Israel's Political Influence on Jerry Falwell

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Christians United for Israel, which has, I believe, seven million members, tons and tons of political donations there, which obviously are shuttled to politicians, which is led by Hagee.

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The question is, right, to what degree does this serve, one, America, or two,

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American evangelicals? It's effectively vote for us because we can get America to do things for us.

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Welcome to the

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Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, and we have a special podcast today, kind of a history, but more of a recent history -themed podcast on the connection, as I understand it, between some of the evangelical support for the nation state of Israel, the modern state of Israel, and the

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Likud party, which is a very conservative party within Israel. And to talk about it, we have

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Jay Burden with us, who is the host of The Jay Burden Show, and you can find his podcast on YouTube.

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You can also go to wherever podcasts, wherever you listen to podcasts, and find it there.

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He has a link tree, which I'll put in the reference center for the podcast if you want to check him out on Patreon or Telegram or any of the other places that he posts.

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So welcome to the podcast, Jay. Appreciate you coming on to talk about this. Yeah, thanks so much, man.

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I really appreciate the opportunity. So, Jay, I know that you've been doing a lot of research in this area, and I used to live in Lynchburg, so I know about the buckle of the

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Bible Belt where Jerry Falwell Liberty University is. And there's a strong support for Israel in the evangelical

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Christian camp. And so you've been doing some research, and you found some connections that you wanted to reveal on this podcast.

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So yeah, tell us what you got. Tell us what you think we should know. Yeah, sure. So I want to start this off because it is a touchy issue, right?

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By just sort of laying out where I'm coming from. So raised in the evangelical world, I know a lot of people who've been to Liberty, been employed at Liberty, and had good experiences.

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Similarly, I know a lot of people, I never met the man, who really loved Jerry Falwell Sr.

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And I take that seriously. This isn't some character assassination. I'm not looking to pull him down.

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But in the aftermath of a fairly dramatic almost war with Iran, I feel like it's worth looking into, well, why do we have this special relationship with Israel, right?

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If we care about America, we obviously have allies, but it should be something that's open for discussion.

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Similarly, if you have these questions, it's not necessarily because you have anything against Jews per se, or the state of Israel in particular.

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But as patriots of a nation, it stands to reason that we should care about the conflicts our nation gets involved in.

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So that's sort of where I'm coming from here. So for a little bit of context,

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Israel as a nation is a relatively new thing. Obviously, started in 1948, in the aftermath of the

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Second World War, with, I think, very good intentions. The idea was this is a persecuted people, we will give them a home.

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But if we look into both the origins of Zionism, the idea that modern day

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Jews should have a homeland in what is now Israel, that is something that is a little bit older, but in the grand scheme of things, not all that old.

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So in a Christian context, the idea of a specific Jewish homeland and nation starts with the

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Puritans. So the 16th century, very early, we see letters being written to then

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British Parliament saying, we should provide a homeland for the Jews, advocating for Jewish interests to bring their money together and purchase that land from then the

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Ottoman Turks who controlled it. And so really, up until about the, shall we say, the 70s or 80s, this was from 1980s, shall we say a minority position people generally held in private.

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It was something you can imagine roughly as impactful as if someone has opinions on Kurdistan, right?

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Should the Kurds have a homeland? I mean, you and I might have opinions on it, but it's not really something that comes up all that much.

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However, in the 70s and 80s, this issue becomes very tied to American evangelicals in politics.

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Now, obviously there's a longer history about, shall we say, evangelical views on the end times, does there need to be a state of Israel that we will probably not get into, but that's really the context when this becomes a live political issue, right?

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The old line goes, I can tell exactly your politics by your opinion on abortion in Israel, right? Those became the hot button issues in the culture war.

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So going back a little bit, right? Obviously there's a lot of history to go over with Zionism, but generally speaking,

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Jewish people started to move to what was then Palestine or Judea round about the turn of the 19th century, roughly a hundred years ago.

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That's when that project really started. And they were moving from all over the world, right?

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Jews were a diaspora people. They were pretty widely spread over Europe and Russia.

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And to explain why we really need to look into nationalism.

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Now, obviously nationalism is sort of a scary word from certain people. It can be used as a slur, but generally speaking at the most basic level, we're going to discuss is nationalism is the idea that the nation, right?

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The political unit, the state should be synonymous with a people group and a land.

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So obviously this applies to something like the American war for independence, but also a lot of people look at the

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French revolution, right? This is a people, they will have a state, the right to self -determine.

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Self -determination is a phrase that we will hear often in this discussion. And it sort of was invoke, right?

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This is the time where we see the birth of, for instance, Ukrainian nationalism, right? Ukraine was for a long time, a region of Russia, the local elite, the nobles there say, look, we're culturally distinct.

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We ought to have our own nation. And so we can obviously discuss when exactly that occurred, but this was sort of in the air at the time.

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Now this trend continues up to the first world war. And the first world war is really the death of monarchies and the start of the death of empires, right?

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After that war, we see many of these countries transitioned from having, in many cases, a nominal, but still a

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King to being parliamentary democracies like what we see now. And part of that, the idea was with someone like Woodrow Wilson, who had been, he had a lot of letters and pressure.

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I don't wanna say pressure, it sounds too negative, but a lot of encouragement had been placed on him to start the work of creating a homeland for the

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Jewish people. So it didn't work, right? It didn't occur then, but that was sort of in everyone's mind is something that they wanted to go towards.

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So this intensifies that process of Jews moving to what was then

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Palestine or Judea, right? Still under first Turkish and then British control.

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So once the Jews get there, they start to organize, they start to start political organizations that sort of span the whole political spectrum.

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And one of the most impactful and one of the most, I guess, sort of infamous groups is

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Irgun, which was sort of a, depending on who you ask, freedom fighter or paramilitary organization.

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Right -wing very much, think of them almost as the Hebrew IRA, right?

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They were a militant group and most infamously involved in a bombing called the

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King David Hotel bombing. This was, and this is controversial history, so the reason

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I'm hedging my bets here is depending on who you ask, it was either a sort of a symbolic attack, a desire to destroy evidence or a legitimate terrorist attack where 97 people, many of them civilians, were killed in this bombing.

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And Irgun had a lot of very sort of influential people who would become relevant later in the history of Israel.

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So fast forward a little bit, right? While the British control this area, there's this series of sort of just nasty terrorist attacks, you know,

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British officers are assassinated. It's just a nightmare for everyone involved. So as you can imagine, after the second world war, when that process of sort of de -imperializing really kicks up, right?

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Almost every nation is setting aside its colonies after that war. England basically throws up their hands and they're like, guys, we don't want to be involved in this.

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All right, fine. You can have your own thing. And many of those former Irgun members become political figures, somewhat similar to what we saw in Ireland, right?

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IRA members would later be involved in something like Sinn Fein, which is a party there for what matters.

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And initially Israel was sort of a socialist republic, a soft socialist republic.

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Actually a little bit closer to, in the cold war context, the Soviets than to us. The problem is, as we're well aware, socialism doesn't work particularly well.

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The society sort of starts to grind to a halt. It's not working correctly. And in the wake of conflicts with Egypt and others in the sixties, the

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Likud party rises to prominence. And the Likud party is made up of sort of this former

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Irgun cadre. And they become sort of the right wing. We can imagine them not quite, but similar to like the

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Republicans of Israel. And there's a man there who was incredibly influential in Irgun, Menachem Begin, who became a multiple time prime minister, minister of defense, and very much tied to founder of the

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Likud party. So he is sort of a George Washington -esque figure, might be too much, but he is a similar level of influential man.

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So he was tied to the camp, or it's not the

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Camp David, excuse me, the King David hotel bombing, right? He's implicated in that, but he became a legitimate political figure.

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So, okay, got the history of that organization. This is later the party that Benjamin Netanyahu will lead.

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Benjamin Netanyahu and Menachem were linked. They were sort of a master and apprentice type situation, but okay, sure, whatever.

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You've got the history of Israel up to a certain time. The question is, how does that matter to us as American evangelicals?

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Well, certainly there was a great amount of support for Israel kind of growing over time due to the popularity of certain beliefs about the end times, the necessity of creating a third temple in Israel, but there's no real money trail, right?

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Until I started to do a little bit of research on Jerry Falwell, right?

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So again, nothing but good things to say about him personally, but he became a very influential figure in American politics.

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Not necessarily looking to go into a history of the evangelical movement, but it kind of the 30 ,000 foot view, right?

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Going fast and loose with the details. The evangelical mainline split goes back again, about a hundred years to what we call the modernist crisis.

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Effectively, what happened before about a hundred years ago is at any normal church where you could receive, you know, small orthodox

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Bible teaching, generally speaking before about then, your preacher would have been trained at an

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Ivy league institution. One of these, you know, prestigious American universities, because they were schools of divinity.

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Around a hundred years ago, we start to see sort of creeping modernism, right?

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The idea that, well, Mary wasn't a virgin, Jesus didn't rise from the dead, sort of watering down those institutions.

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And now if you look at the graduating class of Harvard divinity, it's sort of up for debate if they're

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Christians at all, right? It's effectively a meaningless thing. So you have a great number of people all across the

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US who are realizing, wait a minute, you know, our next pastor, he's not a Christian. He doesn't believe in the resurrection.

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So you have all of these sort of leaderless people looking for preachers.

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So this is the origin of the Bible college movement and things like that. A lot of that was propelled by the

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Schofield Bible, something we don't really have time to get into, but that's really where the popularization of certain beliefs about Israel went from being a minority to a majority position in the

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American conservative evangelical world. Those people are not necessarily super politicized until about the seventies, when weirdly enough,

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Jimmy Carter sort of gets the evangelical vote and turns it into a block. And very quickly that gets taken over by the

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Republicans for fairly obvious reasons, right? Republicans decide that we care a lot about abortion, which is of course a very good thing.

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And so they take that block and it becomes their core voting group. So, right, digging into Jerry Falwell, the creator of the moral majority, which is sort of a shorthand term for that voting block, even to this day.

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Okay. So I'm pulling a lot from the research of a journalist, Whitney Webb, sort of a bizarre character, left -wing secularist leanings.

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So when you read her work, understand that she is a little bit biased, but the factual reporting is there, right?

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So your audience are adults. They can read through and pull out someone's bias. And that's sort of what I've done here.

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For instance, she's really worried about the idea of a Christian theocracy, which, all right, let's be honest, is a little bit silly in current day.

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Not the desire for it, but her response to it. And so she did a series on Israel.

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So point is, Jerry Falwell founds the moral majority in 1979.

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But before that, Jerry Falwell's sort of empire of ministry is in trouble.

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He's completely financially insolvent. He's under pressure from the feds because he's issued what he called church bonds, which, again, he pled financial ignorance, which

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I believe, right? But the feds were looking at that as some sort of securities fraud. So he's under a lot of pressure.

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The life insurance for his employees is completely and totally financially insolvent.

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And very, very quickly, he gets a lot, a lot of money.

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And part of that comes in the form of a $4 million

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Learjet, right? Which was given to him by a donor to the

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Likud party. So he basically gets saved, pulled out of the fire by a person tied to a foreign political organization, right?

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And again, I've heard nothing but good things about Jerry Falwell, personally, but it's pretty obvious to see how this is a little compromising, right?

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Similarly, pick your favorite pastor. But if you found out he was going bankrupt and I don't know any political parties in Russia, but they gave him the money to fix that problem, you would start to look at the scans at why he was a real fan of that nation, right?

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Sorry, let me pull this up. So he is very close friends with Begin.

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We see this over and over again, that he and Begin develop a very close relationship and tied his belief in the inerrancy of the

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Bible, right? Which is something we all believe, to Begin's foreign policy vision, which is called the sort of Greater Israel Project.

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And that involves annexing land from Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, a couple other places, which regardless of your opinions on who owns that land, it's very clear to see why that wouldn't earn you a lot of friends in the region, right?

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And we see this even to the point where he is given awards from the

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Israeli government, right? The Jabotinsky Award, which is named after a famous Zionist.

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He's the first non -Jew to ever be given that award. Again, nothing wrong with being recognized, but, you know, indicating the kind of close relationship between the two organizations.

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For instance, right, when Netanyahu assumes his first term as prime minister, which

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I believe was 96 to 2000, regardless, it was in 98,

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Netanyahu flies to meet the president, right? Flies to talk to Bill Clinton. This is sort of in the era of some peace talks that the

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Norwegians were hosting in Oslo that sort of fell apart. Well, where does he go first? Well, he goes to the small town of Lynchburg, Virginia first, right?

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To talk to Jerry Fola. And the question is, well, why does he do that? Well, the answer is because Falwell is an extremely, or was an extremely listened to voice, both on the voter level and on the political level.

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He was friends with a great many politicians. He's a very influential guy. And that jet, right, that we talked about earlier enabled him to fly all over the country to gin up support for Israel.

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For instance, during those peace talks I mentioned earlier in Oslo, in response to a call from Begin, who's still around then, and the exact quote is wild, is,

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I need you to do some work for me, right? Which indicates there was some sort of relationship there where at least

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Begin assumed he could call in favors. Falwell basically said, I am going to write a letter to the 3 ,000 most prominent pastors in America to tell them to support this, right?

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So he is fulfilling the other end of that deal. And look, obviously Falwell died in 2008, but this exact relationship is still one we see today.

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For instance, the largest Zionist organization in the US is Christians United for Israel, which has,

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I believe, 7 million members, tons and tons of political donations there, which obviously are shuffled to politicians, which is led by Hagee, I think is his name.

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I always pronounce it wrong. The point is, it's a very long relationship between the two groups.

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And the question is, right, to what degree does this serve, one, America, or two,

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American evangelicals, right? Is their support being taken advantage of?

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If we look at the justification, right, that the Likud party uses to stay in power, right, what is the story they tell their supporters?

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It's effectively, vote for us because we can get America to do things for us, right?

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We can pull them around by the nose. And a large part of that is the fact that they can influence the

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American evangelical base. And so my point in this, and like I said, you can read Whitney Webb's article, you know, many others on the topic, is not to say, you know,

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I hate Israel or you should hate Israel, but just to say, this is worth talking about, because politics came for our religion.

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You know, they have decided that we are going to lean on those connections to get people to support certain things.

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And yeah, I think that's definitely something worth going into. How reliable are the sources that indicate that the

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Likud party provided this jet? So it is highly controversial, right? Obviously, you can understand why anyone involved would want to deny that.

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But according to Webb's article, right, which is very well researched, that link is there.

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And again, look, we all have the same opinions on journalism. Take everything you say with a grain of salt.

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But at the very least, right, there is this allegation of a certain amount of corruption.

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And following on from that, we see a change in action. So, okay, look, it's entirely possible that, you know, they,

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Falwell was just really good friends with, you know, the members of the Likud party.

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That's entirely possible, right? I don't want to impugn this man's honor. Either way, right, he sort of stepped into a role as a political advocate for another nation, which, you know, that's, it could have been entirely honestly done.

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But it still warrants a certain amount of skepticism coming from that is sort of my position on that.

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And so again, you know, I have Webb's article, I have others, I recognize that many of these sources don't like American evangelicals, so they are biased towards looking at us in a negative light.

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But nonetheless, the evidence is compelling. And, you know, even from people who don't necessarily like us, if they're saying something true,

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I think it warrants taking seriously. What's the takeaway then that you're hoping evangelicals hear since this is a podcast a lot of evangelicals listen to?

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Yeah, sure. So basically, it is that a large number of influential people in the evangelical world have been our very close friends, personally, with a political party in another nation.

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And that creates a massive bias. So one of the other things that Likud started in the 80s was these free familiarization tours, where basically, if you were a pastor, you can go on an all expenses paid trip to Israel, sort of a free vacation.

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And, you know, in much the same way that in the mid 2000s, we looked at drug companies and said, hey, look, doctors can't make objective decisions about what drug to prescribe, if Pfizer is flying them and their families out to a fancy resort once a year.

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Similarly, right, if we're looking at pastors, we were looking at spiritual leaders who have been being given the same treatment by a political entity.

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Obviously, that biases them as well. And look, we hold pastors to very high standards, but they're human.

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And this is effectively a foreign operation to influence public opinion.

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And again, that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone who supports Israel is getting paid by the Likud party.

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Not at all. But to say that that government is very interested in influencing public opinion in America through sort of a soft form of bribery.

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Yeah, I wonder, like, to what extent I mean, this is obviously just looking at Falwell, but to what extent, you know,

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Israeli interests have, like, obviously, you have a packets, a lot of press, but like, exactly where their influence has been most keenly felt, because they're, they go where they have opportunity, right.

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And if I was in Israel shoes, I, I actually understand it, I feel like I don't,

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I'm an America first guy. So I don't really want foreign governments having their influence in our policies.

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But at the same time, if I was in Israel shoes, surrounded by enemies, and needing a friend, and the most powerful organization and the most powerful military in the world is open to some kind of influence,

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I would totally take it. And so I mean, I've seen all kinds of claims lately, especially, and I haven't researched them that Zionists are staging fake anti -Semite hate crimes.

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And they're behind even some of the anti Jewish stuff, because they want to show that there's a problem that needs to be responded to.

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And although I don't know that they need to do that anymore, but that there's just like, their influences is everywhere.

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And I just don't want to, I want to have a realistic picture of it, right? I don't want it to look too big or too small.

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Like, what are your thoughts on that? Like, how much of an influence do they have? Obviously, if the largest

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Christian university was, you know, follow had a relationship with this guy, big, and then

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I'm sure their influence was other places. But I, but I also know Falwell had relationships with like everyone.

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And he was just, that was his personality. Even who is it? Who's the porn guy that showed up at his funeral and did a speech?

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Because they were so close. You know, I'm talking about, though, it's like, he just had like a very wide ranging, everyone liked him, right?

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And or, or they hated him. But the people who actually got to know him seemed to really like him. That was just kind of the personality he had.

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But yeah, I mean, just maybe go on about, you know, what do you think Israel's influence is?

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So yeah, at a certain point, right, it's, it's don't hate the player, hate the game. And the reason that I brought up nationalism earlier, right, is to say that you really can't blame a people for acting in their best interest.

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But that street goes two ways. And the question is, at a very basic level, what is the point of America?

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Is the point for America, as someone like Glenn Beck said, to secure the existence of the nation of Israel?

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And look, like, I don't have anything personally against them, but that's not why I think America exists.

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I think America exists to provide a home for Americans. The same way that Denmark exists for the

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Danes, any number of these countries exist to host the people that live there, right?

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The person you could look at and say, okay, that's an American, that's a German, whatever. A German's maybe a weighted example, but you know what

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I mean, right? That people ought to have a place to live. And so, like you said,

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I get it. They are, from a certain perspective, acting rationally, right? If you had an opportunity to basically say, well, like, hey, do you think

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I get Mike Tyson, you know, in my corner on the playroom swavel, right? Of course you would, right? That's stacking the deck in your favor.

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But the question is, to what degree does this relationship benefit us?

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Because I look at something like Iran, and obviously there's a whole lot of reporting coming out, very difficult to determine what actually happened.

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But what it seems like happened is Israel launched a strike on Iran and then basically said, all right,

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America, you have to back us up. And look, like, we're not friends with Iran.

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I don't like Iran. But at the same time, being sort of yanked by the nose and said, all right, you guys need to fight right now.

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That's sort of an alarming thing, right? We can just be dragged into a conflict almost overnight.

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And what we saw from a lot of the American conservative movement, although this sort of is shifting, right?

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We see attitudes changing, is that there were some people who were cheerleaders, like, yes, let's do it.

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Go right now. Let's start a war. And again, there's obviously a multitude of opinions on anything.

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But if we're going to take away one thing from the last, shall we say, 20 years of American foreign policy adventures,

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Iraq and Afghanistan, it's that we as Americans lose a whole lot. We lose a lot of money.

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We lose a lot of lives. And have either one of those particularly worked, right?

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The Taliban still have Afghanistan. We can certainly take shots at the way in which we pulled out.

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But it seems unlikely that another five years of occupation would have solved that issue. Sure, we got rid of Saddam Hussein.

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But is America better for it? Is Iraq better for it? And so, again, asking that question of, well, is this good for us?

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Does this suit our needs? And again, if we look at that, you know, America first slogan we hear from Trump and others, that seems to be, you know, a banner that says

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America is for Americans. That is our first priority. And that isn't bundled with a hatred for others, a desire to ruin the life of other peoples or other nations, but to say the first concern for American leadership should be

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Americans. And that's, I think, why this issue has gotten so thorny, is because it seems as if Israel exists sort of as a state of exception, right?

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We offer them more than other allies. And so digging into that, because look, like, we're very close allies with, you know, nations like the

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UK. But there isn't the same level of, to be honest, theological support, right?

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There isn't the same sort of blurring of the lines between, you know, political and religious devotion to that ally.

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So that's really why I'm interested in this, right? Just to examine, like, okay, where did this come from? Why is this a special and exceptional case?

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Yeah, there seems to be a convenient way to justify it in some quarters, Ted Cruz being an example, because of the dispensational framework that the future promises will be eventually.

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And it's actually not even unique to dispensationalists, because there are also covenant theologians who believe that there's going to be an in -gathering, and that the

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Israelis will return to, or the Jews will return to the land of Palestine. So identifying that as the modern state of Israel, saying that that is what that is.

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And then making, I mean, you have to make a few jumps, right? You have to then jump to, they're keeping, this is the fulfillment, they're keeping their confident promises.

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It's the return of those who bless Israel, I will bless, or bless the seed,

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I should say, of Abraham. And so, I mean, I disagree with those things, but I can understand how there was sort of a weak point there, or a point to exploit.

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And it's interesting, though, because I think this same, there's a few things merging here, in my opinion,

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I'll get your take on this, but you got, we've actually given a whole lot more money to Ukraine in the last few years than we have to Israel, by a lot.

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And Ukraine, I've also heard spoken of in these same ways from evangelical

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Christians, they just don't have the verses to back it up, right? Because Ukraine's not a significant player in biblical narrative, but they'll frame it in such a way as like, you're either on the side of freedom or democracy, or you're on the side of Putin, who's a

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Nazi, who is, you know, it's very morally black and white terms. And if you're a real

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Christian, you support Ukraine. And we're pretty much like, you know, all the same people who are very big on Israel.

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And in addition to them, people who are woke in evangelical circles now, which is kind of a weird dynamic, but they have, they all went for Ukraine as well.

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And I think you were right to start the story with the Puritans in a way, just because, I don't know,

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I think there's an instinct that has been in American foreign policy for a long time to see ourselves as having a divine mission of some kind to go spread freedom to the world and make it a better place.

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That's what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. We were giving them democracy. We were giving freedom to women who had been oppressed for years, and they could get educations now.

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And if we just give them a constitution like ours, they'll be good Americans, right? That seems to be what's behind a lot of this.

33:16

And then the theology kind of justifies it. But anyway, I was just going to say that it seems to me that what happened in this recent issue is a few things.

33:30

Donald Trump's been saying since 2011, he said it like over 50 times, that he didn't want Iran to have nuclear weapons.

33:36

And that's been like a very, and he's not a neocon, that's obviously been a neocon thing, but this has been like an

33:42

American thing. And we have a long history with Iran, regardless of Israel. We staged, we helped, this is controversial too, but I'm pretty convinced that we helped with a coup in,

33:53

I think it was the early fifties, the CIA did. And then you had in 19, I think it was 88, we destroyed actually half their

33:59

Navy. One of the largest Naval battles since World War II that you've never heard of was over the transportation of oil and in part at least.

34:09

And we went and destroyed half of Iran's Navy and they don't like us very much. They suspect us, and they have this radical theology of this 12th

34:18

Imam that it's different than North Korea, where if North Korea gets a nuke, they'll be destroyed if they try to use it.

34:25

But the problem with Iran is we're not exactly sure if they don't care. Like if they get destroyed, that's part of their theology is like, there's going to be chaos before the 12th

34:36

Imam comes back. So maybe that's okay. So they might not be intimidated by the fact that there's mutual assured destruction.

34:44

So that poses a problem to the United States, regardless of Israel, even though Israel is probably the first place a nuke would be detonated.

34:50

But if we have an open border, if we have sleeper cells here, if we have a country that's going to go after Qatar and the

34:59

Saudis and other allies, because they're all afraid of Iran too. They're all kind of, they're all, whether it's secret or it's public, the

35:10

United Arab Emirates, Qatar and the Saudis are pretty much all aligned against Iran with Israel, which is weird because it's a flip from the seventies where you actually had

35:20

Israel sending, Israel, believe it or not, had a joint project with Iran to develop missiles, if you can believe this.

35:26

Israel sent five, 50 advisors in the eighties to advise them with Iraq and sold them weapons.

35:34

That wasn't that long ago. It's kind of a recent thing that in the nineties, which is long after, you know, this jet was purchased,

35:43

I think, from this, what was his name? The gentleman from Israel who purchased the jet,

35:52

Begin. Begin. Yeah. So it's long after Begin did that, but it seems like it's more of a nineties thing that this has become an increasing concern that they get a nuke, they're going to detonate in Israel.

36:03

And I don't know, it seems to me like, did Israel, there's this book

36:08

I read called, what's it called? It's about Tehran. I think it's called like Project Tehran or something, but it's about the nuclear project that the

36:20

Iranians have and how Israel has been foiling that. And we've heard for years, they're five years away.

36:25

They're one year away. They're about to get a nuke. And Mossad keeps foiling this because they have agents that do assassinations and they kill scientists and they destroy information.

36:37

And then the latest big one was this 2018 or 19. They had the espionage where they discovered that Iran had been lying for years about their nuclear program.

36:47

And that was the pretext for pulling out of the agreement Obama made with them. Right. And so anyway,

36:54

I guess my point is just that I think what happened, this seems to be the likely scenario is this was just another one of those things.

37:02

Like Israel keeps sending targeted bombs. They keep sending agents to do assassinations.

37:08

They keep foiling Iran's plans at every turn. And they got into a spot where they couldn't foil them anymore.

37:17

The U .S. was the only one with the technology with a bunker busting bombs to actually take out their nuclear program this time and manage the issue because there's really no solution to the issue.

37:28

You don't want to do regime change, but they're still they keep getting close to I mean, they're enriching uranium at 60 percent.

37:35

So it's beyond any kind of civilian use. So what do you do in that spot? And if I was

37:40

Israel, I would probably keep doing what they're doing, which is trying to foil the efforts of Iran.

37:46

But in this case, there wasn't much they could do. These these facilities are deep underground.

37:53

They're they're trying to secure them away from Assad and from Israel's foiling attempts.

37:59

And so it was necessary for the United States to do something. They're the only ones who could. And yet at the same time, the

38:06

United States is war fatigued and isn't going to get involved unless prompted. And it seemed

38:12

I'm obviously also putting pieces together because I don't know exactly what was happening behind closed doors, but it seems like it's right.

38:18

Yeah, I know. Well, maybe Trump does. I don't know. But it seems like he doesn't even seem to know fully because he's he seems reluctant.

38:24

But he also he saw enough of a threat there that he decided,

38:29

OK, we'll take out these these facilities, but we won't do boots on the ground.

38:36

We won't do regime change. And then he yanked on Israel's pretty hard when they were about to violate the ceasefire after Iran had violated it.

38:45

And he basically said no. And they listened to him. So I'm a bit torn about it because I didn't want him sending missiles.

38:53

I didn't. I felt also like, man, we're getting involved in something we don't need to be involved in. At the same time, it's like they're also our enemy.

39:01

And and perhaps perhaps the scenario that ended up unfolding was the best possible scenario for us as well.

39:09

Under the circumstances where we've delayed their ability, hopefully to keep enriching uranium and pursuing nuclear capability.

39:19

And at the same time, we didn't get involved in like an Iraq or an Afghanistan thing. And I think that was Trump's aim.

39:25

And I think he achieved it. And he also he also seemed to prove at the end that he's not going to be just pushed around by Israel, like they're not just going to be able to do what they want to do.

39:33

So that's my way of looking at that issue. What are your thoughts about that?

39:39

I mean, do you think do you disagree with what I said or do you think that that's a likely scenario? So several things here.

39:46

One one of the consequences of. Our several decades of regime change is we have basically set up an incentive structure where if you are our friend, if you're our enemy, you have to have nukes as a safeguard.

40:06

Because in the mind of every one of these dictators is I don't want to end up like Gaddafi. I'd rather be

40:12

Kim Jong -un because. The idea is if you build a big enough fortress or a big enough bomb, right, you become to a certain degree untouchable because no one wants to open

40:24

Pandora's box of nuclear war or the potentiality for it. And so in a bizarre way, we have sort of created the incentives for nuclear proliferation.

40:36

I think that there's another point which is largely outside the scope of what we're talking about, which is how long can you keep a technological genie in the bottle?

40:45

And while I certainly understand the desire to do that, I think that ultimately that's a losing battle, right?

40:50

Like that's something we have. And obviously both us and to a certain degree, the Russians, that's kind of vacillated, are interested in not having every state be nuclear armed.

41:01

But at a certain point, right, this is 80 -year -old technology, right? Like this will happen one way or another.

41:08

And in a bizarre way, we've sort of created an incentive structure where if you don't have the big red button, we're going to constantly mess with you.

41:17

Again, understandable in each one of those specific instances, right? But if you are

41:23

XYZ evil dictator, that's on your mind, right? You're thinking, well, if I don't have this,

41:29

I might get dragged out in the street. Another detail about Iran that's kind of interesting is that Iran is not really a great proxy for a lot of other nations we've started these regime wars with.

41:45

Because Iran is, I don't want to say more of a real country, but it is more of a real country, right?

41:51

They have manufacturing, they have, obviously, I don't want to live there, it doesn't seem like a particularly pleasant place to be, but they are to a certain degree, a scary adversary.

42:01

And part of that is there are multiple different factions within their government, right?

42:07

So there's the theocrats, right? The mullahs who are predominantly aging, right? A lot of them are the same guys who were involved in the initial revolution.

42:15

But there's also the revolutionary guard, which is sort of the military wing of that dictatorship.

42:21

And they tend to be much younger, they tend to be a little bit more aggressive, and they tend to be more competent, to be blunt about it.

42:29

And one of the interesting things that happened in result to this most recent conflict is, relatively speaking, the mullahs were embarrassed and the army was seen as being capable and competent.

42:41

And so that power balance has shifted. But one of the other things that we're talking about with Iran is that, to put it mildly,

42:50

Persian civilization is incredibly old, right? Much, much older than Islam.

42:56

And so the joke before the revolution was, the Arabs didn't islamicize

43:01

Iran. Iran Persianized, except it had been Persia back then, but Persianized Islam, right?

43:07

That culture is so old, so deep, that the Islam didn't really sink through.

43:12

And look, don't get me wrong, there are still regime loyalists. But the mullahs are not particularly popular, right?

43:20

It's sort of seen as an imposition on their culture. Now this war has entrenched their position.

43:26

Because you remember earlier, I mentioned what is the political formula or the story that Likud tells their voters?

43:33

Well, obviously, the mullahs don't have voters. But the story they say is, we are the only people who can protect you from the great

43:41

Satan and the little Satan, right? America and Israel. That's right. And, you know, when there aren't bombs dropping, the economy just kind of sucks because, you know, it's a horrible dictatorship.

43:53

You don't really like the mullahs. We've sanctioned them into it too. Yeah, exactly. It's like, well, okay, protecting us from what?

44:00

At what cost? But when bombs are dropping, all of a sudden, that formula makes a lot of sense.

44:06

So support for the government internally has shot up quite a bit. But to your point more broadly, right, about Ukraine and others, and your point about Ted Cruz, I think that there's a very real case that a lot of our politicians don't believe a thing they're telling to us.

44:21

You know, I really, okay, sure, I don't want to impugn Ted Cruz personally. But in his conversation with Tucker, it seemed very clear that he didn't really know a lot about the situation.

44:30

He just wanted a war with Iran. Any excuse will do, right? Whatever the reason, whatever the justification is, we'll hit that button.

44:37

And so the reason that I look into this particular issue with pastors and the sort of theological justification for this is

44:45

I see who I characterize as largely the best people in America, right, American evangelicals, effectively being cynically used by people who are telling them things that they don't necessarily believe.

44:59

And so that's why this sort of rankles me, right? That's why I want to dig into this. Because if the argument was entirely in policy terms, right, this makes sense for America, you know, it will do

45:10

XYZ for us, therefore we should, you know, send targeted strikes on Iran. Fair enough, right?

45:16

That's fully political. But if it's, hey, the Bible tells me, the

45:21

Bible is telling you, you need to support this in a modern day military intervention.

45:28

I think that that's something that people's, yeah, I agree with their alarms. Yeah, it's like,

45:34

I mean, the social justice stuff was similar. It's like the Bible, the gospel compels you to do this. And it's like, no, it doesn't.

45:40

But you're, you're using something people resonate with to manipulate them into action.

45:47

And, and yeah, I agree, that shouldn't really be part of the equation here. And it's kind of, it is disturbing.

45:54

I'm very disturbed, to be quite honest with you, on almost every angle of this, at least in our country, because, for example,

46:02

I live near a college town. And on the weekend, my wife was out. And, you know, every weekend, we see these protesters, they're pro

46:10

Israel on one side and pro Palestine and the other. Now the Palestine crowd always outnumbers the

46:15

Israel crowd by a lot, you know, and the it's, it's a mixture of people, but there's a lot of young and it's funny enough, a lot of ethnically

46:23

Jewish, the school itself is actually there's a lot of Jewish people, mostly secular Jewish people from Long Island who come there.

46:30

And they're going to, they're going to be standing out with the Palestine crowd. It's, it's a dynamic, it's just a, that's a whole separate conversation.

46:38

That's a little odd to some people, but they, it just, it causes us so many internal problems to have these foreign disputes adjudicated in our own country.

46:52

Like I want to be able to drive down the road without having to be blocked in traffic, right?

46:57

I think a lot of people feel this way because of something that happened in the Middle East. Like it really, what does this have to do with me?

47:04

Right. And so I, I think that's a frustration and I do see to some extent, strong elements on both sides being duped into even going down this line.

47:19

I really care about America's interest because that's where I live and I want to untangle ourselves from these things, but it's not easily done because there's been now over a century.

47:29

You could say maybe the, the strong elements have been more Cold War era, but I think it's really been over a century.

47:35

We've had business relationships that have entangled us into the Middle East and to untangle all those things.

47:43

It takes time. It's hard to do that instantly. It takes wisdom and precision.

47:50

And I don't know, I think as Trump, I think is doing a much better job than George W.

47:56

Bush or Obama or the previous presidents. It's still not exactly what I'd like, but I do appreciate the fact that he wants to untangle

48:05

America. I think those are his instincts and he's fighting his own instinct of the great deal maker because he thinks he can go in there and he can make a great deal.

48:13

Everyone's happy with, and that will be the mechanism under which we sort of let them do their thing and we can do our thing.

48:21

And I, you know, obviously he is in over his head. He's not going to be able to make a deal with people who have been fighting for thousands of years.

48:29

He like there, I think, as you say, the nuke is going to come to Iran at some point.

48:36

The question is when, and I do see a good strategy for putting it off. If the demographics are, as you say, if there are,

48:44

I mean, if it is the case that the mullahs are losing support and if younger people who are a little more friendly to liberalization and that kind of thing are ascending,

48:55

I don't know if that's the case, but, you know, maybe in the wake of the mullahs losing support, that could be, you know, maybe it is good to put it off.

49:03

I don't know. But the goal should be that we're not tied at the hip to any of these countries, right?

49:11

That we're not the Palestinians are not exact. They're not our problem. Israel is not our problem.

49:18

They might serve strategic interests. Israel may serve a strategic interest at times, but it needs to be more of a loose relationship, a trading relationship, something that benefits the

49:29

United States and isn't a drain on us. And I do think it's been, you know, somewhat of a drain, which is unfortunate.

49:36

But I was going to ask you, you can react to anything I just said, but I want to also ask about that quote you said from Netanyahu.

49:43

I've never heard that quote. And I'm just wondering if you have a source for that, that the, what did he say, that the

49:50

Americans or Christian Americans are, I don't know, useful idiots for supporting

49:55

Israel? Yes. So this is actually something you can look up.

50:04

You can look up on Webb's article. She actually has a video of him saying it.

50:10

And obviously it's in, it's in Hebrew. So it's translated, but he literally calls it absurd, right? He says that this is like an absurd support, you know, saying like, why would he say that on video?

50:20

It's so weird. Fair point. I think that he was maybe counting on that translation barrier to help him maybe more than it did.

50:28

But so one thing I wanted to go back to because you mentioned, you know, the factional nature of Iran, and this is something we easily recognize in America, right?

50:40

That there are different political parties, but there's very much the same thing in Israel. And oftentimes with analysis of Israel, people turn it into a monolith, right?

50:49

The Jews in scare quotes or the Zionists. That's not a monolith, right? The Likud party is a party in much the same way that the

50:58

Republicans are. There are oppositions. Their parliament works a little bit differently than ours. It's not necessarily two parties, but it's kind of a bunch of different parties in voting blocks.

51:08

So one of the things that many people have pointed out is that Netanyahu in particular, actually,

51:14

I believe this week, is going to trial for corruption charges. And he's been successively putting that off by invoking war powers, right?

51:24

Oh, we can't let me go to trial because there's a war in Gaza or there's a war in Iran. And so one of the things that some people have speculated on is basically, is this guy starting wars to keep himself out of jail?

51:37

Very difficult to prove, right? He didn't write down a note that said, I'm going to start this war so I don't go to jail.

51:43

But that's something many people have noticed, you know, it's awfully convenient for him. And in addition, right, the

51:51

Likud party, which I mentioned that has such strong ties to American evangelicalism, they're in a bad spot.

51:56

Their coalition, the other parties that help them achieve a majority, have been defecting for the last couple of years, and they are ever creeping closer to being a minority government.

52:08

And obviously, if there's a new party in charge that doesn't have those sort of ties, that changes the landscape.

52:16

But yeah, just something to notice as well, like that same factionalism that is just a function of human organization.

52:23

It applies to Israel as well. Yeah, yeah, I gotcha. Well, this has been,

52:29

I think, enlightening for people listening. And if they want to check out your show, they can go to the Jay Burton Show on YouTube or check out, you're pretty much on everything.

52:39

So more stuff than even I'm on. So Substack, just what's the what's the

52:46

X handle? Oh, shoot, let me find that. It is underscore Jay Burton.

52:52

You can find me there. Okay. All right. Well, thanks, Jay. I appreciate it. God bless. Yeah, thank you so much, man.