Victor Davis Hanson: Raymond Ibrahim, Islamic History, and Western Decline

He had a long prison record and that ended up with four months of riot and mayhem and death, two billion dollars. And here in Britain, this person was perfectly innocent. He was a student. He had no record at all. He was just walking by. It's the most disturbing because we've always had closest ties with the British and they were always commonsense of all. And they supposedly didn't indulge in arc streams and wild swings back on the political spectrum. But they have been more unstable and more nihilistic and suicidal than even we have. And I guess what you're saying is the man's natural fallen character is to satisfy these appetites of violence, women, etc. In 72 virgins, we're seeing people who are openly championing Islam over Israel. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for our podcast, Victor Davis Hansen and his own words. Today, Sammy Wink and Jack Fowler, as is their want, are not with me because we're doing an interview. And I'm interviewing an old friend of 30 years who was once a student, Raymond Abraham. I think you all have known him. He's written three seminal books, controversial, not on the content only on the atmosphere in which we have to write because their theme, defending the West or two swords of Christ or a sword and cemetery is an honest empirical look at the historic rivalry, fight tensions between Islam and the West. This is very, very timely right now because we're seeing the new the Democratic Party morph into an Islamist socialist party. And just when we thought conservatives were an antithesis to that, we're seeing people who are openly championing Islam over Israel. And I'm not trying to be in, you know, character assassination, but we have people like Candace Owens and Tucker who really do believe that Israel is a cheap problem in the Middle East and that the Islamic countries are autocratic, though they be, they're the victims. And we're going to get right back to the show with Ray, but we're going to take a break. If you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show, The Tony Kennett Cast, the same common sense perspectives you love weekdays at 7 p.m. Eastern. And unlike some of the other evening shows, we work up until showtime to bring you the latest breaking news, analysis and good old American sarcasm. Tom Tillis, I'm pretty sure might have been useful at one time as a doorstop, find the Tony Kennett Cast on YouTube, X, radio, TV, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So Ray, I think I first had you as a student, correct me, was it 1991 or something? What year was it? Yeah, it was in the late 90s, actually. I graduated high school in 91, but it was around maybe 96 or 7. Okay, 96. So yeah, about 30 years. Yeah. Yes. And just for you know, Ray was what, Mr. LA County for a while? Yeah, I won the Mr. Los Angeles Bodybuilding Champion some years before that as a teenager. And yeah, I was into the weightlifting. And you may know him because he discovered while he was working in the National Library or Archives, Library of Congress. Library of Congress, yeah. And he found a manuscript in Arabic, of course, and Ray's fluent in Arabic about the ideology of al-Qaeda and he published with the Free Press the Ben Laden reader. I wrote the introduction. It was very good. Yes. Yes. And he's written a series of books and I thought we'd have him on today. And Ray, just tell us basically what's the common theme in your work the last 15 to 20 years? Well, really, it's been looking closely at Islam and particularly its relationship vis-a-vis the West from historical to a contemporary perspective, mostly historical. I think that's the work that I bring forward that most people are unaware of. And what you see is basically unequivocal hostility and animosity from Islam, from day one, from its inception essentially, right at the death of Muhammad in 632. By 634, it's consolidated under all the Arabs, under Islam. By 635, they're waging war on all their neighbors, meaning the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantines, the Sassanid Persians. And from the date of Muhammad's death, 632 to 732, one century, they've conquered that massive swathe of land that used to be part of the Christian world, basically the Middle East, all of those Middle Eastern countries known as Greater North Africa. Syria at the time, all of North Africa, Egypt to Morocco, conquered Spain, and 732, now they're in the middle of France at the Battle of Tours. So that's just the first century. Why do you think it was at the ecumenical message that it said that you can be of any race or any national origin, but you're in the world of Islam? Was it because it didn't have class distinction? Why was it able to spread almost as fast, if not faster, than Christianity had six centuries earlier? Yeah. Well, I think the way it was articulated, it was Muhammad, and this is what a lot of the early European analysts and who are essentially mostly were theologians, how they analyze his message. It was a very carnal message for carnal men, and it basically gave men whatever they want. And so you often find tribal peoples gravitated towards and became Muslim, beginning with the Arabs, later the Berbers in North Africa, later the Turks, and then later some Mongol groups, the Tatars, all took to Islam because Islam, the way he, as I say, the genius of Muhammad is that he basically rearticulated tribalism, which is what all those groups were part of, in a theological paradigm. So now the other who exists for me to attack, plunder, subjugate, and do all that is no longer just a tribal other, he's the other by religion. So you have the House of Islam, the Ummah, versus the rest of the world. And now the tribal person who already existed and could kill, plunder, and subjugate, it's a win-win because he still gets to do that and feel pious. And if he dies, he even gets all that stuff in heaven because it's a very carnal heaven, it's sexual, it's full of rivers of wine and food. So that's what I think really helped win a lot of adherence to it. It's funny, it's antithetical to the message of the Sermon on the Mount, blessed are the meek and turn the other cheek. And I guess what you're saying is the natural, man's natural fallen character is to satisfy these appetites of violence, women, etc., and 72 virgins. I'm reminded there's a Byzantine chronicler that said on Black Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the incentives for the Sultan's army on the last gas to go over the Theodes and walls was 72 virgins and the thinned out defenders, which were now down to about 7 or 8,000, they had to have take penance for killing alive. That's a very different incentive if the defenders have to apologize to God and ask for his mercy to use violence to save Byzantium where the attackers are promised 72 virgins if they can break through and kill everybody. And that's what, what do you, let me just shift gears a second. Did it surprise you, given you spent 30 years writing these books and trying to explain to the general public that there is a historical basis for contemporary Islamic antagonism to the West in general and to Christendom in particular? And yet in the postmodern, I don't know, left wing dominated progressive West, was it surprising to see people on the left now? We see Mondami, we see Ilyan Omar, we just, this El Said may win the Senate Democratic nomination in Michigan. The blind sheik who engineered the First World Trade Center, his associate has just won the Democratic primary for Congress. And then when we look to conservatives to critique that, there's a, not a large group, but Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, even Megan Kelly recently kind of recanted what she had said earlier, her suspicions about Islam and kind of transmogrified into being more worried about Israel. What is about, I thought that after 9-11 and Fort Hood and San Bernardino and the Sarnab brothers that everybody had pretty much reached a consensus that Islam hates the West and you have to be very careful about immigration policy. But something has happened, is that the money going to the universities from these Islamic rich Gulf states, is it the demonization of Israel or why are young people and people on the right and left now, after October 7th, to take one example, you would think that would give more empathy toward the Israelis losing 1200 people on that on provoked slaughter, but it actually brought out pro-Islamic anti-Semitic tropes all across our campuses. Yeah. Yeah. This is an interesting phenomena that I've actually been closely following and I actually find it very amazing because it's, the analogy I give is a seesaw, you know, like two children on the seesaw. And on the seesaw is Israel and Islam, which is really bizarre, because one is a nation that's finite, that came into being less than a century ago, and the other is a religion. And whichever one is down, let's say, is, you know, it's its down point, it's being criticized in the case of Israel. Israel now is being criticized. The other one must go up. And so now Islam is being venerated, is being exonerated by all the same people who, as you mentioned earlier, were suspicious or critical about it. And I find that really bizarre because you can say whatever you want about Israel from a political point of view, but Islam has always been, as I just indicated earlier, from a historical point of view. For 1200 years before Israel existed, Islam was an existential enemy against the West. This is just demonstrable easily from a historical point of view. And it's still the case today. If you look at, as I closely follow also the persecution of Christian minorities, well, that's happening precisely, primarily in the Islamic world, overwhelmingly. And so it's unfortunate that on the one hand, if people want to be critical about, you know, policy and Israel, I think that's legit. But to transform that into somehow exonerating Islam, and now I have to side with Muslims, because I'm critical against Islam is so dangerous. It's so, you know, yeah, it's a real. I don't understand it because Muslim Turks have illegally occupied Turkey since 1973 and ethnically cleansed the whole northern section of the island. And about a week before October 7 of 2023, Turkish people in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, that area of the world ethnically cleansed 150,000 Armenian Christians and desecrated their church. And we know what's going on in Nigeria. But it's always Israel, Israel, Israel, which I think is the definition of an anti-Semite is when you accuse Israel of a particular alleged offense or crime, sin. And yet there's far greater examples elsewhere, but you choose just to focus on the Jews. If I can elaborate on this. So let's look at the person of Tucker Carlson, actually, and he does this often. So, you know, he'll criticize Israel and let's talk about Christians. And he'll mention some of the, you know, stuff that's happened, like the smashing of the Jesus or the spitting, which a lot of people are mentioning. And it is a fact. And I think that is something worth talking about. It's real. We should know about it. But then, you know, he makes that sound like the look at how Israel is very anti-Christian. And then on the other hand, he gets up and he defends Islam repeatedly. He talks well about Qatar. He goes to Saudi Arabia, gets up on stage and says, wow, I feel great as a Christian. Well, guess what? Those countries, Saudi Arabia, if you build a church, they'll destroy it. If they find you in your house quietly praying or having, you know, if you're like worshiping for Christmas or new years, they'll arrest you. And the other countries, Iran, same thing, Afghanistan, I mentioned to you, you know, the persecution of Christians, there's an, there's this organization open doors and it produces annually what's called the World Watch List, which is the 50 worst nations to be a Christian and the 50 most persecuting nations. If you look at that list, and I do all the time every year, something like 37 to 38 of those nations are Muslim. And if you look at the top 13 extreme persecutors, that means the nations that are actually, if they find out you're Christian, you can just be killed on the spot. Those, about 11 of those are Muslim. So I really find it really hypocritical for him, it's not hypocritical for him to point out as a journalist things happening in Israel, but it's hypocritical then to be, to exonerate Islam, the entire religion, and to act like, oh yeah, it's, I look, I'm a Christian, Saudi Arabia, I feel great. Well, yeah, I'm sure because it's you and they're treating you specifically well, but it's pretty horrific for Christians all throughout the Islamic world. Yeah, I had the same experience. I went on Piers Morgan not too long ago with a American, and you probably know him, he's a kind of an apologist for Islam, and he is a professor at the UAE, in the UAE. And they were trying to tell me that Israel was not a democratic society. And so when you used to point it out very politely to them, that in Israel, anybody who's a non-Jew, a Christian Muslim can have a mosque, they can have a church, you can see them all over, 21% of the population is Muslim, and then there's another 180,000 Christians who have fled from the West Bank. But when you go to the Gulf States, or really any of the Islamic, you have to have a concession if you're a Christian worker or businessman in a non-clave that's sealed off. So I was trying to explain that, and I guess I didn't get across that message to Piers Morgan, because he said, well, when I go and broadcast the Middle East, I'm treated well. And I said, you're treated well because you're a celebrity, and you say things that are congruent to your host, but why don't you do this, both of you, I said to the two people. Why don't you have a Muslim on your show and say, this is a historical first. I'm in such a tolerant liberal society that this guesstamine is going to renounce Islam and be an apostate and accept Christianity. And what would happen to you? I would suggest that he would be killed or imprisoned, and you would be on the air for about 10 seconds. And if that didn't satisfy your curiosity, why don't you then have somebody, when you're in Gadar, when you're in Saudi, when you're in Kuwait, when you're in the, say, I've been living in this society and we bring in all these indentured workers, so to speak, we don't treat them too bad. But I was thinking I didn't have a vote about that. We don't vote. So I think that our monarchy here, where I'm speaking in the UAE or Kuwait, should resemble the British one, ceremonial, and we'll have a democratic society. And I ask him, what would happen if you did that, and why don't you do it? And he just said, you have a point. That was all he said. If I can add to that, the thing about these people is it's ridiculous that they don't understand that these Muslim countries are obviously going to treat them like royalty for strategic purposes, for propagandistic purposes. So I'm surprised they can see that. But I think the ultimate point that you're getting at, which I agree, is human nature is human nature, and you can have bad and tolerant people in all guises. The difference is in Israel, yeah, you're allowed to be a Christian on paper, and you're given equal rights. Whereas in these countries, you're not even given that. No, you're not. So officially, you're not given equal rights. Ray, you're speaking to us today from Hungary at the Danube Institute. Tell us a little bit, particularly about what the Institute is and what you're researching there, and what you're doing. And then, given your research, which kind of privileges Eastern Europeans, in many of your books, they heroically in Poland and Hungary, they resisted the onslaught of Ottoman Islam. And do you find a different view of Islam in Eastern Europe than, say, you in the United States or in Western Europe in particular? Yeah, absolutely. This is in fact one of the main reasons that I came here and why there was a synergy between me and the Danube Institute here in Budapest. It's a great think tank, and they're very much... I don't think that we'd even consider it, call themselves conservative, centrist conservative, maybe, and they have all sorts of different fellows that work on different aspects. Mine, the reason I came here is because I do write a lot about Eastern Europe and Central Europe's long war with Islam, past and present, and Hungary, especially interested me because of Viktor Orban and his policies, because he actually would regularly invoke history to justify his stance against mass Muslim migration, which of course to me was very amazing because he was citing the continuity, which progressive politicians in Europe and America, of course, never do. So yeah, I've been here researching particularly these topics, the continuum between them and how, as you point out, a lot of people in these regions in Eastern and Central Europe, they just haven't fallen for the lies the way they have in Western Europe. And you can see the difference in the lifestyle. And now that I'm here in Europe, I've traveled around, including in Western Europe often, and in Britain, it's just amazing. I feel like it's part of the caliphates, part of the oma, certain areas that I go. You won't see that these Easter in Hungary or in Poland, as you mentioned. So yeah, it's interesting. And it really goes back to history because these countries that I just mentioned, Eastern and Central Europe, have a recent collective memory of what it means to live under Islam. It was only, it was literally in the 18th century. Sometimes in the 19th century, I mean, the Turkic genocide of Armenians and Assyrians in Greece was the culmination of it. But it's so you have it until the late 1800s, early 1900s, that these people were fighting and suffering at the hands of Muslims in the guise of the Ottoman Turks. So no matter what progressive nonsense has been pushed on, even Eastern Europe, that part is still kind of a red line that they still remember. Whereas in the West, you see what's happening and Islam, people keep telling me, and this is the irony, they keep saying, no, no, Muslims are invading in the UK, they're invading France, they're invading Germany. And I think people need to understand they're not invading, they're being invited. And that's, that's the world difference. Yes, they are 16 to 20%. Now, 20% are more in some of the cities, but I think Germany's over 16% France is about 12, 13%. Britain is gaining the most rapidly. It's, it's the most disturbing because we've always had closest ties with the British and they were always commonsensical and they supposedly didn't indulge in arc streams and wild swings back on the political spectrum, but they have been more unstable and more nihilistic and suicidal than even we have. And it's, and they clamped down on their own citizens, you know, when people, you know, the, the native Brits, when they protest and rightfully so. I mean, just recently a young man was stabbed to death or he was stabbed. Henry Noor. Yes. Right. Yeah. He was stabbed and the police, you know, they handcuffed him because they were more concerned that the stabber accused the guy he stabbed of calling him a racist slur or something. Dick Wall was his name and it was funny because as most people know, Britain has strict weapons laws and it's against the law to have a knife over five inches. He had an eight inch knife and he was given an exemption because it was supposedly a Sikh. Ceremony. Yeah. And he used that to stab Henry Norwalk repeatedly and then his whole family were very wise to the self-hatred of the West because the brother then called the police and said his brother had been attacked by a racist. That set off buttons and so the police came in the meantime, the mother and the family had taken the knife and hit it so they would not have the incriminating and then when you see the tape, it's almost makes you vomit because he says he has a little wound and they can't even see it on his eye. Meanwhile, Henry's on the ground bleeding out 61 minutes and then they said, well, he would have died anyway, no matter what. No, he would know. And you know what happened with George Floyd in the United States and he was in the process of committing a felony of counterfeit trafficking. He was on, fell on the sleeve, attacking the police. He would resist arrest. He was under the influence. He had a long prison record and that ended up with four months of riot and mayhem and death, $2 billion. And here in Britain, this person was perfectly innocent. He was a student. He had no record at all. He was just walking by and it really shows you what the diversity, equity, inclusion, exemption does. It allows people expands their limits of behavior, of on toward behavior, allows them to do things because they can always fall back on racism, which leads me to a question. Do you feel that in Europe in general or maybe in the United States, we've reached kind of DEI maximum? Trump has said he's by FIA, has outlawed it, but seems to me that here in California, we had an election, the results are not in. We're all worried because we know how California balloting law works. The winner is usually determined three or four weeks later when the mail-in ballots mysteriously appear, but Spencer Pratt seems to be in the runoff and so does Steve Hilton in California. It seems to me that there's people saying what can't go on won't go on and DEI is so destructive, both it's commission and omission. It's an anti-merocratic. It gives people a blank check to behave badly and then fall back on their race or superficial. I think it's peaking and that is, I think it's peaking. I was going to ask you in that context, do you still get people who, I mean, when you travel, do you have to be careful, especially about people who know, do people know of you in the Islamic world and that you get a lot? I know you get a lot of hate mail and criticism, but when you're traveling, do you have problems at all in Europe? Yeah, this is one of the reasons I don't, where I'm at and hungry, I don't know, I don't, but this, when I went to Britain, yeah, it's a little, it could be a little spooky. Some of those places, I feel literally like I'm in a small Muslim village or town, I mean, where, but to your greater point about what's happening in the United States, I think what I hope Americans end up doing is look to Europe as an example of where they may end up, okay, as a warning, because America is definitely on the same trajectory. This, I know, this DEI identity politics, that's what got that young man killed in Britain because they were more interested or more, you know, up in arms about words that may have come out of his mouth, as opposed to the fact that someone stabbed him. So that mentality, this identity, you know, you're guilty or innocent based on your race. I mean, that's essentially what this has become, right? Which we thought, we thought we left that behind. All that's happened is it's been reversed. And so I do hope people, that's why I said the only good news about Europe is it's good news for other people to look at it. I think a place like Britain is really far gone right now, because even the government itself is just doubling down. It's so openly, you know, catering to Muslims and migrants just to get their votes. And there is an official alliance between, you know, these extreme liberals and leftists who you would think want nothing to do with draconian Islam and Muslims. And it's, you know, it's an alliance of convenience because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And they're all trying to take down just like traditional European civilization. Yeah, I think the class system accentuates it. It really is valuable to go back and read Dickens. And you can get the hatred of the upper classes for poor white Britons. Those are novels from 1840, 1855 or so. And you can really see that one of the subtext of what's going on in Britain is all of these Oxbridge intellectuals and the media law, especially academic, the world, the bureaucracy, corporate world, the politicians, they all have the proper British credentials, accent, dress, attire. And they really seem to hate their version of the deplorables, the chumps, the clingers. And they're really putting them in jail sometimes for expressing a contrary opinion on social media. And it's accentuated because they have that class hatred. We have a little bit of that, but not like the British. And they've melded or melded with this Islamist, socialist new party. And it's really strange because socialism is supposed to be for the emancipation of women. And it's supposed to be tolerant of the weak, it's social welfare, and yet they're aligned themselves, transgendered people, gay people, they're aligned themselves with people who demonstrably hate them by their, just by the virtue of their religion. And I don't think it's going to work. The only way to stop this is for everybody to speak out against the anti-Semitism, the Islamist-ism, and then they have to be defeated repeatedly at the polls. And they have to go through the wilderness years that, you know, the McGovern years. So they lost in 68, they lost in 72. They didn't get back till Carter. And they only got back because he had a Southern accent, but then they lost another 12 years under Reagan and Bush. And that kind of killed it for a while, the hard left. But then it came back under Obama and the hatred of Trump. And it's back again. And it's quite amazing. I had some other questions. Tell the audience, Raymond, your family came, were Coptic Christians in Cairo, or just Egypt, or was they living in Cairo? Alexandria. Alexandria. And then what year did they emigrate to the United States? It was before I was born. It was, I think, in the late 16th, late 16th, very early 70s. And that was a perception that things were getting worse and worse for the Christian community. And it's interesting, I can tell you the things that they told me. So when they left, yes, one of the main reasons was the persecution wasn't in Egypt the way it is now, which is ironic. It actually has gotten worse. But it was more discreet. It was just the usual entrenched discrimination. So you're not going to get the better job, no matter how educated you are, that sort of thing. But it's interesting because my mom, who passed away a few years ago, would often tell me, you know, like, well, another reason that she wanted to come is she was under the assumption that America was a Christian country. And but then in latter years, like a few years ago, sometime before she died, she would just like very disappointed and tell me because she would see women in hijabs living in where she lives, which never had that before. And she's like, man, I can't escape these people. They chased me even here. So she basically just, you know, she lived to see the transformation of America. And she just, it would always boggle her mind, you know, and she'd be like, why don't these people understand? Why are they, you know, why are they bringing them in? Why are they not just bringing them in but appeasing them and giving them everything they want? What's your reaction when you go back to Alexandria or Cairo? Do you see you have relatives, you still know there? Or do you people, you talk, or you've treated friendly or do you have you only been on the circuit? I don't go there. I mean, it's been over 20, 25 years, but I do. Yeah, I stay in touch with some people, family, friends. Yeah. Yeah. And it's the Muslim Brotherhood has a very, very active, I mean, that's its home. That's where it was born, Egypt. And it's, you know, it's well entrenched in Egypt, not a place that I'd want to willingly go to. It's kind of strange because when they removed Morsi, which Obama had backed as an Islamist, and then Cece came in, there were moments when you thought he was going to be sort of a secular military autocrat and be fit, but he's getting more and more Islamist as you see, more and more and more. He's giving it, he's kind of like Erdogan. He's, yeah. And I really do think Erdogan is the most dangerous of all leaders because Turkey's a member of NATO and it has access. We have about, I think we had at 1.50 nuclear weapons at Isselurk Air Force Base, we still, and then when they had that supposed coup, he announced that he felt that he had de facto ownership of those, and he would prevent us from removing them. But I don't think, I think that we have been removing them stealthily ever since. To really understand, to get an idea about, sorry if I cut you off. Go ahead. Go ahead. I thought you were gonna, you were done with Turkey, but I want to say something about Erdogan, which you will appreciate this, and it really underscores the intellectual mental difference between Western people, Americans, and Muslims, and Turks in particular. As you know, May 29th, you referenced it just past, and that's the fall of Constantinople in 1453. And here in America, it's like, you can't, if you have a monument to George Washington, even Abraham Lincoln, they get attacked, they get vandalized because they're racist, they're horrible people, and Americans in general always taught their history is just full of genocide and evil. Okay, so in May 29th, this is, as you know, the fall of Constantinople because it was in the 15th century, we have a lot of records of what went down, including I witnessed testimony. A lot of them. And it is horrific. And I cover it in chapter 7 of Sordin's Cemetery. It's very long, and it's just one long, you know, mass massacre, bloodbath, rape, rape of women, children, men, men forcing, engaging, yeah, everything you'd imagine putting women on the Hagia Sophia altar and systematically raping them with a cross under their head, like really, really graphic stuff, and the Turks know this, and they celebrate that day as this magnificent day fireworks. And so this just, you know, and why did the Turks conquer Constantinople? Well, because it was Christian, and it didn't submit to Islam. And they know that. And here they're celebrating it openly. And so that really, I think, underscores the difference in the mentality of the Muslim. I first went to Turkey in 1973, and it was under a military secular. The young Turks of the 1918 revolution. And it was a good, they, they, they discouraged, if not outlawed, the Fez. They were the ones that introduced the Western alphabet for their language for Turkey. But Hagia Sophia, it wasn't in great shape, but it was declared a UN national world site. And it had been that, and then Erdogan expropriated it. Transcendental mosque, yeah. Yes. And I was there about 10 years ago, giving a lecture, and I started lecturing on the Armenian architect of it in 535, and how they had built it, basically, with, within 20 years, the dome collapse that we placed it, and it stood there for a thousand years, and my minder interrupted me, the Turkish guy, from the archaeological service. But he was really an observant from the government intelligence, and he said, that's it, stop. And I said, what did I say? He said, you said that Islam slapped four minarets on it, and that, and added, and this, these were added later to show people that this was now a mosque. I said, well, that's a matter of, it's a banal fact. He said, no, it's not a banal fact. The, this was a poorly designed church, and only Muslim architects could save it. So the minarets are actually flying buttress, so then I made the mistake of saying, so you're telling me this was built in 535, 538, and it lasted for a thousand years almost, and then without any problem, and then you came in and thought that the minarets would save it from collapse that had never occurred in a millennium. Is that what you're telling me? It was very funny. And he even started laughing when I said that, but it's, it's very... Yeah, it is. It's, they're very touchy about real history, you know. Yeah, it's very, there's a lot of moving accounts. They're in Italian, they're in Byzantine Greek, they're in Turkish, they're in Arabic, but the accounts of the last days are just tragic to read about, because it was not a done, everybody thinks it was, because of the fertility problem, the depopulation, it was a done deal, but they, they held out for two months, and they could have saved the city if things had gone a little bit differently, but the West didn't send them any aid. The Pope didn't, and Western Europe didn't, and that was the deciding factor. And then even sadder, people forget that Mestrah, the beautiful city in Greece, which was the provincial capital of the Byzantine Empire, was taken and destroyed about 15 years later, I think it was. And then everything up to the Black Sea, everybody was, it was completely, it's kind of ironic. Erdogan got very angry when people said this was Greek from, Greek Ionia, and when it was liberated from the Persians, it basically stayed Greek or Western until the 7th century AD. And then even then, the Byzantines, I'm talking about the Holy Land, but the Byzantines kept most of Asia Minor up to about 1400 in the city until 1453. So Erdogan got very angry, and he had a 23 and me study, you know, for 1500 random Turks to show everybody the DNA had always been Turkey. And he found out that about 85% of the people sampled had a majority of Greek DNA, and that they had, this was a nation of 20 million people, 20, 25 million at its nadir had once been 50 million, 60 million of the Eastern Empire. And so that was quite ironic, that he proved the opposite. And of course, he stopped the study and reviled it. And but it's worse than that, because if you really look at it and figure it out, the reason they have so much Greek blood is because the Greeks were sexually enslaved, this concubines. Yes, they were. And southern Russians too. Yes, Slavs and Russians and all these. So that's why the Turks are, this happened also, for example, they did a DNA study over the last Umayyad Caliph in Spain. And he was only 0.01% Arab. Because everybody should, that's a good point, because the Sultan married one of the women in the harem. And the favored women were European or southern Russian. So every Sultan, let's say at the beginning when this happened, was half, and then half of half of half and half of half and half. Generations of that, you know? Yes. And they were, and then there was a very sophisticated scholars study. I cited it in the end of everything where two scholars went and they tried to determine which cities and occupied Eastern Europe, particularly Greece, Albania, were given exemptions from the Ottomans, from taxation and the Dervish, so they didn't have to give their oldest son, you know, to the Janissaries, etc. And they found that almost in every case, in the particular time when the Turks conquered that city, if the city was the birthplace of the Sultan's mother, then Turkish foreign policy gave them exemptions. She was that influential. But people forget, you know, they talk about Sultan in morally equivalent terms of the Byzantines, but it was a policy when the Sultan married one of the women as the official wife. Not that he didn't have hundreds of concubines, but then she and the state behind her often wiped out, liquidated all the other ones and all the babies and everybody. It's not just that. The Ottoman Sultan himself, it was incumbent on him, it was Ottoman policy. When he became the Sultan, when his father died, he had to kill all his brothers and all their children and their wives, you know, and even if they said, no, no, I'll leave, no, they had to kill them. So yeah, that doesn't sound like there's a, you know, a Western correspondence to that, you know, where it's actually the law to do that. It's, you know, it's given that history, and then given our recent history, as I said earlier about 9-11, or the Boston Marathon bombers, or the Fort Hood, or the nightclub, or the killing of the two, the young couple at a Holocaust event, a museum, Jewish museum in Washington, or San Bernardino, you would think that there would be zero support in the United States for political candidates that openly sided with Islam. So, Elian Omar comes over here and her father worked for Said Berry, the genocidal dictator who probably killed a couple hundred thousand people in Somalia that during the wars of, you know, Somaliland broke away from Somalia, but they came over here, and most of the people in Minnesota had some connection with that horrific government, and she said that this was a trashy country, and she said that dictatorship here was worse, and yet she still gets, she's still a national politician. It's just unfathomable that anybody who disliked the United States, and this is in addition to the likely immigration fraud of marrying her brother to become a citizen, and it shows you that this therapeutic American culture, there's so, everybody is so worried about be calling Islamophobe or Bigot, and the people who are abusing the system know that, and that's why Henry Norwalk got killed in Britain. Yeah, same mentality. Yeah, and it's got to stop, but I don't know when it will. What are you working on now, Ray? What do you envision? Articles, books? Yeah, all of it. I started a sub-stack almost six months ago, which has been doing really well, and that's great. Where would people, where would they go to read you? And sub-stack, I think it's just my name at sub-stack. It should come out, and also I have that my YouTube channel, which is great fun. While I'm here in Budapest, I'm meeting people, interviewing people, so that's great and beneficial. As far as books, my main thing, which I'm very interested in, I'm still really pursuing the same topics, and one of them is actually very relevant to us today, is trying to understand the men I talk about in my books, Sword and Cemetery, Defenders of the West, Two Swords of Christ, were all Europeans, all Christians, and they did not in any way, shape, or form suffer from the maladies that they're descendants do. This sort of self-hatred, self-abnegation, just capitulating, and so, and they were also religious, which may be hard for some people to understand. They were also violent. So I want to do, I'm doing a deep dive to try to understand the mentality, the theology, the philosophy behind that, and how it can be resuscitated today, especially amongst Western people and Christians in general, who've taken this, I think a lot of the problems we're talking about actually are rooted in the way Christianity has manifested itself in recent times in the West and in America, which is this idea that to be a good Christian, I have to just be what I call a Dormat, Dormat Christian. You just capitulate, you never ever, you know, be confrontational, you give into everything, and you smile, and you know, that's what you got to do because, and so I want to, I'm trying somehow to remedy that mentality. It's funny because whether they're presidents or public officials, but those who have been overly apologetic to Islam, like Obama or Biden, they often incur greater hatred than people who, like Trump, for example, who, you know, he's not an Islamophobe by any means, but he can be tough with people, he doesn't really care with you what religious background, they have more respect for him. It's kind of, you remember in your Ben Lawden reader when Ben Lawden famously said that people respect the strong horse, and not the weak horse, and he was talking about human nature, he was right about that, unfortunately, but that's the way human nature is. And if we just continue to allow basically blanket immigration from the Islamic world, and I would look at the fertility rate of first generation Muslims in the United States, depending on the particular, whether they're from Pakistan or from the Arab world, or it's runs from 2.7 to 3.1. So they have larger families, they have enclaves, like Dearborn, Michigan, and they're not assimilating and integrating, culturing in a way that other groups are. And there has to be some, there has to be some knowledge of that on the part of our authorities that make immigration policy. Do you really want to bring a lot of people in from particular failed states whose religion or politics is antithetical to our own, and then not make an effort to apply the melting pot to them? In other words, to integrate them, to teach them with civic education, just let them have their own community. And then very quickly, they don't, their collective spokesman never really praise the United States and say, thank God I'm here and I can speak freely as I could not in Syria or Iraq or Morocco. It's more, it's more a whole complaint against their host. It's very ungracious. It's, you know, this is the Illinois, this is a dirty country, this is a dictator country, this is a lumbic phobic country, or what you saw at Columbia, the riots waving Hezbollah flags while you're a guest of the United States government as a student at Columbia. Yeah, I think there's two aspects to what you said. One is, you know, the irony is that the Muslims, even the radical ones, they begrudgingly respect the Trump type, as you mentioned, the conservative, the Christian who's conservative, and they would in a heartbeat rather vote for and side with them for their social cultural policies. But they always go with the left and the Democratic Party because that's what's good for them. And on the other hand, they have nothing but contempt for Democrats, liberals, leftists, they do. Yeah, yeah, that's it. And on the other hand, the other weird thing, which is why the Ilhan Omar and all these people can behave atrociously. But the other reason why this, you know, immigration is so failed is because of the mass numbers. If you want an immigrant population, especially one from a very foreign nation to assimilate, you have to bring them in small numbers so they have no choice but to meld into the greater. But when you bring them, and you see this all the time in very large populations, while they create debt owes and they never have, they have no reason to ever learn the language, English, they just speak amongst each other, they deal with each other, and they become like a pariah within. And that's what I'm seeing, especially in a lot of these Western European cities. If only they would have brought a smaller amount, maybe you would have had the chance to have them assimilate. But by bringing in so many, you made sure that that would never happen. Now you have these taboo subjects here. But if you look at the profile of the people in the news who were engaged in the biggest fraud in our history, the 250 billion probably in California on hospice fraud, COVID fraud, medical fraud, altism, fake things like that. And you look at Minnesota and Chicago, you get the impression that the reason that we've had these historic fraudulent cases is that people who were first and second generation from ill-liberal societies are vastly overrepresented as recipients of federal or state or local aid, but more importantly, as administers of that aid. And then the obvious deduction is they had a mentality that was quite correct. They had no respect for their host. They assumed that they could play the discriminatory card, that they were on the right side of 30% victim oppressed binary, and that that gave them a get out of jail card free. Nobody was going, not Tim Walts, not Gavin Newsom, no politician would touch them because they were afraid of being called an Islamophobic or a bigot or a racist. There's a, there's a, that's gotta stop. There's a British, um, Imam, he might be in jail now, his name is Pakistani, Anjum Chaudhry, I think I once debated him, and he was on record, he didn't know he was being videotaped, but he basically, as you know, jizya is this, is a special tax that non-Muslims who are subjugated by Muslims have to pay the overlords. And so he made a video because he and his several wives and all his children living in Britain were getting welfare funding, and he, he laughed about it. He said, well, yeah, it's there, they have to pay me. It's jizya. They're the infidel. It's my right for them to pay me. So yeah, that's, that is the exploitative mentality. This is what happens when you put that kind of mentality, like I said, tribalistic with a high trust society. You know, one is going to exploit the heck out of the other one. And there's another thing going on when I was a, an undergraduate and graduate student in the 70s, from 71 to 79, the Middle East studies programs at universities were either very new or very small or both. And by that, I mean, and they were very diverse. If you went to Middle St, Middle East studies, it was kind of like Balkan studies or European studies. There was a guy who was an expert on the Arab world. There was a guy who was an expert on the Jewish diaspora. There was a guy who was an expert on Iran and they were apolitical. But when you start to infuse 50, 60, 70 billion dollars over 10, 15 years from gutter in the Gulf States, and they name these professorships and they're paid fabulous amounts of money and they're recruited from the Middle East. Mondami's father is a, is a endowed professor at, I think Columbia. And when you bring all of these people in, then those, those Middle East studies are no longer scholarly. They're propagandistic. So all of these demonstrations that we saw were organized by graduate students or professors in these programs. And these programs have so much money because they're, and Qatar is the main funder, but not the only one. And so that's new. And I think we've got to the point, there's a story out that a person with Chinese connections to the government, I don't mean Chinese as in race, but Chinese communist government connections gave us three million dollars at Hoover. I didn't know that. And I think we need to have a taboo on all foreign donations from anybody not residing in the United States to American universities. And that would stop the work with. I have direct experience with this. I went to George, as you remember, I went to Georgetown University and they had the Prince El Walid Saudi Prince Center of Muslim Christian understanding. Okay. Which, so I used to go there. And, you know, the first thing that rises my mind is if you're Saudi Arabia is this draconian, okay, patriarchal, very pro Islam, anti everyone else religion. And so why does this rich billionaire, why is he spending money on, you know, intellectual refinement? He just wants people to learn. No, it's obviously propaganda. And it was propaganda because when I was there, even in the field I was studying history, you know, you remember, of course, George, Professor John Esposito, yes, in one of his books, you'll appreciate this. It's called Islam, the Straight Path. He has a line where he says, five centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed between Christians and Muslims until an imperial papal power play, meaning the first crusade ruined it all. And Muslims still have grievances. So those centuries where Islam violently conquered three quarters of the Christian world, that was peaceful coexistence until for no reason whatsoever, you know, the Catholics decided to go and ruin it all. So even from a historical point of view, they've completely distorted it with this Saudi slash Qatar money. It's so funny about the crusades. You have an area of the world that for 1000 years was controlled by either Greeks or Romans. And then there's this late entry by Arabs, Muslims, and, you know, Saladin was a Kurd, but mostly Arabs. And all of a sudden they feel that to try to reclaim the land that had been there for 1000 years was provocative or something. And that's another issue for another day. But we've got in this society that crusade, you can't say the word crusades because it's a dirty word. Actually, you know, the Muslims of the time, this is a fun fact that has also been distorted for propagandistic purposes. But after the fall of Jerusalem, it wasn't that big of a deal for most of the Muslim world. It wasn't like they really cared. It wasn't that much later. No, yeah, that was a much that was an invention. Now they cite it. And now they cite it because they know Europeans are so sensitive and we can exploit your guilt conscious by saying, Oh, look what the crusaders did. But at the time, and up until very recently, they to them was just like, Okay, more war, we're living in a way, you know, there was always war going on, where the people who do war. So it was nothing remarkable. But now it's being exploited expressly to, you know, for guilt reasons. I don't know. Yeah, that's a good point. We're going to be right back. We're talking with Raymond Ibrahim about his books, sword and cemetery, defending the West, the two swords of Christ, and the bin Laden reader, and we'll be right back. In a few words, I always leave an episode learning something new. I think they forgot the 1982 Falklands war. And in the age of clickbait and ragebait, that's a really good feeling, right? The media, thank you. You can leave now. And if you agree, you might like my show, the Daily Signals long form interview podcast called the signal sit down. Every week, we take you behind the scenes of the biggest battles in Washington, DC, as they happen with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the policymaking process from an unabashedly and unapologetically conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever, especially with the Trump administration back in office, because in 2024, you sent Washington a message it couldn't ignore. It's your government. And together, we're taking it back. So check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you enjoy. Victor Davis Hansen were there too. And drop me a follow on X at Bradley Devlin to stay updated with what's happening on the signal sit them. And we're right back. And we're going to wind it up. Ray, so you're in Hungary for how long in Budapest? Well, that's a good question. It was a one year visiting fellowship at the Danube Institute, which started in January. But as you probably know, there's been a seismic change with the passing of the Orban government and the new government. And apparently the new government is very much against all these types of foundations and isn't everything possible from what I understand to sort of eliminate them. So it's kind of a wait and see type thing, which is unfortunate, because I know a lot of these institutions did a lot of good for Hungary and especially promoting Orban's really good policies. Remember that guy in 2014 was demonized for being against mass muscle migration. Fast forward to today, I think the same people who demonize in those countries would all say, yeah, you were right to do what you did. Yeah. And I have a suspicion the new government will talk big and not. Yes. And they won't touch Orban's policy on immigration because they're looking at Britain and France and Germany and they know where it leads. But the EU, the EU is very pro new government. So who knows? Someone's manipulating someone. But Hungary is very close to Ukraine too. And they've got Russia there. And it's very pro US. Trump is a big Orban fan. Yeah. And that's very unpopular. If you say Victor Orban. Strong demand as they call him. Yes. Victor Orban is a taboo word on campuses these days for some reason. I know. That's why I've always liked him. Yeah. For that very reason. Yeah. Well, Ray, we're going to wrap it up. Take care and we'll have you on again. And this has been Victor Davis Hansen for Victor Davis Hansen, his own words. We'll be back with our next broadcast with Sammy and then Jack. And we'll see you then. Thank you.