This blog will deal with large things and little things: spiritual truths, politics and economy, news, comment, food and the State of Texas. Oh, and my poetry and pictures. Enjoy.
Actually, we have for-profit “death panels” now: they are companies + boards saying you’re on your own bc they won’t cover a critical procedure or medicine.
Maybe if the GOP stopped hiding behind this “socialist” rock they love to throw, they’d actually engage on-issue for once.
Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that health insurance companies essentially act as “death panels” for choosing to cover certain treatments and not others is a highly erroneous, reckless comment.
For starters, health insurance companies are heavily regulated—some of the most heavily regulated companies in the country, in fact—and they are already forced under the Affordable Care Act to cover “essential health” treatments, including emergency services, hospitalization, and some nonemergent treatments, like substance abuse services.
States have numerous additional “essential health mandates.” The National Conference of State Legislatures notes, “There are more than 1,900 such statutes among all 50 states; another analysis tallies more than 2,200 individual statute provisions, adopted over a 30+ year period.”
It’s simply not true that there are all sorts of serious health problems health insurers don’t cover, which is clearly what Ocasio-Cortez was suggesting in her Twitter post.
Second, the “death panels” she described aren’t death panels at all. Death panels are composed of government bureaucrats or policymakers who decide which health care treatments will be covered in a single-payer or government-run health care system.
The reason they have been labeled “death panels” is because under many single-payer proposals, the government is the only insurer, which means it has complete power to decide which services will be covered. There are no other options in a single-payer system—either the government will choose to pay for your care, or it won’t. And if it chooses not to, then you’re out of luck—unless, of course, you’re a millionaire like Sanders.
Ocasio-Cortez says that because health insurers can choose not to cover certain services, that means they have death panels, too. But that’s totally false.
In a true market-based system, if my health insurance company were to refuse to offer me a plan covering all of the services I’m most concerned about, I could simply go to another health insurer who would. If enough people want a particular health service covered, insurers would surely offer it. That’s how markets work.
Since Ocasio-Cortez majored in economics, she should understand that basic, universal economic principle. If there is demand for a product or service, someone out there will supply it.
Third, in opposition to this argument, Ocasio-Cortez might argue that all the insurance companies could decide to drastically raise the cost of covering important health treatments, acting as a de facto death panel by making health insurance so expensive that people can’t afford to buy good health insurance plans.
But if we’re going to apply the term “death panel” in such a way that it can be used to describe anyone that makes health insurance too expensive, then the federal government is already the country’s biggest death panel. No one has done more to raise the cost of health insurance in the past decade than President Barack Obama and the Democrat-led Congress that passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
Since the Obamacare exchanges first opened in 2013, health insurance premiums have doubled. Even worse, Obamacare deductibles are so high that most people can’t afford to use the health insurance they purchased. HealthPocket reports the average maximum out-of-pocket costs for a family enrolled in an Obamacare bronze plan, the cheapest plan available on the exchanges, is over $14,000.
Ocasio-Cortez should know better. Elected leaders who go to Washington with a plan for radical change carry the burden of proving their case to the public—and in that, Ocasio-Cortez has woefully failed.
Ukrainian paratroopers are photographed boarding large planes. There is martial law in the East. Poroshenko orders warplanes to the East. Russian President Putin says he will not take part in Poroshenko's re-election campaign.
The question: Is this real or is Poroshenko serious about restarting the war. Ukraine has cancelled the friendship mtreaty with Russia.
Mix gas with politics and you get a mess. There is the Russian proposed pipeline that was supposed to supply Europe through the South. The proposal is now dead. Then there is the proposed Israeli pipeline that goes through Greece and Italy. Will that be built?
Then there is the idiocy of President Macron who wants to replace a good portion of France's atomic power with wind and solar (both more expensive). Macron even wants to raise fuel taxes in France to pay to cover the extra cost of wind and solar. French truckers are rioting as a consequence.
Then there is the annoying fact that Germany and France want to dictate to the rest of Europe what their energy policy should be. Cheap power from atomics is what is keeping the French economy afloat.
Then there is the US eager to supply Europe with Liguid Natural Gas (LNG).
No wonder European economies are stagnating. Nobody worries about cost and efficiency.
At the beginning of 2018 I wrote extensively on what was likely to happen under the administration of Jerome Powell, the new Federal Reserve Chairman. In my article ‘New Fed Chairman Will Trigger A Historic Stock Market Crash In 2018‘, published in February, I predicted that the Fed would continue interest rate increases and balance sheet cuts throughout the year and they would knowingly initiate a crash in equities.
To be clear, this was not a very popular sentiment at the time, just as it wasn’t popular when I predicted in 2015 that the Fed would launch interest rate hikes instead of going to negative rates in order to start a catalyst for economic crisis. The problem some people have with this concept is that they just can’t fathom that the central bank would deliberately crash the system. They desperately cling to the notion that the Fed and other central banks want to keep the machine rolling forward at any cost. This is simply not true.
The claim is that the banking elites are “required” to keep the system propped up in a state of reanimation because they are reliant on the system to provide capital and thus “influence.” The people that assert this argument don’t seem to understand how central banks operate.
As most liberty activists should know by now, central banks are essentially a legally protected counterfeiting scheme. Using fractional reserve banking at a ratio that is secret, central banks create their own capital from thin air, and they can infuse capital into international banks at will when it suits their purposes. There is no “profit motive” for the banking syndicate. They can print the cash or digitally conjure it anytime they wish, and they can use it to purchase tangible assets before their printing diminishes the buying power of the currency, passing price inflation on to regular citizens.
Thus, keeping the system in perpetual positive motion is not necessary in terms of the transfer of wealth from the population to the banking class. In fact, economic crisis events are very useful to the elites because these events allow the banks to buy up concrete assets like natural resources, businesses and properties for pennies on the dollar.
For example, this is exactly what they did during the Great Depression when major banks like JP Morgan bought out thousands of failing local banks across the U.S. and took control of mortgages and other assets being paid off by a vast portion of the American citizenry. The banking system never looked the same again, and international banks continue to dominate ever since as localized competition remains elusive.
This also occurred after the crash of 2008 when companies like Blackstone bought up billions in distressed mortgages for well below previous market value, taking control of the property market and turning bankruptcies into rentals.
The 2008 crash was an asset buying bonanza for banks and corporation bailed out by the Federal Reserve. Low interest rates provided endless cheap credit through which companies could buy anything and everything. Of course, they mostly bought their own equities through stock buybacks, artificially inflating the stock market to the point of absurdity while taking on historic levels of debt — but we’ll get to that in just a moment.
The point is, there is every reason for central banks and their international corporate banking partners in crime to want a controlled demolition of the economic system. As long as they always control the dominant currency mechanism and the means of wealth distribution, they can use fiscal disasters to buy up hard assets for almost nothing.
The profit motive argument against deliberately triggered market declines has no legs when we consider this reality. But there is another reason far beyond the issue of asset accumulation; namely the psychological effects these events have on the masses.
Economic panic is a very useful tool in the hands of the banking establishment for molding social conditions in a way that gives them greater psychological power over the public. In every instance of financial catastrophe it is the banker cabal that is asked to step in and save the day. In 2008 it was the Federal Reserve that was tapped to act as a hero to the mainstream, and only through the tireless efforts of alternative economists and liberty activists has this fallacy been exposed to some in the population.
In the next crisis, it will be the IMF that is used as the front organization for the next rescue as market collapse leads into a crisis in confidence in the U.S. dollar. I outlined the plan for this in my recent article ‘IMF Reveals That Cryptocurrency Is The New World Order End Game.’
The average person is completely unaware of the Hegelian con-game being played here. And, when banking institutions step in as the designated “caregivers” to the ailing economy, what we sometimes see is a kind of reverse “Florence Nightingale effect”, in which the patients fall in love with the nurse merely because they have associated the extension of economic function to an extension of their lives (or at least, an extension of comfort in their lives).
The next engineered crash is shaping up to become the most epic in history, and make no mistake, it has already started.
Even now mindless optimism and blind faith in the markets continues, and the assumption on the part of the investment world is that the banks will eventually be forced to admit their “policy error” on tightening and that they will revert back to lower rates or even more QE. This is not going to happen.
An example of the Fed reversal fantasy was the reaction to Jerome Powell’s recent speech in light of “criticism” by the Trump Administration. Powell’s statement included a throwaway line indicating that the Fed rate was “just below” the neutral rate, which investors and algo trading computers immediately interpreted as a “dovish” pull back from a previous statement in which Powell said they were a “long way” from the neutral rate. Stocks spiked on the “shift” in speech patterns.
Yes, investment markets really are that desperate for a sign that the Fed will keep the party going. But let’s look at reality.
Powell is simply repeating a fact, not changing Fed policy on rate hikes – the Fed funds rate is 2.19% technically just below what the Fed considers the “neutral rate” of inflation; around 2.5% to 3%. The assumption markets are making is that the Fed will not hike BEYOND the neutral rate of inflation. This is a naive assumption. At no point did Powell indicate the Fed would stop rate hikes. In fact, Powell dared to reiterate his assertions that the US economy is healthy and well into “recovery”. This is not the statement of an institution that is about to stray from its current path.
I would also point out that all this focus on interest rates might be a distraction from the Fed balance sheet cuts. I cannot recall if Trump ever complained about this issue, but asset cuts are a primary key to the decline in stock markets, perhaps more so than interest rates.
Hopium sellers have been peddling several scenarios lately in which the current downtrend in markets will stop and the bull rally party rekindled. The three most pervasive are…
Scenario #1: The Fed suddenly skips rate hikes in the near term under pressure from markets and the White House.
Scenario #2: The Fed fully admits to policy error in light of stock market declines and re-launches QE.
Scenario #3: Trump announces successful trade war negotiations, primarily with China, and ends tariff measures.
As I have noted many times in the past year, Jerome Powell admitted in the minutes of the October 2012 Fed meeting that tightening measures in the face of extreme market addiction to stimulus would inevitably cause a crisis event. The Fed had created a monster of a bubble, and a monster in the investment world, and they knew they were doing it. With corporate and consumer debt levels at historic highs, any interest rate increases, no matter how seemingly marginal, will kill stock buybacks, cause corporate cutbacks and derail consumer spending.
Fed asset cuts will also offset stock buybacks over time and drag markets lower. If the suspicions of alternative economists are correct, then the Fed has been holding a massive short volatility position for years. Powell seems to confirm this kind of market manipulation in his statements in the Fed minutes of October 2012. If they continue to unwind this position as they dump their balance sheet, stocks will crash regardless of interest rates.
Today, Jerome Powell is taking the exact actions in policy that he originally admitted would cause a crash. Powell is not tightening out of stupidity, nor is he tightening out of a misguided error in policy. Powell is tightening because the banking elites WANT a crash. Period.
Because of this, it is highly unlikely that the Fed will stop tightening measures, let alone reverse them. The Fed does not care about “pressure” from markets, or pressure from the White House which I believe is part of a farcical Kabuki theater. The Fed will continue hiking up to the neutral rate of inflation, and probably well beyond that into 2019. This is exactly what they did during the Great Depression to escalate the crisis, and it is exactly what they will do today.
Trump’s trade war rhetoric and false media headlines are now the only levers that can be pulled to stall the market landslide. But it appears that this stalling is meant to make the crash more palatable, not stop it from happening. With Trump’s cabinet loaded with globalists, it is foolish to believe the current trend will end any other way.
Trump will jawbone markets up at times, but overall there will be no progression in negotiations. The latest Powell statement is most likely designed to help mitigate the downturn that will occur when the Trump Administration announces “no progress” with China after the impending G20 conference. The trade war will eventually escalate to include threats to U.S. bond markets and the dollar itself.
Trump’s policies match almost exactly with the model followed by Herbert Hoover preceding the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. His trade war is a perfect distraction for the masses as central banks, the real culprits behind the crisis, pull the plug on life support for the economy. We will at times hear rumors of new ground gained with China and other nations, and these rumors will continue to be dispelled days later as they have been for the past year.
The battle between Trump and the Fed is purely a soap opera designed to lure conservatives into the Neo-con fold as they are told that Trump is a mere victim of Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes. The rest of the world is being told that Trump is a gigantic baby, throwing a tantrum over a collapsing stock market bubble that he originally took credit for. They will be told that it is Trump’s tariffs and populism that are destabilizing the economy, not the Fed’s tightening into economic weakness.
The truth is, BOTH Trump and the Fed are working in tandem while playing a game of pretend-fighting that Trump knows well from his days in the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) and reality TV.
The establishment wants the system to break down, but at a speed that is manageable for them and psychologically disarming for us.
The optimistic claim that what we are seeing in equities is nothing more than a “correction” is a fallacy that misrepresents the reality of conditions on the ground. It is based on assumptions that the Fed will stop tightening measures and that the trade war will end abruptly and favorably. It is also based on severe cognitive dissonance — the optimism of drug addicts, their veins filled with years of QE heroin. The truth is that the drug binge is over.
The banking elites are done with that phase of the collapse, and they are moving onto the next phase. It is clear in their actions, it is clear in their public admissions, and it is clear in the downward spiral of the economy at large. What we are seeing is not a “correction,” it’s a crash. It is time for people to accept this fact and prepare accordingly if they have not already.
Thank you very much, and yes indeed, The History of Jihad is the first book that chronicles the entirety of the phenomenon of jihad for 1,400 years. Not just the jihad against Europe, although that’s very much a part of the book, but also the jihad against India and the jihad elsewhere, also tying in the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is itself a jihad, and of course, the people who struck us on 9/11 were motivated by the exact same ideology that has motivated the jihad conquests of the distant past and is still with us very much today. Of course, one of the reasons why anybody is interested in reading history or studying history is because of the old adage “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” More to the point, really, is that if you do not learn from your mistakes, you keep making the same mistakes again and again and again. That’s U.S. foreign policy today, because of, in large part, a lack of awareness and understanding of the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat and of a complete lack of knowledge of the history of jihad. So I thought this morning very briefly I’d give you three lessons from history that could have a very great impact on foreign policy today in the United States, were there to be sanity in the State Department, which, of course, I know is at a premium.
Now, the first one is that nowhere in history, and this is something to bear in mind when you’re thinking about the case of Jamal Khashoggi, who is, of course, the sainted and martyred journalist who was killed by the Saudis. He was actually a pro-Al Qaeda Muslim Brotherhood operative who was killed by the Saudis, so there are no good guys in that story. But in light of it, it is important to remember that when you look through and examine and study the history of Islam for 1,400 years, there has never been a lasting alliance between a Muslim state and a non‑Muslim state. It would be nice if there had been. There were some sort-term alliances of convenience, but that’s another problem as well.
For example, John VI Kantakouzenos was a Byzantine emperor in the middle of the 14th century. There was a claimant to the Byzantine imperial throne who disputed his claim, so he asked his pal, the Ottoman sultan, to help him by sending some armies into Europe to fight against the rival claimant. Very fruitful alliance for John VI Kantakouzenos, except that the Ottomans entered Europe. They have not left yet. The Turks still control the area around what was known as the City of Adrianople. That is their claim to be part of the European Union, which they are still pushing. More to the point, the Ottomans never gave up trying to destroy the Byzantine Empire, even though they had made various alliances with not just John VI, but other Byzantine emperors.
The Byzantine emperors were not thinking about the reality of the jihad imperative, that an Islamic state that is avowedly an Islamic state and is dedicated to Islamic principles is going to be aware of the Islamic imperative to wage war against unbelievers, and to conquer and subjugate them. It may well make use of those unbelievers at various points for its own advantage, but it will never be friends with those unbelievers. As a matter of, there’s a famous passage in the Koran that says, “Do not take Jews and Christians as your friends.” This has often been dismissed by Islamic apologists, who say that doesn’t mean that any individual Muslim won’t be your pal. That it means that an Islamic state must not ally with a non-Muslim state. Well, okay, that’s a lesson in itself as well.
So when we consider Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia finds the United States useful. The United States finds Saudi Arabia useful. President Trump may have some very good reasons right now to maintain the alliance with Saudi Arabia because of his predecessor’s disastrous policies that empowered and enabled and strengthened the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Another lesson from history is that Sunnis and Shia hate each other. They hate infidels more, but they do hate each other, and have been waging jihad against each other for 1,400 years, as well as against infidels. So the Saudis and the Iranians will never be friends. They will always be rivals. They will always be at odds. So when Iran was so strengthened and it used the billions that Obama showered upon it to finance Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic jihad and even Al Qaeda and the Taliban, then the President is right to try to keep the Saudis on our side and make sure that they stand as a bulwark against Iran. Otherwise, Iranian power could directly threaten the survival of the free world. The Saudis, however, are not a benign thing. I think that anybody who might have been carried away and thought that Mohammad bin Salman was a genuine reformer ought to have been awakened by the fact that not only was Khashoggi killed, but he’s not the only journalist who the Saudis have recently killed. Mohammad bin Salman has also imprisoned the activists who called for women to be able to drive. So you see, he allowed women to drive, then he arrested everybody who wanted it.
Now, why would he do that? You see, it’s crazy, but he’s not nuts. What he’s doing is trying to present Saudi Arabia as a more benign nation to encourage foreign investment, especially when the long-term trends for oil prices are going down. Then he can attract business into Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t mean that he wants any dissenters of any kind or any challenges of any kind to the rule of the House of Saud.
That brings me to the second lesson from Islamic history. There has never been a Western-style secular republic that was based on Islamic principles. Now, that is very carefully worded, because Turkey, of course, was a Western-style secular republic up until quite recently. You might have thought it still was, but actually Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, has been very systematically and persistently dismantling Kemalist secularism and restoring Turkey as an Islamic state. One of the ways he did that was to decapitate the military, which had always been the guardians of Turkish secularism. Now, talking about learning the lessons of history, consider this. Secularism was imposed upon Turkey; it was never a ground up, ground roots movement. Talk about astroturfing, it’s an excellent example of it.
What happened was this. Kemal Ataturk, after World War I, though he was unique in the Islamic world, unique in Islamic history, in saying the reason why our country is in the dumpster right now is because of Islam. So if we’re going to proper, we need to imitate the nations that have prospered, and that’s the West. So we’re going to limit the power of political Islam and imitate the West. This is the only time this has happened in Islamic history, and he established secular Turkey on that basis. What he did was very popular at the time in Constantinople and Ankara, the two largest cities in Turkey, and not popular at all in the countryside. There were several times before Erdogan was elected that other people who wanted to restore Islamic law were elected to positions of power in Turkey. Every time that happened, the military would topple them from power. So the military preserved Turkey as a Western-style secular republic for the large part of the 20th century. Then what happened?
Early in the 21st century, there were very large indications that there was going to be another military coup in Turkey. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned the Turkish military that the United States was the guardian of democracy and would not accept any military coup in Turkey. Because of that now, Turkey has become not an ally of the United States, but a rapidly re‑Islamizing nation that directly aided ISIS. John Kerry went to Turkey a few years ago when he was Secretary of State and he said, “Could you please stop buying ISIS oil?,” and they refused. Erdogan is famous for having allowed thousands of foreign jihadis to cross through Turkey into the ISIS domains in Iraq and Syria. They would say, “You have to fight ISIS. You’re in NATO. You have to do something about this.” He would say okay, and bomb the Kurds. He never fought ISIS, because he wanted to co-opt their caliphate into his own restored caliphate. But since in the State Department they don’t know what a caliphate is, they don’t know anything about history, and they don’t what the pillars of Turkish secularism were, they set this up. They made this happen. That’s what is a classic example of not knowing the past and thus repeating the same mistakes, and being condemned to repeat the same misery all over again.
The third lesson from Islamic history is that there’s never been a shortage of non‑Muslims who are willing to help the jihad. There have always been plenty of them, and it never works out for them. Take, for example, the conquest of Spain. All of us in the room here know probably that Spain was conquered by Islamic armies staring in the year 711. They had the whole country conquered by 718 and they ruled it for 700 years until they themselves were – this is one of the few times this has happened in history — pushed out of Spain, and by 1492 Spain was an entirely Christian nation, as it had been before the conquest. But fewer people know how the conquest came about.
What happened was there was a Christian leader, Count Julian of Ceuta. Ceuta is in what is now Morocco, and it’s still a Spanish possession. Many of you are no doubt aware that Ceuta and Melilla are two enclaves that are in Morocco, in North Africa, but they’re part of Spain. Right now, they’re being overrun by migrants from Africa, who go and climb the fence in Ceuta, and then they’re in Europe even though they’re not. They’re in North Africa. They’re in Spain, and so they are entitled to all the guarantees of protection that the European Union is giving to the migrants. But Count Julian of Ceuta, long ago, he sent his daughter to the court of King Roderick, the Visigothic king of Spain, in order to have her educated. But King Roderick, the Visigothic king of Spain, treated interns rather like Bill Clinton did. So Count Julian was enraged and appalled when he heard what had happened. So he went to his friend Tarek ibn Ziyad, who was the leader of the local Muslim region of Morocco right next to Ceuta. He said, “I’ll help you get across the strait,” because this is what had stymied the Muslims. They had boats, but every time they set sail across the Strait of Gibraltar, then they would find that the Spanish would put their defenses up, because they would see them coming. They weren’t moving all that fast in those days.
So Count Julian gave them his boats, so that when the Spanish who were manning the defenses saw them coming they thought, “Oh that’s our friend Count Julian,” and they did not put up their defenses or have the army ready. So Tarek ibn Ziyad got to Spain and he decamped his army, and then he had ordered the boats burned, which I think was rather ungracious of him, since they were a loaner. But what he was saying was, “We’re here to stay. We’re going to stay here. We’re going to conquer this place or we’re going to die here, but we’re not going back,” and he conquered Spain courtesy of County Julian. Interestingly enough, a few years back there was a big controversy some of you may recall in Minneapolis, about a charter school, a public school that got public funds but was essentially a madrassa, an Islamic school. It got public funds and was a public school, but they had Qur’an study. They had prayers during school time, and so on. People got wind of this. There was a controversy. Ultimately, the school was shut down although it started right back up again, but that’s another story. The controversy was raging all this time, I was puzzled because nobody ever in any of the coverage that I ever saw about the controversy, nobody ever stopped to ask, “Wait, a minute, who is this Tarek ibn Ziyad that the school is named for? Why is it called Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy?” Tarek ibn Ziyad, remember, was the Muslim conqueror of Spain who burned the boats. Probably anybody in Minneapolis whoever gave it a moment’s thought, thought that he was some Muslim John Dewey or something, some sort of great educator. But in reality, he was the great conqueror of Spain, the guy who burned the boats and said, “We’re here to conquer or die.”
Now, why do you think a Muslim school in Minneapolis would call itself Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy? What could be the lesson there? What do you think they were trying to say? But of course, nobody knows who Tarek ibn Ziyad was, and so nobody thought to ponder the significance of the name. Now in any case, Count Julian was by no means alone in his sponsorship of the Islamic jihad and his aid for its advance. There have been numerous non‑Muslims who have been similarly helpful to the jihad cause throughout history.
Another primary example came in Arabia at the end of the 18th century and along into the middle of the 19th. At that time, Arabia was nominally under the control of the Ottoman Empire. But there came to be a revivalist movement in Arabia at that time, and there was a gentleman who claimed to be the great Muslim reformer. A lot of people say, “We have to put our hopes on Islamic reform and we can hope that Islamic reform will happen, and then all our troubles will be over.” Well, I got news for you. Islamic reform has already happened. It happened it started in the middle part of the 18th century in Arabia. This guy said the Ottomans had added all these things into Islam. He was going to strip them out and get back to the basics. He personally stoned an adulteress to death and showed how eager he was in doing so to enforce Islamic law. He got a wide following because he did that. He gained the aid of a local chieftain in Arabia, and they began to make war against the Ottomans and the other Arab chieftains in the area.
In the middle of the 19th century, this man’s movement — it became known as the Wahhabi movement because his name was Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the chieftain who helped him was Ibn Saud who, of course, later became recognized as founder of the Saudi clan which today rules Saudi Arabia. But they were just one of a number rival Arab chieftains at the time, and Muslim preachers who were vying for control of Arabia and all fighting the Ottomans, but they got noticed by the British. The British thought, “Hey, we want to fight the Ottomans. We can use these guys,” and it seemed like a good idea, right? Because the Ottoman Empire is the global caliphate, which is the foremost exponent of offensive and aggressive jihad. So the British started paying money to the Wahhabis in the middle of the 19th century. They sponsored the Saudis to create Saudi Arabia after World War I. They actually decided who was going to be in power in Arabia and gave Jordan to the loser. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan — the Hashemites are not from that area. They’re Arabs, Arabians, but they lost the struggle with the Saudis, and so they got Jordan as a consolation prize. The Saudis, meanwhile, struck oil in 1938, and they used their billions to finance this virulent and violent understanding of Islam that Wahhab had originated. They spread it all around the world in areas where a cultural form of Islam had become a little bit more benign. So it’s really courtesy of the British that we have the revival of global jihad and the creation of jihad terrorist groups in the middle of the 20th century, because had it not been for the British, the Saudis would never have been much of anything and then they would never have been the beneficiaries of the oil strike, and never would have been able to finance the global jihad today. So I think we owe the British government a great debt of gratitude for that.
In any case, I hope that this has briefly made it clear why it’s so important to understand history and particularly this very, very untraveled bit of history, the history of jihad, which I think is one of the most crucial stories of all human history and one of the least known. So this is one of the reasons why I wrote the book. I’m hoping that there will be a genuine change in the public discussion as a result of some of the things that are made clear in the book, that will in turn themselves make clear that a great deal of our foreign and also domestic policy is based on false assumptions, wrong assumptions, wishful thinking and outright fantasy. Thank you very much.
Audience member: Do you have time for one question?
Robert: Okay. We have time for one question, ladies and gentleman. We can auction it to the highest bidder and fundraise.
Question: Hi, thank you for being here. I’m currently at university, and professors all love to talk about the Islamic golden age and how it was rational and they saved the Renaissance and all these types of things. Were those people adhering to Islamic belief? Were they ignoring it, or am I being lied to as a student?
Robert: Yes, yes and yes. The fact is that the Islamic golden age was part real and part fiction. There were great Islamic empires and there were Islamic philosophers, and there was a time when there was peace between Jews, Christians, and Muslims particularly in Spain. However, the time that there was peace between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Spain was only when the Jews and Christians knew their place, accepted their second-class status, and submitted to the hegemony of the Muslims. When, as a matter of fact, in the year 1066, the local Muslim leader in Granada appointed a Jew as the vizier of the city. Now, this was because he knew this guy and they were friends. Human nature is everywhere the same. Sometimes people ignore laws, but the law is that a non-Muslim must not have authority over a Muslim. So the people were incited, and I described this in the book. The people were incited by a poet who wrote a poem about how terrible it was that the Jews were ruling over them. They were incited to riot. It was a terrible pogrom, and 4,000 people were murdered. This was because the people knew that a Jew must not hold authority over a Muslim. That was wonderful, tolerant Muslim Spain. That’s just one example of many that I could give you.
The inventions, the great innovations, a lot of that is just sheer nonsense. It also begs the further question, when people talk about all the wonderful things — like I hear that 100 years before Copernicus, some Muslim astronomer discovered the same thing that Copernicus did, that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, wasn’t that it? Then you’ve just got to wonder, well, okay. Well, that led to a great deal of innovation and further discovery in Europe, what happened in the Islamic world? The great Islamic philosophers, they did influence Aquinas, and they had a great deal to do with the Enlightenment and the Renaissance in Europe, but in Islam, you only know Averroes and Avicenna and a few other others, because after that they were declared heretical. There was Al-Ghazali, who was himself a great philosopher, and wrote The Incoherence of the Philosophers, saying that the philosophers contradict the Qur’an and must be killed. That had a bit of a chilling effect on Islamic philosophy.
What you have also nowadays, because there’s such an apologetic effort to sell Islam to the West, you have a lot of people saying, “The first hospital was in Baghdad under the Umayyad Caliphate.” Well, in the first place, the first hospital was many years before that, but in reality, the hospital in Baghdad was run by Christians and Jews who were under Islamic rule, so that’s not really something that’s to the credit of Islam and on and on and on.
Nowadays there’s a tremendous public relations effort to rewrite history, to manipulate people into thinking. For example, Akbar Ahmed is a professor at American University, and he’s written a book called Journey into Europe, that he actually recommends a new al-Andalus for Europe, which is essentially saying he wants Europe to be conquered by Islam. He presents that as this wonderful golden age that your professors tell you about, but in reality, al-Andalus was nowhere any of us would want to live, and if we did, we would suffer to a great degree. So knowing history is good. It’s being used as a weapon today to manipulate you to accept public policies of nowadays. So it’s very important to be informed. Thanks very much.
, saying that the philosophers contradict the Qur’an and must be killed. That had a bit of a chilling effect on Islamic philosophy.
, that he actually recommends a new al-Andalus for Europe, which is essentially saying he wants Europe to be conquered by Islam. He presents that as this wonderful golden age that your professors tell you about, but in reality, al-Andalus was nowhere any of us would want to live, and if we did, we would suffer to a great degree. So knowing history is good. It’s being used as a weapon today to manipulate you to accept public policies of nowadays. So it’s very important to be informed. Thanks very much.