534. From Warhawk to Peacemaker: A Congressman’s Radical Transformation | Mark Siljander

I mean, obviously, during the 60s, there was a huge rebellion in the United States against the use of the military in fighting the communists in Vietnam. As I matured and learned more about the absolute horrors of communism, how many people in Cambodia died when the communists took over? Four million in the killing fields? At least.
Something like that. This is extraordinary naivete to think one could go to Iraq or even Syria for that matter and force an American U.S.
style democracy on a people group that is broken into different faith groups. Right.
Muslim, Shiite, Sunni. It was completely absurd.
47 of 50 Muslim-majority countries are not democracies. And there is a fourth or fifth century copy of what they call the Peshitta text.
And Peshitta means simple and straightforward. And it has the Aramaic language of Jesus.
So I began reading that and then reading the Quran. And while I had many nice things to say about Jesus, it also said things, for example, he's not the son of God.
He wasn't crucified. I felt, how does one say this? We were assured by his opposition that he was a warmonger and that you could imagine him voted in high school as most likely to start World

War III. But you know, one of the things we might always remind ourselves is that we might not be

able to recognize a true peacemaker when one comes along. But he shouldn't be trifled with.

That's the other side of Trump. Right.
But that might also be absolutely necessary. Okay, so back

to Palestine. I had the privilege today of sitting down with Mark Silgender, a former congressman.
Mark wrote a book in 2008 called A Deadly Misunderstanding,

A Congressman's Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide.

Now, when Mark entered Congress decades ago,

he was a pretty straight-laced and rather hawk-like,

so war-like evangelical Christian

with a pretty pronounced anti-Muslim stance, pro-Christian,

anti-Muslim stance, very partisan in the religious sense. And he had an epiphany while serving as a congressman that he was not loving his enemies, so to speak, in the proper Christian manner.
And that sent him on a quest to learn about the commonalities of belief that could, no, do unite the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian world. Now, he particularly concentrated on Islam and Christianity, and we discussed the consequences of that quest theoretically, conceptually, and also practically.
Now, I'm interested in this because it seems to me that Islam and Christianity, Judaism, have been at each other's throats for hundreds of years and the situation in many ways hasn't changed. Maybe it's even more crucial now than it ever has been.
And I've watched the Abraham Accords unfold over the last six or seven years and there's a real pathway to peace there. It's partly predicated on the United Arab Emirates attempts to bridge the tri-faith gap.
And Mark Ziljander is operating at that nexus. And so I really wanted to talk to him about what he discovered and how he managed to broker peace, by the way, in six major international conflicts, which we also talked about in some detail, especially with regards to Darfur and Sudan.
We also touched upon the objection of the neocon war hawks, of which I suppose he once was one, their opposition to his peacemaking ministration, so to speak, and why that opposition emerged. He was accused of being a traitor, for example, by the neocons who

were hell-bent on regime change as their answer to how to bring a longer-lasting and more stable peace to the world. Anyways, we walked through all of that.
It's one of the most, I gotta say, it's one of the most fascinating podcasts I've ever done. It has a lovely narrative arc.
It Ends absolutely perfectly.

Fascinating personal story.

Very interesting. fascinating podcast I've ever done.
It has a lovely narrative arc. It ends absolutely perfectly.

Fascinating personal story. Very interesting conceptually.
And what would you say? Compelling

with regards to Silgender's ability to shed light on what actually goes on behind the scenes,

internationally and domestically. Join us.
All right, Congressman Siljander, I wanted to talk to you today for a variety of reasons, hopefully all of which we'll go into, but I think we should start with the topic of your 2008 book, which is A Deadly Misunderstanding, A Congressman's Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian divide. Well, there's lots of places we could go with that.
Why was this your quest? Why did you think you were the person to do it? Why do you think a bridge can be built? What's the nature of the divide? All of that, those are things we could spend an hour or two hours on each of those subtopics. But let's start with, well, why was this your problem? Well, it wasn't my problem, Jordan.
When in Congress, I made speeches denouncing Islam, the Quran, and made external speeches as well. I didn't like Muslims generally.

Even though I lived in Michigan and Detroit had a very large population of Muslims and Arabs, and I had an epiphany. Believe it or not, in Congress, it's possible for the spirit to actually speak or hit hard a person within that context.
and I claimed to be, as an evangelical at the time,

a follower of Jesus. And the epiphany was very basic, elementary, and simple.
If you're really following Jesus, why do you disdain a whole group of people, a whole faith group of 1.5 or 6 billion. Is that what Jesus did with the Samaritan woman, the tax collector, those that could have been prostitutes and others? He and Jesus welcomed all and loved them.
And love doesn't always, as you know me, like or agree with. So I began studying the Quran.
Very simple. This is when? When were you making the anti-muslim speeches this is in my last term in congress and this is one of the reasons it was my last term what year what year was that's way back in the late 80s i was in my 20s and early 30s okay okay so in the 1980, so you were operating as a rather straight-laced traditional evangelical in the 1980s? And a neoconservative.
And a neoconservative. Yes.
You should define neoconservative for everybody who's watching and listening. Yes, that doesn't mean you're a Republican or Democrat particularly.
But for example, Cheney, Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld during the Bush

administration were considered neoconservatives. My definition is they're avid hawks.
They typically want to change regimes rather than cooperate and work with regimes by force if necessary. I would say the Iraq War is emblematic of what a neoconservative, they don't mind lying, cheating, being scoundrels, if you will, causing wars if their ends are met.
And the ends are? And that's exactly the question. The ends are democracy.
Presumably, democracy is some of their deity. In that, their hope that if we show these poor ignorant people overseas how marvelous democracy is, they'll beg for it, and the radical Muslims will denounce radical Islam to embrace democracy.
That was the hope that drove the Iraq war, for example. And I remember in the early stages of that, there was a delusion, I would say, that the democratic distributors, the distributors of democracy that constituted the American military would be welcomed with open hands, arms.
And when the dictator tyrant was deposed, the freedom-loving people would rise up and democracy would prevail, which is, you might say, a somewhat naive view of how democracy works. And I know that's a bit of a parody, but that was my sense of the sentiment, the belief.

And so the neocons, they were convinced, let me see if I get it right, the neocons were convinced that if they put the might of the US military and the willingness to engage in warfare behind their pro-democracy words and threatened the stability of authoritarian regimes, that there'd be the possibility of eliciting something like, say, a genuine Arab Spring or a genuine transformation among the freedom-loving people of the Middle East, something like that. Am I parodying it too brutally, or is that a reasonable summary? Quite articulately.
Okay. And it's critical to note that for several administrations, including a Democrat, there were regime change policies.

And in the Bush administration, there was a secret policy revealed by General Wesley Clark

some years ago, much post-Bush's two terms in office, that there were seven countries

they wanted a regime change. And they would do, as you know, anything to achieve it.
So I felt it would be critical, since most of these countries were Muslim countries, and almost all conflicts, which are about 120 at the moment globally, have to do with Muslims, Christians, and or Jews,

that perhaps a logical thing would be to study the Semitic holy books behind each. Yeah, right.
And then see if there's more common ground than we have known heretofore. So I thought, well— Okay, and was that part of the epiphany? Yes, it was.
Okay, so let's go back to the biographical details, and then I'll go into the neocon issue again with you. Well, you said that your initial stance, this was back in the 1980s, was rather traditional, straight-laced evangelical, and you regarded yourself as an advocate for Christianity in the face of something approximating Muslim error and enmity.
And then when you were in Congress, you realized that there was something wrong with that stance, even perhaps from a Christian perspective. But you also had a conceptual realization, which was there is some commonality of text between the three major Abrahamic faiths.
And if you analyzed that commonality, you'd be able to start to establish ground on which negotiation for peace might be established. Is that about right? Well, I didn't realize there was so much common ground at the time, but that was the ambition.
And it was also being a hawk. You know, we were fighting communism at the time during the Soviet empire.
And as young, naive, foolish, and I was given the chairmanship of the Africa subcommittee thinking that I was important and turned out to be, they wanted to use someone young and naive in a dupe. So certain people could sort of use me with certain legislative efforts.
So I promoted anti-communist guerrillas supporting guns and arms and propped up despot regimes that were anti-communist regimes. And the epiphany of this is so contrary to what the Messiah taught and who the Messiah was as an example of love and compassion and mercy, not killing and hate and arming.
So it was an overwhelming feeling of emotions. I actually teared up on the floor of the Congress, and I'm not one often given to tears like that.
And it was just so powerful. And I can't tell you where it came from, but it was during the apartheid debate in South Africa, where there were bills to condemn the white regime at the time.
And I was in charge of it. And I sat there in the House floor by myself and my African-American aide trying to defend a bill that is a weak, useless, toothless bill to condemn the white regime in South Africa.
the Democrats, Republicans came up with an agreement.

My job was to push it through.

And the debates were, for several days, I'm looking,

there are 84 Democrats on the Democrat side and Republican.

I'm looking at my side, it was just me, my eight and nine.

That was it, no one else.

And it was obvious to me then, too bad it took so long to figure it out, that I was being used to prop up racism. So the most radical bill as an amendment to the wishy-washy bipartisan bill that wouldn't hurt the regime at all, but at least makes some subtle statements.
I let that bill go through on a voice vote. And it was historic because it was a little vibration in the ocean of apartheid in white rural South Africa.
And it built into a tsunami, essentially, within the next few years. And that's- So let me get that story exactly straight.
So you were spearheading a weak-kneed bill to begin with, and you were doing that to some degree, unbeknownst to yourself, as a puppet of forces that you didn't fully understand. But then I didn't quite follow that.
What was the transformation of the bill that had the cascading effect? Well, there was a substitute bill by Ron Dellums, a very liberal Democrat from California, that had real teeth in it. Oh, I mean, it was seriously condemning justifiably the apartheid regime.
And he, of course, presented it as a substitute for the original bill. And all I had to do was call for record roll call vote and be voted down.
We go back to the other bill, debate that for another day or so, and the weak bill would float through the Senate and go through the Senate, and everything would be copacetic with the racist. Well, I refused to allow a voice vote, and no one else was there to call for it except for me, because Republicans didn't want to be seen defending racism.
Okay, and so what's the significance of you refusing to call for a voice vote? Because the Ron Dellums bill, this extreme bill, passed the U.S. House of Representatives as a substitute for the weak bill.
And I was blamed for it. And by the time I got back to my office, I can't tell you how many messages of disdain and anger I received from that.

And that was just the beginning of this whole epiphany. And then when I went to the Middle East, usually we go to Israel because I was on the Middle East committee too.
And we were told not to see the Palestinians. And I thought, now wait a minute, how can one ever work as a mediator, especially one

of the most powerful countries in the world and most powerful parliaments in the world, the U.S. Congress, if we don't talk to both sides? We have to.
I'm very pro-Israel, but I felt we still have to talk to our enemies, what are perceived to be enemies anyway at the time. And I was threatened at that time not to pursue this type of, I would call it balance, of engaging people that our party was told not to engage.
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Okay, so let me expand on this a little bit. So you talked about the anti-communism and the role of the military, the role of force in combating communism.
And you talked about apartheid. And then we also started to talk about the conflicts that involved the Islamic world.
So let me walk through those with an eye to fleshing out the neocon position. I mean, obviously, during the 60s, there was a huge rebellion in the United States, especially by young people, against the use of the military in fighting the communists in Vietnam, an extension, let's say, of the Korean conflict.
Now, when I was young, I was temperamentally, I suppose, predisposed and also by my youth to thinking that the anti-war protests were fully justified. But as I matured and learned more about the absolute horrors of communism, both Soviet and Chinese, I could certainly see the rationale for the US in particular to do everything it could from stopping any population like that of Cambodia, let's say, from falling into the hands of the communists.
I mean, how many people in Cambodia died when the communists took over? Four million in the killing fields? Something like that. Some absolute cataclysmic catastrophe.
And of course, North Korea has never been able, the Koreans have never been able to free themselves from the grip of the Chinese communists. And so it's an open question with regards to communism, how much diplomacy is possible and how much force is necessary.
And the certainly weakness in the face of communism and military weakness was not advisable. And then, so let's just park that for a second.
And then on the South African side, I mean, I've been concerned ever since the 1980s, when the anti-apartheid movement emerged, that South Africa would turn into what Zimbabwe turned into or Rhodesia, and that the radical leftists would take over in the aftermath of

the disintegration of the apartheid empire and all hell would break loose and it still seems to me like that that's a real possibility still for South Africa right so so these are the sorts of things that you're caught that you were caught up in in that nexus and so the neocons from from what you've said, from what I understand,

they're more likely to

stand on the side of like resolute and even invasive military force to implement regime changes. Now, I want to add one more thing to that, and then we'll go back to your epiphany.

The theoretical problem, the problem with the neocon theory, in my estimation, is that it seems to be predicated on the belief that a totalitarian state is basically composed of like a hyper thug and his minions oppressing a vast number of essentially freedom-loving people. And I don't think that's a reasonable account of a totalitarian or authoritarian state at all.
Like an authoritarian state emerges when everyone is lying about everything all the time. There might be the worst thug at the top, but the pathology is radically distributed through the system.
So the idea that if you do a regime change,

that you're going to evoke something like democracy in its aftermath strikes me as wishful thinking in the extreme. So it doesn't seem to me that the neocon fault is necessarily their proclivity to rely on military might.
It seems to me that their fault is that they have a naive view of how complex it is to generate the preconditions for a democracy.

Exactly.

Okay, so I'd be more than happy to hear your reaction to any or all of that, and then we'll go back to the epiphany. Certainly.
Well, this is extraordinary naivete to think one could go to Iraq or even Syria for that matter and force an American U.S. style democracy on a people group that is broken into different faith groups.
Right. Languages.
Muslim, Shiite, Sunni. I mean, it was completely absurd.
No institutions, no history of democracy. No, with nothing.
Yeah. And this is, to me, the biggest area of deception with a neoconservative ideology.
They are just so still believe that democracy is the best for every country. But how many democracies, Jordan, are the same? Well, they're also a minority of governments.
And the idea that democracy, see, the problem, part of the problem with this neoconstance is the notion that democracy is the natural state of governance for human beings, which is like, it's rare. There are a multitude of unlikely preconditions, some of which seem to be, well, this is something else that we can talk about, some of which seem to be Judeo-Christian in their essence.
It's like 47 of 50 Muslim-majority countries are not democracies. And 100% of Catholic and Protestant majority countries outside of Africa are functional democracies.
So this is something we can also delve into when we talk about the commonalities between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, because we also have to account for the radical differences in governance style. Okay, so you weren't a fan of the neocons, even though you'd started out as more of a hawk and more of an evangelical hawk, you had an epiphany, and the epiphany, I'd like to go into that a little bit more.
Some of that was conceptual, maybe the Muslims, Christians, and Jews have more in common than we might think. But some of it was your dawning intuition that there was a conflict between the deep realities of your faith and your political approach and strategy.
So how did that, yeah, how do you make sense of that realization coming to dawn on you? It was Spark Jordan by a friend from India. He said, Mark, you talk negative against Muslims and the Quran, but did you know that Jesus is in the Quran? I jumped out of my chair and said, I don't believe.
And this is during the epiphany. You say, I'm still developing.
It's like one is an infant. You're born into a new thinking, but it takes time to mature and hopefully someday become an adult in the context of the epiphany.
And I was very angry. I said, I don't believe this.
So I bought a Quran, in English, of course, and started reading it in English. And it was extraordinary how many times it mentioned Jesus.
He's the central figure, strangely enough. It was just a profound discovery.
And my wife, I'd screamed back to her, Nancy, do you know what the Quran says about Jesus? And she said, I don't really want to know. Yeah, right.
I go, no, no, let me tell you. And then she got quite infatuated with the whole process as well.
So after studying it, I called a spiritual friend of mine who was my pastor from Michigan who spoke Aramaic. And this is the key linchpin now with the epiphany, by the way.
He was teaching me Aramaic. Right, which is Christ's original language.
Yeah, Jesus the Messiah from Nazareth spoke Galilean dialect of Aramaic. And there is a fourth or fifth century copy, I believe, of a copy of a copy of what they call the Peshitta text.
It's in the Museum of London, I think, at the moment. And Peshitta means simple and straightforward.
And it has the Aramaic language of Jesus. So I began reading that and then reading the Quran.
And while I had many nice things to say, which I love to get into before the interview expires, about Jesus, it also said things, for example, he's not the son of God. He wasn't crucified, negative against the Trinity, things like that.
The Christians, including yours truly, felt a little bit offended by it. So there you go.
There's some of the problems. But then the epiphany grew to a second, more minor one.
I felt, how does one say this? A very strong notion that is in the words, the words. So I asked my pastor, Aramaic speaker, what is begotten in Aramaic? And began learning Arabic at some level and comparing the begottenness of Jesus in the Quran and the begottenness of Jesus, say, in Matthew 1, with a long 41 begots, Abraham begot Isaac, et cetera,

and discovered something quite fascinating,

that the same word the Quran uses, walid,

for Jesus was not walid or begotten.

And this may seem a little technical, but it's very powerful.

It's a male verb action, meaning sexually.

So you're a cool... but it's very powerful.
It's a male verb action, meaning sexually.

So, of course, no Christian believes God had sex with Mary,

but that's what many Muslims believe, Christians believe,

because we say Jesus was begotten the same way as we were begotten.

But in the Peshitta text, it uniquely,

and without any coincidental serendipity uses the same word as the Quran, Abraham, walid, walid, this begotten, begotten, meaning sexually conceived. When it gets down to verse 16 to Jesus, the form of the word changes to a feminine passive construct in Aramaic, meaning there's no man and there's no action.
I mean, physical action. And when Muslims hear this, the scholars, the cab drivers, my close friends, they're just enamored with this.
So the point is, the way Jesus was begotten in the Bible and in the Quran is identical. Success in business isn't just about offering an amazing product or service, though that's certainly essential.
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That's shopify.com slash jbp to upgrade your selling today that's shopify.com slash jbp you said a number of things that are of crucial importance okay to well if the goal i've been thinking for some protracted period of time especially in the aftermath of the abraham accords that there are foundational principles that unite Muslims, Jews, and Christians. They're all people of the book, for example, and they're all Abrahamic people.
And those are the idea that all of our cultures are predicated on a book rather than a city, rather than the state, rather than a military power, rather than an empire. That's a radical similarity.
People of the book is a radical change with regard to say the Romans or the Greeks or the pagan empires. The fact that a book is the foundation of the culture, that's an unbelievably revolutionary notion.
And then the three, the books that guide all three of the major Abrahamic religions have marked similarities. One of them, as you pointed out with regards to Islam and Christianity, is the centrality of Christ.
Okay, so you said that was a big surprise to you, and I'm sure it's a surprise to many of the people that are listening.

Well, then, where's the rub?

Well, that's what you turn to right away.

Christ is a central figure.

Jesus is a central figure in the Islamic text, as he is in the Christian text.

But there's doctrinal differences, which you zeroed in on right away.

But one of the things that you were fleshing out, investigating,

was the possibility that the doctrinal differences with regards to the circumstances of Christ's conception

And that you were fleshing out, investigating, was the possibility that the doctrinal differences with regards to the circumstances of Christ's conception and birth were less at odds than might be if you were ultimately pessimistic, right? Because the question is, for me, look, the Abraham Accords demonstrated that people of goodwill could circumvent the State Department and, what would you say, accumulated doctrinal diplomatic wisdom that it was impossible to negotiate peace between the Arab world and the Israelis absent an agreement on Palestine, which was never going to happen because the Iranians, it's in the Iranians' best interest to keep the Palestine conflict with the Jews going on forever. And so that's a non-starter.
And the Abraham Accords signatories just walked around that in quite a remarkable way. And I don't think that that's an accomplishment that's been heralded sufficiently.
And I know that the people, particularly in the UAE, they've built that tri-faith complex. And they seem to be working towards a solution that's similar to the one that you're pursuing, which would be the idea that, well, maybe we should start with our commonalities and see what we could negotiate so that we could establish something approximating at least a lasting and cooperative peace, right, as opposed to continual warfare.
Now, I was stunned, first of all, that the Abraham Accords were ever signed, but I was also more stunned that they held in the aftermath of October 7th. I know the Saudis backed off and everything got kind of quiet about Arab-Israeli cooperation, but the the accords didn't fracture.
And then more recently, I noticed that the UAE in particular, but also the Saudis have taken steps to do something that the West is very loath to do, especially the UK, France, and Germany, which is to define radical Islam, right, Islamism, to set it outside the canonical Islamic doctrine and to oppose it. And the leaders in the UAE have called out Germany and England, or the UK in particular, for being weak in their opposition to Islamism, which the UAE and the Saudis don't regard as part of canonical Islamic tradition.
If I got that, does that seem, is that in accordance with how you agree? Yes, indeed. Okay.
And the Abrahamic Accords were not lauded anywhere near what they should have been.

No. I was privileged to be in the gardens at the White House watching the signatories and working with North Sudan, where I visited 24 times the Khartoum and the surroundings, to encourage them to participate, which they did as did Morocco as well.
So the Abraham Accords began to extend and Saudi was, as you know, as you pointed out, were right on the edge of joining. And then October 6th occurred.
And what a convenient thing to happen at that timing. It was horrific.
It's nothing less than a atrocious atrocity, but it was also well-timed. Well, it seemed to me that the purpose of October 7th was to stop the Saudis from signing the Abraham Accords.
Well, that was one of the goals. One of the goals.
It was Iran's goal. And there were others, but October 7th.
And that's exactly why the timing was as it was. Right, right.
Well, and it meant with some success, although the agreements didn't fragment. Okay, so now you have this epiphany, and so you were talking about going to Israel and speaking with the Palestinians, and you faced opposition from within your own party, especially on the neocon side, for having the temerity to propose such a thing.
Okay, let's pick it up from there so loving enemies is is not appreciated in politics and this is i don't want to get off on a tangent but this is why donald trump is disdained by neoconservatives as well because he talked to kim jong-un his first term he made friends with putin he's a master negotiator as as as you've analyzed his first term. He made friends with Putin.
He's a master negotiator. As you've analyzed his psychology, I noticed on one of your blogs, which is fantastic, by the way.
And I have a great respect for Donald Trump because his heart is, I believe, is for peace. And he talks repeatedly about all these young men and dying and all the people dying

yeah but he talks about dying and killing repeatedly so i believe he he's he this way there's an opposition he is a man of peace he's the strangest man of peace strange indeed yeah Regardless of what people say about his personality, his gruffness, his bluntness, his other characteristics that you pointed out in one of your excellent presentations, he's inside, and I have no inside knowledge of this, but I just believe from observation that he has this compassion. Well, he also has a track record.
I mean, when he was president, he led the West into zero wars, right? And zero is not very many. And so that was despite the fact that we were assured by his opposition that he was a warmonger and that it would be Trump that would be most, you could imagine him voted in high school as most likely to start World War III.
And yet when he became president, the fruits that his tree bore, let's say, were fruits of peace. And that was contradictory and strange given the combativeness of his personality.
But one of the things we might always remind ourselves is that if we're not ourselves capable of promoting peace, let's say in our own family, let alone at an international level, we might not be able to recognize a true peacemaker when one comes along. He's not necessarily going to look like you think, because if you knew how to do that, you do it and so okay now trump seems to be doing everything he can to but he shouldn't be trifled with that's the other side of trump right but but that might also be absolutely necessary right we don't we don't know what the preconditions are for establishing peace he obviously indicated to people like the dictator of North Korea that he could be communicated

with, but not trifled with, right?

And Trump does seem to have that paradoxical personality, which is, don't muck about with

me, but if we don't have to go to war, then let's not, right?

And so he tromps around like a bull in a China shop, and it's not obvious how much of that's

necessary, but I really mean it's not obvious. None of that seems weak, right? And I think that was the position of someone like Biden, who would promote himself like Justin Trudeau does.
A lot of these good-thinking liberals is they're the sort of people in their mouths butter wouldn't melt. They're such nice gentlemen.
And nice has never seemed to me to be particularly virtuous. Discriminating nice from weak is a difficult matter.
And I don't think people make that mistake with Trump. Okay, so back to Palestine.
I got a quick comment. Jesus, you know, they had asked, why don't you call down your angels? Yeah.
Which he could have. But he did not.
Because, and I don't mean to say Trump is like Jesus, please. I'm saying there's an attribute that while there's power behind Jesus, Yeshua as I call him, his Hebrew name, there's power.
He still exerted love, compassion, and mercy. Well, you see the same thing with Moses.
You know, when Moses is near the end of his sojourn with the Israelites, they run out of water again in the desert. And the Israelites ask Moses to intercede on their behalf.
And God tells Moses to ask the rocks to deliver water, right? And he, instead, Moses goes with Aaron to the rocks and uses his cudgel to compel and command the rocks to deliver water, which they do. But his punishment is that he doesn't lead the Israelites into the promised land, right? So the God of the Old Testament, who's manifested, let's say, in the spirit of Christ, is someone who radically opposes the use of unnecessary force, right? Now, it isn't that Moses has no strength of character because he stands up against the Pharaoh multiple times, puts his own life at risk.
He's a very brave person, but he's still severely punished for using force when verbal invitation is the order of the day. Right, right.
And so it's possible to have that power at your back and still be morally obliged to use as little of it as necessary to, let's say, to make your point. Okay, so now you're off to Palestine.
You're running into opposition from the neocons. You have an epiphany that you should be reaching out and talking.
That becomes a practical necessity with regards to the Palestinians. Pick up the story there.
Yes, and we engaged and talked and broke bread and had tea. How did you do that exactly? Walk us through the mechanisms.
Well, I mean, when you're in Congress, you tell the embassy, my interest is to see some Palestinians. I said, well, that wouldn't be recommended or advised.
I said, note taken, I still want to see Palestinians, some of the leaders and some average people. We walked down some of the streets in the West Bank and talked to people and knocked down their doors.
I felt like we were in another campaign of sorts. And it was exhilarating.
And I can't even specify why it was. It was like meeting new people a new constituency but there is something missing Jordan I was trying to find common ground one can be a nice person a diplomat and break bread which is critical in building interpersonal relationship but there is no spiritual connectivity right right so I'm going back to this thought about the begotten, we spoke about earlier that the Bible says that the Holy Spirit was breathed into Mary by God, who is a virgin, and the sinless Messiah was born.
Well, the Quran says precisely the same thing, that God, Allah, breathed into Mary's virgin womb and produced Isa, Jesus, a perfect, Zakiah, perfect, unblemished Mashiach, Messiah. And I thought, well, what's the difference? We call them son, our term is son of God,

and the Muslims are all hung up on that.

They shouldn't be because in their mind,

this is the critical point,

and here's the common ground.

You could build with Gaddafi, Omar al-Bashir,

or your neighbor.

That the common ground is that he was born supernaturally, and the Son of God construct is ubiquitous throughout the Old Testament. It's unique.
Anyone, any being conceived or breathed by Yahweh, including the angels, they were called the sons of God, looked down on the women in Genesis 6 and said, aren't they beautiful and created the Nephilim.

Well, they were called sons of God.

Even high priests were called sons of God.

You see that in the story of Job, too.

Yeah, and Job as well.

So what I'm saying, the notion of son of God should not be so offensive to the Muslims. The point is, what do we mean by that? We mean that God, Yahweh, blew his Ruha Kodesh, his Holy Spirit into Mary.
And that's precisely what the Quran says. The stories are almost identical and even linguistically.
The Ruha Kodesh, Arabic, and Ruha kodesh is the hebrew see the sounds of similarities aloha is god in hebrew alaha is what jesus himself used in his vernacular aramaic and allah ala arabic alaha aramaic aloha hebrew so that similarity was stunning because most of my Christian friends say Allah is not the God of the Bible. Well, I said, etymologically, it is the same God, at least in terms of title.
Now, how one views God, maybe through their lenses, is different. There are 56,000, give or take, sex and denominations of Christianity all over the world, hair splitting every little theological difference.
But I would say that there are more dynamic synergies between the Quran and the Bible. I'm not saying so much Islam and Christianity, because they have their history, dogmas, culture, and politics.
But you mean in terms of the texts? Yes, interpretations. But the text in Aramaic, in the New Testament, the text of the Quran and Arabic merge much more smoothly and consistently

than would an Islamic imam debating a Christian pastor.

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Is it reasonable? There's two pathways we could walk down now. We could continue to pick up the biographical story, let's say, that begins with your interactions with the Palestinians.
Let's do that. Let's do that.
I have a very troublesome question to ask you as well, but I'll forestall that for the time being. So tell me what happens after you start to make contact with the Palestinians.
Now, you've pointed out that what you were doing was like a constituency outreach and the beginnings of an investigation into a culture that you had regarded with enmity and as foreign, and that there was an exhilarating aspect to that, but there was something deeper driving it, which was the search for profound commonalities. Like my sense is, is that with regards to the Islamic world, unless we, we meaning Christians, Jews, and Muslims concentrate on what we have in common and work out a framework for collaboration and fair competition, that the alternative is something like capitulation.
It's always the alternative to negotiation. Capitulation or war.
And those are both dreadful alternatives. And so it seems to me that we should at least pray, hope and pray that there's more that unites us than there is that divides us because otherwise it's going to be a real brutal time.

And the Abraham Accords seem to be a real positive move in that direction, especially with regards to the UAE's attempt to initiate this tri-faith process.

Okay, and obviously that idea gripped you.

Okay, now you're dealing with the Palestinians.

What happens? What do you realize in consequence of that and what happens next? I realize what the Abrahamic Accords are missing, all the interfaith groups are missing, what our State Department and our own government is missing. It's what I would call the fifth track of engagement, which is a missing dimension in statecraft, and that is not speaking about religion or even spirituality, but rather since especially Muslims are deeply spiritual people, and they respect and honor one who brings faith to them in a way that's respectful and one of the so i i did a talk with a pretty radical muslim character in the uk muhammad hijab and i listened to it yeah well you know seven million have watched that, and most of them were Muslim.
And the responses are very interesting because there's a number of hijabs, acolytes, you might say, who are making comments. But the typical comment is, from the Muslim side, is, we're so glad and relieved that a conversation like this is happening and is

possible and like there was a lot of dissent amongst my team about me going to speak with Muhammad Hijab and so like even five minutes before we're in the car on the way there there were people from my team calling me and saying you shouldn't do this this isn't a good idea. But it turned out to be a good idea because the conversation struck a chord and did indicate that the kind of dialogue that you are describing is not only possible, but necessary and welcome, especially on the Muslim side.
They seem, the Muslims, the people who commented in particular, and the people who were there, seemed very relieved and excited that a serious conversation about at least quasi-theological matters was possible, and that could be done respectfully. They were pleased to be, I don't know, invited to the table for the discussion, something like that.
Okay, so now you're seeing that when you're talking to the Palestinians, and now you're starting to broaden out your contact network, I presume. Yes.
So what happens after that? Well, besides, so the idea of the sonship of Jesus can be mitigated to a hair split between Muslims and Christians. And then they'd bring up other issues.
What about the Trinity? What about the crucifixion? Yeah, that's the question I was going to ask you. There's a whole litany of issues that really, if done lovingly, now what I mean by love is not like and agree so much.
But in 1 Corinthians, there's a love chapter. And every wedding in America, probably Canada, love is patient, love is kind.
We decided to do, one of our studies was to do a deep dive in what are the 14 words used in that chapter in Aramaic. What are the sub-meetings?

What are the 14 words used in that chapter in Aramaic? What are the sub-meetings? What are the cultural context? How do we look at it in antiquity? To flesh out the... Absolutely.
You know, large language models are very good at that, by the way. You can use them technically to do that.
So we've done that, something very similar, with the word God. You can ask a large language model to specify the semantic domain of God.
And one of my colleagues has found a set of words that can be used to replace the concept of God with 99.5% completeness. So you imagine that the concept of God could be explicated by a cloud of closely related words, which it sounds like that's what you're trying to do with the concept of love.
Exactly. Okay, okay, so you're doing that in Aramaic.
We find that the Hebrew cognates and the Quranic cognates, because they're all sister languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic are similar to Spanish, French, and Italian. They're all based on Latin.
Most of the Arabic and Hebrew are based on Aramaic, the most ancient language. But they're all cousins regardless of the scholarly debates of which came first, which is frankly irrelevant.
They're all similar. They use similar words, understandable words.
words and as a consequence we're using these uh new common ground discoveries yeah yeah to engage people that was missing in Palestine in the during the visits we could talk about tea and coffee and family right but I was ignorant in terms of faith, in terms of their faith. Well, you also said something very interesting, which we should also not gloss over, which is that you could imagine that the secular view of conflict is that it's primarily political and economic, right? And that's always struck me as wrong.

Political and economic conflict is secondary to conflict about first principles,

about conflict about, and that's really theological conflict when you get right down to it.

So it seems to me to be completely,

it's as absurd to presume that you can make peace without a theological discussion

as it is to assume that if you decapitate a tyranny, it will turn into a democracy. Right.
Those are equally nonsensical propositions. And that seems to be especially obvious, as you pointed out, what, it's 120 conflicts in the world right now.
And what's the proportion of those that have to do with religious conflict well i didn't say religion yeah okay see that word we can get into it later yeah is a word i hardly ever use okay with respect because i know you use it frequently yeah it's not in the old testament it's not in the new testament and the quran's use of religion the word dean's the Arabic, really means the state of one's life and submission to God. So, the notion of there is a institutionalized religious structure, there was in the Old Testament, but they didn't even call it religion.
There's no notion of religion in Hebrew. And the only time religion is mentioned in the New Testament, this is an important backdrop, I hope, is in James.
And it says, true religion is helping widows and orphans and keeping yourself unstained from the evil of the world, which is what I believe is a real Quranic jihad, incidentally, as an anecdote. But getting back to it, the word is in Aramaic is ministry, not religion that implies creeds, doctrines, hierarchy, and so forth.
And religions divide people. Even tribes divide people.
People are divided by so much besides religion and even denominations can divide people. But I found one thing that unites people, including a story, and you might read in the book about the Dalai Lama, and that's Jesus.
Jesus does not have baggage of Christianity. I'm not against it.
Yeah, yeah. I don't want to make that clear.
But I don't think Jesus needs Christianity to lift his teachings up and lift who he was. Yeah, there's plenty.
There's a number of people, a faction maybe, or maybe even more than that, in the prayer group movement, a presidential prayer group that is distributed all across the Western world now and beyond. Oh, vastly beyond.
That also seems to be, what would you say, staking itself on that particular belief, right? That there's something about the figure of Christ that's unifying outside, well, you said outside the religious. You also contrasted the religious, I thought, very interestingly with the concept of ministry, right? Which is a very different idea because ministry is, what is that, act of love? Something like that.
So, let's go back to the Aramaic cloud of words around love. Okay.
Proceed from there.

So there are, in Corinthians,

seven elements, attributes to embrace and seven to avoid.

And we have turned it into

what we may be presumptuously call an algorithm.

And we is who?

Well, those of us that have traveled making peace.

There's numbers of Senate and House members, religious people, both Christian, Muslim, and other. We've traveled to 147 countries and worked on six conflicts and releasing 52.
I'm not saying this is, it's nothing to do with a brag or presumption, but the work, this way of creating common ground, released 52 hostages and believers in prisons all over the world consistently. And you said ameliorated six conflicts.
Yes, including a genocide. Over what span of time has this occurred? 30 years.

Right. Okay.
So we definitely want to delve into that. But it's based on love.
Right. And now you're defining that.
You said there were six? Seven attributes to embrace. Right.
And seven to avoid. Okay.
Okay. For example, You are emitting love to me now by creating a safe environment by which we can communicate together.
Okay, and that's definitional. That's behavioral.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, got it. Well, that's what you do if you have any sense as a psychotherapist, and that is a logos process.
Well, Carl Rogers was one of the people who formulated that most clearly, the idea that if you, Freud was doing this, although he didn't say as much exactly, Freud believed that if you listen to people and let them speak without, like spontaneously and without expectation that their minds would automatically

devolve towards the problems that confronted them and start to spin up something approximating a

solution. And Rogers, who was a Christian seminarian before he became a psychotherapist,

he became an atheist, at least that's what he said, but his doctrine was still intensely

Christian. He believed that if you could set up the preconditions for positive transformation by setting up a dialogue, dialogical space, a lot of Roger's work has been used by peacemakers, like consciously by peacemakers trying to mediate between groups with opposing views.
One of the Rogerian presuppositions, for example, it's a very useful one,

is that you listen carefully to what someone says,

and then you repeat back to them what you think they said

until they agree with your summary to ensure that genuine comprehension has been established.

And it's a Rogerian presumption that when that happens, there's transformation on the part of both participating parties. But to me, that's a reflection of something Rogers knew as a Protestant seminarian, that where there are two more gathered in Christ's name, so to speak, then the spirit is there.
And I think that's actually technically true from a psychological perspective. Because when people can communicate freely, a transformative process that aims at something like peace and cooperation does make itself manifest.
And I think you can tell when that's happening because the conversation is meaningful and engaging. That shows you how deeply that process is in accordance even with the instincts

that mediate attention. And you're very good at that.
Repeating back, you've been doing that. Now you repeat back.
And we try to do that when we're talking to leaders, when they're saying, well, the United States has done this and they don't understand our position and we patiently listen yeah so creating great a comfortable space a safe space listening and not pushing or promoting an agenda is one in terms of international peacemaking for example we went to see omar al-bashir of the sudan in the mid-2000s i say we, there are sitting members, former members, the delegations change, and we brought an American Sudanese Muslim who assured the president that we weren't there to convert him. Right, right, right.
Because this is one of the problems, you start talking about Jesus with anyone, ah, you're trying to convert me. Yeah, yeah.
Well, we skirted that problem when

I talked to Muhammad Hijab, because one of the things that happened in the mosque was that we had a conversation about Christ, which went quite well, I thought, remarkably well, given the circumstances. But again, there was no attempt on my part, or Jonathan Pajot, a friend of mine was with me, there was no attempt to convert, like to count saved souls, let's say.
It was merely a dialogue, right? And an exploration. And so that lack of agenda, that's got to be something like humility in search of peace, right? Like if I want to forge in accord with you,

the first thing I should at least do is try to figure out who I'm dealing with. And I'm not

going to manage that at all till I listen a lot. And that's got to be way before I decide

how we're going to proceed, because I don't understand at all how I could even possibly

proceed with you unless I knew who you were, what you valued, what you would conceptualize as peace

This is a production of WGBH. at all how I could even possibly proceed with you unless I knew who you were, what you valued, what you would conceptualize as peace, you know, whether that was your goal and if not, why not? That requires an awful lot of listening.
Okay, so that love you said, one of the attributes. So there's several, you know, I say there are seven to embrace and seven aspects to avoid.
One of the things to avoid is not to shame or dishonor someone. Do not.
Yeah, that's a good idea. Do not push an agenda.
Do not keep a record of wrongs that, oh, Mr. President, you armed the Janjaweed in Western Sudan and Darfur, and you are massacring the African Muslims.
These are Arab Muslims. There's a difference culturally in one part of Western Sudan called Darfur.
And there are 2.5 million people displaced, nearly a million people have been killed, tens of thousands of women brutally raped. That would be an elephant in the room, wouldn't you say? Yeah, you'd think.
And every single Western person that came to see him, what do you think the first thing they did? Shame? Disgrace? I'm not saying he didn't deserve it. I'm just saying that love says you don't push that.
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It's like it might be the case that there is a litany of sins to be laid at your feet, but it isn't necessarily obvious that me personally, I'm the one to do it. I could be concerned about the errors I made.
That might be a better focus of my attention if I'm trying to understand you and make peace. You know, and you could imagine that in any geopolitical discussion, there's going to be egregious sins that could be discussed on behalf of both participants, especially if you extend the historical timeframe.
Because no one's going to enter the room with a complete, like, man of innocence if you go back like 300 years. You are so right.
We went with congressional delegations to countries, especially communist countries, and we'd outline Jordan issues that we had with their sins. Yeah.
And then they would outline what we have done. We are hypocrites.
Yeah. And they weren't wrong all the time.
Yeah, right. I'm not saying America is horrible, but we do have, if you look back in our history with slavery.
There's a few skeletons. Yes, a few skeletons in Europe with all their expansionism.
There's definitely skeletons. So why be diverted with arguing who's righteous and who isn't? Well, that's also not the of a discussion about peace is if the discussion is about peace, the search is for the pathway to peace.
The search isn't for the longest litany of previous wrongs that can be laid at the other person's feet. Obviously, that doesn't even work with your wife, let's say.
It certainly doesn't. No, no.
You enter the argument with an arm's length list of all the transgressions of the past. That's exactly what you see happening with couples who are on the precipice of divorce.
They can't bring any issue up without all the unresolved issues immediately, all the unresolved demons immediately entering the fray and complicating things beyond belief. Right? So you enter so we're saying think of this now say we were sitting together and we're talking to al-mar bashur in the midst of this horrific unimaginable genocide with atrocities beyond human understanding and we don't mention anything about the janja weed the the murders, the rapes, nothing.
We talk about, ask him about his family, his children, his wives, plural. And we get to sharing the discoveries.
Now, here it comes. Discoveries of the common ground.
Ardia Moustraka, the Arabic. I tell him, Your Excellency, we have new common ground we haven't known before between the Quran and the Bible.
He said, well, I thought you, I looked you up. You're an evangelical, former, you know, congressman, and you're not very, you don't, you're not very appreciative of Islam.
I said, well, you know, that was then, this is, I've read your Quran. And rather than saying, as so many Christians will do, it's of the devil and condemn the prophet and such.
Rather than approaching it, they love, that's disdain again. That is using shame again or using a negative,ful approach rather than we look for look one of the loves to an Aramaic is look for the best inside of a person or situation right right right that's what you want what are we what can we find definition of love I always thought is it is best in me serving the best in you that is in the Aramaic but you wouldn't see it in the Greek, unfortunately.
That's a good definition of love, I always thought, is the best in me serving the best in you. That is in the Aramaic, but you wouldn't see it in the Greek, unfortunately.
That's in the Aramaic. Absolutely.
It's one of the key to-dos. Look for the best.
That's a great definition of parenting. That's what you hope as a father, that's the best in you, that's serving the best in your child your child definitely and that's what you want in a marriage it and first of all they're shocked you study the quran right right you studied i said i've been studying it for years your excellency well what do you think of i think it's marvelous i have disagreements but i found things that.
And so what is the transition? Your Excellency, especially as it pertains to Jesus. Yeah.
Oh, we love Jesus. You can't be a Muslim without loving him.
Right, which is a very strange thing to realize. And that was in your interview with Muhammad.
He said the same thing as I recall.

They will all say that, which is true. However, I say it's deeper than that.
And so I go through a machine gun litany of what the Quran says. And I don't speak Arabic fluently, but enough words of the Quran to recite it in Arabic if necessary.
And we go through that he was supernaturally conceived,

as we alluded to earlier, by the Holy Spirit and he is sinless.

He could heal the sick, the blind.

He could raise the dead.

He could form clay birds and breathe his breath on it.

And it became living beings.

What a miracle.

And Allah took him up to heaven, and he's coming back on judgment day. That's what all Christians believe too.
So of course I appreciate that as part of the Quran. And he said, and he looks like surprised because very few Muslims have heard it all together.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. We have

dozens and dozens and dozens of unbelievably divine attributes of Isa, Jesus in the Quran, like he's the word of God. How much of that is outlined in your 2008 book? Most of it, but not all of it.
Since then, there's been much more research. Where's that available? Well, I'm ready to do a trilogy of a new book called At War With Peace.

But where there are some people interested in making a movie first,

they asked me to hold it off and coordinate with the script and the release of a potential movie.

Could you do a course on that?

Absolutely.

Could you do a course for Peterson Academy on that? You don't have to answer that. Well, it would be an honor.
I know you have 50,000. 50,000 students, yeah.
We got 30 of the best professors in the world. Yeah, it's coming along real nicely, but that's a common ground between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.
Well, that would be a wonderful course.

And it sounds like you've done a tremendous amount of background work preparing for that.

And so that would be, well, that would be a course I'd want to take.

So, you know, that's one of my criteria for determining whether a course should be offered.

Would I like to know that?

So back to the office of Omar al-Bashir.

Have we brought up anything politically yet the answer is no yeah families friendship then he's interrupts says why are you really here yeah i've heard qaddafi did the same thing. Why are you really here? Yeah.

He said, the truth is, we want to become prayer partners and pray for peace together. And together, discover the commonalities between the Quran and the Injil, which is the New Testament in Arabic.
And why would he be skeptical of that? We talked already about the difference between

the approach that you're using, let's say, in the classic State Department approach. So, how would you contrast the discussion that you had with him in which this question arose with what he would have expected from the typical diplomat? Okay, that's a very insightful question.
first of all a typical diplomat you know diplomacy is shame

diplomat, you know, diplomacy is shame. Diplomacy, the things we alluded to earlier, and accusations, and failures, and positioning, and manipulation.
And then if they don't agree, and the politicians come in and assert themselves, and if the person to whom we are addressing these things to as diplomats disagree then we bring up the other two what i call tracks of engagement and that would be economics we could threat sanctions on you your government or trade so threat threat or militarykeeping or bombing. Take your choice.
Right. So where is my question, Jordan? Where's the good cop? You know, everyone's watched police shows during the interrogation.
And the first interrogator slams the table, says, you better talk. Tell us everything.
You're going to prison for 30 years, and we're going to go after your mother, your father, your sister, and your brother. And this person is frightened to death.
He's taken out, and his partner comes in and says, here's a cup of coffee. Don't mind my partner.
Yeah. You know, he gets a little emotional.
Hark under the collar, yeah, yeah. So don't pay.
In other words, where is the good cop in U.S.

policy? We don't have to be religious with this. So if I were speaking to President Trump or Marco Rubio, who has the State Department, I would encourage them to consider some type of training for a special advisor or a special envoy that would be for peace and reconciliation, something I don't care about at times.
How could we, in every country, there needs to be a good cop? So we're sitting there getting back to Omar al-Bashir. He said, why are you here? And I told him we're just here to be prayer partners, find common ground, and pray for peace.
So we leave. We go back home.
Did he believe you? Yes. Why did he believe you? I'll tell you why.
How much time do you spend with the president typically? Me? Well, anyone. A very short amount of time.
Two and a half hours later, it was embarrassing, but we had to go. He was still interested in talking.
Okay, got it. So he said, well, can you come back? Yeah, that's good evidence.
Yes, we will. Within short weeks, we came back, all the way back to Hartman with another team.
This time, he had a room full of his scholars. Oh, yeah.
All dressed in, you know, the Sudanese attire. And some of my friends who hadn't experienced this before in politics were a little shocked, said, remember, if you're coming, you don't have to come with me.
I'm just a former member. I'm a nobody.
But we have behavioral agreement. Do not bring up anything political.
Only ask personal questions unless they ask you. Let them open the door.
So we spent two and a half hours again with all his scholars asking penetrating questions. Well, about the crucifixion and what the Quran says and what about Son of God.
All these provocative issues. How do you feel confident in addressing those issues from a Christian perspective, let's say? Because I presume you didn't bring a team of scholars with you.
No, I brought a Muslim scholar with me from America. I always want to bring a Muslim to a Muslim meeting or a Buddhist to Buddhist meeting if possible to let them know that we're safe through this safe environment and they have to feel like you're not there to ambush them in some fashion.
Yeah.

Well, I mean, how did I respond to them?

They were shocked because most scholars have not heard this.

I was in Oxford University lecturing to people way above my pay grade.

And the Brits were all sitting with their arms crossed. They're good at that.
And 12, looking like this at me. Yeah.
I think they have special classes in that. My wife, Nancy, was in the front row.
And I tried to tell a joke. Not one smile or flinch.
They all sat there in this yeah yeah and yasser suleman who was head of islamic study was the emcee and introduced me kindly and i felt i'm in big trouble my wife similar to the ukraine ambassador during the oval office meeting with trump andky. Like this, it's going to be a disaster.
So I quickly threw up a prayer. I had all these fastidious notes because I'm not a scholar.
I have no paper in linguistics or Islamic medicine. Political scientists, yes, but not in those specifics.
And so they're probably wondering, why is this arrogant former congressman from America going to come and tell us something we don't know? Right. And you could almost smell the angst.
Well, I felt it just led to close the book and just start talking to him, much like you do with people.

Instead, I'm here because I want to validate some shocking discoveries that could be game changers if they're correct, but I'm unschooled to know if they are and I need your help. Immediately, their arms went like this in this manner, and Yasser Suleiman ended up being one of the endorsers of the book, as was a few others in the audience.
Right, so you turned yourself from a salesman of ideas into someone who's on a quest for enlightenment, and them into the providers of that. Hence the subtitle that Harper Collins came up with, not me, you know, a quest.
Yeah. Because it's one thing if you think you know it all and you're a professor.
Yeah. It's another thing if you're- Ignorant.
Ignorant and trying to become less so, but still ignorant. Yeah.
Which is, that's a better place to stand always, I think. So, this showed me something quite dynamic that don't presume that I know everything.
So, we were presenting to the scholars findings in a similar fashion. This is now back in Sudan.
Back in Khartoum, Sudan, with Omar al-Bashir. And to the disdain of our government at the time, which was the Bush administration, they were just so angry with me going there.
Because I've been there 24 times, I told you. And at this time, maybe this was only my second trip with him.
And on this second trip, after talking to scholars for hours, the president leaps out of his seat, actually. And I thought, we said something wrong.
Right. Oh, no.
I've seen this before. The meeting's over.
Goodbye. Right.
I said, well, I'm sorry, Your Excellency. See, if we said anything that offended, oh, no.
He says, we're having dinner. And that's a good sign.
It turned out, I thought, a disaster. And he opened these sliding doors and there was a table for 30 some people lined up.
We all went in. We're sitting together, breaking bread.
He always asked me to pray because they don't pray before the food, typically. They do a bismillah, which is in the name of God, and that's enough.
So he then, at this dinner, Jordan, said, well, now, Mark, you were in Congress. I said, yes.
And you were in the UN. I said, yes.
You know, I can't accept this UN resolution to deploy peacekeepers in Darfur. I said, I know you can't.
He said, what do you think I should do now? Wow. Who opened the door for the elephant to come in? That's for sure.
Yeah, no kidding. Yeah.
I said, well, since you asked, and of course, the team I'm with, he asked a question. Right, right.
I didn't hear him say it, but I could feel it. You're saying, oh, thank God he asked the question.
And I had this plan. And see, God gave you very specific talents.
And you're applying them and using them to influence people, when I respect very highly. And he gives each of us certain talents and backgrounds for reasons.
And we have to discover what that reason or reasons might be.

And right then and there, it occurred to me that this is why God had me in that useless politics.

I've served in town council, state legislature, three terms.

Three terms.

I'm not trying to.

That was at least like what a waste of time. Because you can't really get anything done that's why so i could get in the door why would he talk to me otherwise yeah and ask a question such as that knowing of the background so people calling you for your expertise and as a consequence you can help and bless people and work with.
And I gave him the plan. I said, let's do a hybrid force of African unions.
It'll mostly be Africans and UN. Let's make most of them Muslim.
And I'll talk to the Secretary General, Ban Ki-ma, do you know him? He said, yes, he's a Buddhist and he's a very good man. And we've become friends because his number one goal is to stop the genocide in Darfur.
And this is just to remind viewers, this is in the mid-2000s, 2004, 5, 6. And he said, I'll do it if you write it.
I said, I wasn't a bastard. I didn't write anything, including speeches.
He said, no, but I think you could do it. So we go to Dubai a few days later after touring with his plane, the displacement camps in Darfur with hundreds of thousands of people living in a blue ocean of UN tarps underneath these blue tarps.
and the kids, hundreds, would see a white face, and they'd come and talk about food. And it was so heart-wrenching.
I mean, you have to say, well, this is what God made me to do. Why am I here in the middle of nowhere in Darfur in this horrible crisis? Then I go to a tent of hundreds of women who have been brutally raped and they're being tended to and they wanted, they said, can you give them a word of encouragement? It was one of the hardest talks I've ever given.
What do you say to a person that had experienced such horrific atrocities? So right then, my heart was committed to do whatever it took and wherever God would lead me. And once that was written, the resolution, the new resolution that saves his face, still accomplishes the goal it's much more detailed but it's unnecessary to get into it it passed the security council even with some of our edits they had to be corrected later that are uh because we were typing in a business center in a hotel in dubai with his staff and it literally went through and deployment of peacekeepers were accomplished in Ban Ki-moon.
And I went there to have a prayer session. And keep in mind, he's Buddhist background.
Wonderful man, by the way, in my opinion, in terms of a human being and compassion. So there's my wife who was with me,

and we go on to meet Bashir,

the president and his foreign minister,

with Ban Ki-moon and his chief of staff.

My wife was teasing him

because now I was friends with him,

had met him maybe 12 times,

and we prayed together.

He laughed and often offered me a Sudanese wife

because he thought I was a good Muslim because I knew the Quran so well. She said, please don't offer my husband any more wives.
It was, as we say in North Carolina, a hoot and a half. It was amazing.
He laughed and it really broke the ice because, you know, Ban Ki-moon is a great stature of the UN Secretary General. and then we started started all laughing my wife left we went in the room we're having tea and crumpets and the the president says omar al-bashir remember is bashir is his his uh uh foreign minister the ambassador is chief of staff I mean this as chief staff his chief of staff of Ban Ki-moon, Ban Ki-moon, just the five of us.
He says, Mark, you pray. He's always asking me to pray.
I don't know why. So we hold hands.
Can you imagine this? A Buddhist, Muslim, Christian holding, praying, holding hands. I got up and said, it's time for me to leave.
So we left. And the next day they signed the peace accord and they were, there's peace.
All right, sir. Well, that's a very good place to bring this part of the conversation to an end.
I think for all of you watching and listening that you can join us on the Daily Wire side. I think what we'll do there is you talked about six conflicts that you've been engaged in.
And I think we should probably delve into that and also discuss more about the resistance that the kinds of movements towards peace that you've been participating in have encountered and why those exist, why those have existed and still exist. We got into that a little bit at the beginning of this conversation, but I think we could, that's fertile ground for continued discussion.
So all of you watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side. Thank you to the film crew here in Duluth, right? We're in Duluth, right? Yes, I had a talk here last night with Father Mike Schmitz, which went very well.
That'll be released on YouTube in relatively short order on faith. And so that's probably worth paying attention to if you're inclined.
Thank you very much, sir. That was absolutely riveting.
Thank you, Jordan. Well, and I'm so interested, too, in following up with you with regard to the work you're doing on establishing this domain of foundational agreement.
I mean, at minimum, what that would mean is that, well, instead of fighting about all of this, we would understand with the people that we have to share the planet with that we agree on all of this. And, you know, maybe we can, this is something Carl Rogers did point out, you know, if you listen long enough, you find out that many of your problems vanish in the communication and those that remain are susceptible to intelligent and careful negotiation.
And so, God, I hope that's true. It sure better be.
And your experience has been that it is.

And that's real experience and with real consequences.

And so that's very much worth knowing.

Very nice talking to you, sir.

Thank you, George.

You bet.

You bet.

My honor.

Yep.

All right.

Thanks, everybody.