Raymond Ibrahim on the Crusades

We are live now on the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. It is lunchtime, at least on the

East Coast, breakfast time if you're on the West Coast. And I hope many of you are able to take a break from work and join us.

I already see people coming into the feed. There's already questions, amazingly. I do have a notification from Rumble, I guess we are not streaming there right now.

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This is a big episode. I have with me a special guest. And before I say who it is and everything,

I just wanna say that there's been some talk online, as many of you know, in the more reformed evangelical

Christian world about the Crusades over the last few weeks. And whether or not these were justified, these were

Christian, whether or not we should gain inspiration from them. And while I have taken some courses that relate to this in college,

I'm not an expert on the Crusades. And so I wanted to have someone on who is an expert. And in that spirit, we have with us for the first time on the

Conversations, That Matter podcast, Raymond Ibrahim. Thank you for joining us.

I really appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. And Raymond, I was looking at your credentials and I just don't have time enough to cite all of them.

It's pretty incredible the influence and just the work you've done.

You've done so much scholarly work, you've written popular histories, you've been on news shows.

And in addition to all of that, I understand you're a bodybuilder and you've won competition.

So I guess my first question is, how do you have time for all the things that you've accomplished?

Well, the bodybuilding, I was an actual former and formally a bodybuilder, but this is my late teens and early twenties before I even really cared about these topics.

I wasn't even in college or I had just begun. And yeah, I did win one show, Mr. LA in 1991.

This is a long time ago. I wouldn't even call myself a bodybuilder today. I just lift weights because I don't wanna be an armchair historian who becomes defeat and soft.

I wanna practice a little bit of what I preach in these books. So try to keep physically active and physically fit.

And so that's where the weightlifting and exercise comes in, which I recommend to anyone, not for reasons of vanity and looking good, but just actual health and virility and energy.

And it just does wonders to one's overall dynamic. Well, I put on Twitter or an

X that I was gonna be interviewing you and I was surprised. I had a lot of people respond with questions they wanted me to ask, but more than one question,

I think probably about four or five questions were how much can he bench press? How much can he deadlift? And I'm like, what?

So I won't ask you those questions, but I think that's a good thing and impressive.

And I think that's something we should all aspire for. I mean, I'm not crazy about it, but I definitely try to go to the gym.

And I do find that my better writing is when I am mentally, physically, and spiritually focused all at the same time.

So one of the things I noticed is a good, I guess, segue for your book in your book, Defenders of the

West, is a lot of these guys you talk about. And so far I've read about El Cid and Richard the

Lionheart and Duke, what's his name? Thank you.

And these guys were, they just stand out as man's men.

Like there's just something, there's a quality they have that I don't see a lot of today.

And I think maybe that's a good place to start is, why is that?

Like what kind of world did these men grow up in? And why did they have such a fierce disposition to defend the ones they loved?

They were strong. They were just masculine in so many ways. And we've lost that for some reason, it seems. Yeah. Well, they grew up in a natural world and a natural world will naturally nurture these impulses, manliness.

We don't even, we can't even use that word anymore. Masculinity. These are bad words now, right? Because masculinity is immediately seen as toxic masculinity.

Manliness, what's that? We're supposed to be. So they grew up in a natural setting, much like the rest of the world today, outside of the

West. This is why you have Muslims the way they are and others who are not Muslims. Men are men, women are women.

We, on the other hand, have been growing, we're raised in a, I would say, an artificial world.

Meaning that false thoughts are put into our heads from kindergarten on up. And then they emanate from all sorts of centers, all the major centers, from academia,

Hollywood, the newsrooms, everywhere. You're given this opposite false message.

It's part of social engineering, which is dedicated to emasculating men and trying to turn women into men.

You see this in movies. I can't watch a movie anymore, especially like historic movies, which is what

I like. Let's say Crusades or Vikings or anything like that.

Without, all the heroes are women, right? They're the ones who are the fighters. They're the tough guys. They're the ones who have wisdom and prudence.

And all the men are crying and falling apart. Okay, I mean, this is all by design and it has its impact.

You know, you're a young, impressionable man. You watch a movie like that after, you know, one after another. You're gonna think your role is, you know, not what those guys' role was, okay?

Let's put it that way. And the same thing with women. So that's the primary difference.

They grew up in a natural setting where a man was allowed to develop into becoming a man. And what are the things that normal, healthy men care about?

Well, it's taking care of defending. That's why the book is called Defenders of the West. Defending that which is theirs, whether it's their civilization, their family, their cultures, their religion, their churches, okay?

And that's why these men fought tooth and nail. And we're, by our standards, like you say, you're correct. I mean, you know, try to think of the toughest man today.

He pales in comparison to any of these guys in this book. You talk about real testosterone, right?

So I think that's the primary difference. And I think there are powers in play that are doing their utmost to convince

Christians that they better not be like that. That is not Christian. That is bad. That is, if Jesus said, turn the other cheek, et cetera, et cetera, we can get into that because that's a very important topic which

I've addressed many times. And it's very germane to our discussion today. But anyway, that's what

I would say is the fundamental difference between them and our civilization today. Yeah, I wanna dive into that a little later in the podcast because I do think that we've lost something we need to regain.

But I wanna read for you, this is a quote. It's a partial quote because it's in a long paragraph and series of paragraphs.

But I just wanna get your reaction. This is from a Christian apologist named James White who

I do respect. He's had a significant, I would say, impact in the

Christian apologetics world in debating Muslims. But he did say this about the

Crusades. He says, the motivation of the Crusades, is what he's talking about, was not some pure Christian society fighting off the infidel.

They were originated by the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church. And so you're sending nominal

Catholics from Europe to the Middle East to hack up Muslims and get hacked up by Muslims. I think the insinuation there, the idea is that they're coming from places as far away as England to a foreign land, that it's really just not their business to be there.

The Catholic Church, of course, is a nefarious actor behind this. And I know in the first Crusade, at least,

Pope Urban's dicta basically said you would get, I guess, eternity in heaven, some kind of a reward spiritually for participating in this.

So James White's a Protestant, I'm a Protestant. Obviously, we look at those things and think, well, that's not accurate, that's not biblical.

But what's your reaction to that? Because he's not unique. I've seen this spirit many times.

Yeah, well, the first thing to address is the fact that he's Protestant, you're Protestant, which immediately makes you see

Christian history in a particular lens, in a particular light, which is basically anything Catholic is pretty jaundiced and open to suspicion and has nefarious purposes.

And by the way, I'm not Catholic, so I'm not here to defend this or attack that. I'm just being objective.

It's very obvious that Protestants, anything that is associated with Catholicism and the

Crusades are, is immediately sort of seen as, oh, here's more proof of wrongdoing and something that we have to denounce.

And having said that, I'm not saying that there aren't aspects of the Crusade that one can be very critical about.

For example, promising heaven or remission of sins, more literally, for those who do fight and die.

From a theological aspect, I think it's fine. People can criticize that and debate that.

But what's overlooked is that's not really, to me, that's not what's at hand here. The real issue is, again, we're not told.

So I'll give you a paraphrase. It's almost a verbatim quote from John Esposito, and he's a popular

Georgetown professor and he's supposed to be an expert on Islam and Western interaction. And he writes, and I quote, because I've quoted this so many times,

I've almost memorized it, but he writes, four centuries of peace between the Muslim and Christian worlds elapsed before a papal power play led to the

Crusades and all this mistrust and anger amongst Muslims, okay? The problem with this interpretation, so notice again, he, papal power play, well, that immediately registers in the

Protestant consciousness. Oh, yeah, bad, okay? But notice how he says four centuries of peace.

Well, what is he talking about? Those four, he's saying basically Islam came into the scene in the seventh century, everything was peaceful until 1095 when

Pope Irving called for the Crusade, okay? Well, it just so happens in those four centuries, Islam went completely ballistic on the

Christian world and conquered three quarters of it, okay, through jihad. People forget that when

Islam was born in the seventh century in the deserts of Arabia, the richer, more sophisticated, more articulate

Christian regions were what are today Islamic. And that is all of North Africa, from Morocco to Egypt, and all of what's called

Greater Syria in the Middle East, which included Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, large parts of Iraq and so forth.

That's really where Christendom was, and that was hacked away through extreme violent jihad.

The Islamic sources sound like something straight out of ISIS, the historical chronicles. The Muslims then did the same thing that ISIS did.

They gave the Christians choices, convert, pay tribute, or get killed. Churches were ransacked, burned, turned into mosques.

And when Muhammad dies in 632, in 732, all of North Africa and the Middle East is conquered,

Spain is conquered, Christian Spain, and now the Muslims are in the middle of France, okay, at the

Battle of Tours, okay, where they're finally stopped. Okay, and then this arises again under the

Turkish iteration. A few centuries later, now you have the Turks, who are Muslim, they're the new standard bearers of jihad.

Now they're conquering Asia Minor, which is another ancient Christian bastion. Most of the letters that St.

Paul wrote, his epistles, were to cities that were in Asia Minor, Turkey, today. And then they go into the

Balkans, and that's conquered, subjugated, et cetera, et cetera. So you really look at a map, it's just a few regions of Europe escape this.

Muslims reached Iceland in the 16th century, just for slaves that they took back to North Africa and sold.

In the 16th century, there were at least one and a quarter million European slaves being sold by Muslims just in Barbary.

Later, under the Khanate, the Golden Horde, which was Mongols, but had become Muslims, they enslaved something like five million

Slavic peoples, Russians, and so forth. And before that, it was the same thing.

So imagine ignoring all that and just saying, oh yeah, four centuries of peace, and then these evil

Christians. And even the crusade chroniclers, if you look at them and what they wrote, it was what

I'm discussing. They acknowledged that most of the Middle East and North Africa was Christian, that needed to be liberated, not just the

Holy Land. You know, Louis IX, King Louis of France, he went to Egypt primarily as part of his crusade because he knew it was a

Christian nation that needed, he wanted to bring it back to Christianity by defeating the infidel there, as one example.

So, and what it really boils down to is just war theory. And this,

I would contend, I don't have a problem with just war theory. And anyone who does, I don't think they understand their own church history too well because just war theory is the idea that even within Christianity, you are able to defend yourself, you can defend your nation, you can defend your family.

Okay, I mean, they've grappled with all these verses such as turn the other cheek, and the passive verses of the

New Testament. Scholars have grappled and theologians with that centuries ago, and starting in the first and second centuries.

And the consensus was basically that this sort of thing, the passivity, that's an individual thing that you can do, but a state has to have rules and laws, including punishment, including execution, including waging war when the war is for a just cause.

And that's what the Crusades were seen. At that time, once again, there was another iteration of extreme violence right before the

Crusades, especially attacks on pilgrims who were still trying to go to the

Holy Land, European pilgrims. But even before that in Asia Minor, the Seljuk Turks were running amok.

And according to contemporary sources, had killed or enslaved hundreds of thousands of Christians. And that's what they were talking about.

See, when people condemn the Crusades, they have no idea of this backdrop or the context.

They just think, hey, four centuries of peace, everything's fine. And then the evil Catholics decided to go to war because they wanna colonize the

Middle East, et cetera, et cetera. This is an anachronism, of course. Keep in mind that Europe was considered weak vis -a -vis the

Islamic world in these days. It was the underdog. We're so used to seeing things with a modern lens and we think the

West is always powerful. Muslims are always downtrodden and weak. It was the exact opposite during these times.

So anyway, this is a... And we can get into the just war theory because there's a lot of compelling arguments for it.

And in the medieval era, it was so taken for granted. I mean, not everyone accepted, of course, I can go fight the infidel because of what they're doing, which is attacking innocent and killing innocent lives, that it's more important for me to do that.

Now, as far as if that's enough to get you into heaven, yeah, I'm fine. I have no problem with people who want to argue about it from a theological standpoint, as far as the rewards involved and so forth.

But as far as an actual human institution, defense and just war has a very long lineage within Christian thought going all the way back to St.

Augustine. Well, I always saw that particular incentive as an incentive they were trying to stir up Christians who didn't live in these border regions to go and help other

Christian peoples. And so when King Richard comes from England, obviously that's pretty...

The Muslims would have to get through a lot of territory to get to his island, but he recognizes, you tell me if it's true or false, that pretty soon they would get to his island.

And so that's what motivated a lot of these soldiers to go fight because they knew that it wouldn't stop in the

Eastern area of Europe or the Southern area of Europe. Today, think of what would be considered the most

Islamophobic worldview about Islam. Let's say the view that Muslims are violent, Muslims wanna kill

Christians, Muslims wanna subjugate, Muslims wanna do this. That was taken for granted by everyone in Europe at this time.

That's exactly what they believe. And especially the religious hierarchy. So the

Popes, today you see a Pope Francis and you think that Popes historically are always diplomatic.

In fact, historically, they were the ones who spearheaded the Crusades, but again, for compelling reasons, not because they're trying to colonize.

They're the weaker ones. They're doing this to actually try to save Christian territories or recover them.

So yeah, definitely people and the lay people, the peasants, obviously they didn't have it as articulate of an understanding as we do about Islam.

You know, to them, they were just pagans. Just as long as you're not a Christian, you're in the wrong. Okay, that was the view.

Nobody cared about the particulars. You're just obviously an evil pagan. But it was definitely understood that they were doing what they were doing.

And today, here's another sort of game historians and academics play.

When they talk about the long conflict between Muslims and Christians, they often sidestep the religious aspect and they only highlight the national identity.

So you'll hear about Saracens and Arabs and Berbers and Moors and Tatars and Turks.

You won't hear how all of those are glued together by Islam and that they were waging their wars on Christians based exclusively on Islamic teaching.

The same sort that ISIS promulgates and sponsors that were told has nothing to do with Islam. In fact, that was the most popular form of Islam.

Now that's stirred up by videos and global warming, right? So I have a question on X from Pastor J.

Chase Davis. He asks if were the Crusaders true Christians?

And I wanna just add to that when I was reading your book. One of the things, especially with Al -Sid,

I thought was interesting was how often he gave credit to Christ or would have confidence because Christ is going to win the battle for us in these kinds of things.

And then miraculous looking things happened, things that were against all odds.

I mean, this really is a story. All the stories that you've contained in this book, which I appreciate you writing, seem to have that element that this really is against all odds.

They shouldn't have won or they shouldn't have survived. And yet something positive happens, whether that's defense of the

West or I guess depending on which part of the Crusades they were able to recapture Jerusalem or whatever.

But there is this faith that seems to undergird some of these men. And I'm sure it's a mixed bag, but I'll let you answer the question.

So were they true Christians? You know, I actually addressed this in the book, Defenders of the West, in the introduction.

And my answer would go paraphrase is, I'm not gonna presume to judge the hearts of men who lived over a thousand years ago.

I don't know. By their standards, they were Christian because Christianity back then was not about, you know, saying a certain formulation,

I'm saved or I'm elect. And, you know, therefore I'm going to heaven. That's just not how it was understood.

It was actually about things you do in the now, which would even include, the warfare was actually seen in over and over.

They would quote Christ saying things like, no greater love does a man have than laying down his life for his fellow men.

Obviously Jesus meant something completely different. He was referring to his crucifixion, but it was very common for crusader types to cite that as proof of, you know, this is love, what we're doing.

We're defending our fellow Christians who are being killed and ransacked and raped and enslaved. Okay, so from their world, they were

Christians. They said they were Christians and they went to church. And again, remember there is no

Protestantism in this day. So there's no alternative. It is what we call today Catholicism.

There was no other option. I mean, even Orthodoxy is essentially the same sorts of teachings as Catholicism.

So does that mean they were Christians? No, I don't know if you mean by our, by modern day standards.

And I would even argue that modern day standards now are not even just Protestant. Even Catholics think this way.

I think Catholics have been Protestantized beside themselves without even knowing. So many

Catholics would probably agree with Protestants against their own Catholic ancestors. I think, so what

I'm saying is there's a sort of modern spirit in how people understand what Christianity is and should be.

And I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just simply saying that these were just not applicable. These would not be intelligible to anyone in these centuries that we're discussing.

So they were Christian in the sense that one could be a Christian. Yeah, they probably would have looked at people in our day with two like sideways.

If we were to ask like, are you a Christian? Are you part of a Christian nation? They would have just said, of course we are.

They're wouldn't have. I was baptized, I go to church, what do you want? Yeah, right, we live in this. And that, does that mean that they are truly converted and going to heaven and these kinds of things that, and sincere, you know, in their faith and their walk with Christ and stuff.

That would have probably, I would assume be a little different to them. Like that would have, you know, they would have seen themselves culturally as Christians and then their deeds, as you say, or their actions, the way they live their life would manifest a fruit that would bear witness to whether or not this was truly in their heart.

At least that's what I've read in my limited reading of that period. One of the things you just brought up that I think is important to recognize, and I'd love to hear you speak on it, is this idea that the

Muslims were, that there's a moral equivalency between Christians and Muslims at this time, or that the

Christians are the true aggressors, which you hinted at earlier, and that the Muslims were more magnanimous. I'll give you a little story.

When I was probably in my teenage years, someone came to my evangelical church who was a Jewish, a missionary to Jewish people, we'll put it that way, and as a

Christian. But one of the things that he said, and this colored the entire sermon, it upset me so much at the time, was that Christians are very anti -Semitic.

Throughout the last two millennium, the main hangup Jewish people have is that the

Christians are anti -Semitic. And the evidence for this, one of his main evidences was how the Christians treated

Jewish people during the Crusades, that they killed them, they abused them, they made them second -class citizens, and that the

Muslims were much more magnanimous, much more tolerant, would, worst -case scenario, only make them pay this jizya tax, and that was it.

And they could live in peace and prosperity in the Middle East, and so Muslims are superior to Christians in the way they treat

Jewish people. And when I went to seminary, I had a professor tell us that we ought to apologize, basically, he insinuated, we ought to apologize to Muslims for the

Crusades because the Christians just broke all their rules, and this was horrible, not just for Jewish people, but for Muslims.

So could you just address this moral equivalency or the idea that the Christians were far worse during the

Crusades? Yeah, that's the issue today, and this goes with everything, with the

Crusades, anything Western, what's going on today in academia and popular culture is you find something bad that Western or Christian people did, okay?

And then you catapult it and focus on it, put the limelight on it, and then even though other people have done the same and worse, you ignore that, okay?

So what happens is it stands out. So let's say the transatlantic slave trade, right? I mean, everyone, every

American student knows about slavery and how bad it was and how horrific and all the terrible conditions of the

Africans and boats, et cetera, et cetera, and it's true. This is not a lie. The lie is one of omission.

What you're not told is that was par for the course everywhere, okay? That slavery was just part of the world, that white people were enslaved oftentimes, including by black -skinned people.

Historically, that blacks enslaved blacks, that Arabs and Muslims were the greatest slave traders of all, including of blacks and of Europeans.

Same thing with the idea, like when Europeans come to Europe or the

Americas and apparently they're all greedy and evil and cynical because they're

Christians, Catholic Christians, and the natives are all peaceful, Pocahontas types.

Well, again, okay, complete lie. The natives were cannibals and engaged in tribalism. Here's the thing that people don't get.

It's not, when you look at modern history and the West all of a sudden is superior to everyone else, it's not because the

West was extra violent. It was because they had better weapons and technology, okay?

But African tribesmen, Native American tribesmen were engaged in constant warfare, but it was limited to spears and bows and arrows so they could only do so much damage.

But it was the same, if they could do it, trust me, they would have, if they could conquer vast lands and govern them and so forth.

So the problem is everything is done intentionally to focus just on anything bad the

West does and ignore the rest of history. And so it is with the Crusades. You're talking about antisemitism.

The fact is during popular Crusader movements, sometimes people would rise up against local

Jews in Europe, but the actual priests, the actual church hierarchy, the actual kings were against that.

And they would punish those who did it and they would enforce protection of the Jews. And these guys were also

Crusaders. So it wasn't, you know, it's hard to say that the Crusade movement is itself inherently antisemitic.

No, it's just, it creates a fervor of religious enthusiasm and the argument, many of these, you know, the peasant, it was usually peasants who would attack the

Jews, is why am I traveling thousands of miles to fight the infidel over there when the infidel's right here, okay?

And so it was that kind of logic. But from a formal standpoint, the church condemned it, people and the local monks and priests would defend the

Jews and so forth. So, you know, it is what it is, but that should also be taken into account,

I think. As far as the idea of, you know, Islam was so tolerant and it gave the

Jews so much. Yeah, that's another famous line that we get oftentimes.

But if that was true, then why were most of the Jews living in Europe at the time? Why didn't they go to Muslim controlled regions?

They only went there after they were, for example, expelled in Spain, for example, which we're told is this wonderful multicultural under the

Umayyads, you know, both the Christians and the Jews and Muslims lived side by side. Well, that's not very true.

There's a great book by a scholar, Dario Fernandez Morena, and it's called,

I think, The Andalusian Myth for anyone who's interested in that particular topic. But, you know, they had to,

Muslims did the same sorts of things to the Jews. Another book, it's this thick, it's a tome, it's by Andrew Boston, and it's called something like Islamic antisemitism.

And it's just full of source material. It's this thick of Muslim, what we would call antisemitism towards Jews, persecution, et cetera.

So again, not true. Maybe they found one tolerant Caliph who for his own advantageous purposes was good to Jews.

And now that's become the story that that is all of Islam. And again, they've ignored the vast majority of the history, which is otherwise.

Like I said, that's the game that they continuously play. Well, I have another question here from Matt Borush from X.

He says, were the Crusaders primarily offensive or defensive? I think you may have already answered this, that they were primarily defensive.

They were, their motivation was defensive, but of course, when you look at them, they seem offensive because they're leaving their territories and entering what is seen as Islamic territory.

But in the Crusader mind, that is our territory that was conquered by Muslims and we're reconquering it.

Remember when Islam, Muslims conquered the Holy Land and Jerusalem was conquered in 637

AD. It had been Christian for centuries and Constantine had built magnificent churches and basilicas and so forth, all over marking the

Holy sites, Christ's burial, resurrection, et cetera. And it was a major important pilgrimage center for Christianity for centuries.

And they knew that, the Europeans. So Islam came, conquered, took over. And then, so from the, now this is only four centuries later.

Europeans remember this is Christian territory. So it looks like it's offensive because ostensibly, why are you leaving your land and coming to our land?

But in the rationale, it's again, part of just war theory, it's liberating formerly Christian nations.

Smash bales on X says, did the Crusades go far enough? Probably thinking about today's context.

And did, it sounds, or it looks like Islam was able to regain some power.

And so the Crusades kind of dissipated. Well, yeah, I mean, and this goes back to the question of comparing and contrasting the mentality of those men with today.

It's just amazing because the Europeans of those days, in my books, Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, that you will see, they fought tooth and nail, whether it was during the

Crusades or defending their own nations in Europe from Muslim invaders. And the irony is today, and keep in mind, again, people forget, but during these centuries,

Europe in the Christian world was the weak horse. They were the outnumbered weak one.

I mean, people today that we just have, I think I said this, but we have this mentality, like the West was always powerful and Muslims were always weak, was the exact opposite.

And the Ottoman Empire was this humongous behemoth that could marshal hundreds of thousands of soldiers at any given time, fighting 10 ,000 or 5 ,000 shabbily clad peasants in Romania, for example.

And yet they were able to succeed by and large and liberate European nations, Spain after seven centuries of warfare, the

Balkans, which were conquered, even Russia, which was under Islamic control by the

Tatars, all of them gained their liberation. But today, if you look at the modern world, the

West is supposed to be superior in everything, militarily, economically, everything is in play and Muslims are weaker than ever.

And yet you have Muslims terrorizing the West, left and right. And why is that? It's not because of Muslims doing anything new.

It's because Westerners are the exact opposite of their forefathers. That's why they hate them so much. Now, Westerners are passive.

Now, Westerners think it's a virtue to basically be a doormat. They think that's what Christianity really is.

They make a virtue of a vice, which is their own cowardice. And they elevate that and they want everyone to copy it.

And that's a whole different murky topic we can discuss at some point. Well, Reverend B .A.

Castle asked a question that's related to this. He says, what would a contemporary crusader mindset look like today?

So I do wanna keep talking about the Crusades, but maybe we should just leave them for a second and talk about the modern situation because this is,

I think, part of the reason we're even having this discussion. There are younger guys, especially Zoomer aged men from what

I see who are Christians who are saying, especially in Great Britain, this is unacceptable.

What's happening is wrong. We need to regain that spirit that our forefathers centuries ago had.

And they're being often chided for this by those who are a little older, perhaps.

I don't know if it's fully a generational thing, but I think those who have to deal with and their families are going to have to deal with the problems created by mass immigration, which includes

Muslims coming to these Western areas are angry about it and they want a solution.

So what would that look like today in your mind in the modern world to recapture some of these positive heroes that you've talked about in Defenders of the

West? Yeah, recapturing the positive aspect of these heroes is simply, again, we go back to the idea of just war, which is, you know what?

I can be a Christian, I can be a good person, but enough is enough. And there are lines and barriers you can't transgress, okay?

Attacking my homeland, attacking my civilization, attacking my culture, my family, my people, my women, my children, my churches is a no -no.

And I am fully and completely justified in defending all of these things. And again, this is very biblical, all right?

There's nothing non -Christian about that. And this is a whole, we can get into that. But I think that's the shift that needs to come.

And people need to stop thinking that, I mean, look at where we've gone. We've gone from where, like I said, the

West was weak, Europe, and it was still because of its just drive, it was able to fight back and maintain its virtue.

And today it's so powerful and rich and militarily mighty, and it's being completely run over.

I mean, including demographically all throughout Europe, okay, where, you know, the name Muhammad is the number one name for baby boys in major cities all around.

So that itself is its own takeover. Bottom line is just being passive is not enough.

And that's what something needs to change one way or the other. And unfortunately, sometimes if you keep covering this, it's like a boiling pot and you don't let it vent, it gets really bad.

It gets even worse. The pendulum, which is, you know, passive doormat Europeans is gonna swing all the other way until you get something like Hitler.

Okay, that's usually what happens. I think it's better to let it vent and let people just, you know, get their grievances out and get this fixed instead of pretending nothing's happening.

Oh, you people are racist because you know, you want your country not being destroyed by migrants, et cetera, et cetera.

That kind of narrative needs to move. And if it doesn't, well, it does get violent in general. That's the teaching of history and it gets really bad.

So I think the best way it is, you know, the chivalrous way, if you will, is, you know, maintain this, what

I'm discussing, this sort of just war theory outlook, okay, and work on it. But at the same time, you're not turning into a complete savage or an evil person or a xenophobe or a racist.

You know, you still maintain your balance and you just work through that. And that's actually how Christians historically, that's how they saw this conflict, through that kind of lens.

It's difficult in the modern context, and I've tried to encourage Christians, seek power, seek political office, seek areas where you can deal with some of this stuff.

But when we are prevented and we are backed into a corner where the choice is suicide, you give up your civilization, you give up your way of life, your children won't continue or fight back, but the government's going to come down on you if you do fight back in some way.

And I'm not even necessarily saying violence, but it could be that depending on the situation, or it could be just making life very hard for trying to give people the message that you're not welcome here, you need to move along, whatever that is.

I think that most people pick the second option. And that's, and then they're excoriated for it.

And I can't believe, I'm venting myself now, but what's happening in Britain, you see all these videos of police officers showing up because of a social media post that someone said something anti -Islamic on.

And meanwhile, you have Islamic protesters with knives and shouting profane things, aggressive, and it seems like there's this dual policing system where they get a slap on the wrist.

I know you cover some of this stuff. I know you have a website. In fact, you can plug that. I don't remember the URL, but where you talk about -

My name. What is it? It's just my name, raymondibrahim .com. Okay, but there's a section of the website where you just have like updates every month, right, for terrorist attacks and what's happening with Islam.

And where do you see this going? You can make whatever prediction you want, but what's going to happen? Well, one of two things, either the

West will die, and Europe, as you know it, will just become completely inundated by an alien force of a different religion, different mold, and it's already changing cities.

In the UK, you're talking about it, they actually took over a city, Birmingham, and you have

Muslims walking around with weapons and driving journalists out, kicking them out, and the police aren't doing anything.

And you're right, but if you write a social media post, then you get attacked and thrown in jail.

And literally, people are doing jail time because of stuff like saying anti -Islamic stuff on social media in Europe.

So where it goes is either you lose this battle of attrition that's going on, whether you know it's going on or not, and you essentially disappear one way or the other, your identity will be gone definitely, it's already on the way, or you fight back.

And it should be clear that there's no one who's gonna do it for you, because your leaders and your authorities are in bed with the

Muslims. For nefarious purposes, not because they love Islam or they're Islamic, but they actually hate

Christianity. They're atheists, and they know Islam is the foot soldier that has historically been the one to terrorize

Christianity. If you look in Europe, for example, churches are on fire on a daily basis all throughout, and it's being suppressed by the media.

And who's doing it? Primarily Muslims, but also leftists, alphabet people, and so forth. Meanwhile, the government, which brings them all in and empowers them, denies that this is even happening.

It's a figment of your imagination. In France, it's at least two churches a day which are attacked or burned or vandalized.

And every one of them is just completely discounted, ignored, oh, it was an accident, it was an arson, et cetera, et cetera.

And not just France, all throughout Europe, same exact story. So that's it.

You're either gonna fall into play with the system until it finally culminates into your lack of existence, essentially, at any meaningful level, or you're gonna do something about it.

And one of the reasons I believe Western people, men, are so passive is because we've been indoctrinated and brainwashed systematically to be passive.

And we don't wanna be toxic masculinity, that's bad. So we have to just sit around and, I don't know, put hashtags to express ourselves.

And the system's more than happy with that because you're not a threat, okay? They know that'll never manifest into anything meaningful.

So that's it. And unless Western man can do something about that and rise above that, not worry about the criticism, not worry about how it makes them look, which is all, of course, to say that, don't play by their rules, okay?

Their rules are made for you to lose, okay? Bottom line. Play by nature's rule, by God's law, by just war theory, that's all fair.

And then something can actually change. One of the things I noticed in your book, you will take time, you'll take an aside and you'll say, to this day,

Muslims gain inspiration from this, or to this day, Muslims are still upset about what King Richard did to them.

They have a memory that seems to go back quite a long ways. And so when you talk about what's happening in, for example,

France, with churches burning and some of these apparently Muslims behind it, there's something that's, there's a continuity that they have from what

I was reading in your book, with their holy book, with the Quran and what it commands them to do, with inspiration from the past.

And they're just doing what they say or they know, I guess, they should do.

At the same time, we have these liberals in the West who see Islam as temperate and we can share society, we can be multicultural.

And there are examples of Muslims who are like that. I remember I went to a mosque when

I was doing a religions course in college and they were no different. Well, not all of them, but the imam, at least, seemed no different to me than the, honestly, the emasculated

Anglican priest, or Episcopalian rector down the road. They just seemed like they were gonna sing kumbaya together and they didn't really have much of a religion.

And I know there's examples of that too. So maybe, could you work that out for us because there's these two competing versions of Islam in our heads and Christians don't seem to know their own history like some

Muslims do. And so there's a lot of confusion out there about the threat that they pose and why liberals seem to fall for this.

Yeah, I think this all goes into the whole moderate versus radical dichotomy, okay? That supposedly most

Muslims are moderate and then you have a few extreme radicals. Again, this is a

Western construct that really doesn't apply to Islam. Islam is Islam, okay? It's very different than Christianity.

It's very black and white. Sunni Islam, which accounts for about 90 % of Muslims in the world, is very legalistic.

It's black and white. It's about do this, don't do that. It's not about what's in your heart, okay? It's simply about the five pillars, prayer, fasting, et cetera.

Jihad used to be one, still seen as the sixth pillar by some communities. So that's the good news about Islam is that you know what

Islam is. It's black and white. There's no vague, anything vague about it.

That's what Sharia is. Sharia is the codification of the teachings of the Quran and Muhammad as he supposedly articulated in the

Hadith or these records of him speaking and his actions and his deeds, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so based on that, based on Sharia, based on what

Islamic law demands, Islam is inherently hostile and violent to non -Muslims. Bottom line, the

Quran repeatedly calls for warfare, violence against non -Muslims, against specifically by name

Christians and Jews, okay? Calls for Jihad, check out 929, Surah 929 as one example.

And it manifested itself. It wasn't just some old scripture. It manifested itself throughout history as I explained earlier, okay?

So, wow, I just had a blank. What were we talking about? That's all right.

We were talking about how moderate radical, okay. So Islam is what

Islam was, and it is and was what we would call radical. And even these words are very problematic, but what is radical, what is moderate?

Those words themselves are based on a Western culture, okay? So Western standards establish what we consider moderate and okay and what we consider radical.

Well, but none of these apply to Islam because Islam is its own civilization, okay? So now having said that, especially in the

West, you can have Muslims who are just as effete and emasculate as a lot of these

Anglicans that you were mentioning, and they could genuinely be like that. Why? Because they're free to do so.

Anyone, you can have a Muslim who says, I'm gay and Islam loves gays. It's the same as when you have a

Christian who says, Christianity is fine with homosexuality and it's happy to marry gay people.

You can have that. That doesn't mean it's accurate, right? And then on the other hand, there's also a lot of, and this is another historical thing that happens, but in Islam, it's an actual teaching and a doctrine that if you are under the infidel's control and power and authority, you can dissemble your true beliefs and act like them.

You can even denounce Muhammad. You can curse Islam. You can become a Christian. You can get baptized and go to church, et cetera, et cetera, as long as your heart is secure in Islam.

And this really has a lot of manifestations about history. Very, very spectacular tales come from it, but it's still happening today as well.

And oftentimes I read about stories, especially in the West of someone, a

Muslim, who they thought converted to Christianity. And then three years later, he commits a terrorist crime and they find the

Quran in his book and find out he was going to mosque. So that sort of thing exists as well. So you definitely have these sort of crypto

Muslims who are pretending to be moderate. And you also do have what we would call moderate

Muslims. But the bottom line is, do what they're doing and teaching and saying, does that stand in line with Islamic teachings?

And oftentimes it doesn't. It's black and white in Islam. If you're an apostate, you have to be attacked and punished, possibly executed.

Black and white. If you're a blasphemer, same thing. If you're an infidel, you don't have the rights that a

Muslim does. You have to live as a second -class citizen provided you pay tribute, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, these are ironclad worldviews of Islam. All of them would be considered by our standards radical.

Okay. But they're not. So if a Muslim says, no, that's not true. No, I don't believe in that. Okay, fine.

Good, good for him. Right? You don't believe it, but that is Islam. So the moderate radical thing is a false dichotomy.

Just like in all religions, you have people who can believe whatever they want, but they are not representatives of the actual teachings of that religion.

Well, we only have about 14 minutes left, so I'm gonna be taking questions now. And the first one is, has there ever been a time historically when

Christianity as a whole was so passive and weak and subverted? Not like today. Yeah.

I know of no time when it was like today. Christianity historically was a very muscular religion, whether the

Roman Latins and the Franks or the Byzantines, the Eastern Roman Empire.

Okay, it was not, you know, this idea of Christianity is this meek, kind of always downtrodden, almost like a hippie kind of Kumbaya thing is just alien to its history.

Okay, it was actually a very robust and very muscular religion. And it was the primary threat to Islam because they tried to conquer it.

Muslims tried to completely conquer it by taking over Europe after taking over the greater portions of Christendom.

So, I know of no instance when it was anywhere near like it is now. Big Yehuda asks, can he prove the

Crusades were a net positive for Christendom? How do we know the resources and manpower expended weren't a net negative which weakened

Europe? I'll let you go over it. Well, we don't. I mean, you can make that argument. A lot of people do think the...

I mean, if you put aside the ideology behind Crusading, whether it's right or wrong, and that's really the main point,

I think, if you put that aside, of course, you can say it was a complete waste because first of all, it failed in the end, Crusaders, and countless people died, and lots of resources were spent.

So, it was obviously very expensive in blood and treasure, and in the end, there was no net result.

So, yeah, you can make that argument. But what we're really discussing, I think, is the rationale for it.

Was it justified in the first place? James Ramelli asks, what is some proof that Egypt was once a

Christian nation? I mean, where to begin? I mean, if you need books, there's primary sources.

You have the Coptic Church, which has existed since the first century. That's where Augustine lived, right? There's a whole...

Yeah, St. Mark. Many of the church fathers were... All the church fathers, the vast majority of them were from Alexandria, Egypt, or Syria, or North Africa.

Augustine's from Hippo, Carthage. The Nicene Creed, the first ecumenical council in 325, was probably half of the people there were from Egypt and Syria.

The heretic that they were fighting, Arius, was Egyptian. The defender of the Nicene Creed, Athanasius, was

Egyptian. So we know... I mean, this is one of those things that is just well -known historically.

Now, if you read a modern -day history book, you probably won't find that, but if you read anything written in the 1800s or before, everyone knew this.

And you have the Coptic Church. I mean, that's the native church of Egypt. The word Coptic actually means

Egyptian. So the Greek word for Egyptian... Our word Egyptian comes from the

Greek aegyptos. And then the Arabs just took the gypt, and it became called copt, gypt, copt.

So copt is an Egyptian who, it just so happens they're all Christian. So from the

Arab worldview, when they conquered Egypt, to be a Christian was to be a native Egyptian, okay? So...

I did not know that. We have, though, I mean, the writings, John Cassian was a monk from Europe in,

I think, the 400s. And he wrote an account of his travels through Egypt. And he said, traveling up and down the

Nile, the only sound he would hear constantly was the hymns of monks in monasteries all around it, okay?

St. Anthony of Egypt, he's the founder of monasticism. So believe me,

Egypt was not just a Christian country, but one of the most fiercely Christian nations.

The first drawing of Jesus is found there in Egypt, the oldest, and the oldest parchment with writings that mentioned

Jesus from Egypt as well. Wow. Mr.

Perry asks, what does Raymond think about the Fourth Crusade? It was a crusade that went awry and went to Constantinople, and it was a disaster, obviously.

And a lot of people on the Western side, the Catholic Pope, some of them condemned it.

And, you know, but yeah, it was a fail, definitely probably the most failed crusade because it turned into something else,

Christians against Christians. And that's the point, you know, no one's arguing that to be a crusader is to be infallible.

Yeah, of course they made mistakes, all sorts of mistakes, like all men are prone to do.

We're discussing, though, the idea and how legitimate it is. Let's see, there's just so many questions.

Let's get to this one. Oh, this is interesting, this is a personal one. Could you ask Raymond about his own theological convictions or if anyone already knows, is he a

Christian? Yeah, I'm an Orthodox Christian of the Coptic variety, which is orthodoxy.

So, but you know, born and raised here, and I always say this, it's very hard not to have your beliefs

Protestantized no matter what. So obviously a lot of the Protestant beliefs that people cling to color my worldview.

My brother is a Baptist minister. So yeah, and so I know Protestant ideas very well.

And I like some of them, many of them, but formally I say I'm part of the Orthodox Church. This is fascinating to me that you, so your parents,

I read that your parents, I think, are from Egypt, right? Is that correct? And so you grew up here in California, but what do you mean?

Like just because California doesn't strike me as particularly Protestant, you know, but just being here in the

United States, you find there's an influence. That's fascinating to me. Well, of course, I mean, America is a

Protestant nation and this influence, I mean, you're talking about today in California, but I didn't grow up in California.

I was in the East Coast and you're talking about the 70s and the 80s, okay? Which was, you know, why watch

Jimmy Swagger and Billy Graham, right? So this was in my early youth.

That's the extent of my Christianity, aside from going to church and not understanding what they're talking about. Yeah, because I've heard other people from other places say like, you're so Christianized or you're so Protestant and these kinds of things.

And I think the people who live here think that that's so under attack and so marginalized. It's hard to -

That's great today, but yeah, but the molding years of one's youth, it wasn't necessarily like that.

Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, I could go on about that, but we got so many more questions. Let's see here.

Just so ridiculous. This isn't really a question. Regime of evangelicals always ignore the fact that Muslim hordes are attacking other

Christian nations and trying to encroach on their territory. Yep, couldn't agree more. Let's see.

Okay, this is, I don't know what this is. Do you all know how Queen Isabella won

Spain back? Some spelling issues there. It was just basically, you know, we know about the

Crusades in the Holy Land, but we often forget about the Reconquista. It was another whole Crusade and Jihad back and forth, trying to expel the

Muslims and liberate Spain. So it was the same idea. And Isabella, but she's just the last of the long line of Crusaders who were holed up in the

North after the seventh century or eighth century conquest of Spain under Islam and slowly, centrally after centrally from the

Northwest quadrant of the Iberian Peninsula, they started slowly coming down southward and combating them.

And by the time it was Isabella, it was all but, all that was left was Granada in the southern tip, which she and her husband,

Ferdinand, conquered in 1492. Mike asks, historically

Catholic and Orthodox, did they both support the Crusades? Well, the Orthodox, the

Byzantine emperor was Orthodox. He's the one who asked for help. Right. But if you mean from a theological point of view, my understanding is

Orthodox don't believe, they do believe in just war and you can fight, of course, but they don't believe in the remission of sins aspect.

Okay, so that gets at something though, I think that's important, which is that not all of the people fighting in the

Crusades were in lockstep. And certainly they didn't all believe or they weren't all motivated by, we're going to be absolved of our sins because of this action.

There was variation there. I think that is important to point out. Yeah, especially with the Eastern Roman Byzantine empire, they completely rejected that idea, but they were fierce warriors nonetheless.

And there was a period in the ninth and 10th centuries where they made a comeback and recovered

Christian territories that Islam had taken from them. Because remember all those nations, Egypt and Syria were part of the

Roman empire. They were part of the Christian Roman world. And Byzantium, of course, we call them

Byzantium, but they saw themselves as Rome, right? Second Rome, Constantinople. Right, well, a few years ago,

I'm sure you've probably been there, but I was able to go to the Hagia Sophia and this is when you could still take a tour and it wasn't a mosque.

Now they've converted it back into a mosque and absolutely fascinating. But one of the things

I noticed was the Turkish people, even today, don't seem to want to emphasize anything that was before them, whether it was the

Roman history or whether it was Byzantine history, they only focus on their history.

And I thought that was quite curious because I did a history degree, a graduate history degree in the

West, obviously. And we are just so, we want to preserve everything except for,

I guess, our monuments to Civil War soldiers and founding fathers, but everything else. You know, if it's a

Native American archeological dig, like we want to preserve that even though it really doesn't relate to us directly, but such a different mindset, so.

All right, well, let's see. We have just a few more questions and we're gonna wrap up here.

Should Christians, militias mobilize to help Nigerian Christians? I'm sure you're following what's happening in Nigeria.

And I have a friend actually, who's over there, who says there is this passivity that Christians have that they shouldn't fight back.

They think that's a Christian thing to do. And they're just getting slaughtered. What's your thought on that? Well, you know, in keeping with everything we've just said,

I think they should be able to fight back. Some of them do, you know, whether it's forming militias or whatever.

Again, it just comes down to the person, you know, do you want to fight back? Do you want to, there's no virtue in being, to me, it's not a virtue standing there and getting killed.

That, like I said, is making a virtue out of cowardice or passivity. You know,

I mean, what do people believe that if my house is being invaded by a bunch of people who are going to tie up, you know, my wife and children and rape and kill them,

I'm supposed to, and the only way I can stop them is to kill them. I'm supposed to just not turn the other cheek and let that happen.

That's what Jesus wants. To me, I mean, remember Jesus, who said turn the other cheek, is recorded being slapped one time.

He didn't turn the other cheek. He actually questioned the man who slapped him and, you know, put him on the spot. So, you know, the understanding of this is, the idea of just war, to me, just makes absolute sense, whether it's in the context of Nigeria or otherwise, as long as it's being done for a just cause, defense, protection of innocent lives, et cetera.

Now, we only have like two minutes, but see if you could weigh into this with a soundbite.

Do you believe that a two -state solution is possible in Israel? This is from Max. Oh, that's above my pay grade.

I don't, I'm so involved in this other stuff. I mean, the two -state solution seems like that's what they've been teaching for, or asking for decades and it doesn't work, or in some say it's not being done the right way.

I don't know. I had a few questions. I had them all saved, but I'm not gonna get to all of them because we only have a little bit of time, but basically they all come down to this

Catholic -Protestant dichotomy. I think I told you before, maybe it was before we were recording, that a lot of my listeners are

Protestant. I'm Protestant. And so there is a struggle sometimes with looking back and seeing the

Catholic church involved in something. And so I'll just say this. There was only one game in town before the

Protestant Reformation, and it wasn't even the same Catholic church that we have today. There's been development since then.

And there were many true believers that would have been residing and attending churches under the

Roman Catholic church at that time. It doesn't mean that all the doctrines were necessarily even believed.

But I think that one of the things that Dr. Raymond Ibrahim is saying is that this is really, we need to look beyond this to just self -defense.

This was literally, we are being invaded and we need to defend our homeland. And our homeland is marked by a certain kind of cultural

Christianity. And so that was the easy way to distinguish. As I think you just said, that all these

Muslims were banded together, different people groups by Islam. And so different Christian regions and different Christian traditions were also unionized,

I guess, to fight against this because it was a common threat. So if you wanna add anything to that, that's just my two cents.

No, that's true. Like I said, I make a distinction between Protestant and Catholic theological arguments.

Okay, that's one thing. And, but I look at it from the historical point of view. And it's just a fact that if it wasn't for the

Catholic church and Catholic teaching, I guarantee you Europe would have been a Muslim continent by now, just like North Africa.

And if they didn't have this fighting ethos rationalized through Christian theology, it would have been taken over.

I mean, if they were anything like today's Christians, it would have been taken over like that, okay, in one year. And Augustine, just war theory.

I mean, that's claimed by the Protestants and Catholics and even the Eastern world. They all look back to Augustines. Yeah, so that's why when anyone, whether Protestant or otherwise, has a problem with just war theory, they just think not only they get it, okay.

And it's not, so just war theory, you're right. I mean, Protestants also embrace it. So yeah, if it wasn't for that ethos,

I guarantee you that you would not be a Christian today. Okay. Yeah.

I might be because my people were already conquered and were paying tribute, but you might not. Well, with that, we have to end as we've been going a little over an hour.

Thank you. I really appreciate it, Dr. Raymond Ibrahim. And if people want to access your stuff, they can just go to your website, raymondibrahim .com.

Yeah, they can go to my website, raymondibrahim .com. And my books, here they are.

These are the two really good ones, Sword and Scimitar, Defenders of the West, or this one here.

Yeah, I would recommend everyone read Defenders of the West. It's excellent. And I really am thankful that you'd put it together just from the standpoint of we need heroes.

We don't have, we've forgotten our heroes and you're reading this and I'm like, why aren't there 10 movies and miniseries made about these guys?

These guys, this is insane. Well, there's a reason though. We can talk about that another time.