The video above is from the Holy Quran Does Not Burn campaign, to restore damage from the rioters

Why won’t Iran attack first? Why did they agree when sued for peace before? Given that Iran is an Islamic Republic, these questions have Quranic answers. This Ramadan, let’s go through a bit of the Quran together, to understand them better. This is a bit of the Quranic art of war.

Your unreliable narrator

Note that I am not a Muslim. I don’t know if I believe in Allah, but I definitely fear them. I am a Sri Lankan Buddhist, a Sinhala Buddhist if you like. I started reading the Quran and fasting for Ramadan to understand the Axis of Resistance better, and I suppose I’ll continue doing this until Palestine is liberated. I am in no way an authority on the Quran, I cannot read Arabic and have little historical or cultural context. Someone literally handed me a Quran on the street one day (the GoodWord translation) and that’s the one I use. I recommend reading the book yourself, in whatever capacity, if only to be an educated person.

I’ll limit my quotes here to the first three surahs (chapters) of the Quran because it’s only been five days of Ramadan and that’s what’s fresh in my mind right now. I’ll go through them mostly in order. And I won’t even cover the Shia aspects of Iranian faith (which I know nothing about), but only the Quran.

Knowing the enemy

When I read the Quran it really sounds like They’re talking about today. For example, passage (to me) describes the evil we face in the White Empire (America, Europe, ‘Israel’, same thing). A bunch of people who don’t really believe in God but think God promised them land anyways.

As for those who are bent on denying the truth, it makes no difference to them whether you warn them or not, they will not believe. God has sealed their hearts and their ears, and over their eyes there is a covering. They will have a terrible punishment. There are some who say, ‘We believe in God and the Last Day,’ yet they are not believers. They seek to deceive God and the believers, but they only deceive themselves, though they do not realize it. In their hearts is a disease, which God has increased. They will have a painful punishment, because they have been lying.When they are told, ‘Do not cause corruption in the land,’ they say, ‘We are only promoters of peace,’ but it is they who are really causing corruption, though they do not realize it.”

I think of this latter phrase often, as the United States sets up a ‘Board of Peace’ over the graveyard of Gaza. When they really spread corruption and destruction, as we can see. The Quran repeats that you cannot change such people, and that Allah will “draw them on, for a while, to wander blindly in their insolence,” and that “He makes only the disobedient go astray.” At the same time there are clear and rigid rules of engagement even for such Satanic armies, as follows.

Everybody is not the enemy

The propaganda line from the West (and increasingly India) is that Muslims want to kill everybody but that isn’t Muslim, but this isn’t the case. “There shall be no compulsion in religion,” and the rules of engagement for war are strictly, often frustratingly, defensive. The eschatological line is Iran is trying to eliminate Jews and Christians as infidels, and nothing could be further from the truth. Jews and Christians live peacefully in Iran (and more did, before ‘Israelis’ went throwing bombs in synagogues) and there is a strong Quranic basis for this. The Quran says,

The believers, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabaeans—all those who believe in God and the Last Day and do good deeds—will be rewarded by their Lord; they shall have no fear, nor shall they grieve.

The Quran speaks directly of the Jews, which honestly sounds like it’s speaking to today, though the modern state of ‘Israel’ is of course an abomination created and sustained by the Great Satan. Allah said, via his Messenger,

Remember when We made a covenant with the Children of Israel, ‘Worship none but God and be good to your parents and to relatives and orphans and the needy. And speak kindly to people. Attend to your prayers and pay the zakat [prescribed alms].’ But with the exception of a few, you turned away [in aversion] and paid no heed.When We made a covenant with you, We said, ‘You shall not shed each other’s blood, nor turn your people out of their homes.’ You consented to this and bore witness.Yet, here you are, slaying one another and driving some of your own people from their homelands, aiding one another against them, committing sin and aggression; but if they came to you as captives, you would ransom them. Surely their very expulsion was unlawful for you. Do you believe in one part of the Book and deny another part of it? Those of you who act thus shall be rewarded with disgrace in this world and with a severe punishment on the Day of Resurrection. God is never unaware of what you do.Such are they who buy the life of this world at the price of the Hereafter. Their punishment shall not be lightened for them, nor shall they be helped.

Speaking of the ‘Children of Israel’, ie the Jews, the Quran says, “You will constantly discover treachery on their part, except for a few of them. But pardon them, and bear with them; truly, God loves the doers of good.” The Quran speaks specifically about the Jews of the time which honestly sounds like the Jews of our time. As the Quran says, a bit later,

Some Jews take words out of their context and say, ‘We have heard, but we disobey,’ or ‘Hear without listening.’ And they say ‘Look at us,’ twisting the phrase with their tongues so as to disparage religion. But if they had said, ‘We hear and we obey,’ and ‘Listen to us and look at us with favour,’ that would have been better and more proper for them. God has rejected them for their defiance so that they shall not believe, except a few of them.

Again, I’m reading this out of historical context, but doesn’t the Quran seem to describe the news better than the news? I guess characters don’t change that much, though the stories do.

The Al-Aqsa Flood

The central religious cause of the Axis of Resistance is the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem (Al-Quds). The Resistance often says, of those martyred, that he died on the road to Al-Quds. The moment this is truly over will be when the faithful can worship freely in Al Aqsa Mosque, without being booted by jackbooted thugs. ‘Israel’ violently restricts Muslims from praying there now, their troops even wear shoes inside (which horrifies every Asian), and they make noises about destroying it entirely. The Al Aqsa Mosque is the physical center of the Resistance, such that the ghetto rebellion of October 7th is called the Al Aqsa Flood. As the Quran says about this motivation,

Who could be more wicked than someone who prevents God’s name from being mentioned in His places of worship, and seeks to bring about their ruin, while it behoves these men to enter them with fear in their hearts? There is disgrace in store for them in this world and a great punishment in the next.

Fear, hunger, and loss

Within the White Empire, where people are trained to be motivated by the life of this world, it is very confusing that these religious people keep rebelling despite being killed. But every religion is about a world greater than this one, a higher power, and Islam is very clear on this point. Allah said, via Muhammad (pbuh),

Do not say that those who are killed in God’s cause are dead; they are alive, but you are not aware of it. We shall certainly test you with fear and hunger, and loss of property, lives and crops. Give good news to those who endure with fortitude. Those who say, when afflicted with a calamity, ‘We belong to God and to Him we shall return,’ are the ones who will have blessings and mercy from their Lord: it is they who are on the right path!

The first sentence here occurs in almost every death notice of every fighter. Their motivation is not the life of this world but the hereafter, and if you say this is a dumb superstition, think of the fact that every religion says something like this, and that such belief produces better people. Think about what truth really means, and how on Earth God would communicate this to people. Some concept of an afterlife is necessary otherwise there’s just this, and people being awful and getting away with it. The Quran is very clear about the Day of Judgement coming and being much more important than any days since (which other people of the book should get). But they scoff and choose profit over profits. As the Quran said,

The life of this world is made to appear attractive for those who deny the truth and they scoff at those who believe. But those who fear God shall be above them on the Day of Resurrection: God bestows His bounties on whoever He pleases without stinting.

Or as Allah says in the next Surah,

The satisfaction of worldly desires through women, and children, and heaped-up treasures of gold and silver, and pedigreed horses, and cattle and lands is attractive to people. All this is the provision of the worldly life; but the most excellent abode is with God.

This feels like it’s talking directly to the Emiratis, but we’ll get to that another time, there’s a lot of verses for ‘desert Arabs’ who flee from the fight.

The rules of war

The Quran’s rules for fighting and stopping fighting are very clear. And also very confusing for godless genocidal maniacs who try to game theory everything. The Quran says,

And fight in God’s cause against those who wage war against you, but do not commit aggression—for surely, God does not love aggressors. Slay them wherever you find them [those who fight against you]; drive them out of the places from which they drove you, for [religious] persecution is worse than killing. Do not fight them at the Sacred Mosque unless they fight you there. If they do fight you, slay them—such is the reward for those who deny the truth—but if they desist, then surely God is most forgiving and merciful.Fight them until there is no more fitna [religious persecution] and religion belongs to God alone. If they desist, then let there be no hostility, except towards aggressors.

As you can see, the Islamic art of war is clearly defensive. They should not strike first because God does not love aggressors. Indeed, Iran has not started a war since the Great Satan reincarnated in ‘America’, for over 300 years now. And they’re still sitting there, waiting for America to hit them before they respond. Then they will fight back, inshallah the way to the Al Aqsa Mosque, but they won’t start it.

The other frustrating thing to outside observers is why they stopped after the 12-Day War, just as ‘Israel’s’ air defense were depleted. But that has a Quranic reason also. If the enemy desists, Muslims are supposed to stop fighting. This can be maddening for secular theorists of war, but it’s all in the Quran, and it is deeply honorable. This is actually the most moral philosophy of war I have found.

What of those who say non-violence is the only moral course, that people should not fight at all? Even the (CIA-employed) Dalai Lama has said if Buddhism was going to be destroyed Buddhist should fight, and God knows Sinhala Buddhist have been warlike enough. The Quran puts it clearer saying, “Had it not been for God’s repelling some people by means of others, the earth would have been filled with corruption. But God is bountiful to mankind.” They’re not looking for a fight, but if it’s upon them, they don’t hide. Iran makes much more sense in this light.

On believers and unbelievers

The point I’m getting at is that the Islamic Republic of Iran is what it says on the tin, they are true believers and this is what motivates them and it is necessary to read the Quran to understand them. Or, honestly, to understand anything in the region.

When I read the Quran, it sounds like Allah is talking to true Muslims like those in Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, and Palestine, who actually answer the call to arms when children are being killed and amputated. The Quran says,

You are indeed the best community that has ever been brought forth for [the good of] mankind. You enjoin what is good, and forbid what is evil, and you believe in God. If the People of the Book had also believed, it would have surely been better for them. Some of them are true believers, but most of them are disobedient.

It also sounds like They’re speaking to the corrupted Jews now (this seems to be a historical pattern), whom Hamas called the ‘Diaper Army’ and who I’ve seen run and hide when faced with men on the battlefield, and not children on a computer screen. As the Quran says,

They can do you very little harm; if they come out to fight you, they will show you their backs; then they shall not be helped—abasement shall attend them wherever they are found, unless they make a covenant with God or with man. They have incurred God’s wrath and have been utterly humbled, because they have persistently disbelieved in God’s signs and killed prophets unjustly. This resulted from their disobedience and their habit of transgression.

The Quran has a message for people who deny the truth, and try to raise a state of ‘Israel’ before the Messiah comes, with help from the Great Satan (which many Torah Jews object to too). As the Quran says of those living fat off the stolen land,

As for those who deny the truth, neither their possessions nor their children shall avail them in the least against God. They will be inmates of the Fire. They will remain there for ever; that which they spend in pursuit of the life of this world is like a biting frosty blast which smites the harvest of a people who have wronged themselves, and destroys it. God is not unjust to them; they are unjust to their own souls.

Today, it can seem like the wicked are getting away with it, quite flagrantly. Jews party in Tel Aviv while children starve in Gaza, pedophilic elites in Washington launch warships while Cubans can’t eat. But Allah said this is a bad deal for them, if they only knew it. The Quran says, “And if one desires the rewards of this world, We shall grant it to him; and if one desires the rewards of the life to come, We shall grant it to him. We will reward the grateful.”

On loss again

One of the arguments against the Al Aqsa Flood is look at Gaza now, but I think the Quran speaks to this also. It says,

Those who stayed behind, said of their brothers, ‘Had they listened to us, they would not have been killed.’ Say to them, ‘Ward off death from yourselves, then, if what you say be true!’Do not think of those who have been killed in God’s cause as dead. They are alive, and well provided for by their Lord; they are joyful because of what God has bestowed on them of His grace and they rejoice that those they left behind, who have not yet joined them, that they shall have no fear, nor shall they grieve; rejoicing in God’s grace and bounty. [They know that] God will not fail to requite the believers.

That line, “Do not think of those who have been killed in God’s cause as dead” occurs again and again in Resistance obituaries. And I often wonder how people in Muslim countries where they at least hear this live with themselves, knowing they can’t take their football teams with them when they’re dead, but will still have all their cowardice piled upon their heads. I’m a Buddhist and yet I fear Allah. What about them?

On determination

Yet as the Quran says, among the believers there are men. Some people actually take this stuff (and their souls) seriously, and the Quran speaks to them. Iran is a whole nation of them, bless them. They have suffered deeply for Palestine, but remained steadfast, because they have faith. As Allah says, through his Messenger,

You will surely be tried and tested in your possessions and your persons, and you shall surely hear many hurtful things from those who were given the Book before you and from those who set up partners with God, but if you endure with fortitude and restrain yourselves, that indeed is a matter of strong determination.

That is where, I think, this determination to resist comes from. I remember seeing an Al Qassam (Hamas) fighter mortally wounded, being filmed dying from an ‘Israeli’ drone. I saw him pray before dying, and I was deeply moved. What is this faith, I thought, that gives courage against seemingly insurmountable odds, which enables honor against such powerful evil? That faith is Islam.

On justice for Palestine

People who do not read the Quran use it to slander the Resistance as mindless zealots, but if you actually read it, it’s very clear, sensible, and just. It contains a very clear art of war, and a purely defensive one. Sometimes you do have to fight for justice, it doesn’t just appear. And I think it describes the fight between good and evil we’re seeing now. It is why, I think, Iran answers the call of suffering Palestinians from afar, even though there’s much more wealth and comfort in selling out like most of the region. As the Quran says,

Let those who would exchange the life of this world for the Hereafter, fight for the cause of God; whoever fights for the cause of God, whether he is slain or is victorious, to him We shall give a great reward.And how should you not fight for the cause of God, and for the helpless old men, women, and children who say, ‘Deliver us, Lord, from this city of wrongdoers, grant us a protector out of Your grace and grant us a supporter out of Your grace?’The believers fight for the cause of God, while those who reject faith fight for Satan. Then fight the allies of Satan: Satan’s scheming is truly weak.

At this point—when the rulers of the White Empire are openly raping children on vacation and killing them at work—how can you not see this as a battle of good vs. evil, and America et al as the Great Satan? And the Quran gives clear authority to fight such people, with clear restrictions. It says,

If they keep away from you and cease their hostility and propose peace to you, God does not allow you to harm them.You will find others who wish to be safe from you, and from their own people, yet whenever they find an opportunity of inflicting harm, they plunge into it. So if they neither withdraw, nor offer you peace, nor restrain themselves from fighting you, seize and kill them wherever you encounter them. Over such people We have given you clear authority.

This tells you why Iran accepted a peace deal when they had ‘Israel’ on the ropes during the 12-Day War, but also why they don’t fear the war incoming. When such war is joined, the Quran gives courage. I can now see where the Resistance fighters get it from. The Quran says,

Do not relent in the pursuit of the enemy. If you are suffering hardships, they too are suffering similar hardships, but what you can hope for from God, they cannot. God is all knowing and wise.

This, I think, describes the situation in a way that modern news coverage obscures. Relentless Western propaganda covers up ‘Israeli’ and other imperial losses, but they are happening. The propaganda does this to get the Resistance to give up, but why would they? They don’t watch CNN, and they do read the Quran. They shouldn’t give up and inshallah they won’t, as long as the Islamic Republic of Iran is standing. This is what ignorant people don’t understand about Iran. When they say that they’re an Islamic Republic, when they defend their Islamic Revolution, they actually mean it. And you would be good to read the Quran if you wish to understand them. I highly recommend it.

“NYC’s new Muslim mayor: American Islam or American evolution?” In a recent interview I conducted with Professor Kevin Barrett, a well-known political analyst and Islamologist, we examined this very question in depth. Barrett pointed to Momdani’s election as mayor of New York—despite the intense climate of Islamophobia and influential Zionist lobbying—and described the event as both “unexpected” and “performative.” It was unexpected because a Muslim figure, openly defending Palestinian rights, managed to win in one of the most powerful Western cities. Yet it was performative in the sense that the American governance system consistently attempts to channel dissent into controlled, non-radical forms.According to Barrett, although Momdani holds humane and justice-oriented positions, he is compelled to operate within a discursive framework that is palatable to the mainstream liberal-secular West—rather than speaking in terms that resonate with the masses of Muslims who seek fundamental change. Thus, while on the surface this may appear to be a defeat for Islamophobia, in practice, this election could serve as a way for the system to cleanse itself of accusations of racism and anti-Muslim bias.

FoaDebate: In the name of God, the compassionate, and the merciful. Hello, everybody. Hope you are doing great. You’re watching FoaDebate. Today, I’m honored to host Professor Kevin Barrett, an Arabist-Islamologist scholar, and one of America’s best known critics (of the War on Terror) and political analysts. We are here to discuss the various dimensions of electing a Muslim and anti-Zionist figure as the mayor of New York City. Thank you for joining us, Kevin, and good to see you.

Kevin Barrett: Thanks. It’s great to be with you.

As you know, Mandani’s rise from a relatively unknown figure in the polls to the position of New York City mayor has been described by some media outlets and analysts as a major political upset. How do you assess this sudden rise?

Yes, it absolutely was a major upset. And I think maybe the most interesting thing about it was that it really began when Mamdani was the only anti-Zionist candidate among a number of candidates for mayor of New York City. He was in the middle of a debate, and the question was, “where is the first place you will go if you’re elected mayor?” Every other candidate fell all over themselves competing with each other to say that they would rush off to the state of Israel—that is occupied Palestine, of course—and basically kiss the prime minister’s whatever, and put on the beanie at the wall and essentially pledge loyalty to the state of Israel.

It was actually so extreme that when I first saw this, I thought it was some kind of parody. But no, it was the actual debate. And Mamdani was the only candidate who said the opposite. He said, “I’m not going anywhere. If I’m elected, I’ll be elected to represent the people of New York City.” And then he was attacked. Everybody jumped on him and attacked him as some sort of anti-Semite who wasn’t loyal to Israel. And he defended himself very ably, very competently, in a way that won him a lot of admirers in the mainstream—by saying that he didn’t hate Jewish people. He would be happy to meet with New York City Jews, who of course are the most influential segment of that city, and listen to their concerns and help them achieve their goals and so on, but that he wasn’t going to rush off to Israel.

And then when attacked later as an anti-Zionist, he said that he does recognize that “Israel” has a right to exist, but only as a non-ethnostate: not a state of and for the Jewish people, but a state of and for all of its rightful citizens, obviously including Palestinians who’ve been ethnically cleansed.

That’s a very strong position for a successful American politician to take. And it’s kind of astounding that he won the office of mayor of the most Jewish city in the world outside of occupied Palestine.

As you mentioned, Mamdani is known as a staunch critic of the Zionist regime’s policies in Gaza. He has explicitly described the Israeli regime’s atrocities in Gaza as genocide. However, he has also condemned the October 7th attacks by the Palestinian resistance, and stated that he does not actually support Hamas. Nevertheless, his explicit anti-Israeli positions have led Trump and the Republicans to label him a Hamas sympathizer or a radical socialist. They have even threatened to cut federal funding to New York City over this matter. How would you analyze these seemingly contradictory positions and policies?

Well, first, I think we have to face the fact that to run for mayor of New York, or really any American city, with possible exception of a couple of cities in Michigan, you have to basically condemn Hamas. In the Western world today, there is a tremendous wall of propaganda against the resistance axis, including Hamas. The biggest single target of this propaganda is indeed Hamas. And this propaganda is so extreme, powerful, and widely accepted, thanks to the Zionist control of mainstream media, that the population of the West has—with the exception of more and more young people—but the majority of the population, and certainly most of the people in power, have been conditioned to think of Hamas as being essentially the same as Daesh or Al-Qaeda. It’s listed as a terrorist group. So that puts it off limits to openly support. And so it shouldn’t surprise us that Mamdani refuses to support Hamas, opposes Hamas, and has not pushed back harder against the false and ridiculous Western official media distortion of the heroic al-Aqsa Storm uprising on October 7th, 2023.

That said, Mamdani’s view of the future of Palestine aligns him with the Palestinian resistance. That is, he wants a liberated Palestine in which all Palestinians will be first class citizens. And he wants Jews to be able to remain there as equal citizens as well.

And I think that that vision, as improbable and idealistic as it may sound, would not be rejected in principle by the Islamic resistance. So it’s really, I think, a way of conveying the same message. The Islamic resistance knows that the only language that the genocidal Zionist entity understands is the language of violence, the language of military action. But people are not allowed to understand that in the West, certainly not if they’re running for mayor of New York.

So Mamdani phrases his understanding of the issue in a way that will get a friendlier reception in the United States. And the Zionists are, of course, horrified because they understand what I just said. They understand that Mamdani’s desire for justice in Palestine is really no different from the desire of the Palestinian resistance. So they get very, very angry because Mamdani phrases his thoughts very carefully and does so with sincerity. I think he actually believes in his idealistic vision.

So he’s very effective politically, especially among the younger people who are becoming more and more aware of what’s really going on in Palestine.

In your view, is the election of someone with a specific religious and ethnic background as mayor of a key Western city purely a domestic American affair, or should we analyze it within a larger global framework?

That’s an interesting question, because Mamdani’s relationship to the religion of Islam is not unlike the relationship of, let’s say, the Kennedy family to the religion of Catholicism, or of most U.S. presidents to Protestantism. He clearly is not a scholar of religion. I’m sure that he is inspired by religious ideals in his heart. And indeed, his apparent care for justice probably grows out of his Islamic religious background, given that Islam does, of course, carry a message of justice. But I think that it’s more a matter of identity politics. In the United States political system when people who are nominally members of this or that religion run for office (it’s about identity politics not religion) because there is a kind of a widespread secular culture in the United States, particularly on the progressive left.

And so someone like Mamdani, despite the fact that his love of justice grows out of his religious background, has an overall view of the world that is closer to that of secular progressives than it is to traditional Muslims. And for that reason, I think what’s significant here is not so much that we have a genuine, practicing, believing Muslim who’s really well-informed about Islam and so on running New York. No, I don’t think so. It’s more that what we’ve done here is we’ve overcome the prejudice against Muslims, the hatred, the Islamophobia that has been broadcast around the United States incessantly since the September 11th, 2001 public relations stunt by the Israelis and their neoconservative friends, when they blew up the World Trade Center and invented a false story attributing it to Muslim hijackers under the control of Bin Laden. Since then, the Zionist controlled media has been working overtime to slander Islam. And many Americans have been afflicted. In fact, I think most Americans have been afflicted by this Islamophobia to one degree or another.

So regardless of what we think about how deeply pious he is, how genuinely representative he is of someone of genuinely Islamic faith, I think his election is significant because it’s a huge defeat for the Islamophobia propaganda push.

If we take a closer look at Mr. Mamdani’s intellectual history, political background and his stated positions, what key insights does that reveal? Does this profile suggest he is the product of a carefully engineered process?

That’s another interesting question. I have been labeled a conspiracy theorist because there are certain issues in the United States that you’re not allowed to investigate honestly, because once you do, you understand that the American public has been sold a false story about these events. The Kennedy assassinations and September 11th are the two most obvious ones.

In the community of so-called conspiracy theorists, there are people who imagine that everything is somehow being orchestrated by nefarious forces. And in this case, such people might look at Mamdani and imagine that this is part of some kind of pushback against the Trump regime by liberal oligarchs who are going to be trying to recapture power in the near future. And that maybe he’s useful. The election of Mamdani has energized the Democrats. And it will help them do better in next year’s elections and then in the presidential elections in 2028.

And so one could come up with a theory that it’s all orchestrated. But when I look at Mamdani, especially the way his campaign got off the ground with that debate in which he was the only candidate who refused to pledge to go to Israel, I don’t think that was scripted. I think those other candidates are really so terrorized by and owned by the hardcore Zionist oligarchs around New York City that they were just behaving naturally. And Mamdani—I don’t think somebody dreamed this up as a stunt for him to speak that way. I think that he sincerely expressed his actual views. And I think he’s very gifted at doing that. So I think what we have here is just that a very gifted young politician hit pay dirt by being in the right place at the right time.

From my perspective, our adversaries have learned a critical lesson. Framing the conflict as Zionist Jewish civilization versus Islamic civilization would unite the Islamic world into an insurmountable force leading to their own defeat. Therefore, they must change the game. I believe they are shifting the battlefield and altering the rules of engagement. They are turning an external war into an internal one, essentially pitting the Islam against itself. Do you agree with this analysis and to what extent do you see Mamdani’s election as a part of this strategy?

That’s an interesting point. And I think there’s some truth to that, undoubtedly. For instance, Mamdani, in order to win as mayor of New York, has to do what these other nominally Muslim candidates have done in other places in the United States. Rashida Tlaib and others have had to basically align themselves with the progressive left. And the progressive left in the United States now is very pro-LGBTQ, it’s very opposed to (some) Islamic values. But it’s also the last bastion of so-called tolerance and anti-Islamophobia.

So I think that there has been a sort of a deliberate effort in the United States to make sure that Muslims have nowhere to go but that corner of the American political system. Because it’s really the least threatening, at least to the extent that there’s a genuine civilizational threat to this very decadent Western civilization coming from Islam.

Islam is definitely the best preserved of the great faith traditions. We still have well over a billion people are fasting every Ramadan. Probably the same number would agree that we should be praying five times a day. They don’t necessarily all do it, but they all agree that they should be doing it.

And they are respecting the message of the Holy Quran, and essentially not falling for the (false) values of secular, decadent Western secular civilization. And so people like Mamdani, while they may be a threat to extreme Zionism, are certainly not threats to the hegemony of liberal secular Western civilization.

I noticed when I was representing the 9/11 truth movement in the United States, starting in 2004—and I got a lot of mainstream media coverage starting in 2006—that nobody wanted to hear what Muslims really think, about what the Muslim majority thinks. They reject it, they cover their ears, they just don’t wanna hear it.

So when people like Mamdani basically say the same things that Bernie Sanders says, maybe a little better than Bernie on a few issues, that reassures the progressives and the liberals who still are true believers in the ideals of this Western secular materialist progressivist civilization that’s created a false religion. It grew up 150 years ago when traditional religion fell by the wayside. The Western elite adopted the notion that things will always get better and better, “because we’re materialists now. Scientists study the material world. And they will make things better and better by improving technology. And therefore, we should allow science to be the arbiter of truth. And we should basically drop all of the traditional religious values.”

But that new religion of scientific materialism and progressivism and secularism has not succeeded. The postmodernist movement that grew up 40 years ago showed us that. It showed that where we have really arrived at in Western civilization is nihilism.

And that left the door open for Islam, which has a well-preserved message, a very coherent message, that’s so shockingly coherent that people like me convert to Islam. And because we see that it actually lives up to its self-description as the last, best preserved and clearest divine message, capable of being the foundation of a better civilization.

And so that challenge to contemporary Western civilization from Islamic civilization— the single biggest historical expression of which was the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran—that challenge is something that is people like Mamdani and other American, nominally Muslim politicians are actually probably on the wrong side of. They’re closer to being true believers in liberal secular materialist progressivist humanism than they are to being well-informed practitioners of Islam.

Fantastic. Another question: What’s your take on the seemingly intense rivalry between figures like Trump and Mamdani? Is it a form of political theater designed to deceive the public? And if so, what is the ultimate goal of this performance?

You can analyze American politics as these series of performances. And sometimes they’re very coarse, crude performances indeed. Trump’s performances have been compared to the sport, the so-called sport, of professional wrestling. And I don’t know if you’ve watched any professional wrestling American style, but it’s a kind of humorous hoax in which two big muscle-bound guys pretend to fight. They pick each other up and slam each other on the ground. They have all of these stunts where they pretend to be fighting dirty and trying to kill the other guy, but it’s all scripted. And Trump and some of his opponents sometimes look that way.

Trump is notorious for having actually participated in some professional wrestling stunts when he was a showman. And indeed, this is a bit off track, but when Trump was supposedly shot on July 13th 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania, that alleged assassination attempt looked very much like a professional wrestling stunt. Trump was supposedly shot in the ear by a bullet. But there’s no evidence whatsoever that his ear suffered any damage. The shot rang out, he hit the floor. He was only down for a few seconds during which he popped a little blood capsule on his ear or someone else did it for him. So he had some blood on his ear and his face. He stood up, having painted war paint onto his face, and exposed his entire torso to more bullets—had there really been any bullets—and shook his fist in front of the American flag in what was obviously a staged photo op.

This is exactly the kind of stunt that professional wrestling people have been perfecting over the years. And then interestingly, just a few days after that, the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention that nominated Trump for president was Hulk Hogan, a famous professional wrestler, who delivered a ridiculous speech almost making fun of the whole thing.

So yes, American politics does have a very, very strong element of this kind of deceptive showmanship, which features false antagonisms, people pretending to absolutely hate each other, but they’re actually all part of the same club. Whether that’s true with Mamdani and Trump, I don’t know.

To be elected in New York City, Mamdani did have to make himself non-threatening to liberal Jewish oligarchs. But they’re still Jewish oligarchs. And those people compete with some of the other oligarchs, including the non-Jewish ones and the right-wing oligarchs. But at the end of the day, they’re all working together to preserve the oligarchy.

So I don’t think Mamdani is a threat to the oligarchy.* And as to whether it’s all scripted and it’s a big show, I think it tends towards that, but I don’t think it’s entirely scripted. I sort of participated in the show a little bit in 2006 when Republican politicians attacked me as “the professor of conspiracy theories” for what I was saying about September 11th. So I got a lot of mainstream attention. I went on mainstream media and fought with people. I fought with Sean Hannity and I fought with Bill O’Reilly and other famous radio hosts and TV hosts. And was a spectacle, but it wasn’t…well, my part wasn’t scripted. Maybe they had their orders about their talking points to attack me with.

But I just sort of fell into that spectacle. And I think that Mamdani may have sort of fallen into his role as well. I don’t think they put him in the casting couch and cast him. So it’s sort of like a reality TV show in a way. The people with the cameras and the microphones and the money decide what gets broadcast, what gets boosted on the Internet, on social media, and what doesn’t get boosted, what gets suppressed and shadowbanned.

Those people are constantly thinking about this as a big chess game and how they can try to keep their power and augment their power. And I think that does lead to a certain amount of professional wrestling style fake animosity between people who aren’t really against each other. But I think Trump may have pushed it into territory where there are people with very strong feelings on both sides now who actually really do have these strong feelings, who genuinely hate the other side, people who believe that the professional wrestling show is real. There is a lot of open hostility now in the United States between the red and blue factions. And so I think the people who control the script are actually trying to figure out how to get a handle on it to maybe turn down the animosity a little bit.

-

*Though Mamdani himself may not pose a threat to the oligarchy, his election is symptomatic of an ongoing collapse of faith in the oligarchy’s media propaganda, which could eventually lead to an anti-oligarchy regime change. See here.

It is said that by the invocation of God (dhikru ‘Lláh) a believer attains such peace of soul that the great terror on Resurrection Day cannot sadden him; how then could he be disturbed by whatever trials and misfortunes may befall him in this world? So be constant in the invocation of your Lord, my brother, as we have advised you, and you will see marvels; may God fill us to overflowing with His grace. -Shaykh Al-`Arabi ad-Darqáwi, translated in Letters of a Sufi Master by Titus Burckhardt

We are witnessing the ugliest spectacle in human history as the first-ever live-streamed genocide, filmed in real time by its victims, reaches its crescendo. The Antichrist occupying Palestine is the avatar of ugly. Horrendous images—starving children, high-rise apartment buildings exploding, Charlie Kirk’s throat spurting blood—slam into our eyeballs with the rapidity of machine gun fire.

But God has put us here to witness this, and everything else. There is glory in sumud, “steadfast perseverance.” Complete surrender to God (islam) involves both the fulfillment of the prayer “let me be pleased with what pleases You” and the patient persistence—“persist in (pursuit of) Truth, and persist in patient striving”—mentioned in the Qur’an.

People in Yemen, Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine have done the right thing, the beautiful thing, by taking up arms and fighting Antichrist. Here in Morocco…not so much. But the glorious patience and persistence of the Resistance is at least faintly echoed here by the Maghreb Sumud Flotilla, which is sailing to Palestine with the Global Sumud Flotilla.

The sight of a huge fleet of small boats setting off to deliver food and medicine to Gaza, sails billowing in the Mediterranean breeze, is heartrendingly beautiful. The concept of a Maghreb fleet, bringing together North Africans from several unnecessarily-divided nations—and uniting Muslims and Christians—is in itself sublime.

My recent article “Chefchaouen and the Beauty of Defensive Jihad” invokes beauty jihad: striving against spiritual ugliness, both in ourselves (greater beauty jihad) and in the world around us (lesser beauty jihad). The word jihad itself means “effort, struggle, striving” in the path of God, and the artist’s effort to find or make beauty in and from the world we witness amounts to a kind of heroism.

Can Beauty Save the World?

Alex Krainer recently offered the provocative headline “How beauty could save the world.” His article discusses Chinese social media videos documenting beautiful craftsmanship. Projects include traditional bamboo furniture, water wheels, and teapots.

Krainer, an economist and investment advisor, asks:

“What if, instead of industrial hyperproduction we made craftsmanship great again? We’d produce less stuff, but the stuff would be more valuable, more beautiful and more durable.”

If there is ever a global “beauty jihad” to make craftsmanship great again, it could, like the Almoravid and Almohad movements, come surging out of Morocco, where great craftsmanship never went away. The Moroccan landscape of partially-forested mountains, variegated seashores, and sun-blazed deserts offers a spectacular backdrop for a “traditional beauty industry” of woodwork, leather, ceramics, metalwork, and weaving—as well as inspiration for painters, photographers, sculptors, writers, musicians and other fine artists.

Unlike in so many other countries regionally and worldwide, where traditional craftsmanship was largely killed off by colonialism and industrialization and had to be artificially resurrected to promote tourism, Morocco has an unbroken heritage of handicraft dating back centuries or in some cases millennia. The French colonization here lasted only around four decades, as opposed to 150 years in neighboring Algeria, and was much less heavy-handed, allowing traditional Moroccan religious and esthetic life to maintain a certain continuity.

I bracket “religious and esthetic life” together because they are two sides of the same proverbial coin. The so-called arabesque designs of Zellige tilework, stucco carving, and woodwork are not frustrated attempts at individual artistic expression constrained by a religious ban on representation, as ignorant partisans of Western art sometimes claim. Nor are the so-called Islamic geometric principles that underly them mere academic exercises. They are reflections of spiritual beauty actually witnessed by those who succeed in the great undertaking of islam, ecstatic self-surrender to God. And they are incentives and encouragement to others pursuing that same undertaking—an aid to the contemplative life, and a glorious vision of its eventual fulfillment.

Morocco has succeeded in preserving these traditions of spirituality and beauty, even as they eroded elsewhere, for various reasons—a strong guild-based apprenticeship system, financial and other support from the monarchy, specialized schools like the École des Métiers d’Artisanat in Fes, the development of cooperatives and fair trade movements, and of course the national pride of a country that traces its political-cultural identity all the way back to the founding of the Idrissid dynasty in 788 (and to the even earlier emergence of Islamic al-Andalus, with which Morocco has always been inextricably intertwined). But as I mentioned earlier, what saved all of this heritage was the relatively light footprint of the destructive, nihilistic Euro-American imperialism and colonialism that has laid waste to traditional civilizations elsewhere.

In neighboring Algeria, brutally colonized from 1830 to 1962, French authorities dismantled artisanal guilds, mass-imported industrial goods, marginalized traditional crafts, and waged a cultural war against Islam and the Arabic language. French colonization of Lebanon and Syria, while not quite as extreme, yielded similar results. All of those countries suffered horrendous destruction from imperialist-colonialist-imposed wars. Most of the anti-imperialist forces that emerged were leftist-modernist in orientation, indifferent if not hostile to traditional Islamic lifeways and associated esthetic traditions. That same syndrome affected Egypt and Iraq, which like Syria were once thriving centers of traditional Islamic civilization. As for the Gulf States, their traditional lifeways were destroyed by American neocolonialism and oil wealth—a story beautifully told in Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt novels.

Nowhere, of course, has the colonialist assault on an indigenous Arab-Islamic people been as obscenely ugly as the Zionist Antichrist’s assault on the Holy Land of Palestine. What the Zionists have done to Gaza will never be forgotten, nor forgiven, even until the day the rocks and trees cry out for justice.

Morocco, at least partially preserved from the destruction visited on neighboring lands, contains the seed of the new al-Andalus that could sprout from the ruins of nihilistic Euro-American modernity, transforming the barren landscape of the modern world into a latticework of beautiful organic and geometric forms—a built environment that resonates with the peaceful soul, al-nafs al-mutmainna, and serves as a dignified abode and stimulus for the contemplative life.

British philosopher, writer and dissident Claire Rae Randall, whose magnum opus The War on Gender was published with Arktos in 2022, is arguably the world’s pre-eminent scholar on the politically ‘sensitive’ and ideologically weaponized phenomena of transsexuality and transgenderism. Nautilus puts the spotlight on the remarkable ways in which some of Claire Rae Randall’s scientific findings and philosophical musings on these controversial subjects match Traditionalist teaching and Islamic jurisprudence. (*)

Claire Rae Randall’s in the (social) media: Substack: YouTube BitChute Rumble Twitter/X Wordpress

Read the transcript of this interview by clicking “transcript” above the video image at The Al-Andalus Tribune Substack.

But does that mean that all forms of “political Islam” or “Islamism” are inherently untenable? Does the fault lie with religion and its interpretations, or with the inherently conflictual nature of politics? And are many or even most of the apparent excesses of modern Islamism, above all the phenomenon of “Islamic terrorism,” illusions created by the enemies of Islam by way of false flags and other forms of propaganda?

In this podcast, Prof. Mansur discusses and debates these and other issues with Islamic Studies colleague Kevin Barrett.

Excerpt:

Welcome to Truth Jihad audiovisual and the Al-Andalus Tribune podcast. I'm Kevin Barrett bringing on the most interesting folks I can find from all over the world with something important to say about religion, politics, 9/11 truth and other heresies—basically anything you're not supposed to talk about at the family dinner table.

Today it’s Salim Mansur, the author of The Quran Problem and Islamism, a very provocative and stimulating book that I received in my P.O. box here in Saidia, Morocco, not too long ago. So thank you for having sent that, Salim Mansour, and welcome.

Thank you so much, brother. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Yes, it's wonderful to be back with you too.

Your book made me think about Stanley Fish. Stanley Fish is a famous Jewish literary theorist. I'm not sure why he's so famous. I don't think he's really that interesting. But in any case, he wrote a full-page New York Times op-ed about me in 2006. And in that op-ed he was essentially trying to come on board with the side of the media that was calling for me to be fired from my teaching job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And he took a very strange and circuitous route to his argument. Unlike Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, who simply said that I was corrupting the youth of Athens with horrible conspiracy theories and had to be silenced, Stanley Fish—his book title was There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing Too—came up with this weird deconstruction-style argument based on a false premise, which was that I was teaching 9/11 truth conspiracy theories in my classroom.

And that wasn't true. I never did anything like that. But they attacked me with that talking point because what I was actually doing was that in an 18 week Intro to Islam course, I was spending one week talking about interpretations of the War on Terror including the neocon interpretation, the John Esposito liberal interpretation, and then the Muslim majority interpretation, which is that it was a false flag. The polls showed that about three quarters of the world's Muslims and two thirds of American Muslims knew it was a false flag from the get-go and never stopped saying that. So I was at least going to mention that. But I was not going to tell the students, I would never have told them, what I thought about it.

Anyway, so Stanley Fish comes up with this false premise that I'm going to be teaching my particular interpretation of 9/11 in the classroom. And then he says, “academic freedom should not cover this.” Why not? He says (elsewhere) that professors should not try to teach anything recent in history (i.e. advocate for a particular interpretation) because they might be wrong. He says it's fine for professors to teach their own interpretations of World War I, maybe World War II, certainly ancient Athens and things like that, and ancient old European history from centuries ago. That's all fine. But professors shouldn't be teaching their own views about any recent history. That was one of his arguments about why it was okay that I should be thrown out of the university.

When I read your book here, I was reminded of that. The title is The Quran Problem and Islamism. And your treatment of the Quran problem, which of course is a 1,400-year-old issue, I find generally brilliant and fully defensible. And even if you want to pick a bone with it here or there, there's not a major problem with it. It's a very, very good contribution.

However, your discussion of Islamism, the phenomenon of political Islam in recent decades, which has been so heavily conditioned by 9/11 and other Israeli false flag attacks attributed to radical Muslims—I think you got a lot of things wrong in your treatment of Islamism. And so that actually suggests that maybe Stanley Fish wasn't as crazy as I thought he was, and that when one writes about recent events, one runs the risk of having to revise one's thinking in light of new information.

So that was my first take on your book. What do you think?

There's a lot to unpack in what you have said. It's interesting that Stanley Fish would make a critique of you in the fashion that he did, given the fact, as far as I know, he was a professor of Comparative Literature and English and so on and so forth. And that's the debate that goes on in literature. Shakespeare scholars are still arguing about who was Shakespeare.

So Stanley Fish's complaint was contra his own work, you know, on that basis... Anyhow, so yeah, I mean, the question of Islamism is, in a sense, open to debate and dispute. I would suggest…you're putting it in the context of 9/11 and thereafter. We live in a stream of time. Events happen, and then they become history. Episodes happen, then they become pasts. The pastness of the past remains with us. We cannot get away from it. It is embedded in our consciousness, in our mind, in our intellect as we try to understand where we are today, and where we are progressing.

So…Islamism is not something that emerges with 9/11. I would say it emerges with the Prophet and immediately after the Prophet the the first and greatest crisis in Muslim history, the fitna after the Prophet's death, which leads to the elimination of the Prophet's family. And it was the elimination of the Prophet's family not by Hindus or Jews or Christians or Zoroastrians. It was the elimination of the Prophet's family by the very people to whom the prophet brought the message: the Arabs, the bedouins, who saw the Prophet, who lived with the prophet, who saw how he dealt with his family. And it is they who did what in our language today would be called crimes against humanity.

And so in my book, I was trying to put all of that together within the limited space, and I was trying to reach to the ordinary Muslim. I don't know whether they will read it. But from my perspective also, the book was written in the post-9/11 context because I saw, and I'm sure you have seen, that 9/11 was not only a false flag operation, but it opened the gate to the most vicious attacks on the Prophet without any defense of the Prophet. Even a cold-blooded murderer has a defense in the court. But here in in the court of world opinion, the Western world and its intellectuals driven by Zionists and polemicists and people like Robert Spencer and others, just unloaded upon the Prophet with all sorts of ad hominems that we don't have to go into.

Anybody honest enough would have to say: If you're going to talk about the Prophet and Islam, have we forgotten Jesus' admonishment that take the beam out of your eyes before you take the mote out of the eyes of your neighbor? I mean, that is the primary epistemological foundation of any honest human being, particularly scholars and academics and writers and thinkers, that we take the beam out of our eyes.

(Read the full transcript at the Al-Andalus Tribute Substack by clicking on “transcript” above the video image.)

Nautilus Ep. 1 – Linh Dinh – 280725

(*) Podcast description:

Poet, writer and photographer Linh Dinh, exiled during the infamous 1975 Fall of Saigon, rose to literary fame in the US before becoming a world-wandering dissident legend. ‘Nautilus’ located him back in his native Vietnam, from where he shares his thoughts on rootlessness, exile, alienation and dispossession, reflecting on the Mark of Cain, the Wandering Jew and Homo Aeroporticus - and their antidotes.

Linh Dinh quotes, from his interview with Neonpajamas:

Language is used mostly to disguise and mislead, with whatever of any importance hardly ever addressed, much less probed. Although failing abjectly, of course, I’ve tried to give shape to these unmentionables. … I suggested after a reading that the first poem hasn’t been written, that “poets” are merely preparing the groundwork for a distant poetry, which of necessity must be unspeakably devastating. We’re in the prehistory of poetry.

In the US, nearly all self-identified rebels only rebel in prescribed and heavily manipulated ways, which makes them pawns of the very people they think they’re rebelling against. History will retch in disgust at the cowardly collusion of our “intellectuals.”

Links:

to subscribe to Linh Dinh’s Substack:

substack.com/@linhdinh

to donate to Linh Dinh’s photoblog:

linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com

to read Alexander Wolfheze’s essay ‘The Guardian of the Threshold’

about Homo Aeroporticus as a geopolitical factor:

geopolitika.ru/en/article/guardian-threshold

to read the Vietnamese version of Alexander Wolfheze’s essay ‘The Heresiarchs’: geopolitika.ru/vi/article/su-tro-lai-cua-moirai-phan-1

Transcript

Tucker Carlson etc.: “Building 7 was never hit by a plane. Why did it fall down? There was never a steel building that ever clashed. And all the wackos would be like, ‘Building seven, building seven.’ I'd be like, ‘Shut up, wackos.’ And Donald Trump, which I'll give you a copy. I've seen it. In his own words, says, (Trump:) ‘I happen to think that they had not only a plane, but they had bombs that exploded almost simultaneously cuz I just can't imagine the evidence in the Twin Towers and the third uh skyscraper.” Kevin Barrett to Hannity” “It was a brainwashing operation…"

The Deen Show: Today we'll be talking about the biggest event in US history that reshaped how Americans viewed Islam and Muslims. But alhamdulillah we are seeing the tide is shifting. Conversations on this topic are happening not just on the fringes but in the mainstream. We're seeing it on the news. Senators, members of Congress are asking questions. Even some of the biggest voices in media are starting to ask these questions that were once considered off limits. The event that launched us into war after war, that reshaped how the American public looked at Muslims and Islam, it's being re-examined. For over two decades, the shadow of that day reshaped our foreign policy, our media, and the subconscious of every American. But now, something is changing. And to talk about that shift, I'm joined by someone who's been ahead of this curve for years, probably the most qualified people that I know to talk about this topic.

Dr. Kevin Barrett is a PhD scholar, a former lecturer at the University of Wisconsin. He was let go not for misconduct, but for doing what this country was once proud of: encouraging students to think critically, to question narratives, freedom of speech…

Bill O’Reilly (clip): There's a fringe gentleman out there that believes the US government orchestrated 9/11. That is President Bush and the American military killed 3000 people. One of those pushing this theory is Kevin Barrett, who actually taught at the University of Wisconsin this fall. He joins us now from Madison. You know, there's no sense in debating this issue. I had one of your compadres on a couple of months ago…

Kevin Barrett (clip): Well, you know, uh, Bill, it's actually been one of the best things that ever happened to me. And in fact, we're not a fringe element. The latest polls show that 84% of the American people do not accept the 9/11 Commission report. Only 16% of the American people believe the government is telling the truth about 9/11. That's a New York Times poll that came out several months ago.

(More clips of Kevin Barrett debating O’Reilly and Sean Hannity on Fox News)

At that time his words, his views were controversial. But today, the biggest name Fox News has ever produced, Tucker Carlson, is asking those very same questions Dr. Barrett raised years ago. Dr. Barrett, welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you, Eddie. Asalamu alaikum. Great to be back with you.

Walaykum. Salam. Greetings of peace. How have you been?

I'm doing well. Alhamdulillah. I moved to Morocco about two years ago and it was a little bit of an adjustment, but it's gone great overall. I'm very happy to be here hearing the adhan five times a day, living with people who see things closer to the way I do. So, alhamdulillah, it's a great place.

Give us a little bit of recap of that history that I opened up with professor at the Wisconsin University and then you were let go. Was it for misconduct?

Uh, no. Actually, they did a very thorough investigation just to see if there maybe had been some kind of misconduct somewhere and they came up empty. This was after I was ambushed by Fox News.

It actually started with a right-wing radio host in Milwaukee named Jessica McBride. And it was an orchestrated campaign to try to produce some mainstream media publicity against the 9/11 truth movement in general and the professors who were jumping on board with Scholars for 9/11 Truth in particular. So this was in June of 2006. It pretty much killed my academic career because I didn't want to roll over and go away like my administration suggested I should. So they they investigated me and they found that I had high ratings as a teacher and I'd never done anything wrong. So they said, "Well, we're really sorry. We can't fire this guy." And then the Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature voted almost unanimously to have the university fire me, but the university refused.

So this fight went on for about six months. I got six months worth of five minutes of fame. But by the end of it I was pretty much unemployable in any American university. I had been on a a year-to-year contract and nobody at that point was likely to give me any more of those contracts because they lost a lot of money. The university lost half a million dollars overnight when I appeared on Hannity, and that was just contributions canceled to the engineering school alone. So yeah, it was an interesting experience in academic unfreedom. And things aren't any better now with people being attacked for opposing the genocide of Gaza. America isn't the beacon of freedom that it used to be.

We're recording this on July 4th. Maybe some patriotic Americans will think about that and think about trying to restore freedom to their country. Let me get into this video because at that time this is probably the biggest star of Fox News, way bigger than Hannity. You were debating Hannity at that time. And now the former Fox News star Tucker Carlson is actually in line with what you were saying. Let's have a look.

Tucker Carlson with Ron Johnson: You tried the other day to raise science-based questions about 9/11, and you asked, "Building 7 was never hit by a plane. Why did it fall down in exactly the same way the first two towers did?" Witnesses, first responders, kept saying they heard explosions before the buildings came down. There was never a steel building that ever collapsed because of a fire.

Isn't that ironic? So, this is Tucker Carlson and he actually has a senator, Senator Ron Johnson, asking the same questions that you were asking at that time, and you were asking your students the same questions. You get let go. You lose your career over this thing that they're actually bringing up now.

Yeah. The irony is it's Fox News and the biggest star in the Wisconsin Republican party: former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Ron Johnson, who's the biggest Wisconsin Republican.

Back in 2006 Fox News and the Wisconsin Republicans were screaming to get me thrown out of the university for saying exactly the same things that Tucker Carlson and Ron Johnson are saying today. So, it's funny how what comes around goes around, I guess. But yeah, I have a tremendous respect for Senator Johnson's courage, and I appreciate that Tucker Carlson has finally started asking those hard questions.

Do you think the tide is shifting now? This was something taboo to talk about, but they're actually discussing it now. You have this senator. We're going to play another clip with another congressman. We'll play a clip also from the news. What goes through your mind when you're seeing this? You just mentioned this is a senator from Wisconsin.

That's right. Like I said, when I was fighting for academic freedom in 2006 it was a straightup party-line issue. The Democrats were almost unanimously in favor of allowing me to continue to teach and ask whatever questions I wanted to ask because that's academic freedom. And the Republicans were all saying I should be fired because I was unpatriotic and I was teaching crazy conspiracy theories. But somewhere things flipped. I suppose maybe Trump had something to do with that. So today it's Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, and Ron Johnson, the biggest Republican out of Wisconsin, who are are saying those things.

It's funny…before I left for Morocco two years ago, I started hanging around with some of these Wisconsin Republicans, and a whole bunch of them have come around on 9/11—some of them because I converted them back in 2006 and they've been slowly spreading the word ever since. So you can't completely bottle up the truth forever.

What do you see happening now? But before that, let's get into another congressman here.

Tucker Carlson with former Congressman Curt Weldon: It's our country. It happened to 3000 of our fellow Americans. We have an absolute right to know what happened. It’s not even a question. And it was almost 25 years ago. So, like, spare me your lectures about national security. But, can I ask you this? So, by the way, I never questioned anything about 9/11 and I actively attacked people who did. I'm ashamed of that, but that's a fact. I did it on tape more than once. My feeling was, well, you know, like that's divisive or whatever. I was a child and an idiot. But what began to make me wonder, and I have no idea what happened to Building 7, but it's very clear that there's a lot of lying around the collapse of building. And all the wackos would be like, "Building seven, building seven." I'd be like, "Shut up, wackos." And then if you just sort of look at it, you're like, "Well, that is very weird. Actually, no plane hit that building." And…does this happen a lot when buildings catch fire?

Weldon: Besides being a firefighter, I work for the INA, largest insurance company in North America. I was responsible for training their fire protection arson people for years. That doesn't happen. You never have a 47-story building just collapse. Even Donald Trump, I have a tape of him speaking on 9/11. And Donald Trump, in his own words, says there was a hole in the steel.

Trump: And this is steel that was, you remember the width of the windows in the World Trade Center. I think you know if you were ever up there, they were quite narrow. And in between was this heavy steel. I said, "How could a plane, even a plane, even a or or whatever it might have been, how could it possibly go through this steel?" I happen to think that they had not only a plane, but they had bombs that exploded almost simultaneously, because I just can't imagine anything being able to go through that wall. Most buildings are built with the steelers on the inside around the elevator shaft. This one was built from the outside, which is the strongest structure you can have, and it was almost just like a can of soup.

Tucker Carlson: That's controlled demolition. Even Donald Trump believes it was a controlled demolition. Do you know this, congressman? What are your thoughts?

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, that's Congressman Curt Weldon. He tried to open up an investigation of certain aspects of 9/11 back in 2005. I was strongly supporting him at the time. He wanted to investigate why… He was hearing from whistleblowers like Colonel Anthony Schaefer who had worked for a terrorist tracking division of the US military. Anthony Schaefer had uncovered many of the alleged hijackers, who of course didn't hijack anything. But anyway he had been all over those guys like a year before 9/11, and he had been ordered by his superiors to forget that he had ever heard of Muhammad Atta or these other people who would later be blamed for 9/11. He was actually told to put little yellow sticky pads over their faces on his huge wall chart that he had built featuring many of these people who would later be blamed for 9/11. He was told to forget about them, put yellow sticky pads over their faces “and we don't ever want you to look into this again.” So when Weldon heard this, he was a congressman. I think he was from Pennsylvania if I recall. He and Colonel Schaefer went to Weldon and others and tried to get an investigation going of “what did the US intelligence services know and when did they know it about these alleged hijackers?” And then of course some dubious characters ginned up various kinds of political pushback against Weldon and got him forced out of Congress.

Interestingly, Eddie, back in 2005 I had actually called Wisconsin Public Radio during an interview with Senator Barbara Boxer, the US Senator from California, and I said to her, "Senator Boxer, are you aware of Curt Weldon's investigation in the House of what what the services knew about these alleged hijackers before 9/11? We've learned that they trained at secure US military facilities. They were shadowed by Mossad agents. The 15 Saudis came over on special CIA snitch visas from Saudi Arabia. They were also not the least bit Islamic in their lifestyle, to say the least. They were hard drinkers, heavy drug users. The guy who was posing as Mohamed Atta, was a fluent speaker of Hebrew, which Mohamed Atta, the real Mohamed Atta, was not. He was dating a pink-haired stripper named Amanda Keller. So, anyways, I gave this spiel to Barbara Boxer on live radio and then said, "So, Senator Boxer, given all of that, do you support Congressman Weldon's call for a new investigation?" And Senator Boxer, bless her heart, answered me. She said, “Well, what you just said isn't what the 9/11 commission said, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. But my first priority is to end the war in Iraq.” That’s a direct quote from Senator Barbara Boxer. I was kind of floored by that. And of course, that created a viral story in the alternative media.

So…Curt Weldon made a good effort and I'm glad they didn't kill him. They just forced him out of Congress.

This is amazing. We're seeing all this unfolding now and there's not a American when you mention Islam that somehow in his subconscious…I was changing a flat tire and a real nice man came to help me out. After he we finished changing the tire he started talking. I offered him a smoothie and the conversation was going great. Then I asked him, "So what do you know about Islam?" He was like, "Uh, nothing except what I saw on 9/11." So there's this association in the back of people's heads with 9/11. Do you think we're at the beginning steps of that shifting, with people like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, these congressman, senators…

And let me also show you this clip. This is from a mainstream news outlet.

Interviewer: You're not just somebody with a a wacky idea, okay? You come with some science to you. What is the official reason for the collapse of the World Trade Center towers?

Richard Gage, AIA: Well, we're told that the planes hit the buildings and there was an explosion and a fire. And about an hour and a half later in the case of the North Tower, the building collapsed due to structural weakening due to the fires. The problem is that we don't have large gradual deformations associated with the collapses. And fires in highrises have never brought down a a steel frame high-rise building at all, ever. And what we have, unfortunately, is the evidence in the Twin Towers and the third skyscraper to collapse that day, which most people don't know anything about it—we have the evidence of the ten key features of controlled demolition. In the case of Building Seven, it collapses straight down into its own footprint at free fall speed in the first 100 feet. It's dropping, as you can see, symmetrically, smoothly, at freefall speed in the first hundred feet, 2 1/2 seconds.

This is uncanny. There's 40,000 tons of structural steel designed to resist this collapse.

Interviewer: It’s a 47 story building?

Richard Gage, AIA: Yeah. This is called Building 7, a football field away from the Twin Towers.

Interviewer: Okay. So what we're showing is what happened in fact is a controlled demolition, where the people who made this happen used demolition.

Richard Gage, AIA: Indeed and this is a direct comparison. And you can indeed see that almost free fall acceleration through tons of structural steel. That is uncanny. So we have architects and engineers demanding a new investigation as a result of this evidence, and the evidence in the World Trade Center, that is very explosive. Almost every architect and engineer we show this information to agrees with us that these are controlled demolitions. If we can get them to look at the information. Because obviously the implications of a controlled demolition are dark for our country. Because that means somebody besides al Qaeda was involved, because these have to be easily three of the most highly secure buildings…

The Deen Show: Your thoughts?

Kevin Barrett: Well, it's great to say see Richard Gage getting some mainstream media attention. It's good to see this kind of information on high quality, high production values mainstream media platforms. And it's good to see people gradually waking up and realizing how important this is. It's important for a lot of reasons. One of them, as you mentioned, is that those of us who are Muslims who lived through the aftermath of this found this highly annoying and disturbing, to say the least, to have our religion smeared as this supposedly terrorist religion. It was a brainwashing operation. They clearly had thought it through and were all ready to go with the propaganda that Islam was a religion of suicidal maniacs and killers.

So that's one aspect of it. But another one is that the United States has a tradition of Enlightenment values—freedom, pluralism and so on. And all of that really took a hit on 9/11.

And then finally there's the intellectual inquiry, the scientific inquiry, the academic freedom angle. Just not being able to talk about something this big—and, frankly, this obvious—has done terrible things to America. It's turned America into a country of sheep, of cowards. The brave people who have tried to do something about this and speak out have been vilified. So the best people have been vilified, ostracized and marginalized, while the worst people, the neoconservatives who did it, have cemented their rule.

We're at a very strange moment right now, as the neoconservatives, who were the party behind 9/11—they were the intellectual authors of it—are still very much in command. But their ideology has been challenged from both the left and from the right. I think that if 9/11 really comes out clearly in such a big way that the entire mainstream media starts showing what we just saw, and admits that the truth movement was right all along, and we get some kind of official investigation that genuinely seeks the truth about this…. I think it could potentially solve a whole lot of the worst problems that we're facing, including the genocide in Gaza and the world war that may be starting in the Middle East even as we speak. I'm convinced that the same kinds of reckless Machavelian lunatics who are perpetrating genocide in Gaza are essentially the same group that orchestrated 9/11. And allowing these kinds of people to run the United States of America and lie to us all at this scale is just unacceptable.

That's one of the reasons I left two years ago. I no longer find the US habitable after this. But if we fix this problem, I would be very happy to come back and celebrate.

If the University of Wisconsin called you, apologized, and said, "You know what? We need you back. We made a mistake." Would you accept?

Well, I'd have to talk to my wife. We're pretty settled here in Saidia, Morocco. But I’d certainly go back and spend some time there.

The Deen Show: Do you see that happening now? This is starting to…this movement is continuing, the truth is getting out there. More and more people are questioning, people like congressmen, senators. You mentioned that you also have spoken to different congressmen that also now are questioning. Where do you see this going?

I think that it might actually take a crisis to force the issue. Because for every step forward that we make, the side that wants to cover this up finds some way of distracting the public. For instance, as I said, the Democrats were not only in favor of academic freedom to discuss this kind of thing, but a whole lot of Democrats were at least vaguely aware that there was a huge problem with the official story of 9/11. And of course, many of them blamed it on the Republican President Bush and (Vice President) Cheney.

And then Obama was elected in 2008 and suddenly it flipped. And people, especially Democrats, were largely put back to sleep. And now, interestingly enough, with the Trump movement of populists or fake populists in some cases, a lot of Republicans are open to this information, people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.

But the number of Democrats, the percentage of Democrats, probably is not much higher now. It might even be lower than it was in, say, 2006, when the polls showed that 37% of the American people thought it likely or very likely that 9/11 was a false flag designed to launch wars.

So it’s a long haul. And to reach critical mass, it would take something even bigger than US senator Ron Johnson picking up where US representative Curt Weldon left off. It would take something more than Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson informing their audiences about it. We would really need some kind of big breakout. And what that would be, I don't know. Possibly the right insider leak of crucial information could help. And if somebody in charge of a major network really made the decision to go for it, then who knows.

So it's touch and go. I think we're probably closer to breaking this issue now than ever, and that's the way it's been unfortunately (for a long time).

The Deen Show: Don't we see this happening before in history, these events? You had discussed previously how if people start putting it together and seeing the patterns…for example the King David Hotel bombing. For people that don't know— most people don't know about these incidents— but, for instance, the King David Hotel bombing—wasn't this perpetuated by a certain group of people and then blamed—the intent was to blame Muslims for it.

And you have the Liberty ship? What is it called? The USS Liberty.

Another event that was false flag, and the intention was to blame Muslims, was the Levon affair. And you also had the weapons of mass destruction lie that took us into Iraq with a million lives being lost. It was also by this particular group of people, the Zionists, including Netanyahu, who got America involved.

You're an expert in this area. You know these events quite well.

And then you had some kind of dancing people who were dancing when this whole event happened. So it's not far-fetched that these events are perpetrated and then they try to go ahead and blame the Muslims. Can you touch upon these historical events and how they're actually not conspiracy theories, they’ve actually been uncovered as false flags?

Kevin Barrett: Candace Owens did a really good segment on the USS Liberty. It was an Israeli attack on a US spy ship working for the National Security Agency. Most people don't know much about that, but it was in the middle of the 1967 war. The US had sent that spy ship towards the war zone and the Israelis deliberately tried to sink it. They killed 34 people, wounded about 170 others, and nearly sent the ship to the bottom, which was their intent. They were hoping that after sinking the ship they would be able to blame it on Egypt and bring the US into Israel's war against Egypt.

You mentioned the Lavon Affair, when Israel bombed American targets in Egypt and tried to blame Egyptians.

And then we also have the issue of assassinations. The Israelis and before them the Zionists, before there was a state of Israel, were very strong on assassinating people. They they sent letter bombs to Truman and to Churchill. They tried to assassinate George HW Bush in Madrid during his presidency. That's an interesting one that people can look up. Most people never heard of that. And they most likely killed John F. Kennedy, and then presumably later his brother Robert. There's a lot of work on that. Michael Collins Piper wrote the seminal book Final Judgment, which has been followed up on by Laurent Guyenot, a French historian. Those who aren't aware of this can just stop and ask yourself: We know that Robert Kennedy was shot after he won the California primary in 1968. He would have almost certainly become president had he not been killed. And he was shot from point blank range from behind by a pistol held against his skull. It made powder burns on his skull. Sirhan Sirhan, the man who was blamed and convicted of that murder, was never closer than about fifteen feet, and he was in front of Senator Kennedy at the time. So somebody shot Robert Kennedy point blank from behind, and it was part of an orchestrated murder plot aimed at blaming Sirhan Sirhan. Now Sirhan Sirhan was a Palestinian, and he had been apparently hypnotized. He was found to be an extremely hypnotizable individual, and so he was hypnotized to randomly fire a few shots to distract everybody and allow the killer to kill Senator Kennedy. Now the question is: Who would choose a Palestinian patsy? What group would do that?

And when we ask that about what happened to Bobby Kennedy in 1968, then we go back to 1963 and we notice that after the murder of John F. Kennedy, the patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald, was killed before he could tell his story by a Jewish mafiosi, Jack Rubenstein, otherwise known as Jack Ruby. Ruby was a hitman and a bagman who worked for Mickey Cohen, who was the chief of Jewish organized crime on the West Coast, and also the man who had raised the most money for the state of Israel in all of American history. Mickey Cohen went up and down this West Coast shaking down everybody and raised I don't know how many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for Israel.

So that was the guy whose hitman murdered Lee Harvey Oswald. And so you just put those two things together, the Palestinian patsy in one case and then the Jewish mafiosi with connections to Israel killing Leah Harvey Oswald, and you're a step towards seeing who's behind these kinds of crimes.

In the case of of John F. Kennedy, he was likely killed primarily because he was dedicated to shutting down Israel's nuclear program. And President Johnson, who took over after Kennedy thanks to Kennedy's murder, was a huge supporter of Israel, who allowed Israel to steal American nuclear weapons. And then Johnson conspired with Israel in the 1967 war and was complicit in the attack on the USS Liberty. Johnson was quoted as saying, when he was first informed that the Liberty was in trouble, “'I want that bleep bleep ship to go to the bottom.” And he was actually in bed with an Israeli Mossad spy at the time that he was interrupted about the USS Liberty.

So essentially the same group of people has been so reckless in their terrorism and their assassinations since long before Israel was founded. There's a book called State of Terror by Thomas Suarez that goes into how—the subtitle is How Israel Created Modern Terrorism. And of course it actually happened before Israel was even founded. The Zionists slaughtered not just Palestinians but also the British. They slaughtered their fellow Jews who were not radical enough in pushing for a Jewish state there. And that kind of mayhem has only accelerated since the creation of the state of Israel with this long history of false flag terrorism.

I kind of downplayed this when I first started talking about 9/11. I just wanted to show that the official story couldn't possibly be true. I didn't want to point too hard at the perpetrators, especially Israel, because if you point the finger at Israel, you get all kinds of pushback and it's harder to get any kind of media attention, except for the wrong kind. But at some point, it became so obvious to me that it's just unavoidable. Every foreign policy expert will agree that the only real geostrategic beneficiary of 9/11 was the state of Israel, because it tricked the American military into coming in and basically removing the problematic regimes in the region that Israel didn't like— with one exception, Iran. And look what's happening now.

The state of Israel has been compared to the toxoplasmosis parasite that takes over the brains of cats and mice and makes them act in self-destructive ways. And that's kind of what the state of Israel has done to the United States. It's taken over the command and control system in the same way toxoplasmosis takes over the brain of its victims. And it's marching the US into disaster, one disaster after another: the loss of freedom, wasting eight trillion dollars on wars for Israel that are against US strategic interests, and now today risking World War III in this crazy war on Iran. I think that if we solve 9/11, if we expose 9/11 and show that it was primarily orchestrated by the state of Israel and its American assets, I think we'll be in a position to cleanly sever the connection with this psychotic settler colonial genocide project that's squatting in occupied Palestine.

The Deen Show: This history that many people do not know is very important because it dispels the myth—because when you bring up Israel, when you bring up Jews, the people out there, the politicians and whatnot, they'll try to make it look like, “oh Muslims hate Jews” and whatnot, but when you study history, when Muslims were the superpower in Spain, when you look at many academics—I've had on many Jewish rabbis who have come on and who have testified to this, they thank Muslims who actually took them in from Christian persecution. And David Warrenstein writes in the Jewish Chronicles that Islam saved Jewry. So how can you be taking Jews in and saving them if your religion calls you to hate them? How do you like to answer this?

Kevin Barrett: It's a very interesting issue, and very complicated. The short version is that Muslims got along better with Jews throughout most of history than Christians did. That's unquestionable. And why that is—it's a long debate, but probably the biggest single factor is that in Islam we have injunctions to protect minority religious communities and to act with impartial justice. Muslim rulers haven't been perfect, obviously, but the general thrust of Islamic dogma and teaching is that we are supposed to respect and protect minority religions starting with Christianity and Judaism. So for that reason, Muslim rulers tended to allow Christian and Jewish minority communities to run their own affairs, and they often thrived under Muslim rule, notably in Islamic Spain, for quite some time, many centuries in fact. The Christian and Jewish communities there were doing very well.

So it obviously isn't that Islam has some problem with Jews—or Christians for that matter. The real issue is that a certain extremist version of Jewish messianic millenarianism has mutated into Zionism. A lot of people, including many Jews, the Naturei Karta Jews and others, would argue that Zionism is actually satanic. It's not properly Jewish, because the traditional Jewish belief was that returning to the Holy Land would only happen when God made it happen, and that Jews themselves should not even lift a little finger to make it happen. But bit by bit a radical extremist fringe within Judaism pushed that away and started preaching that Jews should go back to the Holy Land and found their own state by hook or by crook, even by very unethical means. And so here we are today with much of the Jewish community actually convinced that this is a good idea to have Jews invade the Holy Land and create a Jewish state there even at the expense of the Palestinians who've been living there forever.

So it's a very tragic situation. And because the Zionists have captured much of the Jewish community, that's led to friction between Jews and Muslims, because Muslims are taught to respect justice, and what's happening in Palestine is such a grave injustice. It's so extreme that genocide is being perpetrated in the Holy Land! That's just not acceptable to Muslims. And so that's led to tension between Muslims and Jews. And it doesn't need to be there. And once Zionism is finished, I don't think we'll see anything like that tension again.

The Deen Show: Are you are you familiar with the Scofield Bible and John Nelson Derby and the Christian Zionism that stems from them, and how Christians now believe this is a part of their faith, to support this modern-day holocaust that's happening against innocent men, women, children. Babies are being just decimated there. And now Christians who are supposed to—they promote love, Jesus the prince of peace, but they're supporting this because they feel it's a part of their creed. (But) this is false. This was never part of the Christian teachings. This dispensationalism, can you go into that a little bit? Are you familiar with the con artist who got funding from Zionists, and they ended up pushing over a million copies for free into the universities and churches? And slowly this is being uncovered as a scam?

This is not part of Christian teachings! And then you often hear this verse constantly. You just had Tucker Carlson with Senator Ted Cruz. Did you see that interview? And then Cruz is misquoting the Bible, and he's saying whoever blesses Israel is blessed in Genesis. Whoever curses is cursed. And then in the footnotes in the Scofield Bible, this is where they get this idea that you have to support this state, but in actuality it is talking about Abraham. It's not connected to the modern state. Can you go into this a little bit?

Kevin Barrett: It was in the 19th century…Cyrus P. Scofield was a pretty dubious character, not even all that literate, a bit of a snake oil salesman, and somehow he ended up with his name on this very popular Bible, which as you said has been printed all over the world. I think it was Oxford that that took it somehow.

The Deen Show: Yeah. He obviously had help. Scoffield did not act alone.

Yeah, there was a orchestrated effort to get Christians on board with Zionism. There's been a lot of money and power and propaganda behind this. Obviously some of the world's wealthiest most powerful people have been hardcore Zionist ideologues… But in terms of Christian ideology, it's really quite astounding that Christians who are taught that Jesus peace upon him was was the prince of peace who turned the other cheek and so on, although he was pretty hard on those money changers in the temple…But the Bible's or the New Testament's account of the career of Jesus is obviously completely contradictory to supporting genocide and these horrors that we're seeing in Palestine. So there's been a major propaganda operation to try to convince Christians to support this genocidal Zionist project. And I think part of the reason that it's worked is that…the Bible is divided into the Old Testament which is the Torah and the New Testament which is the Injil or the Gospels. And the Old Testament or the Torah reads a lot like a sort of tribal myth, a myth of tribal conquests and a tribe’s conflicts with its neighbors. And it records a history of the Jewish people in which it seems that throughout much of that early history, their version of God was not the universal God that we know today, but rather a tribal god who is viewed by his followers as just one among many gods, but he's the god of of their tribe. And he tells them to go out and smash the idols, meaning the gods of the other tribes, and steal their loot and give it to Yahweh, or give it to the high priests of Yahweh.

So, there's a lot of the Old Testament that is really pretty problematic from the standpoint of people who whose holy books are either the Quran or the New Testament. And I think that by steering Christians towards a really a unsophisticated and morally indefensible reading of the Old Testament, the Zionists have succeeded in brainwashing them and turning them into something very very different from real Christians. Christianity is a religion of love and that's great. I think it was Schuon who said that Christianity is a religion of love and Islam is a religion of knowledge. But of course they both have both. Islam has plenty of love and and Christianity has plenty of knowledge. But the reality of Christianity and of universal monotheism has been distorted by this bad interpretation of these problematic elements of the Old Testament. So that's where I think the problem lies. Christians were vulnerable to this because they accept the Old Testament as inerrant gospel in which every single word comes straight from God. And we Muslims of course know that the earlier revelations (including the extant Torah) were to some extent distorted by the transmitters. And so we don't have to accept every bizarre or immoral thing that we might come across in the Old Testament, because we have a well-preserved book, the Quran. So I think there are Christians who haven't figured out how to deal with the Old Testament properly. And this would be more Protestants actually than Catholics or Orthodox Christians. Protestants have been (especially) vulnerable to this brainwashing by the Zionists.

Just a couple more questions. We were dispelling this myth of Islam and Muslims having anything to do with this evil event (9/11). And now with more and more people, the senators being on the news, the congressman, the greatest host of Fox News actually talking about this, raising questions, more and more people are starting to not believe the official narrative. Do you think people are going to finally wake up, if this continues to to come out, and realize that Islam truly has nothing to do with such evil actions, that Islam is being used as a scapegoat, and that those people will start to shift to more of an affinity now away from all the negativity? Do you think this can shift them into raising questions about the event and the official narrative being programmed for so long to think negatively about Islam that they can start also looking into Islam to see really truly what the teachings of Islam are and hopefully leading them to see the beauty of this way of life that's actually from the creator, submission to the will of God not the creation? What do you think?

Yeah, inshallah that can happen. We've seen some of it already. Interestingly enough, even during the periods of the strongest demonization of Islam, some folks who didn't know anything at all about it looked into it and found the beauty of it and came to Islam. And that process has been ongoing. But it's been kind of swimming against the current. Today, if we actually do get a complete reconsideration of the war on terror and a reconsideration of Zionism—they're tied in together—I think that shift very likely could open up even more minds, in much greater numbers, than we've seen in the past.

WHEN GOD'S SUCCOUR comes and victory

and thou seest people enter God's religion in hosts

extol thy Sustainer's limitless glory and praise Him and seek His forgiveness: for behold He is ever an acceptor of repentance. (Surah 110)

I think the West uh really needs a lot of the values that Islam carries (such as) an insistence on justice. That's so important. It's just a lot more clear in Islamic teaching that we're supposed to aim at full impartial justice and that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala (demands it). That teaching is really important in a world where injustice is so far out of control. And there are all sorts of other areas too where traditional values and family values have fallen by the wayside, and Islam has not succumbed to that as much as some of the other traditions have. I think Western people could benefit from that.

And then finally there's the mysticism. That's what first attracted me to Islam: the way that we can actually experience a taste of getting closer to the Divine. And that's ultimately the real test of religion in the modern age. We've got so much information around us. We can hear “this is what the Buddhists think. This is what the Muslims, the Jews, the Christians, the atheists, the materialists, the existentialists, all these different schools of thought…” We can see them all talking and arguing. It's all right there. With a click of your phone you can hear it. And in that situation we can hear the dogmas and the ideas, the disembodied ideas of everybody. Well that's all great. The idea of justice, as I said, is great. But what we really need is to be able to get a little taste of the reality of it, to know it like people who've actually had an experience where they have been overwhelmed by feeling a kind of a closeness to God and actually a change of consciousness. Those people are not going to ever change after that. They've know that it's real. And I think that Islam has an incredibly rich heritage of this sort of thing. And that if you're going to taste the reality of the absolute transcendent starting out with the Islamic teaching is more likely to get you there on the straight path than if you start out with ideology around the Jewish tribe, or around the person of Jesus and dogmas about the trinity and crucifixion and this and that, ideas about how you have to believe, that it's all just about belief, and if you believe this or that you'll be saved. All of these things that have crept into other religions can be distracting. I think Islam really offers a a very straight clean version of the essential truth of monotheism, and it's not only good for the abstract ideas, but also for tasting the reality. We get a little bit of a taste of that reality each time we pray, and we can cultivate it to whatever extent we're capable of. So yeah, I think the West could use a hard look at the positive side of Islam.

I think even the hardliners those who can love and support the (Jewish) people who say the nastiest, vilest things about Jesus, that he's in the hellfire burning in feces. His mother laid down with a Roman soldier. And on the other side, you have us (Muslims) who love and revere Jesus as the Bible calls him, a prophet, the Messiah. That there's a whole chapter that is in the verbatim word of God Almighty, the Quran, named after his blessed mother. Most of them don't know these facts. I find it ironic that I'll try to reach out and talk to some Christians, come together, hardliners who'll be on X, and they'll be just spewing all this hate. I say, "Hey, have you ever broke bread with a Muslim? Let's let's go ahead and talk. You can go ahead and form a relationship with someone who's cursing your God and savior. But here, if you say one negative thing we believe about Jesus, if you deny Jesus, that you can end up in hellfire." Is that correct?

Yeah. And I think that's especially important today. We we have this sense of (being in) the end times, whether it's because of nuclear war being just one button push away, or artificial intelligence could get out of control and create the singularity and that would be the end for us, and so on. Technology has made our situation both more comfortable and more precarious. And there is this sense that we're sort of at the end. So I think that we need to look at what these religions say about the end of things. And essentially, the last word for both Islam and Christianity is that Jesus is the Messiah. And when he comes back, whatever that means—maybe it means his spiritual values return to the world, that things will be radically better—and on the other side, the Jewish teaching has traditionally been very hostile to Jesus as you said. So if we are in this end time stage of the Christ versus the Antichrist, let's face it, the Muslims and the Christians are both on the side of Jesus alaihi as-salam. And maybe some some Jews are, but the bulk of the Jewish tradition is that the Jews are basically the group that rejected Jesus. That's the definition. The Jews who accepted Jesus now call themselves Christians (or Muslims). So if we're in the end times and the figure of Jesus, the one and only true Messiah, is is crucial to everybody's notion of the end times: Hey Christians, who do you want to be with? The people who who love Jesus and are praying for his return, or the people who are boiling him in excrement? I would think that would be a no-brainer.

Thank you, Dr. Barrett. Thank you very much for sharing some time with us, going over these reactions. God bless you. It was good having you on the program again.

Thanks, Eddie. It's a great conversation. Appreciate it. Keep up the great work.

The Alhambra in Granada, Spain—the last Muslim stronghold in al-Andalus, which fell to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492—symbolizes both the lost glories of Islamic Spain, and the ethnic cleansing that gave birth to modern ethno-nationalist Europe. Within a few decades of the fall of Granada, Spanish Muslims and Jews were force-converted to Christianity. A little over a century later, their nominally Christian descendants, the Moriscos, were expelled from the Iberian peninsula, with 300,000 made refugees while tens of thousands perished.

Today’s convivencia interview features Leon, who was affected by a more recent ethnic cleansing: The persecutions, expulsions, forced conversions, and killings of the Assyrian Christians of Bartella, Iraq by Daesh (ISIS) circa 2014-2016. (It is worth noting that Daesh/ISIS is a fringe movement with virtually no support in the Islamic world, as shown by Pew Research surveys among other polls. ISIS leaders, including some of Syria’s new rulers, are widely viewed as mercenaries of the Zionists and imperialists.)

Interview with Leon and Azalea

We're here with Leon and Azalea at the Alhambra in Granada talking about convivencia. And the question is, do you think that convivencia is possible in today's world?

Leon: I do think it's possible. I do think people need to be careful these days because…the issue with social media is it sort of promotes like the more extreme beliefs on any end of the spectrum. In reality, what we need to do is get to know people in real life and talk to people in real life. And I think when you do that, you get to find out everyone's the same. We all have similar values. We all care about family, friends. Food brings people together. We're all humans at the end of the day. It's important to realize that that stuff is popular online, but it doesn't reflect reality. And I think it's important for people to remember that.

And how about in Europe and North America in particular? Trump is famous for stirring up tension, and there are far-right movements in Europe. Will Europe and North America recover and rediscover living together?

Leon: We're from Canada, and one of the things I'm kind of grateful to be in Canada right now…it's a shame that Trump's got back in office, but one thing that it has done is it's really unified the country. And you see people really feel more inclined to stand together. And I think there's a lot of people in Europe who are seeing similar things.

In Canada, it's a lot more multicultural. You'll see people of all different backgrounds and faiths hanging out and getting food together, visiting the mall and all these sorts of things. They promote each other's cultures and holidays.

Azalea: Very much so, yeah. Everyone knows you can greet each other in each other's languages. That's a big one. Some of the street names are in different scripts. Some will be in Punjabi, some will be in Mandarin. Some are in indigenous languages.

And your backgrounds are interesting. Remind us…

Leon: Yeah, so I'm from Iraq. I'm from a northern part of Iraq called Bartella. We're a small Christian community there.

Azalea: I was born in Canada, but my family is from Punjab in India.

Excellent. Okay, and then last question. Is convivencia going to be possible someday in Palestine?

I think that's quite a challenge because again there are a lot of outside groups that sort of have a vested interest in, let's say, seeing conflict in that area. But you talk to people there—I have some friends who are from Palestine and I have some friends who are Israeli—and what I hear, a lot of people there, they get along. They don't want to have conflict. And I think when we start allowing those people's voices to be heard, I think that's when we start making steps in the right direction.

100% and absolutely. I think we are stronger together and we can learn from each other. And that always makes for a better life and a better society and better communities.

Excellent. And how about here in Europe? There's been some strife recently and growing right-wing movements calling for ethnic cleansing of Europe and things like that. Is Europe heading in the wrong direction there or is it going to catch itself in time?

I think all societies can take missteps. And clearly I wouldn't be with such groups and such ideas. Europe's been there before and we know these things don't end well. But hopefully the majority of people and the rule of law and democracy which we believe in can override these little bumps in history.

Okay. And then how about Palestine? Are we going to get any convivencia in Palestine?

I think it's absolutely possible. I think this has been going on for too long. And Muslims, Christians, Jews can come together in Palestine, and it can be a locus for growth for the whole region. And as somebody who’s a Muslim and knows that part of the world, absolutely. There's a journey everywhere to solve these problems and they are absolutely solvable, I would say.

Inshallah. Well, thank you for that very cheerful, positive, upbeat view.

Well, that's what I believe. It's easy to talk about stuff that you believe in.

The notion of convivencia, like so many other ideas, can be understood relativistically by way of its opposite. (Hot means the opposite of cold, big the opposite of small, etc.) When Américo Castro coined the term convivencia to describe the relative tolerance of Ummayid-era Islamic Spain, a.k.a. Al-Andalus, he was contrasting that relative tolerance with the gross intolerance of the Christian regimes that committed genocide against Spanish Muslims and Jews by murdering, force-converting, and/or expelling them. Specifically, Jews were ordered to either convert or leave Spain in 1492, while Muslims, who had initially been allowed to continue practicing Islam in the wake of the 1492 conquest of Granada, were given the “convert, leave, or we’ll kill you” directive beginning shortly after 1500. After a century of extreme persecutions and witch-hunts of suspected crypto-Muslims, hundreds of thousands of people officially considered Christians, but with suspected Muslim ancestry, were expelled in the early 1610s, and many tens of thousands died trying to flee.

Today, genocides and ethnic cleansings are back in the news. Jews are murdering and expelling non-Jews from Palestine, the Holy Land of nearly five billion Christians and Muslims, and the brutal massacre of the people of Gaza is being called “the world’s first live-streamed genocide.” Meanwhile talk of expelling nonwhite people (a category sometimes confused with “Muslims”) from North America, Europe, and Australia is making headway among extremist political groups and movements, who are calling their proposed racist genocide “remigration.”

In the above interview, Denis mentions that Jews have been invited back to Spain and Portugal as post-Christian governments try to atone for the sins of their Christian ancestors. If you can show that any of your ancestors was part of a Sephardic Jewish community, and hence presumably descended from people expelled from Spain in 1492, you can be fast-tracked for Spanish or Portuguese citizenship.

But the vast majority of people descended from victims of the Reconquista Genocide—Muslims—have never been given a similar offer. Why not? As Denis suggests in the interview, the Spanish and Portuguese authorities seem to think that because Muslim armies conquered Spain in the 700s CE (100s H) the so-called reconquista or “reconquest” circa 1100 to 1500 was justified, which then somehow justifies the genocide of Muslims (but not Jews).

But that analysis is wrong. Nobody should blame societies of 500 to 1500 years ago for “conquests.” In that era, all states were essentially permanently at war with their neighbors. It would be absurd to blame Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād for conquering Spain, or Ferdinand and Isabella for conquering Granada. What matters is how they dealt with the “other”—the ordinary citizens of a different ethnicity or religion—in their domains. Throughout almost eight century history of Islamic Spain a.k.a. al-Andalus, Muslim rulers did NOT mass-expel Christians or Jews. While there a few relatively brief periods of persecution during times of war or social unrest, the overall policies of the Muslim rulers were so relatively benevolent that Spanish historians like Américo Castro use the positively-connoted term convivencia to describe them.

White nationalist extremists today, prisoners of their hateful ideology, grossly distort history by cherry-picking rare episodes of persecution under Muslim rule and presenting them as if they were the rule rather than the exception. They anachronistically present the dhimmi status of Christians and Jews under Muslim rule as if it were horrible and humiliating, when in fact (1) the special tax paid by dhimmis was so far from onerous that the Christians and especially Jews were generally, on average, richer than their Muslim neighbors, who had to pay a 2.5% wealth tax known as zakat; (2) the maintenance of a different identity by minority religious groups allowed them to rule their own affairs, make their own laws, and generally live with dignity—for example, alcohol was legal for them but not for Muslims; and (3) the supposedly harsh rules against proselytizing (generally enforced) and building new houses of worship (often not strictly enforced) were only harsh in comparison to today’s anything-goes liberalism, but for their time were wildly ultra-tolerant.

Memo to the Spanish government: Please invite Muslim descendants of the Reconquista Genocide back to al-Andalus!

Transcript of the Interview

We are at the Aljaferia Palace in beautiful Zaragoza, Spain and we're with Denis from Turkey. So Denis, what do you think about convivencia. Is it possible to have convivencia in today's world?

Yeah, I think that it's very possible. At this palace, the Arabic influence in Spain is still very visible, and I think that it's still possible to make a convivencia.

And how about in Palestine? They're not doing so well at this point, are they?

Yeah, exactly. What's going on in Palestine….These are very bad days for the people, because the people are suffering, Israel is not giving permission to humanitarian aid and they are locked down in Palestine. So it's a very sad to see these people in this world like that, suffering. Yeah, it's very, very bad.

So we still have a ways to go with convivencia.

Yeah, sure. There's a ways to go.

Three or four years ago, the Spanish government that made a new law about the Jewish people expelled in the 15th century from Spain. And they said “Please forgive us what we have done to you guys and now we are giving back citizenship for you. You can come back and live in Spain.”

But they didn't give it to Muslims, and they expelled Muslims too! Is that fair?

Yeah, okay. I believe they are thinking in this way. They were thinking the Muslims made an invasion in Spain. They are not thinking as like the Jews were living together as like a co-community. And so that's why they are still thinking (that way) because they're calling it Reconquista. Because they think that they conquered their land and they reconquered them. And they conquered another time. And for Muslims, I think they are not thinking the same.

I think they aren't either. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Denis. I appreciate your taking the time.

We are traveling the length of historic al-Andalus, from Barcelona to Zaragoza to today’s Andalusia (southern Spain) asking ordinary people about convivencia. What is convivencia? It’s a friendlier term for “coexistence” that was originally used to describe the strikingly positive relationship between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities in Islamic Spain a.k.a. Al-Andalus. Today's interviewee is Hamid from Ghana.

Do you think that convivencia is possible in today's world?

Yeah, I think so. But it just depends on the people. Depends on their background, the type of education they have, and what they were taught about Islam and all that. Because some guys, as soon as they hear the word Islam, all they think of is terrorists, bad people, wicked people, people that have been brainwashed, people that only think of killing and doing bad things. And in the first place, there's no religion that will send people to go and kill and do bad stuff.

The only problem is sometimes when you poke somebody, definitely the person will poke you back. To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So people act, then they don't see the cause of the reaction. All they see is “they are bad people.” But some of them are also good. Those who like to read, those who are educated, then they know it's possible. Because in the first place, you can't be a foreigner in someone's land and begin imposing things. You can't do that. As a foreigner, what you have to do is to adapt to what you have around you. You see, but more or less they think the Muslims are brainwashed, but I would say it's the opposite. They are the brainwashed. Because they have been told that the Muslims are bad people.

All this stuff started in Iraq. What happened in Iraq? They said they have weapons of mass destruction and there was nothing there. So what do you expect? To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When they react, now they are bad people. Look at what Trump just did.

Yeah, crazy.

Yeah, with a B2 bomb base and all that, definitely they will react back. But when they react back, they are the bad people, you see?

Right, right.

After doing the s**t, now he wants to do settlement, you see? He wants to do peace talk. How can you do peace talk after poking someone?

Yeah, he wants them to surrender.

Yeah, no, no, no, they won’t surrender. They will retaliate, then we'll talk about peace. Because you can be smart. No one is stupid nowadays. Everybody is wise. Just with your phone, you can find out everything. Gone are the days where they go to Africa, buy gold at a cheap price. Now even someone from the countryside will just take his phone, he can Google it and he'll see the price of everything. So social media has made it so open that it's not so easy to manipulate people nowadays.

But as for convivencia, it's possible because there are a lot of people, when you talk to them, you see that they are open-minded. But the old ones: Oh, my God. 90% of the old ones, they don't understand. They are rather brainwashed.

Yeah, in America, it's even worse. So how about Palestine? Is convivencia possible in Palestine?

Yeah, it's possible, like in the past it was possible. When these Jews were sacked from all over the world, where did they go? The only people who accepted them were the Palestinians. They co-existed for so long, until they started doing—it's like me coming to your house and saying, let me sleep on your couch. From sleeping on your couch, I am now the landlord of your house. We can never have peace by so doing.

If they steal the whole house, that's the worst.

Yeah. Just look at what Israel was doing to the Palestinian people. Even food, they don't allow food to get in. But now Iran is doing the same thing to them, they are giving them their own medicine. And look at what Trump just did.

Well, inshallah, it will work out. Inshallah, we'll see some justice eventually.

You know, I like America, but one thing that I don't like about the U.S. is when your principles change depending on whom you're dealing with. Then you are not fit to be a leader, because your principles should be your principles. But when your principles change depending on whom you're dealing with then absolutely you are not trustworthy.

What is convivencia? It’s a friendlier term for “coexistence” that was originally used to describe the strikingly positive relationship between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities in Islamic Spain a.k.a. Al-Andalus.

Below is an English translation of our first interview with a woman who works in La Baldufa bookstore in Montblanc, Catalonia.

Well, do you think convivencia is possible in today's world?

Here, yes. And among ordinary folks, the people, yes. The thing is, politicians are the ones who complicate things. Because for their own personal interests, they attack people who are totally not guilty, right?

That's true. And (specifically) is coexistence possible here (in Catalonia)…and in Palestine?

Here, yes. But I see it as difficult now (in Palestine). In the current situation, this is a war for their interests, political interests, religious interests, which makes it very difficult. If they don't get rid of Netanyahu, it will just keep getting worse every day.

I agree.

I'm against this war. I don't like it because the poor children, the people, are being killed. It's a genocide (happening) today.

That's true. Thank you very much. And this bookstore, La Baldufa, is the real deal.

It means the children’s toy “a spinning top” in Catalan.

Thank you so much. And, inshallah, we'll be back someday here in beautiful Mont Blanc.

This khutba was delivered three years ago on 9 Dhu’l-Hijra (July 8 2022).

So we're now in the season of the Hajj, and of Eid. All over the world, Muslims will be observing the great feast of the sacrifice, Eid al-Adha.

So in this khutbah, I'm going to talk a little bit about the significance of the Prophet's final khutbah. Prophet Muhammad (SAAS) delivered his last message in his final khutbah on the Valley of Mount Arafat not long before he passed away. And then in the second khutbah, I'll talk a little bit about the significance of Eid itself.

The Prophet's final sermon included his mention of Surah Al-Ma'idah, the third ayat, included the famous line,

اليوم أكملت لكم دينكم واتممت عليكم نعمتي و رضيت لكم الإسلام دينًا

which would translate as something like, “today I completed for you your religion and perfected for you the blessings and gave for you Islam your religion.”

So that (was the) day of perfecting Islam as the the nominal religion of the group of people who are following the final revelation from God, while also recognizing the validity of earlier revelations and the communities that follow those revelations, while still having a clear sense of the finality of the seal of revelations being this revelation of Islam, meaning that the Muslim community would be the foremost community in maintaining society so that the worship of God is the highest priority, and that the spiritual development of people is the highest priority of all social practices and rules. This is the inheritance that's what was left us by this final khutbah.

The final khutbah of Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wasallam included some statements that have echoed down through the centuries and that still guide Muslims. The pillars of Islam, what we now know as arkan al-Islam, are mentioned here.

The Shahada is mentioned in terms of worshiping God, because the translation in English would be: “oh, people, listen to me in earnest. Worship Allah, say your five daily prayers, and fast during the month of Ramadan, and give your wealth in zakah, and perform hajj if you can afford to.” So that's a passage from this final khutbah, and it lays out these five arkan al-Islam, these five pillars.

Another interesting passage reaffirms the Quranic banning of riba, or lending an interest, usury: “Allah has forbidden you to take usury, therefore all interest obligations shall henceforth be waived. “So just as the Quran tells us that God and his prophet have declared war on usury for all time, that absolute prohibition is again mentioned here in the final sermon on Mount Arafat.

Another key point raised in this final khutbah is that the prophet Muhammad is the final prophet, the last prophet, the seal of the prophets, and Islam is the seal of the divine revelations: “O people, no prophet or apostle will come after me and no new faith will be born. I leave behind me two things, the Qur'an and my example, the sunnah, and if you follow these, you will never go astray.”

That's a lot of key information about Islam in a very few words. So “no prophet will come after me. No new faith will be born.” So the final revelation here is this revelation of Islam. There were earlier prophets. We may assume that the Jews, the Christians, perhaps the Buddhists, at least some of the Hindus, the Taoists, Native Americans, Africans, and others have followed legitimate prophets— perhaps even the Greeks with some of their visionary thinkers. Who knows? But after this, there won't be any more. So there's no valid revelation creating a major religious community since then. And history seems to bear this out. All attempts to create whole new religions by people who have called themselves prophets have not worked out, have not created major world religions. The religion of Islam is the last of the great religions of the Axial Age, which began a thousand years before it and then ended with this great Islamic revelation. And scholars of comparative religion would pretty much agree to that, I think.

And then: “I leave behind me two things: the Quran and my example. If you follow these you'll never go astray.” Muslims have looked to this and taken this as kind of the guidelines for their sacred texts—the Qur’an being the direct word of God, and then the example, the sunnah, of prophet Muhammad, peace upon him. Trying to understand the word of God, we understand it through the example of the prophet.

There's one more I wanted to bring up, and that is equality under God. The prophet Muhammad SAAS said in his last khutbah, his farewell sermon, that “every Muslim is the brother of another Muslim. All mankind is from Adam and Eve. An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab any superiority over an Arab. Also, a white has no superiority over a black, and a black has no superiority over a white, except by piety and good works. So learn that every Muslim is a brother to every other Muslim, and that Muslims constitute one brotherhood.”

So that unity and equality under God is a very important principle of Islam. And it's one reason that we don't have formal degrees of priesthood. Priests and bishops and archbishops and popes and things like that—we don't have that in Islam. We all go straight to God, and ultimately all people, male, female, black, white, from whatever ethnicity, are equal in the eyes of God, except in one thing, which is their degree of piety and good works.

And so these things have been preserved. These points have been preserved from the prophet's farewell khutba, down through today, and are the cornerstones of the religion of Islam. How well are we following these? How well are we preserving them? How well has the Muslim community done at not only remembering these things, but at actually implementing them? That's another question that I'll discuss in the second khutbah.

The Hajj

So the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, emphasizes the equality and brotherhood of Muslims that I just spoke about that was put so strongly, so profoundly, in the Prophet's farewell address. And that brotherhood is really the whole point, in a sense, or at least one of the biggest symbolic elements of the Hajj pilgrimage. Everybody shaves their head. Everybody puts on the same Ihram white garb. Everybody's supposed to be equal.

However, at the Hajj today, this emphasis on equality is maybe not quite what it should be. There are luxury hotels now for rich Hajjis. And then the poor hajjis can actually be staying in, I don't know if I would call it squalor, but in pretty difficult circumstances. Many people packed to a room or camping outside even in some cases. There's obviously no material equality, not even close to it. In fact, the level of material inequality today during the hajj is greater than it's ever been before in history, in the same way that the level of inequality today everywhere in the Muslim world and the rest of the world is probably greater than it's ever been.

Now, some people will say, but wait a minute, in the old days there were kings and princes and sultans who lived in luxury and splendor while their people lived in hovels if they were lucky. And these high-living powerful people spent their lives in dissipation, while the ordinary people worked and slaved and suffered and died. So how is that any different today?

Well, at one level, it isn't. But at another level…today, the kinds of dissipations available and the kinds of powers available to the powerful are off the charts compared to what they were a thousand years ago, or even 500 years ago or even 200 years ago or even 100 years ago. We don't need to get into the details, but... Clearly this extremely wealthy and powerful people today have access to all sorts of frivolous dissipations and decadent pleasures. And they have power over other people, technologies of power over other people, that didn't exist in the past.

Whereas for the poor and powerless today, not only are they still suffering and living in hovels and not having enough to eat and dying early easily preventable diseases, but they're also subjected to the power of the powerful in ways that they weren't before. Today, the powerful can surveil them from satellites. The powerful can chip them or put tracking devices on them or on their vehicles or what have you. (Though if they have vehicles, I guess they're not the poorest of the poor.) And the powerful can blow them up with drone attacks and hire hit men to go after them no matter where they hide in any quarter of this earth.

So the poor and the powerless, if they try to rise up for justice and truth, they're facing a much more difficult situation in some ways than in the past, because of this massively bigger difference between the powerful and the powerless. And we see this at the Hajj with these luxury hotels for the rich hajjis and then the very modest, if that, situations for the poor. Today, the Saudis earn about $8 billion per year on Hajj so-called tourism. They call it the tourism industry for Hajj. And these luxury hotels are bringing in a lot of that money.

Well, this year (2022) at least they are putting on the Hajj. There'll be about a million people doing it this year. Last year, there were only 60,000. And the year before that, 2020, the first year of the pandemic, there were 1,000. So they're back to a million. Before that, before the COVID hit, a little under 2.5 million people per year were coming.

Some think it's a bit shameful that this is a money-making venture for the host country and for the entrepreneurs who are building the luxury hotels and often tearing down the great monuments to do that. And I would have to agree. Again, the statement that an Arab is the equivalent of a non-Arab, there's no difference between the black and the white—this insistence on human equality which is supposed to come to a peak in the Hajj is is kind of missing here. And if we look at the Gulf Arabs: These are the people who are hosting the Hajj now. In some of these countries the non-Arab people who come to work there are treated little better than slaves. Unless, of course, they're non-Muslims. If they're kuffar, if they're rich kufar, especially rich Western kuffar, especially rich Western American kuffar, then they're treated like idols, like gods, and these supposed Muslims bow down to them.

So there are some things that have gone astray here in terms of implementing the message of the Prophet Muhammad’s (SAAS) farewell address.

And finally, the the usury part. Reminding us in the farewell address that we're at war forever with usury—and yet this whole pilgrimage industry that's grown up around the Hajj that puts the rich pilgrims in splendor and luxury is of course all operating on riba money. Indeed, the oil money from the Gulf has propped up the riba currency system by which every currency unit that exists—dollar, what have you—is lent into existence out of nothing, created out of nothing, and lent into existence at interest.

So we have a ways to go in implementing all of these principles.

Finally, as the Prophet Muhammad ended his farewell sermon by saying, he left behind two things, the Qur'an and Sunnah. Well, the greatest Sunnah he left behind, some say, is that he left no real inheritance, no body of wealth, just his wife's huts. That's pretty much it. Maybe a couple of minor household items. That's it. He was not interested in amassing wealth.

Are the people who are running the Hajj today in Mecca following that Sunnah? Maybe some of them. But quite a few of them obviously are not. So when we think about the Hajj and the ideals this stands for of equality and devotion to God, equality in this community of Muslims, surrender to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, in a state of absolute equality with other Muslims, we should be thinking about how to better implement this message and keep Islam alive even in these, what may be the akhiru zaman last days.

Hello everyone and welcome to the 20th episode of Youssef Hindi’s Chronicles—and of course, welcome to democracy.

We'll come back to this idea of French democracy.

First of all, as always, I invite you to support this channel more than ever via Tipeee and PayPal—links are in the video description.

Also, subscribe to Patreon. I’ve created a Patreon page and many of you have already signed up. Keep subscribing. I’ll be releasing a first video on Patreon exclusively for subscribers, in which I’ll answer your questions in early June, God willing, after my hearing.

With the anti-terrorism police—we’ll get to that.

So, head to the video description, subscribe to Patreon, and support this channel so I can continue publishing my chronicles on YouTube weekly via Tipeee and PayPal.

Now, let’s get to the heart of the matter.

Today’s topic isn’t really about me—you’ll see that I’m using my case to expand on a broader issue—but it’s still a serious situation that reflects the current drift of the French political system and regime.

To give you the main details:

I’ve been summoned by the anti-terrorism police—specifically, a unit known as GLAT, the Anti-Terrorism Task Force.

This group doesn’t deal with terrorism per se, but is an auxiliary unit of the anti-terrorism division. They handle cases like fake bomb threats, monitoring of radicalized individuals who’ve just left prison, and incitement or glorification of terrorism:

(video clip)

In the current context of war in the Middle East, antisemitic threats and glorifications of terrorism are on the rise. Yes, in France, since the Arras attack on October 13th, fake bomb alerts have also been increasing—in museums, train stations, airports. More than 60 investigations have been opened by the GLAT units—these are police units little known to the general public but highly valuable, according to William Molinier.

There are 210 specialized investigators spread across France. The GLAT units handle so-called “peripheral” cases—those related to terrorism but not officially classified as such. Their activity has surged in recent weeks. Normally, each group handled one or two cases a month. Since the Arras attack, the pace has jumped to one a day, according to a police source.

They mostly deal with glorification of terrorism, false bomb alerts, and administrative monitoring of radicalized ex-prisoners. They focus on “weak signals”—low-level threats—says one investigator. And it’s precisely this level of threat that’s being closely monitored now, because a seemingly mild case can escalate very quickly.

Once local investigators detect a sensitive file, it is then escalated to the anti-terrorism division of the judicial police or to the DGSI, this time under the official label of terrorism.

So, I’ve been summoned on June 3, 2025—likely in a case of glorification of terrorism involving someone else.

I am not the one being accused, since I’m being summoned as a witness.

According to Article 105 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and I quote:

"Persons against whom there are serious and consistent indications of having participated in the acts under investigation by the examining magistrate may not be heard as witnesses."

This means there is no evidence against me, no serious indications—I am indeed being summoned as a witness.

What must be understood is that for ten years I’ve been publishing books, and for ten years my books, articles, and videos have been scrutinized by law firms and by community organizations linked to the CRIF, etc.

So I know that for a decade now, efforts have been made to catch me out over a statement, to incriminate me—to trigger a search, custody, or even pre-trial detention.

They’ve been trying for years.

Let me remind you: I am a writer. I write books. I’m not even a political activist. I belong to no political party or political association. I’ve written 12 books, over a hundred articles. My work has been translated into half a dozen languages across four continents. I give lectures in France and abroad.

In ten years, I’ve never been taken to court—not once—for a video, article, or book.

So what does this summons mean? In my case, it means they haven’t found a way to attack or implicate me.

Otherwise, I would’ve already been taken into custody or placed in pre-trial detention.

They’re summoning me to interrogate me, likely with trick questions to get me to incriminate myself—to fall into a trap and say something that can be used against me.

At the end of the hearing, I could, in rare cases but it does happen, be placed in custody.

So that’s what this is about.

Now, what’s driving all this?

As I’ve already told you, since October 2023 there’s been a series of cases, convictions, searches, pre-trial detentions, custodial interrogations—targeting politicians, MPs or future MPs, like Rima Hassan, trade unionist Anasse Kazib, and others—possibly Mathilde Panot as well.

And in many of these cases, complaints or reports were filed by a group of 50 lawyers I’ve already mentioned—one of them is Olivier Pardo, who represents Benjamin Netanyahu in France. He also represents Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev and Éric Zemmour—a lawyer for very respectable, honorable people with no blood on their hands…

Also involved is Sarah Saldmann, a pro-Israel lawyer who organizes tax-deductible donations for the Israeli army.

These are people who support the Netanyahu government.

I remind you that Benjamin Netanyahu is the subject of an international arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued by the International Criminal Court.

Several rulings have also been issued by the International Court of Justice—not to “convict,” as it doesn’t work that way—but to order Israel to cease actions deemed genocidal.

I’ve already spoken about all this.

There’s a wave of repression and intimidation stemming from these pro-Israel complaints and reports filed with the French judiciary and police.

And so, the whole system gets moving—you see arrests, police custody, and so on.

So I’m probably being summoned as a witness in a similar case—one that, without a doubt, originates from those same pro-Israel lawyers.

And since, to this day, there’s been no statement or writing from me that’s punishable—and nothing that could qualify as glorification of terrorism—this is really about my work: historical research and analysis.

My aim is to explain—not to justify, but to explain.

Once I’ve laid things out, everyone is free to draw their own conclusions.

But clearly, my explanations are upsetting—especially because almost all of my sources are primary. When I write about a subject, I go straight to the source.

If I’m writing about Israel, I quote Israelis. If I write about the Muslim Brotherhood, I quote them or ex-members.

Small aside regarding current events:

To my knowledge, no French pro-Israel public figure who has openly justified war crimes or crimes against humanity committed by the State of Israel—or called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—has been summoned by police or a judge.

It’s strange, this double standard.

We’re going to listen to some excerpts: there are public figures in France who call for the massacre and expulsion of Palestinians—who describe Palestinians as a “cancer.”

They say civilians in Gaza are as responsible as Hamas or Islamic Jihad fighters, and that they must pay dearly.

They support the Trump plan and say Gaza should be emptied—a blank slate. That Palestinians must go live elsewhere so an entire generation can mentally reset in a different environment—not next to Israelis or Jews, whom they supposedly seek to exterminate.

That time is over, they say. All hostages must be recovered, and then Gaza must be emptied.

These are people who support a state whose leaders, like Netanyahu, talk about a “people of light” and a “people of darkness.”

A state whose former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Palestinians are “human animals,” and that Israel would treat them as such—by cutting water, electricity, and food.

So we have people who support that government and work to ensure that those who criticize Israel find themselves imprisoned—or at least interrogated.

That’s where things stand in France today.

Now, let’s turn to the core issue.

Since we’re talking about terrorism and the glorification of terrorism, we need to examine definitions and legal categories.

Because we have to stop spreading nonsense on this subject.

So, I'm going to quote the Practical Dictionary of Humanitarian Law published by Médecins Sans Frontières.

I quote:

"This term has no precise definition in international law. It remains loaded with political and ideological connotations. A person may be considered a terrorist by some and a freedom fighter by others. The United Nations, as well as the European Union, have for years attempted to reach a definition acceptable to all. However, to this day, no definition has reached consensus."

Now, I’ll instead play excerpts from an interview with Johan Soufi, who is a lawyer specialized in international criminal justice and human rights. He has participated in various trials before international tribunals and United Nations bodies working on cases related to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and human rights violations. Since March 2023, he has been the legal and strategic advisor to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine. From 2020 to 2022, Johan Soufi was the head of the legal office of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA, in Gaza.

So now I’ll play a first interview—an excerpt from an interview he gave to France Culture on October 13, 2023, at the very beginning of the war in Gaza. He is asked a question about terrorism, and listen to how he responds.

(video clip)

Yes, it’s a legal term, but above all a political term, a media term. From the standpoint of criminal law and a legal perspective, it is above all a term of national law. For example, in France, terrorism is defined in Article 421.1 of the Penal Code as the act of carrying out a certain category of actions with the aim of creating a sense of terror, notably among the population.

At the international level, there are also numerous conventions that regulate terrorism, but there is no universally accepted definition by the international community, and therefore no universally accepted legal definition of terrorism.

So, Johan Soufi explains to us that there is no universally accepted definition by the international community, and therefore by legal texts, of terrorism. There, we’ve heard it.

Now, I have a remark. If the definition is national, how is it that people in France are imprisoned, held in police custody, placed under formal investigation, or in pre-trial detention for comments they made about acts committed in another country? That’s a question I pose to legal experts. I’d like to understand how that works.

Regarding the definition of terrorism by the UN Security Council, Johan Soufi responds as follows on France Culture. Let’s listen to him.

(video clip)

In terms of the definition, indeed it is commonly accepted and, moreover, it broadly mirrors the French definition, which is essentially to create fear among the civilian population. The two stumbling blocks, in fact, with this definition—what poses a problem politically—are, first of all, state terrorism. Can a state, when it creates terror among the civilian population, be considered a terrorist state?

The second dimension is resistance and national liberation movements. Can, for instance, to break free from the yoke of colonization, some form of terror among the population—for example with the ANC’s techniques in South Africa—be permitted under international law?

And so the states are not all aligned on this, and you understand why in this context the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the center of the debate because it touches on both of these questions.

So, he speaks about the UN Security Council’s definition of terrorism, which is quite similar to the French one: “Creating fear among society.” He says this raises a problem. First, there's the issue of state terrorism. Can we call a state terrorist if it practices state terrorism? Let me remind you that Robespierre, back in 1793, had already theorized—there are texts, notably cited by Xavier Moreau in his book Le Livre noir de la gauche française—texts about terror, about the political use of terror. I’ll close that parenthesis.

And then the other issue is the distinction between a resistance movement and a terrorist movement. He brings up the ANC, led by Nelson Mandela, who was once considered a terrorist and then went on to become president of a state, namely South Africa. Is that allowed under international law? That’s the question. Is armed struggle allowed under international law? Well, we’re going to answer that question. We’ll answer it by turning to UN resolutions on armed struggle.

So I’ll cite two resolutions for you. This is very structured—we’re not talking about speculation or interpretation.

The first UN resolution I’ll cite is 26/49 of November 30, 1970, on armed struggle, or rather on resistance. I’ll quote the first paragraph: this resolution states the legitimacy of the struggle carried out by peoples subjected to colonial and foreign domination and who have been recognized as having the right to self-determination, to recover this right by all means at their disposal.

End of quote.

So, the struggle is legitimized by the UN, and therefore by international law.

Then, a second resolution, more precise: UN Resolution 3070 of November 30, 1973:

“Also reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples to free themselves from colonial and foreign domination and foreign control by all means at their disposal, including armed struggle.”

Then still the same resolution, 3070 of November 30, 1973:

“condemns all governments that do not recognize the right of peoples to self-determination and independence, particularly the peoples of Africa still under colonial domination and the Palestinian people.”

Therefore, the Palestinian people have the right, according to UN resolutions, to fight with arms against the occupier. There, it's very clear. And so, saying this is in accordance with international law and cannot expose you to legal prosecution in France.

However, there's the matter of war crimes. That’s another issue. War crimes are recognized under international law. It’s when a militia, an armed group, or a regular army commits crimes—like deliberately targeting civilians, for example—and there, when an organization, whatever it may be—Palestinian or otherwise—kills civilians, deliberately targets civilians, that’s a war crime. When Israel targets civilians, that’s a war crime.

Then there’s the question of proportion, of course. The scale of the massacres committed by the Israeli army is enormous compared to what Palestinian organizations have done.

If we’re talking numbers—I recently listened to an interview with Henry Laurens, a well-known historian whom I’ve cited several times, who is a professor at the Collège de France, and who says that the Israelis count Jewish deaths since 1870—that is, since the first Zionist Jewish settlements, not just Jewish communities, because Jewish communities already existed—the Old Yishuv in Palestine—but he’s talking about starting from the first colonies in the 1870s.

Israeli authorities have counted 30,000 deaths on the Israeli side, or more precisely, the Zionist side, because Israel was created in 1948, well after this count begins.

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If you take the Israeli technical base, I don’t know why, they start counting Israeli casualties from 1860. I still don’t understand how they started from 1860. Personally, I would start from 1908. But that’s a historian’s detail.

In any case, they consider that their human losses since 1860, recorded, are 30,000 deaths on the Israeli side. Well—Jewish, Zionist, Israeli since 1860. That’s the most recent count he gave a few weeks ago; it was around 30,000.

Well, if we look at the Palestinian side... Before October 7, one might have thought the number of Palestinian victims—it’s a bit tricky to record because they are also caught up in inter-Arab conflicts that complicate things—we were looking at around 100,000.

So all of a sudden, we’ve jumped from 100,000 to at least 150,000.

On the Palestinian side, just from what happened in Gaza since October, we’re talking about more than 60,000 direct deaths, that is, directly killed.

And if we use estimates from The Lancet, which I’ve already referred to several times, so we count indirect deaths—that is, lack of access to water, those who died in the rubble, lack of access to medicine, to healthcare, etc.—we're talking about over 240,000 deaths, in fact, today.

So, you see the proportions.

So it’s clear under international law: terrorism and armed struggle are two different things. But as we’ve said, terrorism is not clearly defined.

Well, now we’re going to talk about what’s happening today.

France has had shifting positions regarding Israel and terrorism. Remember the famous declaration by General de Gaulle on November 27, 1967, where he spoke about Israel colonizing, attacking, etc., and provoking a Palestinian response, a Palestinian resistance, which Israel in turn labeled terrorism. And in October 1967, there was a communiqué from the French embassy in Tel Aviv, which described Palestinian organizations, etc., as resistance movements.

So you can see it evolves depending on the states, depending on the regimes, depending on the times.

That’s why it’s very difficult to define terrorism, since each party's position shifts with circumstances and historical periods.

But today, there’s been a reversal since the beginning of the massacre in Gaza, after October 7, among Western leaders, notably in France, on this question.

And here, I’m going to cite a very important communiqué, which has gone somewhat unnoticed, because you have to dig to find it. A communiqué from the French embassy—from the Quai d’Orsay—in London, a communiqué dated May 19, 2025, so just a few days ago.

Titled: “Israel, Palestinian Territory—Joint Declaration by the Leaders of France, the United Kingdom and Canada on the Situation in Gaza and the West Bank.”

Here are some excerpts I’m going to read to you. It’s very important, listen carefully because here we see a reversal.

“We strongly oppose the extension of Israeli military operations in Gaza. The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable. The announcement made yesterday by Israel to allow the entry of a minimal amount of food into the Gaza Strip is completely insufficient.

We demand that the Israeli government stop its military operations in Gaza and immediately allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. This must include a commitment with the United Nations to ensure the resumption of aid delivery in compliance with humanitarian law.

We call on Hamas to immediately release the last hostages it has cruelly held since October 7, 2023.”

The Israeli government’s refusal to provide essential humanitarian aid to the civilian population is unacceptable and risks violating international humanitarian law. We condemn the odious language recently used by members of the Israeli government and the threat of forced displacement of civilians faced with the desperate destruction of Gaza. Permanent forced displacement is a violation of international humanitarian law.

Israel suffered a horrific attack on October 7. We have always supported Israel’s right to defend Israelis against terrorism. But this escalation is completely disproportionate. We will not stand by while the Netanyahu government continues its scandalous actions.

If Israel does not end the new military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take other concrete measures in response. We oppose any attempt to expand settlements in the West Bank. Israel must end illegal settlements that compromise the viability of a Palestinian state as well as the security of Israelis and Palestinians. We will not hesitate to take further measures, including targeted sanctions.”

“We are determined to recognize a Palestinian state as a contribution to achieving a two-state solution and are ready to work with others toward this goal.”

Regarding the evolving stance of the United States toward Israel, especially the Israeli government, the Trump administration is distancing itself for reasons I won’t revisit here as I’ve explained them in previous videos.

We see that the global geopolitical power balance is accelerating historically. Already, the legal proceedings initiated in France against critics of Israel are being overtaken by events. The convictions, summonses, and trials expected in the coming months will appear scandalous, as they will be seen as attacks by proxies of the Netanyahu government in France, notably through his lawyer Olivier Pardo.

So here we have a government being put on the international community’s blacklist. Netanyahu has even attacked France, Great Britain, and Canada following these official positions I just described, which highlight the extreme fragility of the Israeli government.

This is in addition to the international arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity targeting Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister, Yoav Galant.

Today, France finds itself doing the dirty work for the Israelis, for the Netanyahu government—that is, attacking those whom Netanyahu and his proxies consider political enemies on French soil for having criticized the Netanyahu government, supported Palestinians, or made statements that might fall under accusations of glorifying terrorism, even though sometimes those statements comply with international law, as I just cited.

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For a long time, I was very reluctant to use this word—genocidal—because for reasons that would be too long to explain here, both legal and historical. But we have to face the truth: there are genocidal actors in the Israeli government. They proclaim it every day. Indeed, very violent statements like “we must eradicate,” “it’s not complicated,” “we want to kill everyone,” “we want to destroy everything”—these are genocidal statements. The army is committing acts that are, at a minimum, massive war crimes and crimes against humanity.

That’s all for today. I remind you that I am summoned by the anti-terrorist police, the GLAT (the anti-terrorist fighting group), as a witness. Nothing is being reproached to me, but they will certainly try to trap me and move me from witness to accused.

That’s where we stand today.

So I strongly encourage you to support this channel via Tipeee and PayPal in the video description and to subscribe to my Patreon, where I will post at least one video per month responding to questions from Patreon subscribers.

So, I say to you, God willing, see you next Wednesday, knowing that my hearing is on Tuesday, June 3. If all goes well, I will make my Wednesday video; otherwise, if you don’t hear from me on June 4, it means I am in police custody.

Thank you very much, see you soon, and have no fear—trust in God. See you soon!

More information at Sheikh Imran Hosein’s Youtube channel.

Dr. Hasan Zafar, a notable media figure in Pakistan and its diaspora, just interviewed Captain Dan Hanley of 9/11 Pilots Whistleblowers about the evidence that no Muslim hijackers, or indeed any hijackers, were involved in the remotely-flown attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Captain Hanley is a retired American commercial pilot and whistleblower, and a convert to Islam. He currently resides in Pakistan.

To read a transcript of the interview, click “transcript” above the video image.

Yvonne Ridley rocketed to fame when she was captured by the Taliban on the eve of the US invasion of Afghanistan, then apparently targeted for a false-flag operation by US forces, who wanted to kill her and blame it on the Taliban. After surviving the false-flag plot, Yvonne kept a promise to her captors to read the Qur’an – and she was amazed at what she found. She came to Islam in 2003, and has been a leading Muslim human rights activist and engagée journalist ever since.

In this interview she discusses the ongoing genocide of Gaza—and the Israeli drone strike on the aid ship Conscience off Malta, which could have killed her and Greta Thunberg, among so many others.

Transcript

Kevin Barrett: It's hard to keep up, it's hard to contextualize it and figure out what's going on in the larger sweep of history. Are we about to be taken over by AI or aliens or djinn? Is the U.S. empire collapsing and are we witnessing its death spasms? And if so, what happens next? It's all very mysterious, and certainly tragic in terms of this genocide in Palestine, the Holy Land. It’s holy to more than half of the world's population. Yet this tiny minority sect that hates Jesus has gone and taken it over. And they're committing genocide. They're focusing especially on killing women and children with relish. And watching this go on for a year and a half has been really grueling, hasn't it?

Yvonne Ridley: It's been horrific. And I would have been tempted to correct you maybe a couple of years ago by saying, oh, we can't lay this all on the door of the Israelis. But I actually think that we can. Because this is more than their government. More than half the people in Israel know fine well what is happening. They know that there's a genocide on their door and they are looking the other way. The very people who told us never forget over the Holocaust are now looking the other way because a Holocaust is unfolding on their doorstep. And I just... They do know what's going on. And I was listening to the former Israeli Prime Minister, Olmert, yesterday and he was saying that more than half of the Israelis are against what these thugs are doing. And he described Netanyahu and his military as thugs.

So that was quite interesting coming from Ehud Almut, a former Israeli Prime Minister. By saying that this is against more than half of Israel, it means that they're all aware of what is unfolding. They're all aware of what is happening on their doorstep. And, you know, this is a country that isn't even the size of a South African game park. And it is wreaking havoc across the world and committing atrocities that I...would never have imagined that I would witness in the 21st century.

When did doctors become a target? When did journalists become a target? Humanitarian aid workers, babies in incubators, even babies in test tubes, People go on about the amount of babies that have been killed. 5,000 with one missile, and that was on a fertility clinic. And these were all embryos, which, according to Trump's brigade, are all viable human beings. And it's astonishing. Nobody is safe.

Just last week, I returned from Malta, having intended to sail on a boat to deliver aid to Gaza. And it was targeted—thousands of miles away from Israel and Occupied Palestine. And that ship was hit with two missiles in the Mediterranean, in the heart of Europe. None of us are safe.

You were going to be on that ship. Tell us a little bit more about that. Where were you when that attack happened?

Well, I was packing my bag ready to board the ship along with 35 other international activists, including Greta Thunberg. And they would have killed her. They would have killed little Greta Thunberg, the dynamo behind the climate movement.

She was the most famous person on Earth for a while. And then she spoke out for Gaza and suddenly she became an unperson.

Yes, she has diminished in headlines, but her heart is as big as ever. And she discovered Palestine. And like everybody else who discovers Palestine, they just can't believe the story and think, “I've got to get involved and get justice for these people.”

Indeed. So the boat got hit. It's being repaired. And I take it, are you still part of that project?

I'm very much part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, and I've told them just today, I'm ready to sail. I believe that there's another boat that's been prepared, and I'm ready to go on it.

You know, this is a very simple, peaceful journey, a bit of activism that somebody my age can take part in. And it's delivering aid to Gaza. Nowhere near enough, but it's more symbolic than anything else. Apart from the food and the water that they so desperately need, there's medicines, something as basic as painkillers. How many of us reach for the medicine cabinet if we get a headache because we can't stand the pain? Imagine the pain that a child is going through having just had their limb amputated without anaesthetic. And it's... inhumane what these children are having to go through. And you know the surgeons and the doctors and the medical staff are broken. Because they gave an oath, they swore an oath to preserve life. And it must go against every doctor's ethics to perform an operation without anaesthetics. But in order to save a life, you know, this is what they have to do. And no medical professional should have to go through that.

In fact, I did write to the Israeli Doctors' Union or Medical Union and said, for God's sake! Surely you can intervene. But I didn't get a response from them, not even an acknowledgement that they had received my letter, although I did send it to the email address advertised. But I just thought maybe if I appeal to fellow professionals there'll be someone somewhere, for God's sake, whose heart is melting. But it doesn't seem to be that way.

In terms of fellow professionals, not just doctors, but also journalists don't seem to be as upset about the deliberate massacre of hundreds of journalists, as one might expect. In the past, journalists have at times gotten angry and made noise when even one of their number was targeted. I remember when Somoza was overthrown in Nicaragua after uh the execution of an American journalist. I remember watching that on television and seeing the American news anchors’ outrage. That was a huge factor in allowing Somoza to be overthrown. But today with vastly worse treatment of journalists coming from Israel, it seems the Western journalistic establishment is somewhere between totally complicit and largely complicit in this genocide. To what do you attribute that?

Well, one journalist who was murdered in his hospital bed just yesterday—He was in hospital because he'd already suffered a missile strike and was burned and he was being treated for his burns and they, not content with the fact that they'd already injured him, they pursued him into his hospital bed. And they used what is called a suicide drone, which is exactly the same sort of drone that was used to target our boat. And this suicide drone—it's called such because it means that it will be destroyed in the mission so it's only going to go one way—went into his hospital room and dispatched the missile on his bed.

Now, this is interesting because they can be that specific with their targeting. As they were on our boat. They wanted to get the generator, which for anybody listening, if you imagine that a missile was coming for your car radiator, it was that specific. And they knocked out the generator. And they used the same method to kill this journalist in the European hospital, I think it was, yesterday. Now, if they can be that specific in their targeting and they're not committing genocide, so they say, how is it that so far they've killed more than 60,000 people, probably nearly 100,000? [Or more. -Ed.]

And if they can be that strategic... We keep being told, “well, there's a command center. Hamas are hiding behind this hospital. Hamas was hiding inside this university.” If they can take out a ship's generator and if they can take out an individual journalist... then why are we getting so many deaths?

And basically, I believe this, Kevin, I think that the Israelis are that insane and that psychotic that they are using Gaza and surrounding areas as one big experimental military laboratory where they are testing out different missiles, different weapons, different bombs. And they're treating us all like mice in a laboratory. And they have no heart, they have no compassion, they have no red lines. This is a nuclear power and they are the most dangerous people on the planet today.

Now the people will say, oh, she's anti-Semitic. This has absolutely nothing to do with the great faith of Judaism and has everything to do with the evil political ideology of Zionism.

There's a discussion to be had there about to what extent Zionism is a heretical offshoot of Judaism that really is opposed to Judaism, or to what extent it actually in some ways does represent the mainstream tradition of Jewish eschatology—the prophetic millenarian expectations of a Jewish Messiah who's going to conquer the world. Zionism seems to be sort of a maniacal offshoot of that. So anyway, that's a long discussion. But I personally am convinced that there are some flaws or some problems in traditional Judaism that have quite a lot to do with what we're seeing in Gaza.

Well, I would dispute that, but it is worth a discussion. And nothing should be off limits at the moment. We had a famous TV celebrity, a sportsman, Gary Lineker, make an apology a couple of days ago for retweeting something that on reflection he felt he shouldn't have done. And it was some sort of cartoon that drew the analogy…It used a rodent or a rat. And this was said to be anti-Semitic. And I haven't seen the cartoon that he put out. So I don't know how offensive it was, but I do know it didn't kill any babies in the womb. It didn't kill any babies in incubators. It didn't starve any children to death. It didn't mow down any children. Nobody died as a result. And to be told, “well, it's hurt people's feelings.” I think, to hell with that. To hell with people's feelings. People are being butchered in front of our TV living rooms, in front of our iPads, in front of our telephones, our smartphones. We're seeing people being incinerated. So I'm not interested in somebody whose feelings are hurt.

Absolutely not. Yeah, I agree completely.

They die because of it. He didn't kill anybody because he retweeted something that may or may not have been offensive. I don't know. I haven't seen it.

Yeah, I think I have. I've seen it. And it's like it's got an Israeli flag background. And I think it's got a rat in the same blue and white colors. I forget the details. But in any case…I mean, one could argue that they should be apologizing to rats.

Because the rats are not running around committing these kinds of crimes. And, you know, I honestly think that this is an opportunity to sort of rethink a lot of things. I know over the past 25 years, since I started looking into 9/11 and pointing the fingers at people like Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, who are not Jewish, and then finding that the whole Jewish establishment was coming down on me and doing everything it could at every level, from the local level where the communist Jewish manager of a local bookstore went on a complete rampage against 9/11 truth, on up to Wikipedia, where they started calling me a Holocaust denier when I had never said anything or even knew anything about that issue. They just made it up out of whole cloth and sourced it to some obscure blogger.

After that experience, I started looking into this whole issue of this so-called Jewish question. There's been this tension between Jews and non-Jews throughout history. And after studying that for a while, I came to the conclusion that it's not all the fault of the non-Jews, which is the official story. Just like official stories of Zionism and 9/11 are not true, that official story isn't true either. And on reflection, how could I have ever been so stupid as to think that it would have always been the fault of the non-Jews? It's ridiculous.

And indeed, if we look at the Jewish storytelling tradition, going back through the Torah—and unlike Laurent Guyenot, the critic of the Torah that I translated, I think there's a lot of good material and divinely revealed material in the Torah. But I also think there's some material there that is indefensible. It can't possibly be genuinely revealed from God.

And after looking at these stories of one massacre after another, where the story is always the same: “They tried to kill us. We killed them first. Hey, let's celebrate. Let's eat.” That's the story of every Jewish holiday. And it's also the story of the Holocaust as well: “They tried to kill us. We won. Hey, let's eat. And let's get reparations. And let's guilt trip everybody into letting us rule the world, through taking over the world of finance and the world of media.” That's how it looks to me. And you're not supposed to say that.

Now I think you're conflating Zionism with Judaism. But…As I say, you know, not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews. In fact, there are far many more Zionist Christians out there than there are Jewish Zionists. So there's five million Trump supporters who are all Zionists, and Trump himself. He’s a strange combination of someone who is anti-Semitic, but he is forgiven for all of his anti-Semitism and all of his stereotypical tropes because he's a chief Zionist and he has probably delivered more to the Zionists than any other leader on the planet today.

Yeah, that's true that Trump and his supporters are quite an interesting case. Unfortunately, there are more than five million of them. I think maybe you meant 50 million or something. I would guess that the Christian Zionists would be in the tens of millions in the United States, unfortunately.

So, yeah, I'm not saying that the Jews have a monopoly on vice or non-Jews have a monopoly on virtue. I think it's actually pretty even. But I do think that Jewish tradition of being a minority that has had to interact with majorities in all of these different cultures, build trade networks, be very, very successful in working to get resources from all of these different societies where Jewish communities settled, has led to and was produced by a mentality of extreme ethnocentrism. They really hang together against outsiders. And that, I think, was less harmful to the world when Jews were minorities in the diaspora. But now that history has led to this situation where there's such Jewish domination of finance and media in the West, as well as them having this genocidal gangster state armed to the teeth of nuclear weapons, it's really reached a point where we can give some credence to the critics of Jewish eschatology like Bishop Williamson. I have had him on the show a couple of times. The headline of the last show I did with him was: “The Jews do have a vision, world domination.” And that sounds anti-Semitic, right? If you didn't know that traditional Jewish eschatology is indeed that the Messiah will be a military conqueror who subjugates all of the non-Jews and every Jew has 2,800 non-Jewish slaves, that is the eschatology.

In Islam and in Christianity, we say Jesus comes back and inaugurates a kind of a spiritualized paradise, and there's none of that tribal superiority. So again, I do think that there are these issues in the religion—which doesn't mean that everybody in the religion interprets everything in such a way as to be part of this problem. But there are aspects of the traditional religion that lend themselves to these problems. And I think we should be able to talk about that. And indeed, people do talk about it. The Jews talk about it. Reform Jews talk about this all the time. They don't like aspects of their Talmud. And a lot of them don't even like the Torah. And they have all kinds of problems with it. But they're allowed to talk about it.

‘I think everybody needs to talk about it now, especially with the genocide that's going on. And who knows, maybe you'll get pushback from the government. I understand in the UK now, you're not supposed to express any support for Hamas. In October 2023, I wrote a piece headlined “Why I support Hamas and you should too.” And I imagine that that's illegal in the UK, apparently.

It's becoming illegal in the UK. The UK used to be a beacon of human rights and a lightning rod for anybody who wanted to escape persecution. They would land up on these shores and claim asylum. Now, I think it's going to be the reverse. I really feel as though freedom of speech is going. It's in danger. The police state...is taking over. We used to joke about things being a police state, but when we've had about four journalists now who've had armed police raid their homes in the middle of the night, trash their belongings, terrify the occupants, and for nothing more than being people who have written in support of Palestine. And it's... It really is unbelievable, the state of affairs.

I'm pleased I live in Scotland. There's a different legal system here, but it's only a matter of time before that's going to change as well. You know, I came to Scotland and joined the independence movement because we desperately need to get away from Westminster's rule. It really is... It's become so bad now. Every newspaper falls under the MOD's D notices, which forbids you from writing about anything. Any journalist who finds anything interesting, for instance, about the RAF's secretive flights from Akrotiri in Cyprus over to Gaza and handing intelligence over to Israel, the newspapers aren't allowed to report that. They've all had a D notice telling them that they cannot report on what the RAF, the Royal Air Force, is getting up to overseas.

This has been done in our name and we ought to know. My grandfather was in the RAF. He'd be spinning in his grave now if he thought that British spy planes were being used to fly over Gaza, this hell on earth, and sending intelligence to Israel so that they can return and drop bombs on refugees living in tents and incinerating hospitals and universities and schools. This is not what the RAF was designed for. In fact, I've been told that the morale is very low among some seniors in the RAF because they feel ashamed of what the Israeli Air Force is doing in Gaza using information that they have handed over.

And part of the reason for this is the way that a certain wing of the establishment, including the Zionist establishment, prevented Jeremy Corbyn from becoming the next prime minister. He was totally on the path for that. How did that work? They just threw out these ridiculously empty accusations of anti-Semitism against him and somehow that magically stopped people from voting for him. What's wrong with the British people?

Well, the net effect of all of this is that people are now up to here with politics. They don't feel as though they can make that much of a difference. They're very disengaged from politics. They're going... They're making crazy decisions. They're going for populist votes. And it's... Our democracy is in the can. It's really…it's…in fact, I love politics. And every election day, I used to get really excited thinking “this is the one day in the year when the prince and the pauper, their votes count the same. It doesn't matter, rich man, poor man, whatever. Each vote carries an equal weight.”

And all of that is gone now. You know, it's just destroyed. And I switch on the television and I listen to Parliament. And they sit there on these green benches, these self-opinionated, self-important men, and they lie. And we know that they're lying. And anybody who stands up and has the guts to say you're lying is kicked out of the parliament for insulting an honorable member.

And they're all liars. We can see what is happening in Gaza by picking up our mobile phones. And yet the international community is refusing to call it a genocide because they know once they admit that this is a genocide, then they are duty bound under international law to act to stop it. And supplying Israel with weapons is not acting to stop a genocide. It's actually encouraging it. And Britain is complicit in it. And the honorable men who sit in the House of Commons, they should be sitting in The Hague, charged with war crimes.

This is popular opinion. And people can see. They know what a genocide looks like. And the language coming out of Israel from hoodlums like Smotrich, from the far right…And again, Ehud Olmert is saying that they are thugs and that they must be stopped.

Yeah, it's crazy. It does appear that there might be some movement happening now with Trump leaning away from Netanyahu towards the Saudis. Whether that's entirely good or not, but it at least raises the chance—I wrote a piece for American Free Press about a month ago, laying out the case that it's time to throw Netanyahu under the bus. The Jewish oligarchy in the West can see, half of them at least, can see that this is not good for the Jews, it's not good for Israel, it's not good for anybody. And so if the American power structure really came down hard and regime-changed Israel and forced the end of the genocide—of course they'd have to buy into the Arab peace plan, which is imperfect, but anyway it just seems like the logic of politics dictates doing that. At this point, Netanyahu—this is a personal thing for him, he needs to stay in power to stay out of prison. And so he's keeping this thing going forever. And it's not really in the larger interest of the powerful players to keep letting him do it.

Well, I mean, he couldn't give a toss about the hostages, the Israeli hostages. He couldn't care less about them. But what I can't understand is why won't the Western media talk about this Hannibal Directive? The Israeli media has no problem in writing about it. Thanks to Haretz, we now know that the Hannibal Directive was invoked on October 7, and Israel probably killed more of its own people than Hamas did, because of the Hannibal Directive. But we're still going along with this narrative that there was this heinous operation on October 7. And I mean, were you surprised when October 7 happened? I wasn't.

No, of course not. You could see it coming. Ever since the so-called Abraham Accords, which were more like the Shaytan Accords, as far as I was concerned, you could see that this was coming. And so it didn't surprise me at all. I was actually quite honestly pleased. I mean, what else can you? These underdogs have been beaten down so long. And I watched the coverage on Al Jazeera and elsewhere. I had just moved to Morocco that summer and following it in the media, the Arab media that actually showed the reality of it. It was clear that this was not some kind of horrible terrorist slaughter of civilians. This was actually a really well planned out military operation. Maybe there was a stand down that helped it on the other side, I don’t know, but they certainly achieved far more success than they expected. And they went after military targets primarily. Their number one mission was to bring back Israeli military hostages to trade for Palestinian hostages. And then secondarily, as a fallback measure, they were authorized to grab civilian hostages, too. And you can argue that that's unethical if you want to. But given what the Palestinians face, I'm not so sure about that.

In any case, there was no deliberate plan to harm civilians other than grab some hostages. But they were not there to massacre civilians. And they didn't even know there was going to be a music festival there. The whole mainstream narrative of this (is lies). If you want the truth about it, you need to read people like Scott Ritter, who called it the most successful military raid of the century. But the mainstream media has lied so systematically about it with just endless, obvious genocide propaganda, I really think that the ownership and directors of the mainstream media should end up facing a new Nuremberg trial at some point.

Well, unfortunately, the world we're living in today, Kevin, might is right. And they're the ones who dictate who will end up in The Hague. And the only thing that we can hope for is that more countries like South Africa stand up. and heroically resist the West. The West has to start looking and listening to the global South. And the global South are looking at us at the moment as though they've got something nasty on the bottom of their shoe. And I can't blame them for it.

You know, I... going out to Malta, I'm going through the airport and I'm carrying my British passport and it's not a source of pride for me at all. You know, this is something that's quite shameful. And the more that I look into the history of Britain, theAnd the more that I look into the history of Britainand America, the more I'm disgusted. But you if you look right into the history, there's nothing that Israel is doing today that the British Empire and the American Empire haven't done in the past. And that is the shame. We have used famine as a weapon of war. We have locked up people without trial, without charge. We have brutalized unarmed people and killed women and children. And the bombing or blitzing of Dresden during the Second World War by Britain was something quite shocking.

Right. That's a whole other issue, that the history that we're taught, the victor's history, turns out to be wrong in so many ways. That would be a big conversation to even go into. But getting back to :the global south has had it up to here with this Anglo-Zionist empire.” Do you think that we could be seeing some big changes there? Because we just saw Pakistan prevail over india in their big dogfight skirmish using Chinese weapons. And the best European and Israeli and American weapons fell flat, going up against the Chinese, not even their best stuff, being used by Pakistan. So the military level as well as the production level, where China is now so far ahead of any competition in terms of its manufacturing capacity, which is what wins wars. That's why World War II came out the way it did, because of the US manufacturing capacity primarily, and the Russian one too, of course.

So anyway, the global balance of power seems to be shifting along with the ideology, right? The Western worship of democracy and freedom, Western democratic liberalism is obviously on its deathbed. As you were remarking, there isn't much of it left anymore. Nobody really believes in it anymore. So what comes next?

And this leads us to the idea that Islam might play an interesting role in a number of ways. Including people like you and me who've come to Islam by recognizing it as a plausible final revelation that is very rigorously ethical and moral. And one wonders whether Westerners, seeing this at some point, as their civilization implodes and rots and disappears, there might be more people who will notice this and we might end up with a rebirth of Islam in the West. Is that some kind of crazy fantasy or is there any chance it could actually happen?

Well, that's a wonderful thought. But looking back at history and then looking to the future, Europe is once again swinging to the far right. We've had about 11 different elections and they've all swung to the far right. And I just think, my God, it wasn't even 100 years ago that the Third Reich seized power, initially democratically, in democratic elections. But I just despair. I don't think we're learning anything from history. You and I both came to Islam and you and I both know that in our hearts, Islam is perfect, but the people who practice it aren't. And we've seen that with the Gulf states, some really powerful, dirty games are being played. There's the United Arab Emirates that is working overtime to undermine the democracy in Tunisia, to kill the democracy that started in Libya. The crown princes who are treating the Middle East as their playground are competing against each other to see who can build the tallest building.

The sign of the of the end of the world, the End Times (akhir uz-zamaan).

The most successful football team. Who can have the World Cup? Who can sportswash their reputations? Who can bring Formula One racing to their cities? And these are three relatively young men who have far too much money, who are psychotic.

Look at the Trump meeting with Mohammed bin Salman. And gosh, you know, it was like “pass the sick bag.” Trump was just overflowing in compliments to this man who...in all but name wielded a chainsaw to dismember Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who he wanted to punish for writing nasty things about him.

And it's like the laws of the universe are just upside down. And I just wonder what the next generation how they're going to turn out. Because we've got a convicted felon in the White House. He has no respect for the law. We've got, well, a would-be convicted felon in Tel Aviv, who again is no respecter of the law, and he's now committing a genocide to keep himself out of the dock for facing fraud charges. Netanyahu is a common criminal. And the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is supposed to be a human rights lawyer, knows all of this. And yet he's willing to hold his nose and do business and support and be friends with all of these unsavory people that you wouldn't really have as house guests. And so what sort of message are we sending out to our children?

And then, Guantanamo is still in existence. There are still men sitting in Guantanamo who've been there for over 20 years without trial, without charge, and now can't go through court because the only evidence against them was extracted under torture.

Right. And that actually leads to the point that the real evidence for the 9/11 Commission's version of events, if you actually follow the footnotes, goes back to those secondhand reports of what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed supposedly said under torture. That's the evidence that they use to present their version of 9/11 to the world, which pretty much undermines it right there. You don't even have to worry about Building 7 and those things. Just read the 9/11 Commission report and you know that this whole thing is a farce.

Well, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed used the torture as a weapon against the Americans. Because they thought it was actually working and making him sing. And of course he was giving them all sorts of deaf information that had them going And of course he was giving them all sorts of deaf information that had them going around the world on a wild goose chase.

He confessed to everything and then some, everything but the JFK assassination and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, including crimes committed after he was already in custody. I guess that's what torture will get you. But yeah, boy, it's again, as we said at the beginning, the world is not getting any less crazy.

That's for sure. Well, Yvonne, a nonprofit that I work with is starting a new publication called the Al-Andalus Tribune. And I'll send you some information about it. If you become a contributor we can put some of your stuff there like this interview, for example.

I would love to. I would love to. And I'm just finishing an article at the moment about what really happened when the freedom flotilla boat, the Conscience, was bombed, and the weapons that were used. This is something that will be of interest to everybody because people imagine drone warfare and great big missiles. I don't think they were. To be able to get the pinpoint technology that they used, it was something else.

That sounds like a really interesting report, especially given that you were about to get on that boat and you may be going back on another boat. So that you definitely have skin in the game there. So that should be a really fascinating piece.

Well, I haven't taken it personally, so I'm able to—I'm trying anyway—to be impartial. But…We're living in a strange world and we have to stand up and be counted.

Okay, that's a great place to leave it. And I hope our audience will think about standing up and being counted too and going the extra step. Thank you so much, Dr. Yvonne Ridley. It's great talking with you again. God bless you. Keep up the great work.

And let's not leave it as long next time.

(We’ll reconnect) much, much faster than that.

Okay.

Talk again soon, inshallah.