0:00
- This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
0:23
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
0:25
Let's get into it.
0:26
All right, guys, we got a special guest on the podcast today.
0:29
His name is Raymond Ibrahim.
0:30
So he's an author, translator, columnist,
0:33
and vocal critic of Islam.
0:35
He's also an expert in Islamic history and doctrine.
0:37
He was actually born in the United States
0:39
to Coptic immigrants from Egypt,
0:41
and that kind of leads us into a discussion
0:42
of how he became fluent in both English and Arabic.
0:45
He also did his master's thesis under Victor Davis Hanson,
0:48
who's now at the Hoover Institution.
0:50
Most of you should be aware of him.
0:51
But he is the author of multiple books,
0:54
including Crucified Again,
0:55
Exposing Islam's New War on Christians,
0:58
a sword and scimitar, 14 centuries of war
1:00
between Islam and the West,
1:02
and his newest book, which is an absolute banger
1:04
called Defenders of the West,
1:06
the Christian heroes who stood against Islam.
1:09
And in this discussion today,
1:11
we talk about Islam a lot,
1:13
because it's really the center point
1:15
of why we wanted to even get into this discussion.
1:16
But when I found out that Defenders of the West
1:18
was even a book that was on the market,
1:20
I wanted to have Raymond on
1:21
because he's spent his entire life
1:23
basically taking the slings and arrows
1:25
of being critical of Islam.
1:26
But he's coming at it from a very informed point of view.
1:30
And so he understands the history,
1:31
understands the religious aspect,
1:32
and he understands how it spreads.
1:34
And so for him as a self-described Christian,
1:36
which we talk about in this particular episode,
1:39
we talk about how he gained interest in this,
1:41
but also overall why the West is so confused about Islam,
1:46
how we just look at the things like the English verses,
1:50
the English translations of the Quran,
1:52
or these peaceful verses, and we think,
1:53
oh, well, that's what Islam is.
1:55
And when Islamists extremists do something
1:57
and they're not really extremists, they're fundamentalists,
2:00
when they do these crazy things, we think,
2:02
oh, well, that just, that isn't a reflection of Islam,
2:04
even though that's exactly what it is,
2:06
because we talk about the Ninth Surah
2:08
being the least abrogated of all the texts left by Muhammad.
2:11
These are basically his final marching orders
2:13
and how that basically demands
2:15
that Muslims perform jihad and to kill the infidel, right?
2:19
So in this discussion today, we talk about all that,
2:22
but then we talk about the men that he writes about
2:25
in this book, we talk about Duke Godfrey, the Sid,
2:28
King Richard, we spend a lot of time talking about King Richard,
2:32
but then also Saint Ferdinand, Saint Louis, John Hunyadi,
2:35
Skanderbeg, and Vlad Dracula.
2:38
And in the discussion of these men,
2:39
we get into discussion about Christian pacifism
2:42
and how Christian pacifism basically doesn't have a corollary
2:45
within Islam or the Quran or the Hadith
2:48
or any of those types of things.
2:49
We talk about how the West has been lulled to sleep
2:52
into thinking that Islam is not really a big deal.
2:54
You know, yeah, there's these flare ups
2:55
where they, you know, kill a thousand Jews,
2:58
the most Jews killed at any time since the Holocaust,
3:00
but you know, that's not really indicative of Islam.
3:02
And so we don't understand our enemy
3:04
and then we also don't feel like
3:05
we have any reason to fight, right?
3:07
So it's like, oh, we shouldn't really fight back
3:08
against these ideologies.
3:10
We shouldn't really, we should just be pacifistic.
3:12
And if, you know, a Muslim wants to come into my house
3:14
and perform jihad on me and chop my head off
3:17
and then rape my wife and kids
3:19
and then burn them alive, like, ah, you know,
3:20
I really shouldn't fight against that.
3:22
And it really goes in this discussion
3:23
about how Christianity and modernity
3:25
is not really a muscular religion anymore.
3:28
We bought into this idea that Jesus is this hippie
3:31
that just wants what's best for you
3:32
and thinks you're cute and wonderful.
3:34
And, you know, just come as you are and it's no big deal.
3:36
And that's just completely divorced
3:38
from what we see from the men specifically
3:41
that he's highlighted in this book.
3:42
And then again, we get into a lot of detail
3:45
about King Richard, but I was very, very excited
3:46
to talk to him and it really exceeded my expectations.
3:49
I really enjoyed my time with him.
3:50
So I'm not going to keep him from you any longer.
3:52
So without further ado, let's get into it.
3:55
- Raymond, Ibrahim, welcome to Undaunted Life of Man's Podcast.
3:58
- Hi Kyle, good to be with you.
4:00
- I'm very excited to talk with you today
4:02
as we were talking just off air just a second ago.
4:05
The stuff that you've covered is not really something
4:07
that I've covered on the show.
4:08
So we're creeping up on 600 episodes.
4:10
And I've talked a lot about Islam
4:12
and I've talked about different things,
4:13
but certainly not to the level
4:14
that you have written or spoken about it before.
4:17
But we can't just race there.
4:18
We got to start small.
4:19
So let's start with your upbringing.
4:21
So you were born here and raised in the United States,
4:24
but you were born to Coptic immigrants from Egypt.
4:27
And so talk to me a little bit about that.
4:29
Like what was it like growing up for you?
4:31
Were you around Arabic speaking and English speaking,
4:35
both sides of the family as you were growing up?
4:39
Tell us a little bit about that.
4:41
- Sure, you're right.
4:42
That's the background for those who don't know,
4:44
the cops are not cops, they're the indigenous Christians
4:48
of Egypt, the original inhabitants for the Muslim conquest,
4:52
the Arab conquest in the 7th century.
4:54
And correct, my parents immigrated from there.
4:58
And I was born here.
5:00
I grew up, the Arabic speaker is actually back then.
5:04
And when I was young, it was very limited.
5:06
I didn't know many Arab speakers or Arabs in general,
5:10
not in the places I lived in.
5:12
Even though nowadays, there's a huge community,
5:15
both of cops and Arabs and Muslims in American,
5:19
certain areas.
5:20
So no, I didn't, the extent of the Arab speakers,
5:23
I knew really were my parents.
5:25
And my extended family was mostly not a,
5:29
it's back in Egypt or other countries around the world.
5:32
But what it did do for me, I think,
5:36
is made me really interested in that nexus
5:39
between Islam and Christianity.
5:42
So being raised as a Christian in America
5:45
and hearing stories and being familiar
5:48
with the background of what happened to Christians in Egypt
5:52
naturally made me interested in the general relationship
5:56
and conflict between those two civilizations.
6:00
- And so was that an interest that was kindled
6:02
like as a child because you were now fluent in Arabic
6:05
in English, you're literally a linguist.
6:08
So did it really start there from childhood
6:11
or I guess how did that develop
6:12
as you were going through your formal education?
6:15
- Yeah, I spoke Arabic, I spoke Arabic,
6:20
but I didn't learn to read or write it so much, much later
6:24
in college, I studied it formally.
6:27
And you'd be surprised at the differences
6:29
between the vernaculars of different Arab nations
6:33
and Arab speakers speak compared to the original writing.
6:36
So it was actually not an easy task as one might imagine,
6:40
but of course easier than for someone
6:41
who doesn't know anything at all.
6:43
- Right.
6:45
- And I actually, probably also because
6:47
of the fact that I was bilingual,
6:50
I developed an interest in languages in general.
6:53
And so I did study a fair bit of languages in college
6:56
and just for fun, I studied, I developed a fair bit
7:00
of hieroglyphic studying on my own, for example,
7:03
Coptic, Greek, a little bit of Latin.
7:05
Most of the languages I developed
7:06
and are really dead right now.
7:08
So when I see Greek, I mean classical,
7:11
coin aid Greek, ancient Greek.
7:13
But yeah, so all of that, I've always had,
7:15
the bottom lines, I really had an interest in history
7:18
and the further back it goes,
7:19
the more interesting it is for me.
7:21
And the more it had elements that pertain to me,
7:23
like I mentioned, the Christian Muslim thing, obviously,
7:26
not also sparked an interest.
7:28
- And so for you personally,
7:30
'cause we'll get into your newest book defenders
7:32
of the West here in a second,
7:33
but if I remember correctly while reading it,
7:35
you said, "I'm not a Catholic, nor am I a Protestant."
7:38
And you kind of left it there.
7:40
So in terms of your personal faith,
7:42
where do you land?
7:43
'Cause I didn't really see that in any of my research
7:45
in terms of what you personally believe.
7:46
'Cause you spent a lot of time
7:48
in between the worlds of Christianity and Islam,
7:50
but where have you landed?
7:52
- Well, I was baptized in the Coptic or Orthodox church.
7:56
So I would technically be Orthodox.
7:59
That would be my formal designation.
8:02
My personal beliefs are akin to Orthodoxy,
8:05
but I'm definitely not a good Orthodox in the sense
8:08
that Orthodoxy is very demanding religion.
8:12
If you wanna follow Rachel very closely.
8:16
And I think it's inevitable for anyone,
8:18
quite Catholic, Orthodox, or whatever was born
8:20
and raised in the West not to have some sort
8:23
of Protestant influence on them.
8:26
And so in my mind, the Bible is very important
8:29
and everything else is sort of secondary.
8:32
So I think it's a little amalgamation a bit,
8:35
but formally, I would say I'm an Orthodox.
8:38
- Well, it's interesting you say it that way,
8:39
'cause I know a little bit about Orthodox,
8:42
I know quite a bit more about Catholicism,
8:43
but you're right, a lot of them,
8:45
they don't look at the word of God
8:47
as kind of being the final say.
8:48
It's like, okay, the word of God,
8:50
plus the early church fathers, plus tradition,
8:52
plus whatever the church made up and like,
8:55
or decided they were gonna do at some point.
8:57
And there's not a whole lot of substantiation for it,
8:59
but at the end of the day, being a Christian,
9:02
regardless of your flavor of it,
9:03
comes back to the person of Jesus Christ
9:05
and whether or not you believe
9:06
that a Middle Eastern Jewish carpenter
9:08
died on a cross and was resurrected
9:09
three days later to pay for your sins.
9:11
Ultimately, that's what makes a Christian
9:13
everything else is seemingly window dressing.
9:15
- Which, by the way, just to add to that,
9:19
I'm glad you say that,
9:19
because in Defenders of the West, the book we're discussing,
9:23
I try to anticipate the question
9:25
because the subtitle of the book is the Christian heroes
9:28
who defended the West against Islam.
9:30
And so I say, so what makes them Christian?
9:32
And I get into it.
9:33
And really, that's the bottom line, what you just said.
9:35
And even though it manifested itself obviously differently
9:39
in those days, in the pre-modern era of Christianity,
9:43
while I would agree with what you said
9:45
about the belief in Christ,
9:46
manifested itself in a much more physical way.
9:49
And I don't just mean violently.
9:50
I mean, it was a material thing.
9:53
It was obvious, you know?
9:56
So that's what I used the criteria.
9:58
And if they said they were Christian
10:00
and they went to church and, you know,
10:01
they professed Jesus, et cetera,
10:03
then to me that was good enough
10:05
to make them call them good.
10:06
- Yeah, so here in a second,
10:08
when we go through who is titled
10:10
or who is detailed in this book,
10:11
there's one name in particular
10:13
that people would be shocked to know.
10:15
And I think it's gonna be very, very obvious
10:17
which one people would be shocked to know,
10:19
at least identified as a Christian.
10:21
But you, Raymond, you're a very vocal
10:24
and outspoken critic of Islam
10:26
and a public critic of Islam,
10:28
which kind of makes you persona non grata
10:30
for any Muslim circles and also could make you a target.
10:34
But in 2007, you release something called the Al-Qaeda reader.
10:38
And so this is what Victor Davis-Hanson
10:41
who wrote the foreword of your new book.
10:43
The way he put it was this, quote,
10:44
"revealed to Western readers the sharp dichotomy
10:47
between the terrorist filtered Islamism
10:49
that appeared in English
10:51
and their fiery jihadism they spoke
10:53
and composed in Aramaic
10:55
to inflame their own constituencies."
10:57
Obviously that's a crazy quote, but very, very accurate.
11:00
We've gotten this thing where
11:02
when you see anything quoted from the Quran
11:05
on major news media or blogs or something like that,
11:08
it's always the peaceful verses
11:10
and the verses who are basically the most abrogated verses,
11:15
I guess would be the easy way to say.
11:16
And I talk about the ninth Surah of the Quran a lot
11:19
saying that's the least abrogated Surah.
11:21
This is basically the last commands that we get from Muhammad
11:24
to Muslims and it's the bloodiest Surah arguably
11:28
of the entire Quran.
11:30
And there's another thing that you specifically put
11:32
in the book here and it's Surah nine verse five,
11:34
"Kill the idolaters."
11:35
Those are non-Muslims, wherever you find them,
11:38
capture them, besiege them and sit and wait for them
11:41
at every place of ambush.
11:43
And so what we've seen really in the last few months,
11:46
we've seen what Hamas did in Israel,
11:48
but then the thing I did on my show here,
11:51
I know I'm taking a while to set this up,
11:53
but I wanna tee you up properly.
11:54
I talked about it on my show,
11:56
not just about the atrocities that happened in Israel,
11:59
but why they were doing them
12:01
and what was in the Hamas charter
12:03
and what the words of Muhammad are,
12:06
I guess you could say the words of Gabriel or whatever,
12:09
but the words of Muhammad is put down in the Quran
12:12
or the Hadith or any of the other traditions
12:14
and kind of why they're doing these things.
12:16
And the reason why I said is because guys,
12:18
within a couple of weeks,
12:19
people are gonna say, why is Israel being so mean?
12:23
What about all the peaceful Muslims?
12:25
All my Muslim friends are peaceful.
12:27
You're gonna start hearing these things
12:28
that are attached to kind of like a sanitized version
12:31
of what Islam really is.
12:33
So again, I apologize for going into that
12:35
long of an explanation,
12:35
but talk to me a little bit about as a public critic of Islam,
12:39
how you deal with so many ignorance,
12:41
English-speaking Westerners
12:43
that don't really understand the depravity of the worldview.
12:46
- Okay, yeah.
12:48
So I've been in this business for quite a while.
12:51
The book you mentioned,
12:51
the al-Qaeda reader came out in 2007,
12:53
but really I was writing and publishing
12:56
about the topic of radical Islam
12:58
and historical aspects since about 2001.
13:02
So over 20 years.
13:04
And that book, the whole point of it was,
13:06
I was working with the Library of Congress at the time
13:09
and I worked with Arabic materials.
13:14
And by the way, you were quoting Victor and Davis Hanson
13:17
and you said, I don't know where you got the quote,
13:19
but you said the books were in Arabic.
13:21
It's in Arabic.
13:22
- Yeah, correct.
13:23
I misspoke, yes.
13:24
- Okay, okay, okay.
13:25
Because if that's written somewhere, that needs to be fixed.
13:28
But anyway.
13:29
- It definitely wasn't,
13:30
it only needs to be fixed in my brain
13:31
whenever I put it on my face.
13:32
- Oh, okay, okay, okay, okay.
13:33
Thank you for very slyly corrected.
13:35
- Flip it a tongue, flip it a tongue.
13:37
Okay, no problem.
13:38
So those Arabic texts that I discovered were written
13:41
by al-Qaeda and they weren't even classified yet.
13:45
They were in tubs and bins.
13:46
And when I read them, basically what they said,
13:50
the whole message is completely different
13:52
than the communiques that al-Qaeda was sending to the West
13:56
and were being disseminated and published
13:57
and translated by BBC, CNN, et cetera, et cetera.
14:01
And those latter ones that were being published
14:03
and disseminated were all about how al-Qaeda
14:05
is attacking the West and everyone else, the Israel,
14:09
because the West and Israel are the aggressors.
14:12
Okay, the narratives that we're familiar with, obviously.
14:15
And you know, you attacked us first
14:17
or we're attacking you.
14:18
The Arabic writings that I found
14:20
in which after I translated and were published
14:22
as the al-Qaeda reader said the exact opposite
14:24
and they were directed to fellow Muslims.
14:26
But basically what they said is what ISIS
14:29
or the Islamic State says,
14:30
which is that America and Israel are enemies first and foremost
14:34
because they're non-Muslims, because they're infidels.
14:36
Doesn't even matter what they do,
14:37
whether they're good, bad, oppressive, et cetera.
14:40
They're existential enemies that must be fought to the end.
14:45
So that was the whole point in bringing that out
14:47
and I found them in 2005.
14:48
It was published in 2007 and you're right.
14:50
You would have thought it would create some sort of shift.
14:52
And obviously I believe it did open many eyes,
14:55
but it's still, you know, the debate only recently,
14:58
you might remember a few months ago, someone posted
15:02
Osama bin Laden's letter to the Americans and it went viral
15:07
and everyone was wow, see, al-Qaeda and radical Muslims,
15:11
their whole point is they're angry
15:12
at what's happening to Palestinians.
15:14
And again, actually that letter was in the al-Qaeda reader.
15:17
I put it in, just to show the difference
15:20
of what they were saying to the West
15:21
and then showing as they spoke to Muslims
15:23
how they were saying no, that's secondary.
15:25
We don't even care.
15:26
They have to be fought no matter what
15:28
because they're not Muslims.
15:31
So yeah, that's definitely the case.
15:34
That is scriptural doctrinal Islam
15:37
and as we'll see the manifest of itself historically as well.
15:40
So there's something apparent about it.
15:42
The Muslim that you know down the street, you know,
15:45
the Joe Blow or Muhammad Blow, that's a nice guy, right?
15:49
I don't discount that, they exist obviously,
15:52
but they're not representatives of the religion.
15:54
The religion could be dissected as I've done
15:56
and it could be assessed and understood for itself.
16:00
But obviously with all religions,
16:02
whoever the practitioners are,
16:03
they can say whatever they want.
16:04
That's not necessarily a reflection of the religion.
16:08
Like when you get a Christian who says,
16:09
yeah, I'm homosexual and I think that's, you know,
16:13
that's definitely,
16:13
and I think God approves of that, et cetera, et cetera.
16:16
Yeah, they can do that, they exist.
16:17
Does that mean that's what Christianity is?
16:19
Obviously not the same thing with Islam.
16:21
- Flowing ad bunted on metrics that look great
16:23
till the CFO sees them, that's bull's bend.
16:26
And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.
16:31
- I remember telling my boss,
16:32
it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow.
16:36
Yeah, it wasn't.
16:38
Cut the bull's bend.
16:39
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16:50
- Yeah, there's a lot of things I've heard before.
16:53
I think Frank Turks said it to where it's like,
16:54
okay, if somebody is playing Beethoven on the piano
16:58
and they're doing a poor job, you don't blame Beethoven,
17:01
you have to go back to the source material.
17:03
It's like, you know, the guy in guitar center
17:05
trying to play Guns N' Roses.
17:06
It's like, if he does a crappy job,
17:08
you don't blame Slash.
17:09
But the same thing is true.
17:10
Like when someone's a secular Jew,
17:12
they're not a representative of Judaism, right?
17:14
They're checking a box as if they were, you know,
17:17
doing it before going into, you know,
17:19
someplace that they need to fill out
17:20
their generalized information.
17:22
Like they're just checking a box
17:23
or not representative of it.
17:24
And that's why I also don't like the language around
17:27
Muslim extremism using air quotes.
17:30
Because when you look at examples of quote unquote
17:32
Muslim extremism by Al-Qaeda or ISIS or Boko Haram
17:36
or the Houthis or any of these types of groups,
17:40
they're not extremists when they're doing exactly
17:42
what their source material is telling them to do
17:46
and to act in these ways.
17:47
And the thing that I found,
17:49
The Defenders of the West is the most interesting book
17:51
I've read so far this year.
17:52
We're still early in the year, but it's just a fantastic read
17:55
is you're reading stories about things that happened
17:57
in some cases over a millennia ago.
18:00
And they sound like they could have been taken out
18:02
of the pages of the news from last October, right?
18:04
It's the same exact things as they're screaming
18:06
aloha, aloha Akbar as they're raping and beheading people.
18:09
It's like, oh, this is just the way
18:11
that it's been from the beginning.
18:12
But let's go ahead and get into our discussion
18:14
of Defenders of the West.
18:15
Again, the book Defenders of the West,
18:17
the Christian heroes who stood against Islam.
18:20
So just generically,
18:21
'cause we will get into a lot of detail.
18:23
I want to know why you specifically wrote this book
18:26
and also Sword and Cimitar is another book that you wrote.
18:31
And I believe from the intro, you said,
18:32
"Hey, these two can kind of be read alongside one another,
18:36
but one focuses on decisive battles
18:38
versus the other focusing on decisive men."
18:41
And then also, why did you focus on the men listed here?
18:44
And I'll go ahead and give the list of the men highlighted here.
18:46
Duke Godfrey, The Sid, King Richard, More on him later.
18:50
St. Ferdinand, St. Louis, John Hunyadi, Skanderbeg,
18:54
a Skanderbeg, and then Vlad Dracula, right?
18:57
So that's the one that's gonna be a shock to most people.
18:59
So why write the book?
19:00
Why focus on the way that you did?
19:02
And why focus on these specific men?
19:04
- Yeah, so the reason I wrote Defenders of the West,
19:06
and actually before I can even talk about it,
19:08
we have to talk about its predecessor,
19:10
which you also mentioned Sword and Cimitar,
19:12
and the subtitle clarifies what it's about,
19:15
14 centuries of war between Islam and the West.
19:18
I have it here.
19:21
- Let's go on.
19:22
- I always, so this one came out in 2018,
19:26
and that book, as you mentioned,
19:28
it looks at battles, decisive battles,
19:31
and the oftentimes cataclysmic impact
19:33
it had on the development of the Old World,
19:36
Europe, and so Christendom.
19:38
And I saw from the very beginning,
19:40
the first battle is the year 636,
19:42
Yarmuk, first decisive battle.
19:45
All throughout the book, they're smaller battles,
19:47
but I look at the major battles.
19:49
And ironically enough, the battle of Yarmuk, 636,
19:52
was my master's thesis.
19:54
I was about that, which came out in 2001, I think.
19:59
And Victor Davis Hanson, military historian,
20:01
was the actual chair of it.
20:02
So that's interesting, it just shows you
20:05
I've been in this history aspect for quite some time.
20:08
And then in the final battle, just to pass forward,
20:11
the eighth battles in 1683, the Sea to Vienna.
20:14
So that's over a thousand years right there.
20:16
But I also go closer to our times,
20:19
including America's first war as a nation,
20:22
which was with Muslims, the Barbary Wars.
20:24
And you were mentioning Surah, or chapter nine
20:28
of the Quran, nine five, which is known in Arabic
20:31
as aid, it's safe, which means the verse of the sword.
20:36
Which says, to paraphrase it, you know,
20:38
you're lying weight in ambush.
20:40
Fight the, fight the disbelievers,
20:41
the unbelievers, infidels, whatever you want to call them,
20:44
however you want to translate it, and lay in ambush, et cetera,
20:47
et cetera.
20:48
So Thomas Jefferson and John Adams,
20:50
when they met with the ambassador of Barbary,
20:52
and asked them why have you been attacking your vessels
20:54
and enslaving and torturing our sailors,
20:57
that's exactly how the ambassador responded.
21:00
You paraphrase that particular verse.
21:03
So that's now 1,200 years after Muhammad.
21:06
So it gives you an idea of how continuous this logic
21:11
that we're told, of course, is not Islam, was,
21:14
and how it manifested itself all throughout the century,
21:17
century, different regions of the world.
21:21
At any rate, so that's sort of the scimitar.
21:23
And we can talk a little more about that later,
21:25
because, you know, again, the way it intersects
21:26
with the defenders of the West is pretty interesting.
21:29
They complement one another.
21:30
Defenders of the West, I decided to take a different tag.
21:33
And instead of in eight chapters,
21:35
instead of looking at decisive battles,
21:36
I looked at decisive men.
21:38
And so this is more of a take on spirit and motivation
21:43
of the actual warriors who fought and defended
21:46
the Christian West from Islam and Islamic invasions.
21:49
And it's essentially each chapter of the eight
21:52
is a biography, a short biography of their lives,
21:56
highlighting and mostly focusing on the conflicts
21:58
with Islam.
22:00
And I just thought it would be a great complement
22:02
to sort of the scimitar to just show you the motivation,
22:05
what compelled these men, what was, you know,
22:08
and as I discussed a little bit in the introduction,
22:11
you know, the West today is far stronger
22:14
militarily, economically, in all ways,
22:17
technologically, than its predecessor, Christendom.
22:20
And yet, you know, here we are always being terrorized
22:23
by Muslims who are immensely weak compared to the West today.
22:28
When you, if you go back in time, of course,
22:30
the Muslim world was the strong horse, as it were,
22:33
and it was the power, it was the superpower at the time,
22:36
you know, I think the Ottoman Empire, for example.
22:38
And yet, small Europe, embattled Europe, managed to survive.
22:43
And for me, the answer is because of these types of men
22:46
and what motivated them and how they solve the world.
22:50
So I thought that would be a very interesting lesson
22:52
to go along with sort of the scimitar.
22:55
And as for, I think you were asking about, you know,
22:58
the selection process.
23:01
I just, you know, who to highlight, which heroes.
23:04
I'd go into some depth in the introduction explaining it,
23:07
but the short, long and short of it is, one,
23:10
I didn't want to bring in men that I already discussed
23:13
in sort of the scimitar, because in sort of the farther,
23:15
it's obviously a lot of Christian heroes.
23:16
And, you know, a lot of those guys could have made it
23:19
in the book, but I just, you know,
23:21
with a fresh blank page, I didn't want to reiterate
23:23
what I had written, because I know a lot of people
23:25
will read Defenders of the West had read sort of the scimitar.
23:28
So one of my criteria was, you know,
23:30
not to be redundant and to pick different characters
23:32
from the first book.
23:34
And then after that, it was just,
23:37
and it's, I gotta tell you, it's a large,
23:39
it's a large pool to select from.
23:41
One could technically write volumes
23:45
on just these types of men,
23:47
just as one can write volumes about the battles
23:49
between Islam and the West.
23:52
So in the end, I really, you know,
23:53
I just picked the ones that I thought would resonate the most
23:55
and I tried to get also a, you know, a wide net.
23:59
So they're not all, you know, from Spain,
24:01
or they're not all from the Balkans.
24:03
So it ended up with two from Spain,
24:05
three from the Balkans, and two Crusaders.
24:09
Sorry, three Crusaders.
24:12
Yeah, I'm losing count, yeah, three Crusaders, okay.
24:17
And again, you know, in the Crusades, you must keep in mind,
24:19
the book is called Defenders of the West,
24:22
Christians who stood against Islam.
24:24
When you hear the Crusades, of course, people think,
24:25
well, wait, that's Christians invading Muslim territory.
24:29
But of course, you have to understand the backdrop
24:31
and the history, which is that Muslim territory,
24:33
the Holy Land was Christian centuries
24:35
before Islam conquered it ruthlessly.
24:38
Jerusalem conquered around 637.
24:40
And the Christians knew that, and Muslims were more over.
24:43
There was a new rise of persecution at the hands
24:47
of the Seljuk Turks, especially with vast, you know,
24:51
that the carnage is horrific, especially Eastern Asia Minor,
24:54
Armenian, the Greeks.
24:55
And, you know, that's what propelled the crusade.
24:58
So it was understood in the context of just war theory.
25:01
That's Christian territory, that's under occupation,
25:03
and Christians are being persecuted.
25:04
So even though they're traveling there,
25:06
they were actually defending and liberating, in that sense.
25:10
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26:41
- Right.
26:42
And if we have time, I want to get more into a lot of that later.
26:44
You mentioned the introduction.
26:46
The introduction of this book is fantastic.
26:48
In between the forward written by Victor David Hanson
26:51
and the introduction, there's a lot of stuff
26:54
that you all bring up.
26:55
And the first thing I want to talk about is really
26:57
this idea of Christian pacifism.
26:59
So Victor David Hanson, again, said in the book,
27:01
Western pacifism has no counterpart in the Quran
27:05
and the Hadith.
27:06
So the Quran is, you know, according to them,
27:08
the words of Allah and the Hadith are basically
27:10
the collection of the traditions and the writings
27:13
and observations of Muhammad and his life
27:15
and some other things beyond that.
27:17
But then you put three different scripture,
27:18
holy Bible scripture references
27:21
before the introduction of the book.
27:22
The first is Luke 22, 36.
27:24
This is Jesus.
27:25
He hath no sword or he that have no sword,
27:28
let him sell his garment and go buy one.
27:30
Then Proverbs 25, 26.
27:32
Let it trampled spring and it polluted well,
27:35
or like a trampled spring and it polluted well
27:37
is a righteous man who gives way before the wicked.
27:39
Let's see if I can get the last one, right?
27:41
Psalm 144, one, praise me to the Lord, my rock.
27:44
He trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.
27:48
So talk to me a little bit about this idea
27:49
because I've literally done debates with people
27:52
that are anti-gun, anti-violence,
27:55
Christian pacifist activists.
27:57
And they think that there basically is never,
28:00
there's certainly no such thing as a just war,
28:02
but that there's never a time when you should use
28:05
your physicality to hurt another image bearer of God
28:08
because Jesus said, turn the cheek once.
28:11
Even though they completely ignore the entire context
28:13
of that situation and what was being communicated there,
28:17
but it is one of those more frustrating things
28:19
for guys like me and guys that listen to this podcast
28:23
to where it's like, wait a minute,
28:24
like if somebody is being violated,
28:27
if somebody is being destroyed,
28:29
it is incumbent upon me as a Christian
28:32
to use my physicality to stop that.
28:34
But a lot of people just brain dead operate
28:36
through the world saying, no, it's got to be bad somehow.
28:38
So talk to me a little bit about Christian pacifism.
28:41
- Yeah, this whole topic of interest to me is also
28:45
because I think it's very important for the modern era.
28:48
And I think this idea of Christian pacifism
28:50
has been enabled and sponsored by forces
28:54
that are this very hostile Christianity
28:57
because they want to get the message out
28:59
that you as a Christian who is our enemy,
29:02
but they don't say that.
29:03
We need you to do nothing and to say nothing
29:05
and to shut up and to forgive and turn the other cheek
29:08
and be a doormat.
29:09
Obviously, that's the best position to have your enemy
29:12
and to convince him that his job is to do absolutely nothing.
29:16
So I think that's why you see this message
29:18
just being propagated all around,
29:20
including from wolves in sheep's clothing.
29:22
That is to say, Christian leaders and pastors, et cetera,
29:26
et cetera, whether it's because they're naive
29:28
or intentionally doing this.
29:29
You probably have both of them in there.
29:32
But the reality is, no, look,
29:35
let's just distill it down to a simple concept.
29:37
Let's say you're in your house and you have your children
29:39
and your wife and some people come and break in
29:41
and they're going to rape your women and kill
29:44
and rape your children too.
29:47
And you have a gun and you can stop them.
29:48
Would Jesus say, no, do nothing?
29:50
Let them get raped.
29:51
Let them be mauled.
29:52
- Of course not. - That doesn't be right.
29:54
Okay, and keep in mind that Jesus,
29:57
one of the, because these topics is Christianity
30:00
pure passives or can you fight for yourself?
30:02
These have been going around since the beginning of the church.
30:05
But the idea amongst the leaders from Augustine to Aquinas
30:10
was that just more theory is, of course, appropriate
30:13
and compatible with Christian teachings and mores.
30:18
And they would cite things like,
30:21
when the centurion goes to Jesus,
30:24
asking to heal his servant, and Jesus does it.
30:27
And as we know, every time Jesus would perform a miracle,
30:30
it often ends up with a rebuke to the person,
30:34
a form of, you know, repents about X, Y, or Z.
30:37
In this case, he didn't tell this centurion,
30:38
oh, by the way, now repent and stop killing people,
30:42
stop being a leader of this war machine
30:45
that exists on violence.
30:47
You didn't say that, why?
30:48
Because it was understood that the military
30:52
and physical force were appropriate.
30:55
The idea of, you know, I mean, today they've highlighted
30:57
within the context of humanism, you know, the human life.
31:00
It's such a, you know, it's such a precious thing.
31:02
And I'm not saying it's not, but back in those days,
31:05
you know, we're all gonna die, it was the logic.
31:07
So if you die now or later, it was not a big deal
31:10
depending on the circumstances.
31:12
So if killing you, ending your life now,
31:14
which is gonna end anyway, because you're an evil doer,
31:17
that was in scene as some dramatic thing.
31:19
And it still is, this is why we have execution going on.
31:22
So, like I said, I believe that this idea,
31:27
this has been promulgated recently,
31:29
and it's really being backed and enforced
31:32
by groups that are hostile to Christianity.
31:34
And it's for the simple reason to just handicap Christians
31:37
and convince them if you're a real Christian,
31:39
then you do nothing except be a doormat.
31:42
Well, obviously that's the greatest way
31:43
to have your enemy think of themselves.
31:46
The last thought, Jesus, you know, you mentioned this,
31:50
you know, turn the other cheek to the slap.
31:53
People forget that in the only recorded instance
31:56
of Jesus getting slapped, he actually did not turn
31:58
this other cheeky challenge to the man who slapped it.
32:02
And this is during this trial.
32:04
So, even so clearly, just by Jesus' own example,
32:08
this was a figurative thing about forgiveness,
32:10
you know, obviously it is stressing forgiveness
32:13
and non-retaliation in that, in a personal capacity.
32:17
But even when it happened to him,
32:18
it wasn't obviously appropriate
32:20
and he spoke up and challenged that person.
32:22
So there's definitely, I think Christians need to really
32:26
understand the concept of just war,
32:29
that to be a Christian is not to be a doormat,
32:32
it's not to be an aggressor either, obviously.
32:35
That's not what I'm talking about,
32:36
but in the confines of what we're discussing, you know,
32:39
this war with Islam, all these Christians were defending,
32:42
as I mentioned, against unprovoked violent Islamic assaults.
32:46
- When I think the other thing that you have to bring
32:48
into the discussion about Jesus talking
32:50
about turning the other cheek,
32:51
if you look at all the context of what's being said there,
32:53
he's not talking about physically being hit,
32:55
he's talking about basically being backhanded.
32:58
And I don't mean in a physical way, but in a verbal way,
33:01
where somebody's taken a verbal assault against you
33:03
and to not respond in kind.
33:05
And then also when you go back to the garden,
33:07
when Peter tried to, you know, chop that dude's head off,
33:11
the Roman centurion and accidentally just nicked him
33:13
in the ear and Jesus rebuked him,
33:15
he was a rebuking Peter because he was being violent,
33:17
he was rebuking Peter because he was being a moron
33:20
and Peter was getting in the way of what he was sent
33:22
to this planet to do, which was to die on the cross
33:25
and then be resurrected by God as, you know,
33:27
propitiation for our sins.
33:28
And so it's like, yeah, it's easy to just say
33:30
these stupid things out loud because they look good
33:32
on a t-shirt, but then when you start digging down,
33:34
it doesn't really go your way in terms of your argumentation.
33:37
But another thing that is brought up in this book
33:40
is specifically in the introduction,
33:42
is how the West in general is refusing to recognize,
33:46
not just not recognize, but they're refusing to recognize
33:49
the threat that Islam poses.
33:51
So I'm gonna read this quote from the intro here.
33:53
Not only has the West forgotten about Islam,
33:56
it has become sympathetic to this creed
33:58
that for over a millennium, terrorized
34:00
and negatively impacted the West's development.
34:03
Everywhere the threat is real and palpable,
34:05
even as a somnolent of, if not comatose West slumbers on.
34:10
And then a little bit later in the introduction, Raymond,
34:13
you talk about how the West has really lost
34:16
his reason to fight, right?
34:18
So we don't recognize our enemies,
34:20
but then we've lost our reason to fight.
34:22
So I'll read another short quote here
34:23
and then get your feedback.
34:24
What did the West pass possess that it's present,
34:27
which seems to be far superior in every conceivable way,
34:30
including military, does not?
34:32
The answer is men who had something worth fighting for,
34:36
from their faith and family to their country
34:38
and their cultures.
34:40
And even just reading that out loud,
34:42
someone's gonna clip that out later
34:43
and say, Kyle's a Christian nationalist.
34:45
He thinks we should fight for our country
34:47
and we should do all these different things.
34:48
Oh, we need to conquer this group in that group,
34:50
even though that's not even vaguely what is being communicated,
34:54
but talk to me a little bit about the sickness in the West
34:57
of again, not even recognizing our enemy,
35:00
which even Sunsu would tell us
35:01
is a really stupid thing to do.
35:03
Like if you don't know your enemy,
35:04
you can't even know yourself, but then even beyond that,
35:06
we just think, ah, you know,
35:08
nothing's really worth fighting for.
35:10
Like people again, looking at this Hamas issue,
35:12
they're just like, ah, you know,
35:14
they killed over a thousand of your people
35:16
and they still have a bunch of them in captivity
35:18
and some of them have probably already been killed,
35:19
but ah, what's the big deal, right?
35:22
I'm gonna go get another Starbucks drink
35:24
and go play video games and then watch porn.
35:26
Like that's just kinda where everybody has ended up here
35:28
in the West, but go with that wherever you wanna go.
35:32
- Yeah, good observations.
35:33
So I think it all stems down to the secularization
35:38
of the West and in as much as the West
35:40
became secular and less having a faith and a heritage,
35:44
it became inevitably more materialistic, okay?
35:47
So the things that matter to us as a culture
35:50
are purely material and hedonism as well, okay?
35:53
So it's pleasure and it's material.
35:56
You know, as long as I have what I need, my food,
35:58
my drink, my pleasure, my home, my fun, I'm good.
36:02
And well, as it happens, those are not,
36:03
and when it comes down to it, things worth dying for.
36:06
And I think it's turned the West in general
36:09
into, as I described in the book and that intro quote you said,
36:11
which is basically, you know,
36:13
just this kind of propped up corpse
36:15
that's feeding off itself and enjoying itself
36:18
and has no motivation to go on
36:20
because there's nothing really there to fight for.
36:22
No one wants to fight and die for gay rights, okay?
36:26
No one wants to go fight and die for all the things
36:28
that they prop up and they message
36:30
and tell us this is what it's all about, okay?
36:33
Those are all vices which, you know, humans
36:36
to various degrees fall into.
36:38
But no one in his heart of heart
36:41
is gonna stand up and make a real extent for these things.
36:44
So I think that's why, to a large measure,
36:47
the West in general is so comatose, as I said,
36:50
and totally oblivious.
36:51
And as you say, are more interested in their star bugs
36:53
and et cetera, et cetera,
36:55
because everyone's become so insular,
36:57
insulated into their own little world.
36:59
And to them, and this aspect makes sense to them,
37:03
they understand that the West is lost
37:05
and there's very little to do.
37:06
So they just worry about their own little home,
37:09
their own nucleus, you know, which makes sense,
37:12
like I said, and other than that,
37:14
what can they do?
37:15
And now I'm talking about the more virtuous ones,
37:17
which are the minority, as opposed to the majority
37:20
who we were discussing earlier
37:21
that are just materialistic, heatiness,
37:24
and that's certainly just not enough
37:25
to motivate anyone, unlike, as you read in that quote,
37:28
about the defenders, the heroes, who, as I was saying,
37:31
this is in the time when the West was so weak
37:33
compared to the Muslim world.
37:35
But because they had things, important things,
37:38
historically, the things that have always been important
37:40
to people, like faith and family and culture
37:43
and civilization and God, those were worth fighting for.
37:47
That's why Muslims today are fighting for that,
37:49
because actually, believe it or not,
37:50
they have something to fight for,
37:53
something whether it's right or wrong,
37:55
it's still a lot more motivating
37:58
than what we're told we should be fighting for.
38:01
- Well, and certainly, I think the idea
38:03
that Christians should be violent in any way,
38:06
should be muscular in any way,
38:07
is anathema to a lot of people.
38:09
They've bought into this idea that Jesus was this hippie
38:12
that just wanted everybody to have a good life
38:14
and to just do their best
38:16
in that it would all work out in the end.
38:18
And it's like, okay, if you only look at the lamb of God,
38:21
that becomes the way that you see it.
38:23
But when you look at him as fully lamb and fully lion,
38:26
lamb of God and lion of Judah,
38:27
you don't really get that.
38:29
'Cause again, you don't get that from scripture.
38:31
So it's like, where did you get that idea?
38:32
It's probably because you got it from culture,
38:34
you got it from frescoes,
38:36
you got it from these paintings that show this like Middle East,
38:39
not a Middle Eastern Jewish guy,
38:41
but kind of like a Danish guy with soft features.
38:43
And you just really, really nice guy,
38:45
blond hair blue eyes somehow in the Middle East
38:48
a couple of thousand years ago.
38:49
And it's just one of those things.
38:51
But to get back to this whole idea
38:52
of the whole muscularity of the religion,
38:55
I wanna read this quote here from the introduction.
38:57
For starters, it must be understood
38:59
that pre-modern Christianity was for at least
39:01
the first three quarters of its existence,
39:03
a muscular religion.
39:05
Not only does recorded history,
39:07
including the forthcoming one,
39:08
make this abundantly clear,
39:10
vestiges of the glories of Christendom still surround us.
39:13
Consider the impulsive faith that erected so many massive,
39:17
if not imposing cathedrals and churches all throughout Europe.
39:20
Once thundering with the booming masculine voices
39:23
of confident worshipers,
39:25
they are today the haunt of little old ladies
39:28
lighting candles for their departed loved ones.
39:31
That is, when such buildings are not actively being pawned off
39:34
or donated in the name of Christian charity
39:37
to Muslims who transform them into mosques.
39:41
Brutal quote, and so unbelievably true.
39:44
We don't build beautiful buildings anymore.
39:46
We build ugly post-modern buildings.
39:49
We don't go into most churches
39:51
and hear the voices of men singing in multiple harmonies.
39:55
We hear a smattering of male voices
39:57
with a bunch of female voices singing songs
40:00
that were written as if they are love poetry
40:03
or like pornographic novels to some, you know, Jesus guy, right?
40:08
So it's this homoerotic thing
40:10
that men can't really wrap their minds around.
40:12
And then at the end of the day,
40:14
any expression of Christianity that is masculine
40:17
is automatically deemed as toxic.
40:20
And again, when you look at the entirety of Christian history
40:23
and when you actually read the source material
40:26
and the scripture and the things that we're supposed to do,
40:29
you don't come away knowing that.
40:32
So where do you think all this comes from?
40:33
Raymond, is it just the influence of culture?
40:36
Is it the secularization of the West?
40:37
Is it the fact that we're basically biblically illiterate?
40:40
'Cause even Christians that say they're evangelicals,
40:44
many of them don't even believe that Jesus was God.
40:46
They believe that he was, you know, a created being.
40:49
Like, where does this come from?
40:51
- Wow, and as much as they agree with you,
40:54
that's a lots of impact right there.
40:56
- Yeah.
40:57
- You know, I have very disjointed thoughts
41:01
which I'll offer them.
41:02
So one is the sort of the femininity of Christianity,
41:05
which has been imposed on it.
41:07
And I'll tell you a little bit
41:08
of my own personal experiences.
41:09
Like I said, I was baptized in the Orthodox Church,
41:12
but I was born and raised here,
41:14
so it was impossible for Western Christianity
41:16
not to influence me in a major way.
41:20
For the record, my brother is a Baptist,
41:23
I think, or a part-time minister or not a full minister.
41:29
Okay, so just to give you an idea,
41:31
I mean, I'm very familiar with modern Western Christianity.
41:35
And when I was in my youth,
41:37
I started really disliking what I thought Christianity was
41:40
for this very reason, it just seemed so effeminate.
41:44
And I felt like to be a good Christian,
41:45
I act like a woman, and that's what Jesus wants.
41:48
And it was really frustrating, and I just couldn't do it.
41:52
So thankfully, that's one of the reasons
41:54
I really gravitated back to the more traditional interpretations
41:58
of Christianity, which was not that, okay?
42:01
And I understood that this effeminacy
42:03
that's being imposed is really a modern manifestation,
42:06
one can call it a heresy.
42:07
In fact, that's the idea that heresy is you take a truth
42:10
and you highlight it and conceal all the other aspects.
42:14
So they've taken one aspect,
42:16
which is the love and the forgiveness,
42:18
which is Christian, and they've just put that on a pedestal
42:22
and completely obliterated the justice and the righteousness
42:25
and the warfare as needed.
42:27
And so it's become this.
42:29
And the other thing I would also say,
42:31
I think it's part and parcel of this ongoing
42:34
defeminization of society in general.
42:37
And that too is I believe by design, okay?
42:39
If you wanna conquer a land or the world or whatever,
42:43
what better way can you do it
42:45
than to convince the men that they're women, right?
42:47
Or whether literally as these trans and whatever,
42:50
or more frequently spiritually,
42:54
making them passive and defeminate and emasculating
42:57
that in that sense.
42:58
And that's obviously very widespread.
43:00
And so I think because there's a truth,
43:04
of a kernel of truth, which is the love,
43:06
not being a woman obviously, but the forgiveness,
43:10
it's been, and because the powers that be
43:12
have been trying to emasculate and dominate Western civilization,
43:16
all of that converged into what you have today,
43:18
which is secular people are emasculated,
43:20
and Christian people think it's their job
43:22
to be emasculated as well.
43:24
But like I said, and as you quoted
43:26
from the booming cathedrals and the voices,
43:29
that's not how Christianity was for century,
43:31
for most of its existence.
43:33
And I don't know who's gonna get Christianity right,
43:35
the people who are closer to the times of Christ
43:38
or us who are so completely separated,
43:43
especially epistemologically,
43:44
and how we understand things.
43:46
And a final observation of interest
43:49
is modern-day Western Christians.
43:52
To them, the Old Testament is just at best poetry.
43:55
It holds no meaning.
43:57
And as you quoted those opening verses
43:59
that I had in the book,
44:00
the Old Testament is very militant.
44:02
And pre-modern Christians, as the men in the book,
44:06
took the Old Testament very seriously.
44:08
Okay, so just as the Old Testament is full of warfare,
44:11
righteous warfare, and defense, et cetera, et cetera,
44:14
that to them, that was Christianity as well,
44:17
because it's in their holy book.
44:19
I find it strange that for us, Western or modern Christians,
44:23
the Old Testament is just completely.
44:26
I understand the New Testament abrogates it,
44:29
in that sense, because it's fulfilled, et cetera.
44:32
But I think too many people treat the Old Testament
44:34
as just, there's absolutely no lessons there whatsoever
44:37
when there are, I think.
44:38
- Well, certainly there are, and it's interesting.
44:41
If you're gonna overtake a people,
44:43
you need to take out the men.
44:45
And how much better if you can get the men
44:47
to take out themselves?
44:48
So let's make our men fat, let's make them lazy,
44:51
let's make them soft, let's make sure their hands are soft,
44:55
let's make sure that they would never even want to hurt a fly.
44:57
Let's convince them that if they did want to hurt a fly,
45:00
that that would be immoral and that God would be mad at them.
45:03
And so yeah, it's the perfect plan if you go that route.
45:06
But in the book, you highlight these men
45:08
that obviously didn't go that route.
45:10
Again, I'll read the names here.
45:12
We're only gonna be able to get into one of them.
45:14
That's all we're gonna have time for.
45:15
But Duke Godfrey, the Sid, King Richard, St. Ferdinand,
45:20
St. Louis, John Hunyadi, Scanderbeg,
45:23
I messed it up again in Vlad Dracula.
45:25
But I wanna talk about King Richard.
45:26
So the title of this chapter was The Lion That Roared at Islam.
45:31
I just absolutely love that title.
45:32
So this is Richard I, Richard The Lion Heart.
45:36
He was a six foot five, super athletic, very handsome guy.
45:41
And if you don't know him a whole lot about history,
45:43
guys that grew up around the time that he grew up,
45:45
either wrote a whole lot of dudes that were six foot five
45:47
walking around.
45:48
And so a lot of these guys were very, very impressive.
45:52
But these guys were all warriors.
45:54
But I do wanna read a quick quote from the chapter.
45:56
And guys, we're barely gonna be able
45:58
to scratch the surface on King Richard.
46:00
And we're not even gonna get into the other guys.
46:03
You're gonna have to go pick up your own copy
46:04
of Defenders of the West.
46:06
It will be in the show notes.
46:06
You guys can check it out.
46:08
But this is a quote from Richard of Devisees.
46:12
Devisees, what would that be?
46:14
I don't know how to pronounce it.
46:16
- That's good enough.
46:17
- It's a different Richard.
46:18
So it's not King Richard,
46:19
but this is a contemporary English chronicler
46:23
of Richard's life.
46:24
He said the short quote, which was great.
46:26
For so great were the men's,
46:28
was the man's many strengths of body,
46:30
mental, encourage and entire trust in God.
46:34
And so the thing is, is this was a man that was very strong,
46:38
very courageous, very strong mentally.
46:42
But in addition to that,
46:43
he put his entire trust for his life with God.
46:46
And so if you would,
46:47
give us just a very, very brief overview of King Richard.
46:51
And then I wanna ask you a few things
46:53
that specifically went down during his life,
46:55
but how does history come to know who King Richard even is?
46:58
- Sure, an amazing character for sure.
47:03
So King Richard is, he's known really,
47:05
he spearheaded the third, what's called the third crusade,
47:08
which happens right after the fall of Jerusalem,
47:10
which was a cataclysmic event,
47:12
but the fall of Christian Jerusalem
47:14
to Saladin's forces around 81187 or 83,
47:19
I think 87, sorry.
47:22
And yeah, 87.
47:24
And because it was such a cataclysmic movement,
47:26
so lots of kings and emperors joined it,
47:30
including Barbarossa, who had a tragic fall
47:32
and died very early before he even made it to the Holy Land.
47:36
But Richard and Philip, I believe the second,
47:39
or so many Phillips, I think the second,
47:42
were the ones who really spearheaded it,
47:44
but before long Philip bailed from the Holy Land,
47:48
because it was the sufferings of two immense.
47:51
Right when Richard got there, he immediately got a fever.
47:54
And yet he was still fighting.
47:55
He had his men bring him out with his fever
47:59
and lay him down so he can shoot with his crossbow.
48:02
And as you said, very, very tall, muscular, ferocious warrior.
48:06
And the reason we know this is true,
48:08
because one can say, yeah, it's in the sources,
48:11
but obviously they're exaggerating,
48:12
but the Muslim sources say the same exact thing.
48:15
He really terrified the Muslims.
48:17
They describe him as a mountain of madness, essentially.
48:21
And he would just single-handedly just barge in
48:24
and like on his horse and just slaughter
48:25
like 10 Muslim warriors.
48:27
And these weren't weak, wimpy Muslims either.
48:29
These were powerful Turks.
48:30
So definitely the most physically imposing
48:34
of all the characters in the book, I would say.
48:38
And anyway, it's tragic because as you read the story,
48:41
this is a powerful man, very charismatic.
48:44
The men loved him.
48:45
And he did so much and he could have done more,
48:49
but it was because he was essentially betrayed
48:52
by the aforementioned Philip II and his brother, John.
48:55
And this is where the Robin Hood legend,
48:57
of course, comes in, where King John, along with Philip,
49:02
skiing to basically subvert and take over England for John
49:06
and portions of what we call France that belonged
49:09
to Richard at the time.
49:11
So think about it, here's a classic example.
49:14
Here's a king who sold so much and raised so much money
49:19
just to go to the Holy Land and fight.
49:21
And he knew the risk he's taking.
49:23
And he almost lost everything.
49:26
And even when he learned what was happening in England,
49:30
and it would obviously behoove them to go there,
49:33
he still waited and risked it.
49:35
And then he goes to the other adventures,
49:38
just trying to get back and gets thrown in jail, et cetera,
49:41
et cetera.
49:41
So he's the prime example of the sort of motivation
49:46
and what motivated these men who just risked everything
49:50
for an ideal.
49:51
Whereas today, and let's go back to earlier observation,
49:54
we don't do that because we don't have ideals.
49:57
We're just materialists.
49:58
Our ideals are the now.
50:00
Satisfy me, and that's it.
50:02
There's nothing to fight or die for.
50:04
So that's his story, really.
50:06
I can give you more details if you're going to ask me as well.
50:09
But yeah, go ahead.
50:12
No, we'll certainly get into more details,
50:14
but I do want to put a finer point on what you just said.
50:17
Again, back in those days, even kings
50:19
didn't have nearly as many possessions as we have.
50:23
Most human beings have thousands, if not tens of thousands,
50:25
of individual possessions.
50:27
Whereas that's not really something that is known
50:30
outside of modernity.
50:31
And these were men that some of them had tremendous wealth
50:34
but they would pay for their soldiers
50:37
to live and to eat on their own dime, right?
50:40
And so this was something that was very important
50:42
for a lot of people to understand.
50:43
But you did say this briefly, and gosh,
50:45
I'm setting you up with all these huge topics
50:46
that you only get a few minutes maybe to talk about,
50:49
but you said that Richard was very important
50:51
to the third crusade.
50:53
There is a lot of confusion over the crusades.
50:55
You talked about it just a little bit earlier.
50:57
People don't know why they were fought.
50:58
They thought, they think when you say the crusades,
51:01
that's like saying World War II or the Vietnam War,
51:04
like it was this one thing that happened
51:06
in this one time period, and they just so happened
51:08
to call it the crusades.
51:10
It wasn't something that happened multiple times
51:12
over multiple generations, for multiple different reasons,
51:14
involving multiple different people,
51:16
even though the two sides basically stayed the same.
51:19
But could you give us just a very basic overview?
51:21
Treat us all like we're five.
51:23
How would you explain to a five year old the crusades,
51:27
why they were fought, how did it even get to a third one,
51:30
how did it go beyond a third one, just a basic overview?
51:33
- Absolutely, so the problem with the crusades
51:38
is how historians today present it,
51:40
and that is to say they presented in a vacuum, okay?
51:43
In other words, all of a sudden you have four Islam,
51:47
as I mentioned, you know, Muhammad dies around 632,
51:49
and that's when the jihad begins,
51:51
and the first crusade is called in 1095, okay?
51:54
So we have over 400 years passing,
51:57
and the problem is the historians don't talk about
51:59
those 400 years, they act like,
52:00
everything was normal, everything was fine,
52:02
until 1095, these people, I always, I quote John Esposito,
52:07
a professor at Georgetown University,
52:10
where I also went for a while, who says, you know,
52:13
four centuries of peace elapsed before a papal power plate,
52:17
who led to these tragic events known as the crusades,
52:20
which have led to mistrust, lasting mistrust
52:23
between Muslims and Christians, et cetera,
52:25
and there's a lot more, a lot more,
52:27
he's pouring to say that, well, as it happens,
52:30
if you go back four centuries, after Muhammad died at 632,
52:34
the jihad was declared on infidels,
52:37
which mostly happened to be Christians,
52:38
because that's who were surrounding Arabia at the time,
52:42
and long story short, by 732,
52:45
one century after Muhammad's death,
52:47
Islam had conquered all of North Africa, from Morocco,
52:50
to Egypt, all of the Middle East,
52:52
every country you can imagine,
52:54
it was known as Greater Syria,
52:56
but it encompassed Lebanon and Israel and Jordan,
52:59
and so forth, and later, of course, Asia Minor,
53:02
under the Turks, and much later, I'll get to that,
53:05
of course, after the crusades, the Balkans, and so forth,
53:08
and then, you know, so there were in the middle of France,
53:11
the Muslims, doing the same sorts of things, ISIS does,
53:14
okay, that we're told Islam Muslims do not do,
53:16
but on a grand scale, 'cause these weren't just the handfuls.
53:20
Terrorists on a pickup truck, these were the Calabates
53:22
and the Sultanates, you know,
53:24
the sources talk of hundreds of thousands of jihadis,
53:27
oftentimes, it was a mass migration, as well,
53:30
into Europe, so, and Spain, of course, was conquered,
53:34
and have since from 711, and, you know,
53:37
held for centuries of warfare,
53:39
the recent peace that we could talk about that,
53:41
but, so, and in these four centuries,
53:45
Christians not only were being conquered,
53:48
but the atrocities that were being committed against them,
53:50
like I said, make what ISIS does, look like child play,
53:53
at least at least the quantity, because there was much more,
53:57
okay, and Europe was continuously bombarded.
54:01
You know, when we think of Europe, or Christendom,
54:03
we think of Europe, really, in the seventh century,
54:06
before all this began, it was North Africa,
54:09
and the Middle East, and Europe,
54:11
and most of Christianity was in North Africa,
54:14
and the Middle East, that's why Constantine moved the emperor,
54:16
and the capital to the little Greek town,
54:21
Byzantium in Asia Minor, and all the early councils,
54:25
and so forth, and all the leading theologians
54:27
were from Africa, of Egyptians, you know,
54:30
Augustines, from the Hippo, which is either Tunisia,
54:33
or Algeria, I think Algeria, and so forth,
54:36
so all of that, you know, think of the historical Tunisia,
54:39
was conquered, rested away from the rest of Christendom,
54:42
which was now Europe proper, and that was embattled,
54:45
and battered, for centuries, by the forces of Islam,
54:48
who were still trying to conquer them,
54:49
just like that, conquered their religious counterparts
54:52
of North Africa, and the Middle East.
54:54
Okay, so that's the backdrop of the crusades.
54:57
Now, fast forward a little closer, I mentioned the Turks,
55:00
they start coming into the scene,
55:02
in the 10th and 11th century, 9th century,
55:05
and they become, for long, their converts to Islam,
55:08
and now they're the champion bearers,
55:10
the standard bearers of jihad, literally.
55:12
Okay, they're very, they took the concept
55:15
and the duty of jihad, more literally,
55:17
because there, and this is another topic we can get into,
55:20
because all the people who convert it is often tribal,
55:22
and Islam is a tribal religion, okay,
55:25
it's us versus them, the infidel,
55:27
so it comports so easily with the tribal,
55:30
or Bedouin mindset, already,
55:32
and that's the genius of Muhammad,
55:34
he was a tribal Bedouin, and he founded a religion
55:36
that's based on his understanding of the world.
55:39
At any rate, right now, in the years before the crusade,
55:43
you have Asia Minor, in the Eastern Roman Empire,
55:45
the Byzantine Empire, under complete attack
55:48
by the Seljuk Turks, and the sources talk about,
55:51
contemporary sources, the atrocities being committed
55:54
to the Armenians, especially, you know,
55:56
when we talk about the Turkish genocide of Armenians,
55:59
we think it's in 1800s, early 1900s,
56:02
so it actually goes back a thousand years earlier,
56:05
and the sources talk about tens of thousands
56:07
of Armenians just being slaughtered, enslaved,
56:11
churches everywhere being set on fire,
56:13
turned into stables for horses, turned into mosques,
56:16
and the rest of it, and also Greeks,
56:19
the further west into Asia Minor, so, you know, Turkey,
56:22
we know the country, Turkey, people forget,
56:24
this is one of the absolute oldest regions of Christianity,
56:27
this is where St. Paul wrote most of his letters
56:30
to that area, and of course, it was transformed
56:33
through extreme violence and force,
56:34
and also at the same time, because pilgrimages
56:38
to the Holy Land from Europe were always a continuous thing,
56:41
and they were always fought with dangers
56:44
from the surrounding Muslims, who were usually content
56:47
to harass and extort and take money
56:49
with, you know, the criminality sort of limited,
56:52
thanks to the reigning Khalifa, whoever.
56:54
But under the subjects, it got really bad,
56:55
and extreme, and the violence, and one source talks about,
56:59
you know, a group of nuns under who went there,
57:03
as part of a larger caravan that contained men,
57:06
and they all got attacked, and one nun,
57:08
because she was pretty, was gang raped,
57:10
and then slaughtered, so that's the buildup
57:13
to the crusade, and then the Eastern Emperor,
57:15
who's involved in all this, the Roman Emperor,
57:17
and Bizi Alexias, called for aid from the West,
57:21
and saying, you know, this is, we need some help,
57:23
and that's when Pope Urban the Second,
57:25
and the Council of the Lord of the Month,
57:26
and 95 detailed everything that I just told you,
57:29
so he also knew and detailed what was happening
57:33
to Eastern Christians, and that completely infuriated
57:36
the Franks, as they were known, you know, the Europeans,
57:40
mostly from what we call French today, but all around Europe,
57:44
and that was the beginning of the First Crusade,
57:45
it was understood as an altruistic endeavor,
57:47
to, it was the verse that was often quoted,
57:50
was, you know, love God, with all your heart,
57:52
and love your fellow man, and loving God,
57:55
you have to go and liberate the Holy Sepulcher,
57:57
which is where Christ was buried and resurrected,
58:00
and the Holy Land in general, and loving your fellow man,
58:02
is you have to go and protect these Eastern Christians.
58:05
So that, in a nutshell, is the motivation
58:08
that propelled the Crusades, and as you said, you know,
58:13
yeah, historians, and the way we talk about Crusades,
58:15
as if they're just like a one, like a World War II,
58:17
they're not, and there's, and there's, you know,
58:19
manifestations of similar types of Crusades,
58:22
you can say, well, before this, you know,
58:24
the Eastern Roman emperors, the busy teens,
58:26
in sword and cemetery, I talk about a couple of them,
58:29
Night Siferous Focus, and to him, you know,
58:32
his wars against Muslims were holy wars, you know,
58:35
they weren't called Crusades, but obviously,
58:37
they were under the same impetus of logic.
58:40
So this has been going on for a long, long time, you know,
58:43
you can take it, and then it went on much later,
58:47
you know, George Bush once called what happened in,
58:49
you know, I don't know if it was Iraq or Afghanistan,
58:52
he was calling it a crusade, and then he had to apologize,
58:55
'cause all those evil, terrible Crusades, you know,
58:58
but in the sense he was correct,
59:00
in the sense that this is part of the continuity
59:03
of Islam versus the West.
59:05
- It's certainly a continuity of that.
59:07
And again, we have so many things we need
59:10
to pay attention to, the news cycle moves so fast,
59:14
the biggest story today by next Tuesday will not be big,
59:17
and no one will be talking about it anymore,
59:19
and we just move so quickly.
59:21
So the idea that you could go back and go over hundreds
59:23
of years of history of our particular area seems crazy.
59:27
And so that's why I'm so thankful for books
59:29
like Defenders of the West and Sword and Symmatar,
59:31
because it helps you kind of slow down
59:33
and understand what was happening,
59:34
even though these books are just basic overviews of battles
59:37
and basic overviews of people.
59:39
But King Richard, he was on the crusade
59:42
and he finally made it to Jerusalem.
59:45
And I want to talk quickly about the siege of Jerusalem
59:48
that he led, and here's a quick quote from the book.
59:50
On first seeing the holy city from a distance,
59:53
Richard, it is relayed, began to weep in anguish
59:56
and begged God to shield it from his sight until
59:59
and unless he liberated it.
1:00:01
So that kind of gives you a sense of what it was like
1:00:03
for this man to see this area,
1:00:06
to see it under Muslim control,
1:00:07
to understand all the atrocities that went into them,
1:00:10
taking control of this area,
1:00:12
and then feeling this deep level of I guess guidance
1:00:17
towards the goal of liberating the city.
1:00:20
So how did the siege, how did King Richard siege
1:00:23
of Jerusalem go?
1:00:25
- Well, actually it didn't, on two occasions,
1:00:30
Richard and his men finally made it
1:00:31
because after Jerusalem was conquered by solid
1:00:34
and all the adjoining Christian territories,
1:00:36
most of them were also conquered.
1:00:37
So they had to start peace meal from the coast
1:00:40
and they had to actually do the final decision,
1:00:44
which was given to him by the most experienced
1:00:47
and veteran fighters of the military orders,
1:00:49
the Templars and Hospitallers, was don't do it.
1:00:52
Don't do it, but we can't do it now
1:00:53
because it just logistically would be impossible.
1:00:56
They did not have a supply train to the coastal area
1:01:00
where they did have control of,
1:01:03
and it infuriated a lot of his men,
1:01:05
and eventually many of them walked away
1:01:08
and left him and others didn't solve the logic.
1:01:10
So this is also interesting about Richard's character,
1:01:13
and as much as he was a fiery warlord,
1:01:15
he was prudent enough not to go into battle
1:01:18
when he knew it was a lost cause.
1:01:19
And this forces talk about how he was more careful
1:01:22
about his men's life than his own.
1:01:24
And he wouldn't risk their lives and he wouldn't do it.
1:01:27
And when they got angry, he said,
1:01:29
you know what, I'll go with you, but I'm not leading it.
1:01:30
I'm not leading it because I know it's gonna end badly.
1:01:33
Someone else can lead it.
1:01:34
But he did, another very remarkable feat of Richard
1:01:39
is the siege of Jaffa.
1:01:42
So one of the cities that he liberated is Jaffa,
1:01:44
and when he was somewhere else,
1:01:47
solid and calm, tame and completely conquered.
1:01:50
And again, the atrocities they committed
1:01:53
to the Christians there, better description,
1:01:56
including saying, you know, lying and telling them,
1:01:58
you know, you can surrender peacefully,
1:02:01
and then once they open the doors,
1:02:02
they cruelly torture them and disembowel them,
1:02:05
things of that nature.
1:02:06
And Richard was now actually on his way back to England,
1:02:09
because as I said, he was,
1:02:11
his, John and so forth were subverting England,
1:02:15
and he was finally about to go,
1:02:16
and word came to him saying, what happened to Jaffa?
1:02:19
And he just stopped everything, fled to Jaffa,
1:02:23
and when he reached there by boat,
1:02:25
and he saw it completely surrounded by Muslims,
1:02:28
including Saladin.
1:02:29
And he actually, he just jumped half armed into the water,
1:02:34
holding a crossbow with one hand,
1:02:36
and I think a sword and the other, or a battle axe,
1:02:39
and just charged alone, which of course,
1:02:41
motivated that he had about 2,000 crew members
1:02:44
to do the same thing.
1:02:45
And that just, and the Turks, you know, they fought,
1:02:48
but it's so terrified then,
1:02:50
and he completely routed them in solid,
1:02:52
and the great Saladin fled.
1:02:54
Okay, and you know, the descriptions are all there
1:02:56
in the books of the primary sources, right?
1:02:58
- Right, I actually--
1:02:59
- Where's the movie for this, you know?
1:03:01
- Okay, no, there's so much,
1:03:02
that's why I wanted to talk about King Richard so much,
1:03:04
is because this should be a movie,
1:03:06
and this really wanted to,
1:03:08
this gets into something that I wanted to ask you about,
1:03:10
because as you talked about,
1:03:11
Richard was feared to an extreme degree,
1:03:13
that we can't even fully comprehend by the Muslims,
1:03:16
and he had consistently beaten down groups
1:03:19
that outnumbered his Christian troops,
1:03:20
you know, five to one, 10 to one.
1:03:23
He was seen as very bold, very capable, very deadly,
1:03:26
but there's a story in the book,
1:03:28
where there were some truce talks going on
1:03:30
between the Muslim leader, Saladin and Richard,
1:03:33
and at the time, Saladin was unwilling to meet
1:03:35
with Richard on the field in pitch battle,
1:03:37
because, you know, he was terrified of him,
1:03:39
but Saladin found out that King Richard
1:03:41
and some of his men were camped outside of Jaffa,
1:03:44
and Saladin and his crew launched a surprise attack
1:03:48
to try and take him out, so here's a quote from the book.
1:03:50
Hearing the cries from his tent,
1:03:52
the king was roused and leapt in great alarm from his bed,
1:03:55
putting on his mail shirt of unbreakable mesh,
1:03:58
he ordered his knights to arise without delay,
1:04:01
even as the Muslims rushed in with horrible shouts,
1:04:04
and then began to howl and fire javelins,
1:04:06
darts and arrows very densely.
1:04:08
Crying, everything is bearable for those of manly character.
1:04:13
Awesome quote, I'll read it again.
1:04:15
Everything is bearable for those of manly character,
1:04:18
Richard at the head of tin hurriedly hoarse knights,
1:04:22
charged powerfully into the thick of the enemy,
1:04:24
emptying saddles of their riders,
1:04:26
and transfixing some of them.
1:04:28
Their initial impact was so great,
1:04:30
and their violent spirit carried them through
1:04:32
all the Turkish lines as far as the last.
1:04:35
As you mentioned, I think in the intro of this book,
1:04:39
there's a reason, and it's not because it's not interesting,
1:04:41
there's a reason why we don't have movies
1:04:44
about these guys that, you know,
1:04:45
musicals haven't been written about these people's exploits,
1:04:49
it's because of the foundation of it,
1:04:52
it's because people are really, really awkward
1:04:54
about violent Christianity, they're really, really awkward,
1:04:56
they don't wanna [inaudible] off Muslims,
1:04:58
you know, they're totally fine to just route Christians
1:05:00
and say they're the worst people on the planet,
1:05:02
but they would never say that about Muslims
1:05:04
'cause they're scared of them.
1:05:05
But when you have stories like this,
1:05:07
that's just one of the many stories from Richard's life
1:05:10
that are like this,
1:05:12
and they were written by people that were with him, right?
1:05:15
So it wasn't like one of these things
1:05:16
where it's like 700 years later, like without--
1:05:19
- Including Muslims.
1:05:20
- Exactly.
1:05:21
- Including Muslims.
1:05:22
- And they hated him so much, but they revered him,
1:05:25
and that's the thing that I found compelling about your book
1:05:28
is you talked about both sides,
1:05:29
like look, if you just took the Christian's accounts,
1:05:32
maybe you could look at them skeptically,
1:05:34
but even the Muslims looked at men like King Richard
1:05:37
and said, "God, I hate him, but like, you know, Allah,
1:05:40
help my hands to defeat him,
1:05:42
but my goodness, this dude is a gangster."
1:05:44
I mean, just, it's so incredible.
1:05:46
- I'll give you a final anecdote there
1:05:48
that really underscores Richard
1:05:51
and shows you that till today,
1:05:53
he is the most recognized, feared,
1:05:54
and hated of all crusaders in the Muslim world.
1:05:57
Muslims, of course, are familiar with the crusades in general.
1:06:00
When I was born, my parents,
1:06:03
their first names both started with an R,
1:06:07
and they decided to name all their kids with a name,
1:06:09
with an R, and I was the third to be born.
1:06:12
And at the time, they were actually gonna name you Richard.
1:06:15
They, back then they would do this practice
1:06:18
where you put a candle names
1:06:20
and whichever candle lasts the longest, that's the name.
1:06:23
And I think it was Richard.
1:06:25
But at the final moment, by that said, no,
1:06:27
because we might return to Egypt,
1:06:29
and if this guy's named Richard, they're gonna kill him.
1:06:31
- Oh, no.
1:06:32
- And, but that, but they named me Rachel,
1:06:35
which is another crusader name,
1:06:36
and they didn't know it and they didn't recognize it.
1:06:38
So it just shows you the singular power
1:06:40
of the name Richard till this very day in the Muslim world.
1:06:45
- Right, it just carries that connotation with it.
1:06:47
And again, we're kind of winding into a close here.
1:06:49
And so we gotta, you know, kind of wrap up Richard's life.
1:06:52
But as you mentioned earlier, he was betrayed
1:06:54
by a fellow crusader, he was betrayed by his brother.
1:06:58
And this is a guy that, as you talk about in the book,
1:07:01
during a lot of these battles,
1:07:02
he would have arrows all over him, right?
1:07:05
I think the way he talked about in the book was like,
1:07:07
you know, it stuck out like spikes of a hedgehog, right?
1:07:10
And so, but there was one particular guy
1:07:12
that shot him with an arrow.
1:07:14
He goes to pull the arrow out, gets infected,
1:07:16
it got gangrenous.
1:07:18
And that really led to eventually his death and his plight.
1:07:22
But I do wanna read at the end,
1:07:24
and actually I wanna read this one little part
1:07:26
because apparently his sister was a gangster as well,
1:07:29
because I think the guy who shot the arrow at him
1:07:32
was brought to like his death bed.
1:07:34
If I'm just trying to remember from memory,
1:07:36
was brought to his death bed and he forgave the man.
1:07:38
And he basically sent him off and, you know,
1:07:41
wished him well.
1:07:42
But apparently his sister, I'll read it here,
1:07:45
a last for the archer, however, after Richard died,
1:07:48
his enraged sister, Joan, had the man skinned alive
1:07:52
and torn apart by wild horses.
1:07:54
So apparently she wasn't as forgiving as her brother.
1:07:57
So that's one thing.
1:07:58
But I have to read this last thing,
1:07:59
'cause I thought you did a very poetic job
1:08:02
of summarizing King Richard and how he should be remembered.
1:08:06
Thus King Richard I died on April the 6th of 1199
1:08:10
at the age of 42.
1:08:12
In his brief life, he was the archetypal medieval warrior king
1:08:15
and chivalrous knight par excellence,
1:08:18
evidenced him part by the fact that his moniker,
1:08:21
Lionheart, lives on to this day.
1:08:23
He sacrificed and risked much in his crusade
1:08:26
and went against all odds.
1:08:28
At a time when the crusader states
1:08:30
were on the verge of collapsing,
1:08:32
Richard cowed the forces of Islam,
1:08:34
retook several cities and castles
1:08:36
and gave the Christians the much needed breathing space
1:08:39
to regroup and re-fortify.
1:08:41
His capture of Cyprus was moreover,
1:08:43
a milestone for crusading.
1:08:45
So near to the Middle East, it became for centuries
1:08:48
the chief base of resources to supply
1:08:50
the coastal crusader kingdoms.
1:08:52
It was where every future crusader stopped
1:08:54
before entering into the lion's den of Islam.
1:08:57
Indeed, until this day, it is the name of Richard
1:09:01
that most personifies the archetypal crusader enemy
1:09:04
in the popular Muslim consciousness.
1:09:06
A testimony to the havoc he wrought single-handedly.
1:09:10
That goes back Raymond to what you talked about
1:09:12
that if your name was Richard and your family
1:09:14
moved back to Egypt,
1:09:15
that was gonna be a major, major problem for you.
1:09:17
But before I ask you about another one of your other works,
1:09:20
is there anything that you wanna say
1:09:22
to put a bow on King Richard?
1:09:24
- Yeah, it's not a bow though.
1:09:25
It's how he's understood today,
1:09:27
and I get a little bit into that
1:09:28
in the conclusion of the book.
1:09:30
For all that we said about him and his persona
1:09:33
and the manly man that he was, a man's man,
1:09:37
today in your average scholarly academic book,
1:09:40
if you encounter Richard,
1:09:42
he's portrayed as a tyrant, of course,
1:09:46
who doesn't know what he's doing.
1:09:49
He's reckless, he goes to the Holy Land
1:09:51
and he should be taking care of his own kingdom.
1:09:53
He's a bad father, a bad son.
1:09:55
I'm paraphrasing a famous historian that I quote in the book.
1:09:59
And most recently, he's his homosexual, okay?
1:10:02
So today, it's very common in movies.
1:10:05
Richard is a secret closet homosexual.
1:10:08
There's absolutely zero.
1:10:11
Where did they get that from?
1:10:13
It's because in the sources,
1:10:14
it talks about how he slept in the same bed
1:10:16
with King Philip when they were young.
1:10:19
But because homosexuality was so divorced
1:10:21
from pre-modern men's mind, they didn't eat to clarify
1:10:24
what that meant because it was very common for young men
1:10:27
and young women to sleep separately in the same beds, all right?
1:10:31
And they also cite that he didn't have a son.
1:10:34
So I guess every Barry man is a homosexual, that logic.
1:10:39
But they inconveniently ignored that he had a [inaudible]
1:10:42
for the legitimate son.
1:10:44
So when he was dying, he asked for women or women
1:10:47
to be brought to comfort him.
1:10:50
So the point is that you can see the powers that be,
1:10:54
once again, not only ignoring someone like Richard,
1:10:57
but they've turned him into the exact opposite.
1:10:59
They've really turned him into some contemptible thing
1:11:02
that's not heroic, that's not worth looking up to.
1:11:05
He's a bad Christian, of course, 'cause he was violent.
1:11:08
And that applies to really all of them in the book.
1:11:11
And I talk about that at greater length
1:11:13
'cause I think it's important to understand
1:11:15
how they were seen compared to how they're seen today.
1:11:17
- Well, Raymond, I guess we can all look forward
1:11:20
to the Netflix series made about Richard
1:11:23
where he's gonna be a black lesbian.
1:11:25
And so I'm very, very excited about that.
1:11:28
Netflix always does great with that.
1:11:29
But I feel a little bit cheapish bringing this up here
1:11:32
at the end because it's such an important topic.
1:11:34
But as with most of our conversation today, Raymond,
1:11:37
every single question could have been like a series
1:11:39
of podcasts, but you did a work back in 2013
1:11:42
called Crucified Again, Exposed Islam's New War,
1:11:46
or Exposing Islam's New War on Christians.
1:11:49
And so this book details the, not just oppression,
1:11:53
but the systematic oppression and murder
1:11:55
of Christians all over the Muslim world.
1:11:58
And this is not talked about ever.
1:12:00
It's not just not talked about enough.
1:12:01
It's not talked about ever.
1:12:03
Here recently in Nigeria, there was the systematic killing
1:12:07
of Christian villagers by Muslims.
1:12:09
Why did they do that?
1:12:11
Because they were Christians.
1:12:12
That's why these people needed to die
1:12:14
because they were Christ followers.
1:12:16
And again, the West were kind of lulled to sleep.
1:12:18
I live in Oklahoma.
1:12:19
If I trip and fall, I'm gonna land
1:12:21
on three different churches, right?
1:12:23
You know, that's just basically the world that I live in.
1:12:26
But when you go to places like Nigeria, or Eritrea,
1:12:30
or North Korea, or Syria, or China, or any of these places
1:12:35
where being a Christian actually costs you something
1:12:38
and it might be your head.
1:12:40
We can't even fathom what this looks like,
1:12:42
but the overwhelming majority of violence perpetrated
1:12:45
against Christians because they are Christians
1:12:48
on this planet comes from Muslims.
1:12:50
And no one is talking about it.
1:12:52
Now, obviously, it's for the reasons
1:12:55
that we talked about earlier,
1:12:57
which is we don't wanna [inaudible] off the Muslims
1:12:58
and you don't really understand.
1:13:00
But at some point, Raymond, I feel like we just need
1:13:02
to take these Muslims at their word,
1:13:04
that the reason they're killing these people
1:13:06
is because they're Christians.
1:13:08
The reason they hate us is because they hate us.
1:13:10
It's not because of our foreign policy.
1:13:12
It's not because we didn't give enough aid
1:13:14
to a particular country at a particular time.
1:13:16
It's because they've been bred to hate us and they do.
1:13:20
So you detailed in the book what's going on,
1:13:23
give us an idea of what this looks like
1:13:25
and what, if anything, we're able to do about it.
1:13:28
- Yeah, the twin topic that I focus on,
1:13:32
aside from history of Islam and Christianity,
1:13:34
is the modern day persecution of Christians,
1:13:37
which I still follow.
1:13:38
I write a report about it every month.
1:13:39
That's how many there are.
1:13:42
There's usually one or two dozen anecdotes
1:13:45
of extreme savage violence against Christians.
1:13:47
Again, just by Muslims, even though it's happening
1:13:50
in other countries, civilizations, as well.
1:13:54
Your point about being in the West
1:13:56
and following over churches and not understanding,
1:13:58
this is again part of an aspect of how we're very,
1:14:02
we live in a bubble.
1:14:03
We don't know the real world, okay?
1:14:05
A report just came out recently from Open Doors,
1:14:07
which is a reputable international
1:14:09
and human rights organization.
1:14:10
And it documents that there's 385 Christians
1:14:13
around the world who are being persecuted as we speak.
1:14:16
That sounds like a story you might hear on the news, right?
1:14:18
385 million.
1:14:20
What you mentioned in Nigeria,
1:14:21
that's just the tip of the iceberg.
1:14:23
People got wind of it 'cause it happened on Christmas Day,
1:14:27
something like 100 Christians were slaughtered.
1:14:30
- Yeah, it was over in the same old days,
1:14:32
right around Christmas.
1:14:34
- But that's the daily thing.
1:14:35
Like I said, I've been following it for years.
1:14:38
That's been going on every month in Nigeria,
1:14:40
maybe a couple of hundred Christians are slaughtered or burned alive
1:14:43
by Muslims screaming jihad.
1:14:45
And as you said, yeah, the entire conflict
1:14:47
is the religious aspect.
1:14:49
And when it gets really bad
1:14:51
and the mainstream media gains to talk about it,
1:14:55
the religious aspect is completely gone.
1:14:57
So they talk about tribesmen who are being driven
1:15:01
by climate change onto the lands of farmers who are Christians.
1:15:05
And that's why they're fighting and killing each other.
1:15:08
And again, it's total complete nonsense.
1:15:11
Which, and why?
1:15:13
Because you said we don't want to offend the Muslims.
1:15:15
I think more, it's more important that it's the narrative.
1:15:18
Christians are the evil guys.
1:15:20
They are never victims.
1:15:21
And the Muslims are the good guys, all right?
1:15:24
But I'll give you a final quick example.
1:15:25
- Well, before your example,
1:15:27
it's even dumber than that, Raymond.
1:15:29
It's that Christians are the white ones
1:15:31
and the Muslims are the brown ones.
1:15:33
Even though people like, look at this situation in Nigeria.
1:15:36
It is very dark and collected.
1:15:39
Black people, killing very dark and collected.
1:15:40
Black people has nothing to do with the level of melanin
1:15:43
in their skin, it has to do with the ideology
1:15:44
that is driving their hands.
1:15:46
But go ahead.
1:15:46
- Well, and that's a good point because,
1:15:49
and I often discuss this, you know,
1:15:50
like the cops in Egypt are persecuted,
1:15:53
the Assyrians in Iraq and Syria and all in Indonesia.
1:15:57
And those, if you look at them,
1:15:59
they're no different than their Muslim counterparts.
1:16:01
You can't tell them apart except for their religion.
1:16:03
They see the same language, have the same names often,
1:16:06
live in the same culture
1:16:07
and they're being attacked and killed.
1:16:08
That really underscores that the reason is
1:16:11
they're of religious identity.
1:16:12
There's nothing else.
1:16:13
It's not a territorial dispute.
1:16:14
It's not a grievance.
1:16:15
As we're often told, it's just that they are Christian infinels.
1:16:19
And, I don't know, there was so much,
1:16:22
I don't know what I was gonna say.
1:16:23
Oh, I was gonna give you an example.
1:16:25
Oh, yeah, we can cap it off to this final example.
1:16:28
So as you recall in 2019, I think March 15th,
1:16:33
an Australian man entered into two mosques in New Zealand
1:16:35
and shot them up until 51 worse first.
1:16:38
Clearly a bad thing.
1:16:41
And the world stood up and condemned it, rightfully so.
1:16:44
And we heard so much about it, how horrible it is
1:16:48
to the point that the UN designated March 15th,
1:16:51
the date of this attack as combat Islamophobia date.
1:16:56
Now, here's a problem with that.
1:16:58
And I wrote an article where I did a study
1:17:01
and right around the same time that that one attack happens.
1:17:05
And I don't remember an attack before or after it.
1:17:07
So it's pretty singular, something like, I don't know,
1:17:11
a dozen attacks on churches, five Muslims,
1:17:14
where if you kind of, when you add them all up,
1:17:16
it was a thought that 1,000 Christians were killed.
1:17:18
And this was in different countries,
1:17:20
different nationalities were involved,
1:17:22
which does underscore something endemic.
1:17:26
This isn't just an aberration,
1:17:27
it happened in various countries, different cultures.
1:17:30
If you say this country has that, that grievance,
1:17:33
well, that one does it, so why are they all attacking
1:17:36
burning churches?
1:17:37
And yet, you don't hear about it in the news.
1:17:39
And where's our, you know, combat anti-Christian day,
1:17:42
or combat Christian, why didn't the UN declare something?
1:17:46
I mean, this is 20 times the number of dead Christians.
1:17:50
So that's, I think that really helps you understand
1:17:53
what's going on.
1:17:54
This topic, Christians are not supposed to learn
1:17:57
know about this, let them live in their La La Land
1:17:59
in the West, where they think everything's fine,
1:18:02
while the rest of the Christians, outside,
1:18:04
are being persecuted in ways that are, you know,
1:18:07
just like the early Roman persecution.
1:18:10
So it's not different, and it's happening,
1:18:12
and again, it's mostly in the Muslim world.
1:18:14
So that report that came out about 385 million
1:18:17
Christians being persecuted, it lists the top 50,
1:18:21
and something like 38, I counted them are Muslim, okay?
1:18:24
So it was just like almost 80%.
1:18:26
So you can say almost like 80% of the persecution
1:18:28
is being done at the hands of Muslims.
1:18:31
So, and that's why, you know, to be honest with you,
1:18:33
that's another reason I find the writing about history
1:18:35
refreshing, because I'm so tired of writing
1:18:38
about Christians that are getting trampled on
1:18:40
in the modern era, and I do enjoy reading and writing
1:18:42
about Christians in the past, who actually fought back
1:18:45
and did something about it.
1:18:46
- When I think the one thing is guaranteed,
1:18:49
if you're a Christian in this world,
1:18:51
you're not guaranteed an easy life,
1:18:52
actually it's quite the contrary.
1:18:54
Persecution is coming your way.
1:18:56
Now in America, persecution might be,
1:18:58
you get an Instagram jail because you shared a scripture
1:19:00
over the top of, you know, somebody's LGBTQ post, right?
1:19:04
That's our level of persecution.
1:19:06
But it's good for us to understand
1:19:07
as Christians here in the West, here in America,
1:19:09
in relatively safe environments as of right now,
1:19:12
to know that there are other people
1:19:13
that are sacrificing way more,
1:19:15
because they are risking their lives
1:19:17
and lives of everyone in their family,
1:19:18
because they have a copy of the Gospel of John
1:19:21
hidden in a place in their house,
1:19:22
and if it's found, they're gonna kill them all in the streets
1:19:25
as an example to everyone else around them
1:19:27
that don't you believe in this Christianity stuff again?
1:19:29
But the Holy Spirit will not be denied.
1:19:32
God will not be denied.
1:19:33
So many Muslims have been converted to faith in Christ
1:19:36
through their dreams.
1:19:37
And so it's not a missionary going over there
1:19:40
and handing them a sandwich
1:19:41
and giving them a bottle of water.
1:19:43
It's Jesus coming to them in their dreams.
1:19:45
And so it's just undeniable.
1:19:46
But Raymond, I've really enjoyed this conversation.
1:19:48
I really enjoyed digging into your work
1:19:50
over the last several weeks.
1:19:51
But that's all for me.
1:19:52
Is there anything else you wanna get off your chest?
1:19:55
- Yeah, actually one little,
1:19:56
since we're talking about defenders of the West
1:19:57
and since some of your viewers might wanna get it,
1:20:00
it actually sold out recently,
1:20:02
all over the place, including on Amazon.
1:20:04
And but if you go on Amazon,
1:20:06
there's a copy being sold for like $50,
1:20:08
which is not even a publisher.
1:20:09
It's like a second seller.
1:20:11
I recommend anyone wants to just wait a little bit
1:20:13
and the hard cover or another version,
1:20:16
a much cheaper version,
1:20:18
should be available, hopefully in a few days.
1:20:20
- Okay, and that would also be through their Amazon link.
1:20:23
It'll just be like a different source.
1:20:25
- Yeah, if you go now,
1:20:27
it's a different source that's not the publisher
1:20:29
and it's exorbitantly priced, like $50.
1:20:32
- Yeah, I think it's $50.
1:20:33
- Usually it sells for,
1:20:33
yeah, usually it sells for like 20-something.
1:20:36
And then it is from the publishers,
1:20:37
the authoritative version.
1:20:38
So just, it'll be clear,
1:20:41
'cause even if you go now that this non-authoritative version,
1:20:45
it's not being sold through Prime,
1:20:46
it's kind of like even hard to get it.
1:20:48
But it'll be, so just give it a few days,
1:20:51
I think, and it should be fine.
1:20:53
- I think by the time this comes out,
1:20:54
it should be squared away.
1:20:55
So guys, if you're going into the show notes,
1:20:57
which I highly recommend that you do for the Amazon link,
1:21:00
make sure it's got the Prime click,
1:21:02
make sure it's like $26.99 or whatever it says on here.
1:21:05
I can't even see it.
1:21:05
But anyway, really enjoy the time.
1:21:07
Raymond Eberham, thank you for coming on
1:21:09
on Don't To The Life of Man's podcast.
1:21:11
- Happy to do it Kyle, thanks for having me on.
1:21:14
- There you go, guys.
1:21:15
I hope you enjoyed my time with Raymond Eberham.
1:21:16
But before I let you go,
1:21:17
we are gonna do a quick resilience boost.
1:21:19
Add on Don To The Life for Mission is equipping men
1:21:21
to push back darkness with content
1:21:22
that forges spiritual, mental, and physical resilience.
1:21:25
So the two links I've got for you today,
1:21:26
as I've got Amazon links to Sword and Symmetor
1:21:29
and Defenders of the West.
1:21:30
And guys, by now, I know you mentioned at the end there
1:21:33
that the Amazon link was all messed up
1:21:34
and it was being sold by a different seller.
1:21:36
That should be all fixed now,
1:21:37
but I definitely think it's well worth your time
1:21:39
to go and pick up both books.
1:21:40
You can do that here in the show notes.
1:21:42
- Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode.
1:21:44
Wherever you're listening to this,
1:21:45
please subscribe, rate, and leave us a positive
1:21:47
five-star review.
1:21:48
If you want to come speak live at your event
1:21:50
or on your podcast,
1:21:51
just shoot me an email to info@undonton.life.
1:21:54
That's I-N-F-O @undonton.life.
1:21:56
Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook
1:21:58
and check out our website for everything else,
1:22:00
including how to donate to keep more content
1:22:01
like this coming your way.
1:22:03
Just go to www.undonton.life
1:22:05
and also we want to thank the band Holy Name
1:22:07
for allowing us to use their music for our content.
1:22:10
The music on this podcast is our song Perpetua,
1:22:12
which is off their self-titled debut album
1:22:14
on Face Down Records.
1:22:16
The links are in the description.
1:22:18
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
1:22:19
Remember, keep pushing back darkness,
1:22:22
keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical resilience,
1:22:25
keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:22:28
(upbeat music)