military tradition.
Israel has a military tradition.
They're very proud of their military, and it's very successful.
And they have an Israeli military attitude that Jews in North America don't have.
Jews in North America typically peace snicks.
Very few Jews in North America join the armed forces.
Israel has a martial culture.
They had to to survive.
The Christians in Iraq don't have that.
And finally, the Jews have allies.
America, the West, not just Jewry in the diaspora, but Christian Zionists.
You would think that Christians in Iraq would have allies in the West.
They're Christian. They're the first Christians.
They speak the language of Jesus.
And it's not for me to criticize Christian leaders, because I'm a Jew, and it's just, I will let Christians say the words that need to be said.
But the Pope should be the number one ally to these people.
Who else is going to be?
And those three things, that the Christians in Iraq do not have a contiguous geography that they can defend, a land to say this is our—they have little dots.
They're not a militaristic people at all.
And finally, where are their friends?
In the West.
Now, they have some. Franklin Graham, the evangelical from the U.S., he's helping.
Well, he's just a guy. I mean, yeah, he's poured in $65 million.
But let me compare that to the United Nations, which in 2017, their budget for refugees in the region is $4.7 billion U.S., And that is 98%, 99% going to the Muslims.
Who's there for the Christians?
This is a question Christians should be asking.
It's not even for me to ask.
I'm just asking it because I'm curious.
But if I was a Christian, if I was part of a church, if I was a Catholic, if I had a word with a bishop or a pope or a cardinal, I'd say, what are you doing about the ethnic cleansing of our people from the biblical Holy Land?
That's what I would say if I was a Christian.
Well, it strikes me, Ezra, that the Christians in the Middle East have some similarities to the Jews in the diaspora before the creation of Israel.
Except, of course, again, that the religious leaders in the West, the Christian religious leaders, don't seem to be talking much about it.
You're right. The Pope should be, this should be front and center.
I mean, the government should be interested because, as you pointed out, the Christian refugees or Christian immigrants under the refugee program are five times more successful than non-Christian.
So there's a compatibility there.
And of course the Pope should be talking about this.
You hear a lot from the Pope about non-Christian.
But not about the Christian refugees or the Christian persecutions, which are, as you point out, endemic to the region going back hundreds and hundreds of years.
Let's talk about this flow as well into Europe of the refugees.
As you point out, the refugees congregate to some degree in the UN refugee camps, and then sometimes they will head off to Europe.
Now, why so few Christians in these refugee camps?
The first thing I should acknowledge, and I know you know this, Stefan, is that the vast, vast majority of people streaming into Europe, they are not in any way a refugee.
They are not a refugee in fact.
They are not a refugee in law.
3%, just to give 3% into Italy recently, the cases that were reviewed, only 3% were refugees.
Yeah, and I mean, the UN, if you actually look at the United Nations definition of a refugee, it's fairly stringent.
They have to have a genuine fear of persecution based on their ethnicity or race, etc.
That's not what this is. And war doesn't count.
Technically, you cannot be a refugee during wartime because that's just conflict not based necessarily upon persecution by the state based on race or religion or ethnicity and so on.
So I just want to point that out. People say, oh, they're fleeing the wars.
That does not qualify you, to my knowledge, as a refugee.
Not under the UN definition, it doesn't.
And, I mean, there is economic opportunism.
It's just... It's stimulated.
I mean, we know for a fact that George Soros and his Open Societies Foundation has a multi-million dollar campaign to have these human trafficking corridors into Europe.
So it's human trafficking.
It's Erdogan, the president of Turkey, That's a pursuit to the welfare state, too. There are many, many refugees, of course, who don't.
And they're supposed to, of course, stay in the first country, the first safe country they land in.
But they continue on and on until they get to the most generous welfare state.
So that is another thing that belies the general narrative.
When I was in Malmo, I met a Muslim refugee.
I use that word loosely.
He said it was his fifth country he had been to.
I can't remember. I remember he was in Austria.
I can't remember all those, but he wound up in Sweden.
And I said, why did you go through five European countries?
He said, because they gave him the biggest house for his family.
In Sweden. So that's not a refugee when you're a comparison shopper for who gives you the biggest houses.
Anyway, let me pull it back to the Christians.
These UN refugee camps, you would think that these are the people who perhaps are at risk of a genocide based on their religion, their ethnicity, whatever, their race.
But these UN refugee camps are run by the UN. They're run by Muslim officials.
And they are dominated by Muslim migrants who, amongst them, have a variety of anti-Christian, a spectrum of anti-Christian biases.
Some are full-out ISIS. Some truly are, you know, they have the ISIS beard and no mustache and garb, and they have the ISIS flags.
I've talked to individuals who tell me, when I was in Germany, I met people who had to leave the German refugee absorption center in Germany because ISIS was right.
It's like a gang in prison.
The toughest gang in prison, well, the toughest gang in these refugee camps is the ISIS gang.
They might not be called ISIS, they might be called Al-Qaeda, they might have some other name, but they're anti-Christian extremists who resort to violence.
So if you, I mean, I remember when Lauren Southern was with us and she went to the Calais jungle, there are no women there.
There are no girls, there are no children.
It is like a prison.
And if you are Christian or a woman or weak in any way, the wolves will devour the lambs.
So you have, if these UN refugee camps are the intake for Western refugee programs, by definition they will exclude the lambs and favor the wolves.
It would be, I'm going to try another Jewish analogy here.
It would be like in 1942 if people were fleeing from Germany to the West.
Would you want to sort the wolves from the lambs?
Would you want to check, hey, are you a Jew or are you a Nazi or are you something in between?
You would want to be discriminating.
You would want to ask or to check.
We're doing the opposite.
We're literally not taking the lambs, these Christians, because they're not in the UN refugee camps.
I call them the forgotten refugees.
They are in refugee camps that are not hosted by the UN. And there's Christians and there's another minority group called the Yazidis that the ISIS terrorists favored for sex slaves because so many of them have blue eyes and blonde hair.
It's quite startling. You're in this 45 degrees Celsius, 110 degrees Fahrenheit baking desert and you come across blonde-haired, blue-eyed people and you say, who are you?
Well, those are the Yazidis.
And The Islamic State kept thousands of Yazidi women as rape slaves.
I met a Yazidi rape slave in Germany who told me she lost count when she was raped 240 times.
She stopped counting. It's horrific.
So you understand the ethnic cleansing.
A Christian town, they hear that ISIS is coming in.
I've seen the edicts.
Again, I'll use the example of Nuremberg Laws.
ISIS gave these Christian towns...
It was like a posted fatwa.
You must convert to Islam or bend the knee and pay the jizya and other humiliations and subordinations or be killed by the sword.
I've seen with my own eyes these pamphlets.
So wouldn't you flee?
Wouldn't you get the hell out?
And so they fled.
But where do they flee to? They can't flee to a UN refugee camp.
They flee to family in other parts of Iraq or they flee to these forgotten camps.
I think we have to be very strict with our refugee policy.
But if we're going to take refugees, for God's sakes, why don't we take the lambs instead of the goddamn wolves?
It is really astounding how little of this filters through to the general population.
I mean, even in countries like America, where significant devotion to Christianity, a lot of fundamentalists and so on, it is really astounding how little of this is getting through.
Now, as you point out, there is a lot of behind-the-scenes work, or at least behind the mainstream media...
Work that is occurring from Christian groups to try and help these charities and help the Christians in the Middle East.
But it is astounding.
And it shows the power of propaganda and the power of unified political ideology that this does not seep through.
And a genuinely victimized group that are refugees from persecution by any reasonable moral or legal definition are not even not helped.
They're not even mentioned in the mainstream media.
You know, I was with Faith Goldie in the town of Batnaya, which is right on the border between Kurdish Iraq and the Iran-controlled part of Iraq.
That will probably be the international border if the referendum passes.
The town had yet to be repopulated.
It was reconquered a little more than six months ago, but it's like Stalingrad.
It's like every building is rubble.
It was like a ghost town.
It was quite eerie. Imagine being in a town of 6,000, formerly 6,000 people.
No one's there. It's like these movies, you know, The Last Man on Earth or something.
That's a comedy, but believe me, this was no laughing matter.
We were in this town by ourselves, and we had two bodyguards with us who were nervous, I should say, because this was near the border.
Mosul was, you could see halfway to Mosul, and this was the final attack on Mosul.
And I think our bodyguards were worried that some ISIS people would be You know, we heard tales of ISIS soldiers shaving their beard, changing into Western clothes, and sort of melting in with the rest of the refugees fleeing Mosul.
So we were in this huge, not huge, we were in this ghost town.
You could hear a pin drop in this town.
And Erie going into houses.
Who lived there?
Were they killed? Did they flee?
Are they coming back?
Where are they?
I mean, I took a few steps into one house.
Our bodyguard said, don't there may be some unexploded ordinance in there.
But more than that, I felt invasive.
Imagine just walking into...
Imagine if you were in a town of 6,000 people and there were no one there.
Would you walk into a home?
I walked a little bit in, but I felt like I was being a voyeur.
But it was a dead town.
But let me tell you the most interesting part of that town.
It was the church. Imagine you're an ISIS terrorist.
You're fighting Kurdish Peshmerga.
You're fighting Shiite-backed Iranian militias.
You're fighting the American Air Force.
You're fighting everybody.
But you make time in your day to go to the Christian cemetery To break the crosses.
To smash icons of Jesus.
I mean, you're surrounded.
You're in a siege.
But you clear time from your fight to go desecrate the cemetery.
And that reminded me of, you know, the only time I've seen religiously desecrated cemeteries was...
Usually Jewish cemeteries in, you know, in the 30s and 40s in Europe.
That's how it looked to me.
These ISIS terrorists, why would they take, because they were trying to defile the Christian presence and expurgate any Christian holiness from the town.
So the church itself, let me tell you this story.
The church itself, they torched it.
They tried to rip the Christian prayer books, but that's like ripping a phone book.
They're very thick. You can't rip a prayer.
You can't. So then what they couldn't burn, they would shoot and use the cross as like the bullseye.
They would do target practice on these Christian prayer books.
They smashed every icon of Jesus or Mary.
You don't realize how many crosses are in a church until you see all of them snapped.
Like any wooden cross, they would break it as a symbol of breaking Jesus himself, breaking the cross itself.
Putrid violations, like the most gross defilements you could dream up.
Every window smashed.
Again, I was thinking Kristallnacht, what the Nazis did to the Jews, the Islamic State was doing to these Christians.
ISIS, Arabic graffiti everywhere.
We had people who translated for us.
It basically said, this is Islamic land.
You Christian slaves get out or we'll kill you.
You either get out or we'll kill you.
There was sort of a...
In the church, in Batnaya, there were sort of seven condemnations of Christianity.
But let me tell you what the most terrifying part was.
In the smaller chapel of the church...
That was still covered in smoke and smashed and just defiled in every way.
It was like if you unleashed a gang of Satanists in a church.
Imagine the gross things they would do.
But here's what ISIS did.
Lots of Arabic graffiti.
But I was stunned, and so was Faith Goldie who was with me.
We were stunned to see German language.
We're in the middle of the Nineveh Plains in Iraq.
What is with the German anti-Christian bigotry?
And I still remember some of the phrases, you cross slaves, get out or we'll kill you.
You're a shit religion.
And I think, who's writing in German?
Well, obviously a German-educated, maybe a German-born Muslim who joins ISIS and goes to Iraq to kill and rape.
And there in Batnaya, Iraq, a place you will never go in your whole life, I'm sure.
ISIS was there.
Germany. German terrorists.
And what happened to that terrorist?
Was he killed in the liberation of the town?
I hope so. Or did he melt in with the refugees, make his way to a UN camp?
And is he back in Germany now?
Battle-hardened.
Tasted blood.
Numb to murder.
Part of a chain of command, maybe.
Weapons training. Like, that's the thing.
Terrorism went from Germany to Batnaya.
But then did it go back as a war vet...
Still part of a chain of command to do things in Europe.
I don't know. Who knows?
Just like I don't know what happened to the Christian families whose homes I stepped into, I don't know what happened to that German-Muslim-Christian hater.
And, I mean, look, there's no Jews in Iraq anymore.
There's just none. But there's still some Christians, and they're getting the full genocide treatment.
I can tell you that with my own eyes.
It is powerful to me to watch these videos as I was raised as a Christian and seeing that lean torso of Jesus, headless, splayed out, crushed, violated on the floor is a very powerful image.
And as you point out, the Germans in the Second World War came across treasures in their conquered lands, but did not destroy them.
They kept them.
They moved them.
They stole them, which is better than destroying them.
At least they can be recovered afterwards.
But seeing the desecration of these holy places, seeing the desecration of the aesthetic treasures of Iraq is truly appalling when you think of how long these communities last, as you point out.
I mean, these communities, These Christian communities go back to John the Baptist, 1400 plus years.
These treasures are hundreds or sometimes thousands of years old and destroyed in a moment.
And that is something that people need to grit their teeth and look at this stuff.
It pissed the hell off out of me.
And people need to see what is going on and how much is being destroyed.
The human life is the first and most important thing, but the history, the culture, the identity, the faith...
The meaning is all being shredded, and that needs to be seen because that anger also can arouse sympathy for its victims.
Yeah. Well, I mean, Constantinople is not called that anymore.
It's a Muslim town called Istanbul.
Palmyra. I mean, some of these places where ISIS would go and smash, they had a history that is now I mean, you can have a Christian presence in a town for 1400 years and imagine the lives, the endless lives in the chain of humanity, father to son to grandson and down through the generations, and then it can be ended.
And then it's nothing more than a rumor, nothing more than a footnote in the history book.
And that's what I was observing.
And as you mentioned, The Christian population in Iraq is so minuscule now.
Again, to use a Jewish analogy, it's smaller than the Jews in North America.
The Christian population in Iraq is that minuscule.
A number, they truly are being ethnically cleansed.
And that's the thing. Should they stay and try and fight?
I couldn't counsel that.
Because I know that even if they're safe, they're not really safe.
And they're safe for how long?
And until what?
Betrayal. I mean, frankly, this whole ISIS war was because Barack Obama insisted on pulling out every last troop.
To fulfill his 2012 campaign talking points.
He didn't even keep 10,000 Americans in Iraq.
Whatever you think of the Iraq war, let's put that aside.
Let's put aside 2003.
Let's put aside George W. Bush.
Let's talk about 2012, okay?
You've already spilled blood and treasure and you've somewhat pacified Iraq.
You have the surge. Let's not talk about that.
Let's talk about if you had it in 2012.
And then to pull out so abruptly...
In defiance of the pleas of the people saying, please help us.
And to create such a void.
And then to lose all those towns that were regained.
That one betrayal, how many lives did that betrayal cost?
And if you were a Christian, would you bet your life that the Turks or the Syrians or the Iranians or Baghdad or even Kurdistan would save your life?
I don't think you would. I wouldn't.
This anti-Christian hatred, Ezra, that comes out of the left is, to me, it's almost a demonic force.
When I think about Obama had this, you know, anti-Christian refugee program.
So he pulls the troops out of Iraq.
He and Hillary are arming ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Syria and other countries.
So they create this void.
They arm the enemies of Christians, thus triggering this domino, attacks on Christians.
And then they have a specifically anti-Christian refugee program.
It's almost like they're just cornering them, fencing them in, and unleashing the bullets on them.
That's the way it sort of strikes me.
And this shift away from the genuine refugees, the victims in this area...
To groups that can include the perpetrators is, I think, one of the great portrayals in history.
And it's a little, you know, history gets clearer as you go forward.
It's one of the great tragedies of history that the patterns only emerge.
What was the pattern of appeasement in the 1930s under Chamberlain and other Western leaders?
That pattern becomes clear only after the fact.
And I think that this will be seen as one of the most brutal betrayals of Western values, of Christian fellowship in the history of the West.
Well, I mean, the Middle East had strong men for decades.
They were like those giant faces on Easter Island.
You know, they would endure for decades.
And then Hillary and Obama sparked the Arab Spring and they put their friends, the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt.
And listen, none of those tyrants were good people, but there's degrees of tyranny.
And, you know, Hosni Mubarak, Bashar Assad, those people, those leaders killed.
But there was a certain order.
It wasn't a war of all against all.
And I'm not here to write a reference letter for Muammar Gaddafi.
But there is someone who did what the utopian neocons hoped would happen after Gaddafi saw the invasion of Iraq.
He had, I'm not going to say his come to Jesus moment, that wouldn't be a fit, but Muammar Gaddafi gave up his weapons of mass destruction program.
He paid more than a billion dollars in reparations to that, I think it was a Pan Am flight that Libyan agents blew up.
Have you ever heard of a terrorist paying reparations to terrorist victims?
I can't even think of that in all the history of terrorism.
He turned to the West as much as any Arab dictator could.
He did everything the West asked him to, and yet he was thrown out, decapitated.
Actually, he was killed in a horrific way, but the Just for those who don't want to look this up, he was, as far as I understand it, sodomized anally with bayonets.
It is an unbelievable way to go.
And I'm sorry to interrupt your narrative, but this also ties into North Korea.
If a dictator gives up his weapons of mass destruction...
And this dictator being the shield between the Africans and Europe.
And he said very clearly, if you get rid of me, Africans will pour into Europe.
This dictator, Gaddafi, gives up his weapons of mass destruction.
And this is the fate that he ends up with.
And every single other dictator now around the world is schooled in that lesson.
You will end being dragged through the streets, anally raped by bayonets, if you give up your weapons of mass destruction.
And then the West has the audacity to go to these other dictators and say, y'all need to give up your weapons of mass destruction.
And they're like, are you kidding me?
We just saw this movie.
We know how it ends. Yeah, and it was so pointless to get rid of Gaddafi.
Why? What? Was there some Thomas Jefferson or George Washington waiting in the wings?
wings?
Was there some great liberal Democrat who was, that all Libyans were just waiting for?
That was a clannish tribal society that Gaddafi was tamping down and they just decapitated the regime and it turned to madness of which the Benghazi attack was just part.
And like you say, the total freight train, you know, the number of migrants, not just from Libya, but from in Central Africa who have poured For what? Why?
What was the point?
And I... We're getting far afield, but the horrific brutality that ISIS operates even in Northern Africa as well.
And I just...
I'm not saying Qaddafi was a good guy.
I'm certainly not saying Saddam Hussein was.
But... To replace these regimes with nothing but the madness, the war of all against all.
That's truly the war of all against all there.
People can get angry at Gaddafi, of course.
I mean, yeah, we all want things to be improved, but these things take time.
And my question is, where is the outrage of the world when it comes to there being open slave markets in Libya at the moment?
Gaddafi, yes, not a great guy.
His people did relatively well.
There was electricity.
There was some peace.
There was some cessation of religious conflict.
When you have very powerful fundamentalist ideologies in a region, they invite a strong man to keep the warring factions at bay.
Now you have migrants being dragged, raped, killed, sold as slaves.
And where is the outrage of the world?
I mean, I'm old enough to remember the outrage of the world in the 70s and the 80s about the apartheid in South Africa.
Where is the outrage of the world with the apartheid against the Christians in the Middle East?
It doesn't exist. I have a theory as to why, but I'll get your comments first before I dive into that.
Yeah, and you know what?
I remember Alan Kurdi, that young boy found on the beach in the meticulously photographed and publicized photo.
He was already in Turkey.
So he was Kurdish, as the last name implies.
He had already left the Hawk War and he was in Turkey.
But that one image was so propagandized in the West and that led to the floodgates opening in Europe and in Canada too.
We later found out That he died at the hands of his father, who was the human smuggler.
And I know I'm getting off on a tangent here, but you know that little boy on the beach?
Oh yeah, no, the father was in an overloaded boat that was not fit for passage, and he was trying to get, I think, to Canada for dental work.
He was not fleeing the bayonets of fundamentalists in the region.
His sister, who lives in Canada, said he was going to Europe for free dental.
So what's that got to do with being a refugee?
What's that got to do with...
His own father caused his death, but those propagandistic images combined with Western self-loathing, with the globalist, borderless mania of our age, it's terrible.
And I think what's the worst about it is it's being done in the name of refugees.
These are not refugees.
The true refugees who need refuge have not left They are still in these forgotten camps, or they're still at risk.
We were in a town called Telescof, where some Christian families are starting to come back, and we brought some food aid with us.
We brought a truck, $10,000 worth of cooking oil and sugar and tea and tomatoes and stuff.
We handed it out to these Christians, and there was another charity there that was handing out sort of water cooler and air conditioners.
So those people, I mean, they've chosen to go back and try and repopulate this Christian town.
But we saw Christians in refugee camps who have been in those refugee camps for nearly three years, and they have been locked out of the United States under Barack Obama and locked out of Canada under Justin Trudeau.
They literally prefer the wolves to the lambs.
As far as this leftist hatred for Christianity goes, I think that the numbers are fairly clear.
I looked some up just before.
Christianity, post-Renaissance Christianity, has traditionally been opposed to big government.
You have early American fundamentalists very, very much against the New Deal, very much against the expansion of government powers under FDR. We've got the contemporary Christian right support, smaller government, and some of them are open laissez-faire free markets and so on.
And the white-born-again evangelical Christians, 81% voted for Trump and only 16% for Hillary.
If you look at other groups, it's very hard to find, I guess outside of pure libertarians, it's very hard to find any of those kinds of numbers.
You have American Jews voting overwhelmingly for Hillary.
You have We're good to go.
If you have a large God, you have a small government.
If you have a small God, you have a large government.
That seems to be the equation.
So to me, this love of power, we know that power is addictive.
We know that power destroys the lust for power, destroys empathy.
And I think that a lot of people on the left are more than willing, if not downright happy, to throw these hapless Christians under the increasing wheels of state power because the Christians may stand between them and them.
Basically, the infinity of power that they thirst for and lust for, it is sort of the Lord of the Rings ring that they're after, and it seems that there's no pile of bodies too high to stand between them and their goal, and I think that it needs to be understood when people look at refugee programs and people look at government sponsorship of this stuff.
They are importing, in general, people they now are going to vote for bigger government, and they are excluding, and often damning to die, the people who would stand between them and their prize.
I think there's a few things going on.
I mean, I think it was Peter Brimelow who came up with the phrase alienist, the opposite of a nativist.
A nativist loves the country of birth.
He's a chauvinist for his own history, his own society, his own kind.
An alienist, I think it was Brimelow, is someone who is the opposite.
He positively prefers the other.
He prefers someone other than himself.
He hates his own culture.
During the Cold War, I think a lot of this alienism favored the Soviet Union.
It undermined Western military and cultural and capitalism because it sided with the strongest other, the strongest counterweight to the West.
After the decline of the Soviet Union, I see that alienism being transferred into A little bit towards China in terms of geopolitics, but in terms of culture and demographics and race and religion and politics, I see it transferred to what's the great counterweight to the West these days?
I see it Islam.
So I think that's one thing.
Another thing is I think for a lot of people on the left, it's some Psychotherapy.
They hated some Christian experience.
Maybe they're getting back a dad in some way.
In the case of George Soros, and I've referred to him several times, not because I'm obsessed with him, but he's obsessed with this refugee issue.
He just is. If you look at the DC leaks, which is sort of the WikiLeaks of George Soros, you can see the tens of millions of dollars he's spending to blast a corridor through Europe.
For these Muslim migrants.
He's on NGOs, on litigation, on PR. And you'll even see, and I mentioned this in my book, Trumping Trudeau, I think you and I talked about this briefly, Soros' Open Societies Foundation has, and this is not a secret, this is not Hidden.
This is on, you know, you can Google it on the government websites.
The Soros Open Society Foundation has been contracted by the Trudeau government to help develop our refugee policy, not just the policy, but the propaganda supporting the policy.
I look at Soros' motivation.
I've studied him a little bit.
He despises the West.
He despises himself. He's an anti-Semitic Jew.
He despises Christianity.
He despises Western culture.
And I think he's trying to raise it down in a Maoist way.
He has certain qualities of Mao.
I think he wants to rubble everything to zero and build up a new utopia.
And he hates the West.
And he sees sheer demographics We're good to go.
They're trying to, you know, you can't win an election.
Well, just change the electorate.
Or, I mean, if you, again, I was in Malmo.
It used to be a shipbuilding city.
Now the chief industry in Malmo is refugees.
There's an industry. Whether it's building subsidized housing, policing, social services, food banks.
Believe me, there is a refugee industry.
That's the new industry in Malibu.
It's not shipbuilding anymore. And that's the new politics.
And if you look at some towns like Rotterdam, You can't win an election for mayor anymore unless you have the Muslim vote.
It's not necessarily a majority vote, but in a town where traditionally, I don't know, elections would be 60-40 or 50...
I mean, look at the American election, how close that is.
It's within 5% every time.
You add a million, 2 million, 3 million, 5 million, 10 million Muslim votes, and they vote as a bloc, and you have a clear call for them to vote for you.
Maybe you run a Muslim candidate, like in Rotterdam, You're going to win every single time.
Every single time.
It is a demographic, political, cultural replacement of the West.
And I think that's a shame.
And I think that's also why we're not taking Christians who are the most pro-Western people.
In Iraq, the Christians I saw, I could immediately imagine them.
In the West. I could see many of them speaking English.
Many of them have a high school or university degree.
I met many professionals who are Christian.
And most importantly, culturally, they would fit in Not next generation.
They would fit in in a couple of years.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, Ezra, but it's something that you mentioned in one of your reports that I wanted to spend a minute or two on.
That the Christians also, I mean, Christianity has a long and complicated relationship with turn the other cheek versus an eye for an eye, so we don't have to delve into all of that.
But the Christians that you talk to, which I understand is scarcely representative of all of them, But they tend to be quite pacifist.
They tend to say, look, we are not going to use violence to achieve our goals, to achieve our aims.
You know, that's not the worst mix to add to a democracy.
You know, as people who have openly said, we reject the use of violence when it comes to ideology, I got no problem with those people, those neighbors.
Yeah, I have to tell you, I know...
Chaldean Christians, Assyrian Christians, other than a last name, which indicates where they came from, there is no cultural barrier.
Sure, there's a bit of a language barrier at first, but there's a similarity there because, of course, our roots are the same.
Can I say one more thing?
I didn't mention it before, but you made me think...
We interviewed one fella in a refugee camp.
I'm trying to remember which one.
We went to so many. He's a Christian who I think he came from Mosul and he fled or maybe some other place like that.
And he said that the Muslim neighbors who they had known for years came through the town when ISIS was sort of on a rampage three years ago.
And they said to these Christians...
Faith Goldie's doing a big documentary on this, by the way.
We put up about 15 short videos at SaveTheChristians.com just to show what we were doing.
But Faith Goldie's doing a full-length documentary, so we haven't even put up most of our stuff.
So I'm sort of giving away one little story from the documentary.
This one Christian guy who said before ISIS came rolling through, their Muslim, young Muslim men would come...
Down the street and say, your house will be mine.
Your women will be mine.
These are people they had known for years.
This was sort of like the brown shirts before the actual Wehrmacht came in.
Sort of saying, your house, mine, and if your girls are around, I'll take them too.
And not only was that terrifying to me, but it rebuked any idea That the jihad is somehow a reaction to something we just did.
Oh, you drew a cartoon of Mohammed.
Don't provoke them. Don't you know that'll set them off?
Oh, you served pork at your restaurant.
Oh, you had this UN resolution instead of that UN resolution.
No, no, no.
This has been a 1400-year war of jihad.
Jihadist expansionism. Read what's on the church in Batnaya in German and Arabic graffiti.
It's got nothing to do with what the West has done.
It's got to do with the fact that you are an infidel.
And these neighbors, Muslim neighbors, who thought, uh-huh, I'm going to get even with my rich Christian neighbors.
I've always wanted that house.
His house has always been bigger.
His girls have always been prettier.
Damn it, I'm finally going to get my vengeance on that goddamn Christian.
And again, there's an analogy here with Nazis saying, I'm going to get that Jew's big house.
And I'm going to get this, like the expropriation of the physical assets, which, by the way, is prescribed in the Koran.
The Koran absolutely prescribes looting and looting of women.
So don't ever let a liberal, a leftist apologist say, well, we caused this, we provoked this.
No, no, no. No more than Abel provoked Cain.
It's in the religious DNA of the Koran, this jihad, and anyone who tries to offer up a different excuse for ISIS, for God's sake, just look at the name, Islamic State.
That's what they are. That's what they want.
Don't try and offer a different excuse for them.
They are motivated by their book.
Let's talk about what you hope to achieve with a website that I hope people will come and visit, SaveTheChristians.com.
What's the goal and how can people help?
Thanks for asking that.
There's two goals. One is to produce Faith's documentary.
Faith Goldie, amazing.
I know you've had her on the show a few times.
Beautiful, brilliant, and just, you know, deus volt all the way.
So we're producing a documentary.
I think our budget for the documentary is about $30,000 or $40,000.
That includes renting the cameras.
We had to fly ourselves to Iraq, stuff like that.
So we've got a little crowdfund at Save the Christians.
We've got two crowdfunds, though, and I want to make this clear.
We've got the journalistic crowdfund over here to do our journalism, and that includes our expenses.
But then we've got a separate crowdfund, and we've put it on generosity.com.
But you can get to it from savethekrishnas.com.
We put it there, separate bank accounts.
That is the humanitarian side.
So far, we've raised more than 150,000 US. I'd like to try and raise a million bucks.
Here's what for. I knew it would be horrific.
I knew the UN was ignoring these people.
So we went there with 10 grand worth of food, as I mentioned.
But part of our trip, besides doing the documentary, was to sort of do a visual audit, to take an accountant's point of view, an auditor's point of view, Who is the least corrupt person who's helping Christians?
And that is a difficult question to answer in a low trust society where It's very difficult to get a straight answer.
Everything is opaque. There's always a scheme or a con.
And if you don't know who the mark is, it's probably you.
Even the $10,000 worth of stuff we brought, like the truck arrived and we handed out the cooking oil and all that.
But I later found out we had been billed at least 200% of what the real bill was.
Now, I knew that was going to happen.
It was only $10,000, so it's not the end of the world.
We had to do something when we came.
But the trip was we met with probably six different charities and we really eyeballed them.
Are these folks spending it on luxuries?
You wouldn't believe how many charities there are.
Five-star luxury offices, limos, servants.
Or... So we found, in our one week there, we found who not to deal with, and we believe we have found...
A pro-Christian charity that focuses on Christians.
Believe me enough, people are taking care of the Muslims.
Let Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, UAE, let all those rich Muslim countries take care of the Muslim refugees and the UN, 4.7 billion.
We're focused on Christians.
So our criteria, number one, can we help the Christians?
Number two, can it actually be a real thing that they need, like medicine or food?
And number three, can we get the corruption and graft And embezzlement as close to zero as you can, given that you're in Iraq and not Switzerland.
And I believe we have found a pharmacist, actually, who impressed us for his honesty and no BS.
And we will make the announcement probably next week of the particular Christian pharmacy that we want to support.
So a very long answer is all my answers being if you go to SaveTheChristians.com, you can help with Faith Goldie's documentary.
You can click that PayPal button if you want to, or you can put it to our humanitarian fund.
100% of the net proceeds are going to actual Iraqi Christians, and we've separated those funds.
One is to do our journalism, and that's for us to do what we do.
The other is to help the Christians.
And in about a week or so, we will show you what we saw and why we believe, of all the charities out there, this guy and his pharmacy is the least corrupt person.
pocket guy we found in the country.
And I know that sounds crazy, but I tell you, that is a land of scams and scandals.
All right.
Well, I really want to thank you for your time today.
Please, everyone go and check out EzraLevant.com and eight bucks a month, one of the best deals on the internet, TheRebel.media.
And you can follow Ezra's great Twitter feed at twitter.com forward slash Ezra Levant.
Always a great pleasure to chat and thank you so much for your awareness to bring into this issue.
And I'll see you next time.
And also to people out there, you know, in Canada who are watching this, it might not be the end of the world to ask your local elected representative what's going to be done to help the Christian refugees in the Middle East, whether it's helping them over there or some other solution.
It's certainly more economically efficient to help them over there.
And if not, why not?
Thanks again, Ezra. A real pleasure to chat.
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