Narek Karapetyan exposes the Armenian Genocide as Ottoman Turkey’s systematic eradication of 1.5 million Christians, rooted in religious persecution, not ethnicity—yet Western leaders ignored it while Israel armed Azerbaijan to expel Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinian, now jails clergy and silences dissent, like imprisoning philanthropist Samuel Karapitian for criticizing the government’s assault on the 1,700-year-old Armenian Apostolic Church. Bob Amsterdam condemns U.S. evangelicals for enabling Christian persecution in Ukraine—where neo-Nazi-linked officials ban Orthodox churches—and Nigeria’s tribal violence fueled by foreign arms, while Ted Cruz selectively targets only some crises. The episode reveals a global war on Christianity, where geopolitics and hypocrisy erase faith-based atrocities under the guise of democracy. [Automatically generated summary]
At the end of the rule of Ottoman Empire, after the Balkan Wars, Ottoman Turks saw that some Balkan countries like Bulgar and part of Greece became independent and the Christian countries in Balkans became independent.
After that, they felt some, you know, big risk in Christian population of Ottoman Empire, like Armenians, Pontus Greeks, became independent and they started to persecute the Christian population of Ottoman Empire or to convert them to Islam.
How it went on.
When the war started between Antanta and Ottoman Empire, Germany and Austro-Hungaria, Hungary, the Ottoman army came to all villages of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and asked two questions, just the villagers or the people who lived in towns.
The first question was, will you convert to Islam?
Like 98% of the population, Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, denied.
And the second question is: if you don't convert to Islam, you will go from here to the desert of their Zor.
It's like 800 kilometers, 600 kilometers from Armenian highlands.
And all the men were killed.
And all the women were taken with children to desert of the Zor and we have lost the 70% of the population of our nation because everyone, one and a half million people, said no to converting to other religion.
We want everyone to know about this story, not just about the dark side of the history.
It has a bright message too, that Christians in the 20th century were very, you know, they went in a way of Christ and they were sacrificed.
And we hope all this sacrificial will bring the Christians of our days to more faith to that what we have, the biggest and most humanistic religion that we accept and we must live with it.
it's the first nation who has ever converted to christian in 301 was an armenian kingdom so in 301 before constantine before the roman empire 11 years before Constantine, before Mediallan edict, it was 312, I guess.
Armenia, like 11 years before, Armenian king Tirdat III converted to Christian religion and convert all our population to Christian religion.
And we are the oldest, eldest Christian nation in the world.
That's why our church and our identity are so already, it's the same thing, you know, the 80% or 70% of our identity comes from Christian values and our church values of our church.
And it's, I mean, the state of California where I'm originally from, you know, the Armenian community is very extremely successful, but very cohesive.
Like they, they have a sense of themselves in a great way, I think.
And that's why, obviously.
So over the past 30 years, Armenia has been involved in a number of conflicts, really a sort of long-running sporadic war with Azerbaijan, which is an Islamic country.
What I don't understand is why nobody said anything as that was going on, and why Christian leaders in the West didn't say anything while that was going on that I heard.
I think it's a matter of real politics, you know, real politics.
We have a very, we have allies with like we have a very close relationship with Greek nation, with Greece.
We have close relationship with Cyprus.
But even from there, we felt that we had support, but not, you know, the support was just with words, not any actions.
I know that real politics and the help of Turkey to Azerbaijan make the many countries that were allies with us or were in a good relationship with us to avoid this part.
This is uh, the problem we face all over our history, because the Armenian nation is in the center of a region where, like Turkey Azerbaijan, Iran and the only religious, only Christian nation of this, from these three countries and always, we had this oppression from the empires, like Ottoman Empire.
There is Qajar Empire and other empires, and the only thing made us to be unite and to save our culture was the church and education from the church yes, the schools.
That church was built all over the country to educate us to be Christian and to be an Armenian Christian.
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I was, and remain, confused by the role of Israel in this, in this war Azerbaijan Islamic nation versus Armenia, Christian nation, and the cleansing of Christians for Nagorno Karnabak that, the region you just mentioned.
Israel took a very aggressive position on the side of Azerbaijan against the Christians, using American tax dollars to do it.
It's like uh, not just defense and attack, but offensive weapons, offensive Azerbaijan received from Israel and the drones many of drones and many of the uh were operated by uh, as we have read in media, by operators from these companies, of Israeli companies.
Because as many media told, like it was in many magazines, and that's so that would mean that Israelis were killing Christians in this war with U.S. tax dollars.
I mean, because the Israeli defense sector is supported billions and billions a year by the United States.
Yeah, I mean, of course, and that's how the world works.
I just suppose from an American perspective, it's like, why are my tax dollars being used to murder Christians around the world, cleanse the Christians from Iraq, cleanse the Christians from Nagorno-Karabakh, murder Armenian Christians?
So now you have a lull in the fighting with Azerbaijan, but you have a prime minister of Armenia who seems to be intent on destroying traditional Christianity or the church.
After the last two, three years, after losing the war in Nagorno-Karabakh and after making like all the people, Christians from Nagorno-Karabakh, have moved to Armenia, our new prime minister decides to have a better relationship with Azerbaijan.
Better relationship with everyone is always welcomed by Armenian society.
We are okay with this.
But what we feel, we feel that Turkey or Azerbaijan had a mission, like made him to change the narratives of the church.
And he wants to change the narratives of the church to forget the issue of genocide, forget our history.
And our prime minister six months ago, he started attacking Armenian church and head of Armenian church.
He wants to dethrone him and he wants to detrone, to change the structure of Armenian church that is like 1700 years old because of taking control of the church.
It's the main institution in our country, like 90%, 95% of our population are the members of Armenian Apostolic Church.
And when he started to attack against the church, our society was shocked because nobody had done it before him, even, you know, just at Ottoman time.
And many people in Armenian society, they were against them, against it, but they couldn't say anything.
We were why the one of archives were took to prison because four years ago, in an interview, he said that this prime minister must be changed.
The second archibishop was in prison, was taken to prison because of like three years ago or five years ago, he went to a protest against the prime minister.
And it's, you know, and nobody like from influential part of Armenian society, everyone were afraid of to talk about this.
And when he came to Armenia and he was in liturgy after liturgy, after mass in the church, the journalist came to him and said, What do you think about the attacks from the side of government, attacks against the church?
And he said, like it was 37 seconds.
What can I think if a small group of people, forgetting Armenian history, forgetting the history of our church, is attacking the Armenian church and Armenian people.
If the politician will not handle the situation, we will take part of handling it by ourselves, our way.
You know, I think the main issue when we thought why he is doing it against the church, we think that he gets some information from Turkey and Azerbaijan that you must change the narrative of the church to forget the genocide and to have a new head of church for being,
for going to a peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan and Azerbaijan.
And we feel that he wants to change the head of church to change, then he will change the narrative of the church and to make our people to forget all our ancestors have done for our Christian religion and for being an Armenian.
And this is the thing that we must show our societies that this is the way they work.
They want to destroy all the historical truth for some reasons.
The reason is to be in peace, but we can't, we are very welcome to be in peace.
But these people, one and a half million people, were killed already.
They were killed for their religion.
The Ottoman Empire must accept it.
The Ottoman Turks or Turks must accept it because after that, we will live in a more peaceful region.
Anyone who's forcing you to lie about history is your enemy.
And of course, the purpose is always to maintain power.
Whoever controls the story, the past, controls the future, of course.
That's why Wikipedia exists to lie to us about the past.
So last question.
This is, I mean, by any definition, a grotesque human rights violation.
You're arresting Christian clergy because you don't like their theological views and you don't like their views of history, so you throw them in prison.
How many Christian churches in the West have weighed in on this, have supported the clergy under arrest, have put pressure on the Armenian prime minister to stop arresting Christian clergy?
Like, how much support are you getting from the West?
So my uncle, we had like they wanted, want to confiscate his businesses in Armenia.
He knows it, but he is he wants to defend the church after that too.
So he's continuing to defend the church.
And this is the idea.
These are the persons with whom we must, I think, we must learn something because it's like in first, it's like in the 20th century when this Armenian, our ancestors were sacrificed in the Ottoman Empire for their religion.
I am proud that Samuel Karapitian is he can be free, he can be with his business, but he doesn't do this for his religion because religion and faith matters, you know, for it's important.
Look, Tucker, as you and I have discussed, I do not understand the evangelical movement, the Christian movement in the United States.
One thing I want to say, and I won't make many friends by saying it, in the United States, Christianity has been subsumed by the State Department.
The U.S. government decides what Christians we support and what Christians we don't.
So in Armenia, there is going to be a prayer breakfast.
And I want you to understand there's going to be a prayer breakfast while my client, Samuel Karapetin, is in jail.
Archbishops have been jailed.
Clerics have been jailed.
The leader of the country is trying to split the church by going to services of a defrocked priest, a man who has said he is going to remove the leader of the church.
This man is being feted by American Christians in Yerevan, Armenia, a man who calls clerics prostitutes, a man who uses language that at my advanced age, I've never heard a leader use against leaders of the church.
And yet, shockingly, this prayer breakfast is going to go on.
But as I've seen in representing the Ukrainian church, the prayer breakfast and religious freedom all seem to follow a script outlined by the State Department.
And, you know, there's a lot of pressure from the administration on peace in terms of Armenia and Azerbaijan, which, of course, all of us welcome.
But it's happened at a tremendous cost to the people of Armenia.
There's tremendous cultural and church relics that are being lost and defiled.
There's 120,000 who have been cleansed from Azerbaijan, and no thought has been given to this.
We have 23 Christian hostages in Baku, and the prime minister of Armenia did not even speak of them when he was with President Trump.
President Trump raised them.
I mean, it is shocking how Armenia has a prime minister who seems to resent his own history as an Armenian.
They've taken Mount Ararat off stamps.
They don't talk about the genocide.
They attack the church.
The leader of the country wants to remove and appoint the Catholicos.
Well, of course, he doesn't understand what an apostolic church is.
To be an apostolic church, listen to this Jew tell you about apostolic churches.
You have to have a connection to the first apostles, which means your election must be sanctified by bishops, by leaders of the church, not a political figure.
I don't know him, but what I will tell you is our State Department has lost the meaning of faith.
They have instrumentalized religion as a tool of foreign policy, exactly what we accuse the Russians of doing.
We have done it.
Thank God our people don't bless tanks the way Bishop Kirill did in Russia, but this support of governments, and we're seeing it in this prayer breakfast, traveling to a country like Armenia with top leaders of the Christian religion in particular, and doing all of this while we have clerics and I have a client in jail.
And I feel very personal about this because I was able to defend this client in an Armenian court.
I want to thank the Armenian bar for allowing me to actually speak in defense of the client directly with an interpreter.
I was able to deal with the court myself and I thought effectively portray the absolute farce that this trial was and that these charges were with respect to Samuel Karpetian, who is an absolutely, unbelievably principled Christian who is now sitting in his fifth month in jail, innocent of everything other than praising God.
I know I've asked this before, maybe not as pointily as I will now, but how did this fall to you?
How did you, I think, grew up pretty liberal or left-wing Jewish guy, wind up being like the world's, one of the world's foremost defenders of persecuted Christians?
And I was raised by a family that was deeply impacted by the Holocaust.
I have traveled all my life.
I have sought refuge during riots or whatnot, whether it be in churches or mosques.
I just never feel proprietary and feel that all men of faith have a commonality to it.
I've been involved with the Orthodox Church since I was a young man.
We did a case against the Soviet Union, which a colleague of mine, Reg McClain, did most of the work on.
But Dean Perov and I were young lawyers together, and he was a member of the Macedono-Bulgarian Orthodox Church.
And I took on that case 45 years ago, trying to fight a Soviet attempt at taking control of a church.
And since that time, I've always had an interest in these issues.
And when, as you know, I was approached by the Ukrainian church and now by Karapetian in the Armenian church context, it just seems very natural as a Jew to defend children of Christ.
You have been the defender of the church in Ukraine, the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, which is under almost unbelievable persecution by the government with the help of the United States.
I'm talking about- This is not just we're cutting off funding.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I have pictures.
I have videos.
There's a trial going on in England where the Ukrainians are trying to ship back a former member of parliament of Ukraine whose crime was to speak out for the church.
They, on the day they passed this horrendous bill to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, a bill that I would say has no comparison in Europe since the Nuremberg laws.
When they passed this bill to ban this church, this man had the courage to stand up in the Rada in their parliament to denounce it.
For that, Zelensky and Yermak pulled his security, knowing that his statements would be highly controversial and perhaps deadly.
He realized that there was basically a death warrant.
He fled the country on foot through a forest, made it to the UK.
Within 14 days of arrival in the UK, they were trying to extradite him back to Ukraine for some hooliganism charge.
And, you know, fortunate for him, I knew him.
I knew when I had met him in Ukraine, when I had been there, that he had evidence of torture.
We're now taking that evidence of torture to the courts.
Ukraine is a one-party, one-person, autocratic state that has no comparison to any democratic values.
Rather, today is a mirror of the old Soviet Union.
The man in charge of religious affairs is an apparatchik who wrote an anti-Jewish screed 20 years ago.
This is a man who spends his life trying to destroy the Orthodox Church and transfer it into what is essentially the OCU, a state church.
He's a keynote speaker at a religious freedom conference in Washington, where there is a happy hour sponsored by the Ukrainian government, where there are men in Ukrainian army uniforms walking around.
I mean, essentially, the Ukrainians are masters of disinformation, absolute masters.
They have their own sort of captive cells of religious leaders who are told essentially, look, we have, you know, black PR against you.
If you don't follow what's going on and you don't support us, we'll take you down.
I mean, the former president of Ukraine is under indictment for treason.
Novinsky, who you've interviewed, under indictment for treason.
They've done nothing treasonous.
They just represent alternative areas of independent thinking.
In Novinsky's case, a religious man who supported the church.
But they have sanctioned him.
They have tried to destroy him.
And of course, they are within a hair's breadth of taking down the church, a thousand-year-old church, destroying it, taking the priests out of it, removing all the churches, transferring it to the state church of the OCU, which essentially is a cutout of the presidential administration.
And I was shocked by what you said at the time, which is the government of Zelensky is trying to eliminate traditional Christianity, the traditional church of Ukraine.
And I thought, boy, you know, when people find out about this, because whatever you think of Zelensky or Putin, certainly Putin, you can hate Putin and still be appalled by this, of course.
I thought, wow, it's going to stop.
Like that, once people know, but it just kept accelerating.
And I still haven't heard a single, I'm sure there have been, but I haven't heard any American Christian leader say anything about this.
I will tell you that JD Vance, when he was a senator and no one, frankly, knew him from Oshkosh, gave a statement in the Senate for which I thank him every day in my prayers that has kept, I think it's one of the key things.
I think you, JD Vance, and there are two young members of the young Republicans.
Catherine Whitford, who is a co-chair of the National Young Republicans and is Orthodox, is actually leading a day of action.
And she has a colleague as well who is leading this.
Those young people have been, along with our vice president now, the only sources of support we've had.
I'm not either, but I'm very sympathetic to the idea, you know, to evangelical people, great people, and I'm not against Franklin Graham, but I'm just shocked that Franklin Graham would.
I don't know, you know, having having certainly being aware of him, I have no idea if he knows.
I think because our government has decided, as has the EU, frankly, that they are going to go with the SOB they know, I think the silence of the government is something that everybody takes as permission.
And I'm sure Franklin Graham is not aware that Archives.
Well, because Franklin, I mean, you would think, and I don't mean to focus on Franklin Graham, I'm sure he's a nice person, or I really don't know what he's like, but I'm not against him.
But has he said anything about what Zelensky is doing to the church in Ukraine that you're aware of?
I honestly am in shock at the silence of the media in the United States and the silence of the Christian community to what's happened.
I mean, thanks to Candy Stroud, who you and I both know.
Great person.
I've been on radio everywhere I can.
But, you know, the Ukrainian effort in Washington and with media is masterful.
They have their own people in key media who continue to write puffy articles about them.
Never a criticism.
The first time it ever came up that I saw was the protests over corruption a few weeks ago, which led people here to scratch their head and say, well, Christ, if Zelensky is so clean, how could he be trying to wipe out the anti-corruption independence?
And that was an eye-opener to some.
But in the UK, we wrote to the government to say, why aren't you doing something about the church?
And I will say to you that the behavior of the press has been the most disappointing to me because I've worked with the press when I was fighting Putin in the early 2000s on behalf of one of his key opponents.
I had the press with me and we would do interviews.
It was constant.
But now that St. Zelensky is starting to show a few cracks in the visage, there's still nothing about this ongoing torture and use of secret police to destroy a church.
Like why most Americans, including certainly most reporters, most people in the media, had never heard of Zelensky until this war started.
They didn't know.
They couldn't identify him.
And immediately after it started, the loyalty to him, you know, blinded them to his faults, induced them to lie to the public in America about what was happening.
I mean, they just became shills for Zelensky in like one day.
We looked at media in the United States because one of the things that's frightening about the churches that are being taken in Ukraine is that very often the people who take them and beat up parishioners and break the heads of priests, those people have swastikas on their arms.
But do you have any guesses as to, and I should say you've been in and out of that region for over 50 years.
You know, well, you know, I mean, just for, I could go on about your background, but I would just ask viewers to look you up or to take my word for it.
You know what you're talking about.
And what you're saying is true.
But why would the media again do that?
Why are they defending actual Nazis?
Like what that's how deep their commitment is to Zelensky.
And secondly, I stopped playing the market when I was 21, but I certainly remember, you know, making a bet and watching it crash and then think, I've got to double down to lower my cost in.
We're going to have a budget that's going to destroy what's left of the middle class.
Look at France, complete chaos right now, complete loss of direction.
Italy, struggling, struggling, but with Maloney, there's some sort of strength there.
But many of the other countries, of course, Spain, Spain is now, you may not be aware, I'm fighting Spain in a big way against their tax administration.
We just outed in a press conference last week the fact that Spain is using Huawei computers to store tax information for Americans.
And not only are they doing that, but they have this discriminatory policy towards Americans.
They have 50,000 Americans.
They have hundreds of thousands foreigners.
They're doing discriminatory tax audits and basically stealing the money from foreigners to try to subsidize a government that is the most corrupt government I've seen since Papadoc Duvalier.
I think something like 21 indictments, the prime minister's wife, his brother, the general prosecutor.
I mean, what's going on in Spain is unexplored territory in the United States, and people don't seem to have any interest in foreigners.
And the king is flying to China because Sanchez is all in with China and Venezuela.
So it's astounding.
And the rule of law is under such attack there that the EU is quietly sending a commission to investigate in January because everybody in Europe knows rule of law is dead in Spain.
So it's frightening what's going on there.
And this is what I mean about the sort of calcification of the ruling elite.
And yet, fascinating, what I'm seeing in watching the Orthodox community, the Christian Orthodox community, and the Jewish community, the Jewish community, as a result of this horrible growth of anti-Semitism, the Orthodox community, as a result of the woke nature of many Christian churches,
is that those who are fundamental in their faith are growing.
Orthodox Christianity is growing at a massive rate.
And in Europe, you know, quite frankly, it's very, very hard to find inspiration.
In the United States, we have a president, by the way, I think probably the most effective president in foreign affairs that we may have had since Nixon.
I think he's incredibly consequential in foreign affairs.
On domestic policy, on legal issues, I think the rule of law is in trouble, but I won't go into that.
But foreign policy-wise, he's moved incredible mountains.
And I'm not just talking about the recent activities with the hostages.
I'm talking about as a lawyer engaged in Africa, the man has done more to open up our eyes to the opportunities in parts of Africa.
He's made it much less risky to go into Africa.
As an American in Africa over the last decades, you don't know how frustrating it is when the Department of Justice opens up investigations the minute American companies want to venture into Africa or into Latin America.
And now that's not happening.
And now American companies are going into some of the Wild West countries in Africa, Latin America, and I say more power to them.
Let's be very clear that the Nigerian government is populated by Christians and Muslims.
I have represented in his earlier life the national security advisor of Nigeria when he was a young man.
And he's a lovely individual and caring and universally respected in terms of religious issues.
Devout Muslim, but universally respected.
In my adopted family in Lagos, the Odysanya family sort of adopted me when I was a very, very young man and living there.
I sort of have a half-brother there, Dapo Odesanya.
That family is a totally integrated family, Muslim, Christian.
I was always teased that I was a Juruba, which is a Jewish Yoruba.
But I mean, there have always been tribal conflict.
I spoke to the foreign minister before I came here because I wanted to get clarity on the government's position.
Absolutely, let's be clear: President Tanubo's wife is a Christian pastor.
This is not targeted at Christians.
There are probably an equal or more number of Muslim deaths.
I am grateful to President Trump for identifying these attacks on Christians.
Believe it or not, you can blame some of this on the French, who had it, but I believe you anyway.
They had a massive force in the Sahel.
They armed the Toregs, which are a notorious, notoriously aggressive tribal group.
That arming has led to mass killings of Christians.
The fact that when Libya blew apart, a massive amount of arms went down to Boko Haram can't be denied by anyone.
Nigeria wants to consult with the United States.
Nigeria wants assistance in protecting Christians and Muslims, protecting their populations.
Nigeria feels it has not had a fair shake from Washington.
And I'm not, you know, I don't work for Nigeria.
I'm not going to go on and on.
The foreign minister is a close friend who I respect deeply.
But I can tell you from my work, I was privileged to represent one of the Nigerian states years ago, a Quaibom.
We won a case, actually, for them.
The Nigerians would welcome American assistance with open arms.
So this is unlike Ukraine, which is destroying its church, or Armenia, which is destroying its church.
Here you have a government that wants to protect its populace, doesn't have the resources.
Nobody's going to deny Nigeria's been racked by corruption all the years I've known it, but they want a new deal, a new relationship with Washington, and in part to assist them in protecting Christians.
So when I read some of what I've been reading, you know, I'm never going to say that Ted Cruz isn't a brilliant man.
But I'm going to say I might have a little more time in Nigeria than he does.
And I would welcome him to speak to the foreign minister or others because one thing America doesn't need are more enemies.
Africa is the future.
I have said it time and time again.
I'm privileged to be counsel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
We, you know, my firm has spent many years, we've just, we're still trying to defend the opposition leader of Tanzania, Tundu Lisu, who's been illegally jailed.
A thousand are dead protesting completely bogus, fraudulent elections.
And to the credit of the United States, at least in the Senate, they've spoken out.
Foreign Relations Committee has spoken out.
We need our administration, and we certainly need the EU to stop funding this grotesque government in Tanzania.
But we have to stop looking at Africa as a security concern alone.
And we have to recognize that between their minerals and between the entrepreneurial spirit, Nigerian lawyers are as good or better than American lawyers or British lawyers.
I mean, there is an incredible infrastructure of intelligence in Nigeria that we don't know anything about.
All we try to do is sanction and condemn.
It is a horrible, horrible part of our policy that we sanction the hell out of everybody.
We are responsible for the consolidation of power in Moscow under Putin.
If we were not sanctioning the hell out of all these people who had moved to Europe, who knows whether Putin would still be in power.
It's so counterproductive that it's got to be part of some sort of larger strategy that I'm too dumb to understand because it's achieving the opposite of the attended result.
And let me tell you, I'm working in Iraq against Iranian interests.
We have a woman, Sarah Saleem, who is an American citizen, bravely, incredibly bravely defending her interests and those of the Kurdish in the north.
And, you know, the Kurds are going to have an election soon.
She's defending their interests against a wildly corrupt chief justice named Zaydan, who is actually an instrument of Iran.
And there have been a complete reversal of her fortunes before the courts because of corruption against a group called the Hanna Brothers.
And when we've gone to the U.S. embassy for help, this is an American citizen who, by the way, was kidnapped and tortured 10 years ago and has been fighting for her redemption and for compensation against al-Maliki and Zaydan and others.
Our embassy pledges neutrality, does not help this brave American citizen.
Listen, we cannot understand it, especially in a moment where the future of Iraq, which is massively important to the United States, is at risk.
I mean, there's an election coming up in Iraq as well, and the oil wealth of that country is almost unimaginable.
And the issue is whether the Iraqi militia will disarm, whether, in fact, the government that we not only have spent billions to support, but we lost almost 5,000 lives, whether that government will be a government somewhat free of the corruption and control of Iran.
And our government's been impotent.
There's a few people in Congress who have spoken out and blessed them for doing that, but very few people have paid Iraq any thought at all.
And yet we overconcentrate on Ukraine to the exclusion of almost everything else.
I mean, the Washington Post did a hit piece on me.
A woman I knew quite well did a terrible hit piece, tried to present me as a Russian agent.
That was their focus.
There was no issue about what's happening to the church.
None at all.
And the funny thing, by the way, is we are not trying to change American policy.
Where you and I disagree is I've always been totally supportive of Ukraine from a military standpoint because my clients are in the front line.
Members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church are fighting and dying for Ukraine.
And you know, I don't know if you remember last time I met you, I showed you a video that we had done of some young men in the army speaking out for the church.
Well, one of those young men has just died fighting Russia.
And his comment in that video was to the president, how do you want me to fight when my own church, I can't defend my own church in my town?
But Cruz specifically, but he's all of a sudden, kind of out of nowhere, deeply concerned about the plight of Christians in Nigeria, which I want to restate.
Look, you know, I can tell you that the Nigerians have no idea where this is coming from.
They've wanted Washington's attention since the beginning of the Trump administration.
There are 230 million Nigerians who long for a strong relationship with the United States, who are being cultivated by Russia, cultivated by China, cultivated by India, but want to work with America.
And we ignore them until we condemn them for a genocide that is absolutely not a genocide.
Yes, I support President Trump's interest in helping out Christians everywhere.
But let's be fair to a government who is working to try to protect Christians and doesn't have the resources.
It's an effort to draw the attention of faithful Christians in the United States away from long-standing persecution that we have studiously ignored in Ukraine and other parts of the world.
No, no, because I don't have another way to explain it.
And one other thing I want to mention on your show is that we have this new white paper on Armenia called Pashinian and the Persecution of Samuel Karapetchin.
And it's available online.
And it's at freekarapetchin.com.
And please download it and you will see a, you know, it's 60 or so pages, but it provides the entire history of the persecution.
But, you know, as you discovered, the Armenian genocide, from there till now, Armenia has been a brave Christian country in a terrible, terrible neighborhood.
And, you know, I, having been in their court, having been in the jail, having met with Karapetchyan, I am at a complete loss about the fact that I know they think that they're going to have this prayer breakfast.
I believe one of the Trump children is going to Armenia.
I'm sure Donald Trump Jr., again, has no idea of what's actually going on there.
It's a terrible situation where because you can't get into the media to tell them the truth, so many senior people in the United States operate on ignorance and reputation launder people like Pashinian.
As you're aware, when I fought to get into the religious freedom conference last time, we had to fight to get a table to put information on.
Then when I wanted to speak, they loaded a panel with five or six other people, and I got about two minutes to speak while the man who is in charge of the destruction of the church was a keynote before a large audience.
People were in Ukrainian army uniforms walking with OCU priests, that's state church priests through the halls of this religious freedom breakfast or I'm sorry, religious freedom convention or conference.
And they had a happy hour, a happy hour sponsored by Ukraine.
I just know they've announced that I'm under investigation.
But again, it's no idea.
It's like with Karapetian.
You know, they try to find something to get you on.
And they invent stuff, as you know.
So it's really, I'm very tempted to go and I may go again, but I have no idea if I go, if I'll get out.
And to some extent, it's a bit like that with Armenia, because in Armenia, they've just arrested not only bishops, but now they've arrested three mayors who spoke out and who weren't helpful, as well as the family of the patriarch, the Catholicos, the brother and some other relative on, again, completely trumped up charges.
I think the EU is a tremendous danger if it doesn't get its act together on fundamental values.
You know, there's this dialectic going on.
Everybody is afraid of Russia, completely afraid, paralyzed.
I mean, a Russian drone crosses the border and we're at DEF CON one.
Yet, after, I don't know, four plus years, Kiev isn't taken.
None, you know, I think there's been a 1% change in territory.
So how can Europe be so completely in fear of Russia and yet at the same time instrumentalize that fear to destroy their economies, to maintain sanctions, to engage in wildly self-destructive behavior and fail to maintain democratic values?
A foreign national was caught celebrating as the World Trade Center fell and later said he was in New York, quote, to document the event.
How did he know there would be an event to document in the first place?
Because he had foreknowledge.
And maybe most amazingly, somebody, an unknown investor, shorted American Airlines and United Airlines, the companies whose planes the attackers used on 9-11, as well as the banks that were inside the Twin Towers just before the attacks.
They made money on the 9-11 attacks because they knew they were coming.