Robert Spencer - How Gaza is Used as a Proxy War for Islam vs Judaism

Hearts of Oak Podcast

Show Notes and Transcript

The current Israeli-Gaza war has sparked much debate focussing on geo politics and historical land disputes.
But few dare ask if Islam is the root cause of the ongoing tension.
Robert Spencer has studied Islam for 3 decades. His dozens of books and the Jihad Watch website are all go to sources of background information on Islam and the history behind it.
He returns to Hearts of Oak to ask if this is a religious problem and we start by looking at what Islam actually says about the Jews.
The aggression and vitriol throughout Islamic text and the history of behaviour towards the Jewish people is an eye opener to all of us.
Armed with this deeper understanding Robert then touches on how the term Palestinian was invented. The history, leader, flag and culture had to be invented as it was all non existent before.
His short book "The Palestinian Delusion" goes into much more detail and is a recommended read.
Enjoy the interview and get ready to see this current conflict in a whole new light.

'The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process' on Amazon https://amzn.eu/d/cPigAab

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of twenty-seven books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, The Truth About Muhammad and the bestsellers The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS and The Critical Qur’an: Explained from Key Islamic Commentaries and Contemporary Historical Research. His new book is Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization.
Spencer has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the FBI, the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), the Justice Department’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council and the U.S. intelligence community. He has discussed jihad, Islam, and terrorism at a workshop sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the German Foreign Ministry. He is a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy.

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WEBSITE jihadwatch.org/

Interview recorded 26.3.24

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TRANSCRIPT

(Hearts of Oak)

It's wonderful to have Robert Spencer back with us again.
Robert, thank you so much for your time today.

(Robert Spencer)

Always good to talk to you, Peter.
Thank you.

Great to have you on.
Always good to have guests on talking about their books.
We'll get into a book that I've been delving into and got a couple of months
ago, but only picked it up recently and have read it.
We'll get into that in a moment.
But obviously, you can find Robert: that is his Twitter handle, @jihadwatchRS.
And obviously jihadwatch.org is the website.
You can find everything in the links below.
Make sure and use it.
Make sure and sign up to it.
One of the latest, I think the latest piece on that, and we're doing this just two days
before the video goes out, is the U.S. Supreme Court gives Hamas-linked CAIRE a
9-0 thumbs up.
And CAIR obviously is the Council on American Islamic Relations.
I encourage you to delve into that, which gives some of the geopolitics,
I guess, that lies behind some of the difficulties that the U.S.
Faces as it engages and grapples and understands Islam, which is a massive subject.
But the book that I've been delving into and enjoying is The Palestinian Delusion.
Short book, 200 pages.
And if you want to understand what is happening at the moment in the Middle East,
I would encourage you to get a hold of a copy.
Available US, UK, wherever you are.
The links are in the description.
Grab it.
And I know you'll want to get it after this interview.
But , I do want to get into modern day; what is happening?
But right at the beginning, chapter two; chapter one is about the formation of Israel.
If we just go on to chapter two, does religion, specifically Islam,
lie at the root of the problem?
What are your thoughts, Robert?
And of course, you delve into this in chapter two.

Yeah, absolutely, Peter.
Islam is what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about.
If you look at the messages from Hamas, from Palestinian Islamic Jihad,
from Fatah, from the Palestinian Authority itself, they are all about Islam all the time.
Yet that is the one aspect of this conflict that is universally ignored
by policy analysts and by policymakers in the West.
Every attempt at a negotiated settlement initiated by the President of the United
States or any other entity over the last 50 years has completely ignored,
100% ignored, Islam as a factor in this conflict.
And yet, from the standpoint of the Palestinian Arabs, that's what it is all
about, and we ignore it to our own detriment.

Now, chapter two is entitled The Roots of the hatred of Israel.
Hatred is a very strong word, Robert, is it not?
Yes, but it's entirely accurate in this case, because what we are dealing with
is not only a hatred, but what has been termed the longest hatred,
that is the hatred of the Jews, which of course is not solely the province of Muslims or Islam, but, many people in the West don't realize that there even is such a thing
as Islamic anti-Semitism.
Yet, it is very real and it is at the roots of the problem between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs today.

Now, we all hear the term Islam being one of the great Abrahamic religions,
and yet there doesn't seem to be a lot of love for the Jews in Islam in the text and the history.
Do you want to just let us know; because that is a different side that many
people will certainly not hear in the legacy media.
Yes.
Islam, the Quran teaches that Islam is the third revelation after
the revelation of the Torah and the Gospel.
That is the core scriptures of the Jews and the Christians, and that it confirms
the message of the Torah and the Gospel.
And that Moses and Abraham before him, and Jesus after him, and all the other
prophets in the Bible, in both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures,
are people who taught Islam.
Islam was the original religion of all the prophets.
We can see this particularly in chapter 3, verse 67 of the Quran,
which says Abraham was not a Jew or a Christian.
He was a Muslim.
And you might wonder, well, this doesn't make any sense.
How could Abraham be a Muslim when Muhammad is the originator of Islam in the
7th century and Abraham is many, many centuries before that?
The Islamic answer is that Islam is the original religion of all the prophets
and that it was their followers who twisted their teachings to create Judaism
and Christianity.
The only legitimate expression of the true teachings of the prophets is Islam.
And that being the case, the orthodox mainstream understanding among Muslims
of Judaism and Christianity is that they have no legitimacy at all.
Now, this is a very important point because, then the Quran commands Muslims
to fight against and subjugate the Jews and Christians, among others.
And it's in part because of their rejecting the true faith and corrupting their
scriptures, although that part comes from Islamic tradition.
Now, the difficulty that people have with this arises from the fact that Islamic spokesmen in the West very deceptively, frequently, refer to how much they as Muslims revere and respect figures such as Abraham and Moses and
Jesus himself himself.
And so Jews and Christians who are uninformed about Islam hear this and they
think, isn't that wonderful?
How generous and open-minded and ecumenical they are.
And we should do the same.
We should reciprocate by acknowledging Muhammad as a prophet.
And they don't realize that the Muslims do revere and respect Abraham and Moses
and Jesus and the rest of them, but as Muslims, not as they are portrayed in
Judaism and Christianity.

I mean, everything seems to be on the terms of Islam.
I knew your book: Did Muhammad Exist?
Actually, I think we need to remind ourselves of the world that Muhammad,
if he did exist, was born into, which wasn't an Islamic world as we know today.
It was a very different world.

Yes.
North Africa, the Middle East, what we think of today as the heart of the
Islamic world, those were Christian lands.
They were 99% Christian from Morocco all the way across North Africa and throughout the Middle East.
And so it was the conquest initiated by the Arabs beginning in the 630s that
ultimately led to the Islamization of those various nations and the steady diminishment of the Christian population.
But, it's important to keep in mind, Peter, that the Christian population did
not decline because the Christians were gradually convinced of the truth
and beauty of Islam.
Rather, they were subjugated, as the Quran directs, under the hegemony of Islamic
law and denied basic rights in the societies that had been conquered.
And the only thing they had to do to free themselves from the oppression of
living with this denial of rights was to convert to Islam.
And so many people did over the centuries, such that, for example,
Egypt was 99% Christian when the Arabs invaded, and now it's about 10% Christian.
The Christians didn't all leave. They just converted to Islam over time, because
of the pressure placed on non-Muslims.

Well, maybe as the world talks about repatriations, especially in the BLM movement,
maybe Christians need to get some of that from Egypt.

Yes.
If there were real reparations for slavery and for oppression,
then yes, the Christian population of the entire Middle East and North Africa
would be owed an immense amount of money.
But nobody's talking about that.

I guess we hear the term anti-Semitism and
we're told that any feeling of anti-Semitism from Islam is purely
misplaced and doesn't lie at the heart of it and this seems to be this
distinction between kind of rogue Islamic preachers, but actually key text
and that seems, I think commentators seem to want to make a wide gap between that.
Yet, as you point out, this term anti-Semitism, it lies right at the basis
of Islam from 1300, 1400 years ago.

Yes, absolutely.
The Qur'an says in chapter 5, verse 82, that the people who
are most intense in hostility to the believers will be the Jews,
as well as the polytheists.
Now, what this works out to in practice is that the Jews are the recipients
of the most hostility from the Muslims.
This is also because this is not an isolated passage, but the Quran is full
of passages depicting the Jews in a negative light, depicting them as
schemers who plot against the plans of Allah himself and try
to foil them.
Who crow about the limits on the power of Allah, saying Allah's hand is chained.
That's chapter 5, verse 64.
They were transformed into apes and pigs by Allah for their disobedience.
That's chapter 2, verses 62 to 66, rather.
Chapter 5, 59 and 60, and 7, 166. and many, many, other passages all the way
through the Quran depict the Jews as being rebellious against Allah and
essentially enemies of Allah.
Then the Islamic tradition is even worse and the Jews are depicted as plotting
against Muhammad, trying to kill Muhammad, being massacred by Muhammad and punishment for their plots to kill him.
Jewish woman poisons Muhammad and this ultimately leads to his death and so on.
They're the real villains of the entire tradition.
And this carries through to the modern age where Judaism and Jews are so stigmatized
in the Islamic world that several ex-Muslims have spoken about moving to America or
moving to Europe and encountering actual Jews for the first time and
being shocked that they were not evil, horned creatures, devils in human form, trying
to disrupt human society in every way, but just ordinary people like everybody else,
some good, some bad.
And they had no frame of reference to understand this, because Islam is so unanimous
and monochromatic in depicting them as evil.

I think if someone is watching this as a Christian, they will understand the
Bible as the text that they live by, which is full of stories, explains things,
not really chronological, but actually, you can read it and you can grasp a lot of its meaning.
And that stands by itself outside the Christian traditions, really.
Islam seems to be quite different.
It seems to be not not only is the Qur'an actually impossible to understand,
but actually seemingly is only supposedly, understandable.
With a wealth of other writings, which seems to confuse things massively for
anyone coming from a Christian background or from the West.

That's right, Peter. The Qur'an in the first place is written,
in many cases it tells the stories that it tells.
In a way that makes it clear that it assumes that the hearers have heard them
before and are familiar with the general outlines of the story.
So, it leaves out important aspects of the stories, and many times it is speaking
about incidents, and events, and not explaining what incident or event is involved.
It's as if you were talking to a friend and I walked up and I didn't know either of you
very well and didn't know what you what incidents you were talking about,
and you didn't pause to explain it to me.
I would have no idea what you're what you're discussing, and that's
what reading the Quran is like in many ways.
So, you have the voluminous hadith literature: hadith
means report and it's the reports of Mohammed's words and deeds.
In the hadith literature you find what is known as the Asbab al-Nuzul which is the circumstances of revelation that tells the stories of what was going on at the time among the early Muslims.
And Muhammad that led to the revelation of this or that passage of the Quran.
And that's all very well, but this material comes from a couple of hundred years
after Muhammad is supposed to have lived.
And there's no trace of it existing before that.
And so, it's an open question as to whether these things really give the circumstances
of revelation and the Quran passage follows from that,
or if these stories were put together in order to explain what is essentially
a gnomic, elliptical, incoherent text.
And that seems, the latter seems to be more likely.
Some philologists like Christoph Luxemburg have noted that if you strip out
the diacritical marks that distinguish many Arabic letters from each other,
because there are 22 letters in the Arabic alphabet, but 16 are exactly the same character, just with different combinations of dots above or below.
And so if you take out the dots and repoint it as if it were Aramaic,
then suddenly it's a whole different text and a Christian text in many cases.
And so, Luxembourg contends that it was actually a Christian text that was repurposed by the early Arab conquerors in order to create the religion of Islam.
And they did this because this is actually the fundamental thesis of my own
book: Did Muhammad Exist?
They did this because in those days, religions were what cemented political unity.
There were no parliaments or constitutions in this era when Islam arose.
And you had two great powers in this region, the Byzantine Empire,
which was Christian, and the Persian Empire, which was Zoroastrian.
They were held together by those religions.
The idea was that to be a Roman citizen at this time, a citizen of the
Byzantine Empire, meant that one was a Christian and adhered to
the tenets of Orthodox Christianity.
Consequently, the non-Christians were not considered to be fully citizens of
the empire.
And this is another story, but it was the Christian identity that was the
cement that held the empire together.
So, the Arabs amassed a great empire, conquering massive expanses of territory,
and then they developed a religion to hold it all together.
And because these were warriors who wanted to expand and defend and strengthen
their empire, they made their religion belligerent, aggressive,
martial, warlike, expansionist, and so on.

I think in chapter two, you talk about that we all know of Muslims praying to
Mecca, and only then Allah can really hear the prayers properly.
But you talk in the book about initially it was facing towards Jerusalem.
So, was this just Muhammad wanting to be accepted?
and then later on, of course, or at that time, Muhammad wanting to be a prophet.
Kind of, in my thinking, that's sheer arrogance, thinking you can be a prophet
to a religion you come across.
Those concepts of him wanting to be a Jewish prophet, but also praying towards
Jerusalem, those are two facts that seem to be missing in any dialogue today.

Yes, well, it does seem as if, at least according to the canonical traditional
Islamic story; that is of questionable historical value.
But there's no doubt that Muslims believe it; that Muhammad taught that he was
a new prophet in the line of the prophets of the Bible.
And that consequently he was the new prophet of the Jews and a new prophet of the Christians.
And both groups said, you're not.
The Jews said, you're not Jewish. You can't be a Jewish prophet.
And the Christians said, Jesus said: it is finished on the cross.
We're not looking for a new prophet.
And so he was rejected by both.
And this has led to the kind of cognitive dissonance that the Quran says that
the Jews and Christians, the Christians in particular in chapter five of the
Quran will be rightly guided if they follow the gospel.
And yet the Gospel does not confirm the teachings of the Qur'an as the Qur'an
insists, and it insists that it confirms the teachings of the Torah also.
And so Islamic spokesmen, Islamic scholars throughout the ages have accounted
for this discrepancy by claiming that the Jews and Christians corrupted their scriptures.
And so, they maintain that Muhammad is indeed a prophet in the line of the biblical
prophets, but that it's the Jews and Christians' fault for not recognizing him.
They twisted their scriptures to erase the congruence so, that people would not
see that the Quran confirms the Torah and the gospel.
A s a result, the Jews and Christians are portrayed as these incredible
renegades and rebels against God who have dared to tamper with the very word
of God that he gave them, and created false religions of their own making.
And so here again, they have no legitimacy.
I do want to get on to current day but, I want to there there's another
concept that comes out in your book which is a widely misunderstood
word and that's the word jihad, and we are told jihad is inner struggle.
It's a spiritual struggle between yourself trying to be right and to be good and live correctly.
Yet, jihad is a term that's used in violence all across the world.
What is this term, jihad?

The primary understanding of jihad in Islamic theology is warfare against unbelievers
in order to bring them under the hegemony of Islamic law.
The confusion arises from the fact that jihad means struggle,
and there are as many things that are referred to as struggles in Arabic as there
are in English.
And so you can have great struggles and small struggles. You can struggle to
be on time for appointments when you're chronically late, but you can also have
a great struggle between civilizations, such as World War II or something.
Now, in the Islamic realm, it's the same thing.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has a department of agricultural jihad,
which doesn't involve blowing things up on farms.
It involves trying to struggle to increase the efficiency of the farms
and their fruitfulness.
Whereas in Islamic theology, the principal meaning of jihad has to do
with this warfare against unbelievers.
So, here again, Islamic spokesmen in the West frequently confuse people.
They're trying to confuse them and make them complacent about the jihad
threat by saying jihad just means struggle.
And it's about struggling to better yourself.
And they don't tell you that Muhammad said the warfare against unbelievers
is the highest understanding of jihad, that there's nothing greater than jihad
in which one loses one's life and then is rewarded with paradise.

In the book, you use a number of examples of what we would call hit preachers.
This is in 45, the Hamas deputy minister of religious endowments on Al-Aqsa
TV 2010 said: the Jews suffer from a mental disorder because they are thieves
and aggressors.
A thief or aggressor who took land or property develops a psychological disorder
and pangs of conscience because he took someone that wasn't his.
And then the next page, you have a from 2018, a program on Palestinian Authority
television saying people could be deluded or think that they have no way out
with the Jews.
The liberation of this land is a matter of faith, which will happen despite everyone.
And then the next page up, the Jews are treacherous and conniving cheaters.
But again, the argument, many of the guests I have on would not look at Islam
as an issue, as a problem.
And they would simply say those are misguided, radical preachers,
and they don't understand the true, beautiful nature of Islam.
How do you speak against that criticism, I guess, that you're maybe
picking things out and you're looking at these preachers that actually don't understand Islam, really?

Well, in the first place, I find it difficult to believe that people who have
committed their lives to understanding Islam correctly would not understand
it correctly.
While non-Muslims who've never picked up a Quran or have any idea
what it says, they understand it perfectly well.
Islam is kind of funny in that way that the more you know about it,
the less you understand it.
And the less you know about it, the more you understand it.
We see this with non-Muslim politicians all over the West who assure us with
immense confidence that Islam is a religion of peace that has nothing
whatsoever to do with terrorism.
Those are actually the exact words from Hillary Clinton a few years back,
but many, many other politicians say exactly the same thing.
And I know that Hillary Clinton doesn't have the first foggiest idea of what
the Koran teaches, whereas I, who have read the Koran dozens and dozens of
times, committed a great deal of it to memory.
Published a translation and commentary of it that's my own, and have studied
Islamic theology for 40 years, now.
They would say, well, you don't understand Islam at all.
And even more to the point, these Muslim clerics who've attended Al-Azhar or
other prestigious Islamic institutions and and spend their whole lives trying
to understand the Quran and the Islam properly, and they don't get it at all.
So, in the first place, it's absurd.
But in the second place, what these people said that you quoted,
like the fellow who said the Jews are treacherous, conniving, cheaters,
that's just Quranic theology.
If you read what the Quran says about the Jews, just get a Quran,
don't even read the whole thing.
Get one with a good index and read all the passages about the Jews.
And you will see that every last one of them is negative.

Every last one of them portrays the Jews as scheming and conniving
and cheating the righteous people.
And so this is the prism through which these clerics see the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
They understand it through the lens of the Qur'an, because they believe that
the Qur'an is the perfect word of the perfect being that is valid for all times
and all places in all situations.
They see the world today and they see Israel and the Palestinians.
And the first place they will go to understand all that is the Quran,
because they would trust Allah over any human authority,
telling them what the conflict is all about.
The Quran tells them over and over that the Jews are evil and enemies of Allah.
So, they see Israel and they think, here are the evil Jews who are enemies of Allah.
Even, the fact that they refer to Jews and not to Israelis or to Zionists or
some other term of that kind indicates that they're seeing this through
theological principles.
And those theological principles are deeply anti-Semitic.

Well, bringing us up to the present day, for over 2,000 years,
the Jews did not have their homeland there in the land that is Israel.
And it was under all different, we'll not go into the history,
all different, I guess, occupying forces or other forces.
And then 1948 happens and the Jewish homeland, modern day Israel, is founded again.
And immediately, and this is chapter three, you talk about the jihad of 1948,which is an interesting term. Why that title?

Well, the whole thing is a jihad from 1948,
from before 1948, when the Zionist settlement began in the late 19th century.
Even before that, because there there were always Jews in the Holy Land,
and they were always subject to sporadic, periodic attacks.
Now, after the Zionism began, these attacks intensify because in the first
place, the Ottomans were alarmed when they owned the land that the
Jews were moving in, because they thought that it would threaten
their hegemony over it.
Then when the Ottoman Empire fell, the League of Nations, the precursor to the
United Nations, gave Britain the mandate for Palestine to establish a Jewish
national home.
Now, why did the Arabs object to a Jewish national home?
There were already large Arab states right there neighboring this territory.
And so it should have been and could have been.
A relatively peaceful and orderly process once the Jewish national home was actually founded.
After World War II, Germany lost massive territories in the East because it
fought a war of aggression and lost.
And for reasons of national security, the Poles, the Soviets, and the French
in the West took various territories from the Germans.
The Germans who who lived in those areas, were sent to what
remained of Germany.
Nobody complained.
Nobody raises, nowadays, some right of return or speaks about occupied German
territory in Poland and Russia.
It would be absurd even to think about.
But it's the exact same situation with Israel.
The Arabs of Lebanon, of Syria, and of Jordan are identical ethnically,
culturally, linguistically, and religiously with the Palestinian Arabs.
There has never been a distinct Palestinian nationality.
That's a propaganda creation that was designed to be a weapon to use against Israel.
So, when you have Arabs who leave, they did not actually get kicked out.
They left because the Arab League told them to leave in 1948, because the Arab
states neighboring Israel were going to crush it within weeks.
Then they would be out of the line of fire and could return home after
Israel was destroyed.
It didn't work that way, because Israel actually turned out to win the war.
The Arab states, after that happened, could have easily absorbed these populations.
And there would be no problem today, just like there's no problem in Europe
today, in regard to the German refugees after World War II.
And yet they did not do that because they they wanted to keep the Palestinian refugees as stateless, as refugees, as a weapon to beat Israel with.
This is what became the linchpin for what I referred to as the Jihad of 1948.
The Jihad, because the Quran says in chapter 2, verse 191: drive them out from
where they drove you out.
It's a myth, as I just noted, it's a myth that the the Israelis drove the Arabs out.
It's not a fact, but it's what the Arabs all over the Middle East and the non-Arab
Muslims are taught about what happened.
So, that is because it triggers the divine command, drive them out from
where they drove you out.
They have to have been driven out for that to kick in as being applicable.
So, now millions of Muslims, Arab and non-Arab, are taught that they must drive
out the Israelis, because the Muslims were driven out.
It's a divine command, no less than the Ten Commandments for Christians.
Consequently, it is a jihad because if it were not for these religious principles
that are rooted in Islam and the Quran, the problem would have been solved by
negotiations decades ago.
But no negotiated settlement ever succeeds, because you don't negotiate away divine commandments.

Well, that negotiated settlement, two-term, two-state solution is the phrase
that comes up, and you touch on that in that chapter.
And we're told this is the way to fix all the problems, if only we can come up
with this mythical two-state solution.
Why is that then not the solution to the issue that the world faces in the Middle East?

A two-state solution would require two states.
That requires at least ostensibly that the Arabs have to acknowledge that
a Jewish state of some size has a right to exist there and they will never
accept that, because the divine command has driven them out from where they
drove you out.
That does not admit of half measures.
It might admit of partial fulfilment that they take over half of Israel and
then the other half later.
But it doesn't allow for the recognition of the right to exist of
any non-Muslim entity on that land.
Consequently, the Jewish state could be the size of my office here.
The Jewish state could be the size of a postage stamp, and it would not be acceptable,
because they have have to drive them out from where they drove you out without any exceptions.
The negotiation, the two-state solution would quickly become, or even eventually,
even slowly become, a one-state solution.
The Palestinian state would make war against what's left of Israel and
ultimately destroy it.
There would never be two states in that land on an indefinite basis.

In your book, one of the chapters talks about the naivety of Carter.
Seemingly, every U.S. president has accepted this.
Even Trump has accepted; has stated that actually he sees that as the best solution.
Is that simply an absolute misunderstanding that this is a religious ideology
that lies at the root of all this?

Yeah, absolutely.
It's because nobody in Washington knows or wants to know about
the power and influence of Islam over political issues.
They underestimated and misunderstood Khomeini when it was the time of
the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979.
And since 1948, they have misunderstood the Israeli-Arab conflict, because they
don't understand Islam.
They routinely discount it as having anything to do with this conflict.
And yet, it's right there in the Hamas charter.
Israel will arise and will remain until Islam obliterates it.
Islam obliterates it.
And yet, no policymaker, no president, not Carter, not any of the others.
Not Trump.
None of them have ever pondered.
What does that mean until Islam obliterates it?
How can Islam obliterate a country?
That doesn't even make any sense to the policymakers in Washington, because they
think of Islam solely as a religion, and they think of it because they come
from Judeo-Christian backgrounds.
The way Christianity operates in the West.
They assume it's like that, and so, they have no idea of its political,
aggressive, expansionist, and supremacist aspects.

In chapter four, you say the Palestinians are invented.
That's a very strong statement.
Surely, we've had the land of Palestine back in the Roman era.
That's surely 2,000 years old.
So, there must be all this history and people: the Palestinians.

Well, I'll tell you, Peter, you're right, and yet not.
And I know you know.
It's true.
The Romans renamed the land of Judea, that is, land of the Jews.
They renamed Judea Palestine in 134 AD.
And they officially expelled the Jews from the area, although many of them stayed
all the way through to the modern age.
Now, Palestine was a name they had taken from the Bible, from the Philistines,
the ancient enemies of the Israelites, in the Jewish scriptures.
And they named it Palestine.
They named Judea Palestine as a yet another taunt against the Jews as they were
expelling them from the region.
They renamed the region against their extinct enemies.
But, there were never any Palestinians.
And I would ask you, you know.
You can find on YouTube, for example, the men on the street interviews,
and people are even Palestinians are asked, name a famous Palestinian from history.
And they all say Yasser Arafat.
Okay, name another.
If they were Palestinian since 134 AD, then, okay, name one.
Give us one from the second century or the fifth or the 10th
or the 15th or the 19th.
There weren't any.
It was the name of a region.
It's like Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is a city in the United States.
And there are citizens of Los Angeles, but if we start talking about a distinct
Los Angeles nationality that deserves its own state, people would laugh.
It's the name of the city.
And Palestine was the name of this region, but there were never any Palestinians.
It was just the name of a place.
The idea that it's a distinct nationality was invented by Arafat and the KGB in 1964.
And they did it as a propaganda weapon because the whole world in those days
was sympathetic to Israel.
The Israelis, because they had faced off and defeated massive nations.
Arab and non-Arab Muslim nations, and had stood against them even though they
were vastly outnumbered and outgunned.
They gained the sympathy of the entire world.
And so, the KGB in Arafat in 1964 renamed the Palestine Liberation Organization,
the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
Very small change and nobody even noticed, but it was a momentous change, because
it indicated for the first time in history that there was a people called Palestinians.
And now the whole world accepts it and takes it for granted,
but this is an invented nationality that was designed to create an even tinier
people that was menaced by the massive Israeli war machine.
And that would take the wind out of the sails of Israel, the tiny underdog Jewish
state facing off against these massive Arab states.
And it's worked very well.
Even the Israelis have admitted or accepted the existence of Palestinians as
a distinct nationality when there has never been such a people in history.
You can go to 1948.
Go to the library, read the newspapers from the day.
Read the United Nations deliberations when they offered the Arabs
half of the area of Israel.
We're going to establish yet another Arab state and a Jewish state.
And the Arabs said no, because they wouldn't accept a Jewish state of any size.
Nobody ever mentions Palestinians.
It's funny, because they're the center of the conflict now.
And yet, in those days, it was the Israeli-Arab conflict. There was not a single mention anywhere of Palestinians.

I mean, Islam does seem to have a trend of rewriting history.
And in the book you talk about a number of statements and articles referring
to Jesus as a Palestinian.
That would be news to Jesus, because I'm sure I read in my Bible that he was Jewish.

Yeah, well, obviously this is another propaganda point that's designed to curry
favour among non-Muslims with the Palestinians.
Even from a historical standpoint, Jesus was not a Palestinian because it wasn't until a
hundred years after Jesus that the Romans renamed the area of Judea Palestine.
The Gospels are very clear.
Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea.
That Galilee was right there next to Judea, where he grew up in Nazareth.
And he says salvation is from the Jews.
A very ignored statement of his.
This is very clearly someone who was operating within a Jewish framework,
a Jewish culture surrounded by Jews.
And even the theology of Christianity is based on the theology of Judaism,
that the temple Judaism before the destruction of the temple in 70 AD was based
on animal sacrifices for atonement for sins.
And then Jesus is presented as being, as God become man,
the eternal sacrifice and the perfect atonement for sins that opens the way
of heaven for the people.
This is something that really doesn't even make any sense apart from Judaism.
And I think Christians nowadays are getting very carried away in this Christ
is King controversy that's been going on in regard to Candace Owens and the Daily
Wire and so on.
It risks ignoring or denying the Jewish roots of Christianity and the fundamental kinship that Judaism and Christianity actually have,
despite the undeniable antagonism and the Christian anti-Semitism that was certainly
operative in Europe for centuries.

Well, you're right. Without Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the stories of
the Old Testament, God's promised there would be no New Testament and Jesus
would not be there.
100%, Robert.
Just to finish off with, the last chapter is what is to be done.
And it seems from this discussion that what the conflict that we see at the
moment between the Palestinians in Gaza and the Israelis is just part of the
wider issue of Jews and Muslims, of Islam and Judaism.
So, when you say what is to be done, how do you see looking ahead?

Well, looking ahead, it doesn't look good, because the American government,
which is essentially the principal, if not the sole ally of the Jewish state,
is betraying Israel because the Biden regime is very afraid that it's going
to lose the Muslim vote, which could lose it several swing states in
the November election.
And end up with Biden being defeated for re-election.
So, they've decided to betray Israel as a result.
They're pressing for a Palestinian state.
If a Palestinian state were founded, that would, as I discussed earlier, become a new
jihad base for renewed attacks against what's left of Israel.
They don't seem to know or care that if Israel is destroyed,
then the jihadis all around the world will be emboldened like never before, and
will step up their attacks in Europe and the United States.
This is what we're looking at in the future unless Israel is able
to destroy Hamas despite the international pressure to get it to surrender
and by surrender.
I mean accept a ceasefire that would allow Hamas to live and if Israel can do
that then all bets are off and the post-war picture will be radically different.
But right now it looks like it's going to be very tough times ahead head,
both for Israel and for the West.

Well, I would encourage people to get: The Passing Delusion.
It's a great book and will help explain what is happening.
And of course, Robert's latest book is: The Empire of God, How the Byzantines
Saved Civilization.
A wonderful endorsement by Victor Davis Hanson.
So, if you're not sure about Robert, go to Victor David Hanson.
Robert, really appreciate you coming along.
Love your work over the many decades with Jihad Watch, certainly one of my go-to
places on the geopolitics and deeper.
Thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you.
Pleasure.