The Middle East on the Mind

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

And we have the Saturday edition today, and we're going to look at the Middle East for the most part.

We might take a few minutes in the beginning to look at some current events.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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Victor, I always like to start with current events because I know that things press on your mind.

It's good to air them.

What are you thinking about this morning?

What am I thinking about?

I wish I could think globally, but I think I have the disaster version of the old PBS show, This Old House.

So I'm living in a 150-year-old house that my great-great-grandmother built.

And since I never had any money, I always would remodel room by room.

It was a spectacular enterprise over my

50 years in this house.

So I would, you know, sheetrock.

It had no.

It had no sheetrock.

It had Muslim and wallpaper, even newspaper.

And then I would make sure that all the exterior electricity was fine.

And I finished and I thought, you know, this is pretty good.

And I did maintain.

And then I realized that it was like getting a person with Botox

or tummy tux

or whatever you want to call it, but they have blocked arteries or they have systemic cancer.

And by that, I mean the shell of the house.

was solid.

The reason the house has stayed here is that in those days they had heart redwood, first stand growth with no knots.

And the entire house is built of redwood.

And I mean that literally.

It's got huge four by six redwood beams.

The foundation is four feet off the ground.

And then believe it or not, the studs are made of redwood.

And be believe it or not, there's one by 12 planks of pure redwood.

That was the walls.

And then the outside is redwood, shiplap, and tongue and groove in some places.

And then the attics are all redwood.

So it was a fundamentally well-built house, but it looked a lot better than it was so a person started to bounce on the roof i went up there they were an old shingle roof it had mostly fallen in through the slats no plywood they had a composition on it but we had to rip it off we ripped it off and guess what most of it had fallen in the attic we looked down in there tons of junk And who knows where the wiring was.

So that took 17 days.

I had a brilliant roofer.

He fixed everything.

He put heavy-duty plywood.

He reinforced the joists.

He put presidential woofing.

It looked great.

Item one, I thought, well, I'm almost there.

I've got, you know, our coronary bypass done.

And I'm on Lipitor and the house is surviving.

And then all of a sudden, there was all this insulation.

And it wasn't asbestos.

It was this 40s, 30s, 20s rock wool that has some earth materials in it that are not good.

So I hired a team.

They had to come out, wear the mass protective stuff, and they did a great job.

They vacuumed it.

They vacuumed all the attics, three big roofs.

They took all the old shingles out.

And guess what they exposed?

Over the last 50 years, every time that we had somebody remodel or dump, they just tapped the interior bathroom, kitchen to

knob and tube wiring, 1920s.

So you have all these new circuits, all these new appliances, and they're going up into the attic and under the house, and they're going to this ancient, and there were some charred joist.

So, you know, I don't know when that happened.

I thought I'd smell burning.

So now,

taking all of the knob and tube off, but it's like Sherlock Holmes.

Nobody knows where it goes.

It goes down to some walls, it goes in between the floors.

There's Romex.

We thought, oh, wow, at least in the 1940s, they came out with first-generation Romex, but there's no ground in them, but I could live with that.

But they were dipped in rubber, the individual hot and negative.

And so the rubber, when you bend it it falls off so then they said to be safe you got to take out all first generation romex so they're doing that now i think we're on the sixth week and then

is this boring everybody no

i'm going to go very quickly yes the septic was just two

my great grandfather they just did their own septic they have two little 24 inch two feet concrete irrigation pipes and that was our septic tank you had to pump it out every year so four years ago, I made a, and then it had a cesspool that collapsed basically.

So I made a 100-foot leech line, but I never put a big septic tank.

So now I'm getting a monstrous 1500-gallon concrete, but I have a wall around my yard, and I don't know, I'm going to try to put it out there.

So I'm trying to do the elevations if I can get the four-inch line out there.

Putting that on hold.

The house had not been painted in a while, the siding needed.

So I'm out there trying to fix with the guys all of the rotten siding, shiplap, tug and groove, etc.

And we're almost, we did all that and then had a wonderful painter.

His guys have finished.

It's 40 feet from the ground to the top of the house.

You have to be an acrobat to get up there.

I don't know how they did it, but it's all painted.

And then we're going to do the interior.

And then I'm bringing all new electrical conduits, water mains to the house.

I have 500 foot of trenching.

And when it's all done, when a person looks at this house, they will not know anything is different than it was before.

It's like looking at a guy that looks better after his bypass, but he can't show you his bypass.

And what I mean by that is he might have had artery disease, but he was tan and had a facelift or Botox.

He thought he was in great health, but he wasn't.

So the house will be in great health, but you'll never see it.

It looks fine now.

That's where I am.

That's a long exegesis.

But I am rediscovering all the things I did wrong in my 20s when I wired and I plumbed and I did carpentry.

And these guys go, every once in a while, I go, who the hell did that?

My God,

that connection is.

And the plumber had told me that, the electrician told me that.

So it's good to be corrected.

Well, good to hear that.

And I know that your wife told me she was freaked out by the guys on their ladders 40 feet up trying to paint in all different positions.

And she couldn't watch it because she was afraid they were going to fall off.

I know I sound like a broken record, but talk about courage.

Courage is not, you know, writing a blog and saying Donald Trump is a fascist.

Courage is getting up 40 feet up there and chipping off the molding on a 150-year-old house.

And courage is crawling on your belly under a house and sitting there in the dirt and looking up at a black widow on one side and rat feces on the other and trying to plumb something or pumping out a cesspool.

I can confess one thing

that one of the guys said, well, how did you get into these little tiny places when you, and I confess that in the old days, I used to take a four-inch hose

and I would take it out to the vineyard.

I know that police are going to arrest me and I would pour water into these little septic tanks and I had a Honda, not a Honda, it was a terrible Briggs and Stratton engine.

And, or maybe it was a Tecumseh engine.

It was even worse in those days.

And I would pump out the sewage

and I would pump it out illegally.

Oh, I better not commit.

I'd be at Echo people will arrest me, but I'd put it out in a field, so to speak, but I'd always wait till it was about 110 in August.

It would dry cake, and then I would keep disking and disking and disking and disking into a place.

And if anybody says I did that, I'm just joking.

Okay, Paul, but this is actually a good story for a Saturday because I think a lot of your listeners probably are working on their houses.

Yeah.

So, Victor, we were going to turn to the Middle East then.

And, you know, it's an interesting place.

And I think the modern politics are dominated in the Middle East by Iran and Israel.

So you find their names everywhere collaborating or fighting with others in the Middle East.

And we know that it's dominated by natural gas and oil, of course, in politics.

And then every once in a while, you get very odd stories, like a teacher who was killed by another teacher and two students for blasphemy, or that there is a female genital mutilation clinic for restoration in Egypt now.

And that it was an interesting article that there are 200 million women affected by that or who have had their genitalia mutilated.

So very strange stories, very expected oil, very expected Iran and Israel domination.

And so, I thought maybe we would take a few of the countries and sort of talk about them.

And I wanted to do this also because I know you've been in the Middle East and all the, I think you've been in all the countries in the Middle East.

So, maybe we can hear also some personal stories of your experiences.

And the first country I wanted to look at was Egypt, partly because, you know, doing research for this, it just seemed like sort of, at least today, and it hasn't always been like that, sort of the happy-go-lucky partner in the Middle East of just about everything.

The President Sisi seems to be doing as much business as he can with African states in his area.

We also see that they're trying to make a trilateral talks with Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the Egyptians are, and so things like that.

And I was wondering your impressions on the Middle East, partly because the U.S.

is also sending or selling some F-15 jets to Egypt.

So I hope they are a good well,

it was the crown and the jewel, remember, of the Roman Empire, because the Nile Delta, actually all the way down to Luxor, was a very fertile area and it was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.

And it was the cotton growing crown jewel of the British Empire.

It had superb quality of cotton.

I first went there, believe it or not, in 1974 in March.

There had been the Yom, I was living in Athens as a junior abroad.

There was a Yom Kippur war and everybody wanted to go to Egypt.

The Yom Kippur War happened, I think, in October.

I had a visa.

And

by the time I went to the Egyptian embassy, they said I had to have yellow fever, bubonic plague,

another smallpox, typhus, typhoid, gamma, globulin, cholera.

And they had it all.

I waited too long.

I had all those shots in two days.

I have a histamine problem called mastocytosis.

I didn't know at the time.

I got sick as a dog for two weeks.

And I had to go anyway.

Anyway, we met, a bunch of students met, and then we traveled all over up and down the train from, you know, Alexandria.

We went to Old Cairo.

Nobody had any money.

You had to wire $100,

$100 for your Egyptian pounds.

And we went to Luxor, and I was taking chloroquine, big tablets.

They looked like Alka-Sultzer tablets.

And I got sick as a dog with the vaccination.

I stopped taking it.

And I got a case of malaria down near Luxor.

I went to an infirmary, high fever, said it was a mild case.

I was in hospital.

I had some very good friends.

They went out and saw things, but every day, four or five of them checked in, see if I was fine.

Somehow, after five days, the fever went out.

I flew back to Athens.

So I had a great six or seven days in Egypt.

We rode camels, the whole tourist thing.

We went to old Cairo.

We looked at, there was a joke in this group that we were going to go see all.

When we first got there, 10 guys said,

The first person who sees all seven wonders of the world wins.

So we took it seriously.

So we'd seen the Temple of Olympian Zeus, A.

We

got over to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, B.

We'd seen now Pharos, the lighthouse, C.

We had gone to the site of the Colossus of Rhodes, D.

We had gone to the mausoleum at Haliconarsis of King Mausolis.

Is that six now?

That's E.

Yeah, that's five, I think.

Yeah, that's fine.

What am I missing?

There's a library.

Oh,

the library at Alexandria?

I guess that was...

I'm not sure about that.

But then the main one we didn't get to, of course, was the hanging gardens of Babylon.

Nobody wanted to go to Baghdad.

So anyway, we were dead.

That's one of the, and so I got very ill there.

And then

I signed up as a lecturer for a number of cruises in the early, right around the turn of the millennium to go lecture on old Carthage, Battle of Zama in Tunisia, went to Algeria, Morocco.

And then in 2006, I was offered a lecture

on the Mosaics.

Libya had just opened up.

I was one of the first people to get a visa.

This company did, but unfortunately, the visa process was confused on the Libyan part.

Instead of coming with the crews, I flew in.

I got to Tripoli, and unfortunately, they wouldn't let me get on the ship.

Can you imagine that?

I was supposed to lecture on this cruise.

So I had to get my two Soviet-era minders and drive along the coast.

I lectured at Sabratha or Leptis Magna, and then they came off and they wouldn't let me on.

And I started getting ill.

This is a broken record.

After about six days of this, and I got very, very ill.

And I met with some people in the Libyan government before I got ill.

And it was very fascinating because Qaddafi was on the way out, they thought.

This was right during the Iraq war.

And he had.

given up his nuclear weapons.

You saw these very strange people at the Corinthian hotel that Malta had built, kind of an independent zone in the middle of Tripoli where they had this beautiful hotel, water supply, sewage supply, ATM.

It was like a country of its own, beautiful, but it was surrounded by Libya, poverty.

And I remember coming when I flew in, this little Soviet car hit a pothole and we all had to get up and lift it out.

of the pothole.

I mean, it went down about two feet.

And I said, how could a country have potholes when it's one of the biggest oil producers with asphalt?

You know, I didn't understand it, but I did within a day

and you know people were telling me he outlawed violins so we had to burn all of our violins you had to raise a chicken in your bathtub all these crazy stories there was all these tragic black women everywhere that people were giving up to ten thousand dollars to you know he was going to be the savior of africa qaddafi marxist idea his little green book which I read, which is nutty.

And so you had to be married a certain number of years and they dumped them.

So the streets were full of of Black women, Black children that their former Libyan husbands had been given money for this new cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, cross-racial, Qaddafi dream.

And then they dumped them and they were treated just terribly.

It was really tragic to see that.

I got there on the day of the 20th anniversary of...

Lionel Ritchie held a concert there celebrating the 20 years of American imperialism marking the day that Ronald Reagan bombed Libya.

So that was kind of strange to see

Lionel Ritchie was there singing in praise of Qaddafi.

Anyway, I did the lectures.

It was really fascinating to see some Roman houses and the mosaics are stunning.

It was really weird.

And when I walk on the excavations, they had not touched since the Italians were kicked out in 65, 66, the Italian archaeologists.

And you could actually go into these little archaeological buildings and see their notebooks.

They would let me go in there and look at them.

But

by day seven, I was feeling kind of bad, neglected it, and then I got really bad.

And then I felt something in my innards go pop, literally, not pop, but something went wrong.

And I didn't know what it was.

Then I felt good for about five hours.

It was like I, but I didn't realize my appendix had ruptured.

And you're in Libya.

So I called the cruise people.

And they said, we're going to go to Tunisia and you get operated there, but it would take two days.

So the minders then said, we'll dump you off at a Red Crescent clinic.

The hospital doesn't let people, foreigners in, because you people cut off all our medicines during the Iraq boycott.

You remember the boycott of Libya about the bombing of the airliner and Libya.

So there was no, so I went in there and I thought, I got there at two in the morning.

I had been ruptured for about a day.

I had 104 temperature.

There's an Iranian advisor was at the clinic and he said, you have a ruptured appendix.

He's really good.

But he said, we can't take it out until you take an AIDS test.

If you have test positive, you got to go out to a camp.

That's it.

So I waited and waited.

You had to get a fisherman.

He came about three in the morning.

Then there was no surgeon that would do it.

Then they called up the hospital.

There was a visiting doctor, a very brilliant guy who was an Egyptian.

And he came at five in the morning.

He showed up chain smoking in his pajamas in a bathrobe and a taxi.

And he said, I'd take it out, but we don't have have sodium pentothal or we had ether and we don't have painkillers.

It's against the law it was to have it.

And then he said, we don't really have the antibiotics we need because of your boycott.

So I got on a table, a woman, a Pakistani nurse,

I wrote about this in City Journal on my beautiful laboring vacation.

And she said, you know, you better pray to Allah because you're not going to wake up.

That's a good thing to tell a patient as he's going under ether.

As soon as they give you ether, if you've had it, and I had it when I was a kid for tonsils, it's like you never, ever forgot that awful smell.

And I said, it just came out of nowhere.

I said, I am not afraid of anything.

I believe in the redemptive power of Jesus Christ.

And then I quoted Sock, nothing ever happened.

If you feel you've done, I don't know if I did, but that came out of nowhere.

And I went on her and she said, that's fine.

He's a prophet too.

And then I went out.

And I woke up a couple of times with a big towel on my stomach with a bunch of stuff.

And then I was out and it it was pitch black i was in a room they turned on the lights i thought i died and i was in hell i was thinking of all the sins i'd committed and i deserved all this and this doctor said he had little forceps and he held up this black thing it was pure black and he said you didn't tell us you had chronic appendicitis this has been leaking for a year look at all these bulbs i said i didn't know it I said I'd get sick all year and then I didn't know it was leaking.

And he said, yes, you should have taken it out.

Now it's five inches into your intestine, but don't worry, I took it out.

I said, you what?

You cut my intestine?

He said, I didn't cut your intestine.

I saved your life and cut the intestine or you would have been dead and I stretched it so you don't have a colostomy or you're going to be constipated.

So I was there and a person came.

There was no U.S.

embassy, but long story short, I called my son and I said, hey, Bill, I'm going on to get a ruptured pinnix.

It doesn't look good.

Just go,

I don't know, go get a number written on my desk.

I don't care who it is.

My son was young at, you know, 20.

So he called this number and it was Christopher Hitchens.

He had no idea.

I knew Christopher and Christopher called somebody,

the Rumsfeld's office, and they called somebody.

Next thing I knew, there was an attaché who showed up in my hospital room and said, we got to get you out of this clinic and go to the Corinthian Hotel.

I stayed there two days, flew to London.

kind of

and they didn't put any tube they just left about four stitches to drain i didn't i had a big pad so they couldn't see me on the plane.

I slept for two days, flew to San Francisco, went to a very prestigious hospital, internus, and he said to me, I showed him the appendix.

It was in a plastic bag.

He said, that's not, those are not cysts.

You have stage four colon cancer.

That's your colon they cut a little bit.

I said, stage four colon cancer.

He said, yes, I need to biopsy.

Six days, I did a probate.

I thought, poor doctor, I won't mention his name in Libya.

He's a very good guy, but he gave me the wrong idea.

He said it was no big deal.

And then I called and I called.

I was thinking, well, stage four.

But if I have stage four count, why can't I have, you know, my colons are working perfectly.

I'm sore.

And then I called the office in a very nonchalant just, oh.

It was on the weekend.

We didn't call you.

You were right.

That Arab thing we had, that guy wrote, whoever that Arab was, we had a guy that translated and he said that you had perforations for at least a year, very rare chronic appendicitis.

Each time you had a perforation, you had a dangling cyst.

They cut off six inches of your intestine.

It was all gangrene and you're fine.

I said, you told me I had before.

He said, sorry, not applicable.

That was Libya.

And I was embedded twice very quickly.

2006 during the surge, the first time I arranged to go through a DOD program.

and it was mostly black hawks you would go to your you'd fly into kuwait wait and then they'd fly you on a

c-17 into the airport in the green zone and then each day you would go out on a black hawk and they would go to various herbil or kirkuk or taji

and you would see Americans in actions.

It was a little bit staged, but it was kind of hairy at night because, you know, people were just erecting cell phone towers.

You were flying low near the ground.

I was very interested in the date farming because I know a lot about farming.

And we landed there once and a guy had been shooting from there.

I didn't get as good view.

The next year, I did it again, and I was embedded with H.R.

McMaster for a few days.

And that was really more instructive.

It was right during the surge, and he was on a fact-finding.

mission.

And I developed a great deal of respect for him because he was absolutely courageous.

We would go into

a Sons of Iraq Arab Awakening group, and these were all Saddamites that had been involved in terrorist activities that wanted to flip and get rid of the ISIS Islamists.

And he was part of the flipping process.

And it was very dangerous, but everything went well.

We got to the airport, NROs, Rich Lowry, and a rocket went right at us, at our plane, and it bounced off the, it was kind of a dud.

It hit the wall over our head.

And that process, a guy, a very courageous guy from the National Guard,

Colorado National Guard, knocked us down, covered our bodies.

And then the airport, of course, was shut down.

And then we ended up flying directly to Kuwait.

And we didn't even go through custom.

The guy had never flown to Kuwait before and a two-engine, very good pilot.

We just landed on the tourmak and walked onto the plane.

And

the year before, the year before they had to get me out of there,

I had just was walking around.

A guy said, Hey, you want to go back to Kuwait?

And I said, Yeah, but because I got dumped off with that tour, I didn't want to, they were going on a different tour.

I don't know whether it was to Jordan.

And I said, No, I've been embedded.

I just want not embedded with this group.

It wasn't really embedded as you'd know it.

So he said, well, I've got a C-30, what do you call it, and I'm flying to a base in Kuwait, and then you can come along.

And I thought, wow.

So I got on there and then he dumped me in the middle of the way and he said, here's the coordinates.

In 15 minutes, somebody is going to pick you up.

Get in the car and they're going to take you to the Kuwait airport.

And I don't know where we were, but they dropped me off.

They said, we cannot stop.

We're going to just taxi slow.

They taxed slow.

I jumped out of this huge plane.

I walked over there and the most wonderful soldier was a young African-American woman.

She was going about 80.

She said, get in.

We're going to the airport.

We're not going to slow down because you never know.

And I got on a plane.

So that was that.

Wow.

I've been to Israel.

I've been to Israel and we're going to go again in May.

That's an oasis.

So the Emirates, Kuwait, that's a whole westernized, there are elements of there that have a standard of living and

infrastructure and stuffing that makes the United States look pathetic in comparison, given their oil revenues and small population population westernization.

I noticed when I got there, everybody has a t-shirt from a university and it's very prestigious who is better.

You know, oh, I went to Stanford, I went to Berkeley, I went to Texas Tech, I went to Georgia Tech, that kind of stuff.

That was kind of bizarre.

And I have never been to Iran, but I've been to Iraq and

all the North African course and the Gulf places and Turkey.

I've been to Turkey a lot, too many times.

So let's just take a moment for some messages and then come right back.

And maybe we can talk a little bit more about Israel and Turkey after these messages.

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Welcome back.

Victor, you just took us through.

I went into Egypt and you went all the way through North Africa and into the Iraqi region.

And thank you for that.

It's fascinating.

I think I shorted our readers because I was really there for the antiquities.

I was going to say that I was going to ask you about that.

Were they stunning antiquities?

I would like to hear the well on the Valley of the Kings is as much as I could remember because I had malaria.

But yes, the Alexandria Museum is some stunning.

And so does the old Cairo.

It's famous near the Hilton Hotel.

You could spend a week on that.

They were created by the English, but the Egyptian Archaeological Service is quite good.

I wanted to go out to El Alamein.

I couldn't at that time because it was cut off.

There were, I think, maybe 50 Phantom jets that they had hauled in from the Am Kipper War that were in the circle outside the Egyptian.

And everybody wanted me to look at the Phantom jets and the Israelis because they had basically almost been annihilated, the Egyptian Third Army, and that was on everybody's mind.

As far as antiquities, the most stunning place is absolutely Libya because they're completely pristine and they have not been fully excavated since the 60s.

That was one of the tragedies of the Arab Spring, the whole at all, getting rid of Qaddafi, because as horrific as he was, he was evolving out of power and he had westernized children.

who I met one of their assistants and he showed me this plan of archaeological development, museums, natural gas, concession.

It was going to be very, I think it would have been so much better than today.

Tunisia's and Algeria are different.

They're more, because of their proximity as the Mediterranean narrows and

they're much more, and Morocco,

they seem to be more Western, et cetera.

Do you have any reflections on the current state of Egypt under President Sisi?

I was very worried when the Obama administration began to cultivate Mohamed Morsi.

He was the USC engineering graduate.

I think he was a Cal State

Northreach professor.

I was in the Cal State system.

So every once in a while, when you would see names, I remember the name.

And he was a hardcore Islamist Marxist, if that's not a contradiction.

And he was, I think his children were American citizens, but he was vehemently anti-American.

And he went over there and he won an election.

You can argue whether it was transparent or not.

And then he began systematically to Islamicize Egypt.

Remember, Egypt under Nasser, it wasn't the Egypt of Sadat.

It was the Egypt of Nasserism, which was sort of pan-Arabism.

And they had something called the United Arab UAE, the United Arab Immigrants, or whatever.

Excuse me.

It was a combination

of Libya and Egypt combined to make this massive state.

And I think they tried it with Syria, but pan-Arabism said that the Arabs were artificially divided by British colonial and French colonialism.

And the truth was if you could get rid of borders, you'd have this huge power that would rival China or Russia or the United States.

It was an irredentist thing as well.

So

that was when you had Morsi go in there, the Obama administration thought he was great.

Remember what the Obama administration thought about the Middle East?

The whole point was they hated Israel because Israel was a westernized, successful, capitalist country that had nuclear weapons and could not be destroyed, could not be intimidated.

And then they're sick thinking.

I'm talking about Barack Obama, especially Ben Rhodes, and to a lesser extent, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

Remember, she cackled about Libya when Qaddafi came.

He saw he died, ha ha ha ha, when he was sort of sodomized with a broomstick on camera.

It was horrible.

But anyway,

they thought that they were going to empower the enemies of Israel and the enemies of the Gulf states that were pro-American but authoritarian.

So in this crazy formulation, they reached out to Iran.

They did the Iran deal.

Iran then, in their way of thinking, was the foreign equivalent of the marginalized people.

I don't know how the Obamas, who now own three mansions, including their new one in Hawaii, but they feel they're marginalized.

Persians, Shia, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Hamas, all of that crescent from Tehran all the way to the Mediterranean would be a monolithic bloc.

And it would likely that plan would have eventually made Iran, not eventually, very quickly, nuclear.

And then they would balance off Israel and the illiberal but pro-Western Gulf monarchies with the oil.

And then you would have a tension, and the United States would not be wedded to supporting and protecting the existence of Israel and would have more flexibility to connect with genuine revolutionary bottom-up.

That's how sick it was.

And the result was we had wars and more increased terrorism bombing, and we alienated the Gulf.

And that's Morsi was the southern flank.

They thought that with Egypt flipping and being a revolutionary pan-Arabist country and Islamicist, then they would really box in Saudi and Israel.

I'm not exaggerating.

That was the idea.

And you think Cece is not like that?

No, CC is

a pro-Western, authoritarian, Egyptian military guy.

And he feels the chief danger is radical ISIS fundamentalism.

Yeah, didn't the Muslim Brotherhood begin in Egypt, I believe it is, that that was the

end of it.

It did.

So they probably know more about the reason to fear a radical.

Egypt's different though, because about, again, I shouldn't be talking about something, I don't have the exact percentages on the air, but I think they've got a huge, and if you go to old Cairo, you see some beautiful Coptic churches.

And when you talk to Coptics, they make this argument that not only are they one of the earliest Christian churches in existence, and we know from the early Christian church that the North African churches were very, very early, but they feel that they are ethnically distinct as well, and that they are the descendants of the Hellenistic Greeks, Ptolemaic Egypt, and its mixture with indigenous peoples.

They're separate and they're usually persecuted, but under Sisi, that was one of the attractions why the Coptics supported him because he was non-Islamicist and he protected their rights of worship.

So, anyway, it's a very fascinating place.

Yeah, it's got a long history that's just fascinating in and of itself.

But perhaps we can turn to Iran and Israel since they're the next two, I think, really big players.

In fact, Iran just shot some missiles into northern Iraq in the Kurdish area, and nobody knows exactly why.

And they say that Iran wants wants to keep it that way, but they hit the house of a gas producer who was dealing with the Israelis in the United States.

So it said, so it's hard to know if the news is accurate or not, but it certainly seems very likely that Iran would be a little bit worried about a gas collective, especially shipping gas into Turkey, I think is the initial, and then eventually to Europe as well.

So they did this, and it kind of brought all those players together, I mean, of interest, you know, the Iranians with their differences with Israel and implication of the U.S.

being involved as well on the Israeli side.

So I thought that was an interesting sort of introduction to, well, Iran and Israel are the big players in the Middle East.

And so what are your reflections?

You got to Israel for one second as far as visiting, but.

Yeah, when you say big players, you're talking about a country, you know that's the size of delaware and it has only 12 million people so how can it be a big player and the answer is that its population is highly educated they're highly motivated they're sophisticated they have a high degree of technology

and their military punch i shouldn't say punches again above their weight they're above their weight and they're the best military in the middle east so That's a very strange phenomenon.

But what I'm worried about Iran right now is that this administration, and when I say this administration, the Biden administration, if you look at these key Maui,

the envoy or the influence of the Obamas

or Blinken and Jake Sullivan, these are the people who came out of the Biden, Obama administration.

And they're just continuing after the Trump hiatus.

They want that Iran deal for so many reasons, not just that it will suggest that their diplomatic statecraft is impressive before the midterms, but part of it is aimed at Israel.

It's not what they are saying to Israel right now is: I mean, they gave a speech the other day and they said something to the effect that we would deplore all violence, settler violence.

And I said to myself, okay,

how many Arabs have been killed this week by Jewish citizens of Israel that are living

in the

suburbs of Jerusalem on so-called West Bank land, zero.

How many Israelis?

Is it five or six now?

And they all.

I can answer that for you.

There were five in a suburb were killed and four were killed off the mall just this week.

Yeah.

So that's what you call moral equivalence.

And what they're trying to do, Sammy, is they're trying to tell the Israelis, We're using Russian interlocutors and think of that for a minute.

Biden has variously called Putin bully, butcher, war criminal, killer.

But that doesn't matter.

He would rather have the butcher, the killer, the war criminal be our adjudicator with the Iran deal.

And so Iran then says, this is great, Russia.

You're getting sanctioned.

We've got gas and oil.

We can, you just give us your gas and oil and we'll work together to break these sanctions and we'll buy stuff from you and we'll send it all through Lebanon.

You can do all this Middle East business and violate the sanction.

We're sanctioned sanctioned too, but we're going to be quickly unsanctioned.

And when we're unsanctioned, and Russia will insist that they're on sanction, that'll be a conduit, a window on the world for Putin.

But more importantly,

they're going to get a bomb very quickly.

And Russia is now telling us and the Middle East and telling the Israelis the days when we used to

protect

you

in the sense that when Hezbollah sent missiles or Assad ordered them to, and you went back in to hit terrorist camps or concentrations of anti-Israeli batteries, we let you do it because we control the airspace.

They have since John Kerry invited them into the Middle East after 40 years.

And they're also basically sending the subtext of that is they're going to get a bomb.

And if you think you're going to go into Iran and preempt, you're going to have to get our permission because we're going to cover all the airspace on the way there.

And we're now very, very friendly with Iran thanks to these prior left-wing administration biden and obama administration so you think about it it's really changed the dynamic in the middle east and this is important because when zelensky as i said earlier when he said to israel you have to sanction russia well

No, they don't have to sanction.

They voted to condemn the invasion.

They sanction Russia, and they'll never be able to retaliate against a strike going into Israel or Kurdistan or anywhere, or they'll never have the option of preempting because Iran will be under the nuclear umbrella of Russia.

That is absolutely reckless what we're doing to Israel.

And I don't know.

Ask yourself, just as this is pretty clear, just as Putin did not go into central or western Ukraine under Trump, but he did under Biden.

So

the

Islamicists did not start killing Israeli surveillance under Netanyahu.

Why was that?

Why are they doing it under Bennett?

And the answer is: they've lost deterrence.

And how did they lose deterrence?

They lost it in two ways.

They felt Netanyahu would attack back and be disproportionate.

They kill one Israeli, then that house goes up in flames that housed that terrorist.

And more importantly, the United States under Trump was unequivocally deterrent.

You know, Golan Heights are Israelis.

We're not going to give it back to Syria so they can rain shells down on the Sea of Galilee.

Why not?

Why doesn't the embassy belong in the historical home of the Jews in Jerusalem?

That kind of stuff.

And they didn't do anything.

And now they've lost deterrence in the way we've lost deterrence.

And the world is going to get very, think of the next shoe to drop.

I guess we're like an octopus with Biden.

We have an octopus who has what eight shoes.

We dropped the Afghanistan shoes dropped.

The Ukraine shoes dropped.

The Israeli shoe is dropping.

I think the Taiwanese and North Korean are left.

All these leaders who hate the United States and hate the West are saying, gosh, the more that we look at Kamala Harris or we look at Blinken or we look, you know, Chinese humiliated that guy in Anchorage, Harris is incoherent.

She's just blabbering around something.

And Biden, Sean, we're never going to have this again.

This is a two to three year window, man.

We better just rush.

and get what we can before some American of the old style takes back and builds up the military and deters us.

So that's what's happening.

And we're going to see a lot more of it.

It's tragic what's happened.

It's very dangerous.

Well, I have a few dogs barking at my house, so I apologize to our listeners.

But let's go on.

I would like to take a moment for some more messages, and then we'll come back and address Turkey because it also is playing in this game with the, well, it's not a very nice game, but the war in Ukraine.

So we'll listen to these messages first.

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Welcome back.

And Victor, as you were talking of Israel, you were reminding me of Turkey because it seems that Turkey is also making an effort to remain neutral in the war in Ukraine.

And so Erdogan, I'm going to say his name wrong, but Erdogan.

Erdogan, yes.

Yeah.

Erdogan seems to want to distance himself from NATO.

And that's, I think, what's Turkey's unusual position, at least as a Muslim state, is that it is part of NATO, but he is not supporting the sanctions that the other NATO countries want to issue against Russia.

So he's really in his own position here, and I'm curious as to why you think that is.

What is his end?

Erdogan,

to use that fancy Italian word, iridentist, he's an iridentist, just like Putin is.

Iridentist is an Italian word popularized with Mussolini's suggesting that any area, we've talked about this with Jack on a podcast, any area where they speak the same language as you, or you had formal colonial powers, it belongs back to you.

Mussolini believes that Rome once owned the shores of all of the Mediterranean, Mar Nostrum, and that's going to be Mussolini's again.

Hitler believed that anywhere there was a German speaker, whether it was in Poland or Czechoslovakia or the Alsace-Lorraine,

or Austria, it was going to be Greater Third Reich.

Greece, the

Megalia Idea.

The Gian was in a lake.

It was going to be all of Asia Minor, Alexandria, perhaps Crete, and then Thrace all back to Greece.

And so

Erléan keeps talking about the Ottoman Empire at a time in which Turkey had enormous influence in places like Iraq

and the Armenian-speaking areas of the Middle East.

If it can't expand its borders, it wants to make a greater Turkey.

That's number one.

Number two is when it goes to NATO, it's got the largest army in NATO and it's got the largest population on the one hand and it's got the most strategic location.

It controls all entry and exit as it always has in and out of the Black Sea.

That's what made Byzantium, Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire so powerful.

And so it's sort of the idea that we need this country because it's got a huge population of 85 million.

It's got this huge army.

It controls, it can box in anybody,

the Soviet Navy of the past, the Russian Navy of the present.

However, it's the only Muslim country.

It's the only anti-democratic country.

And so it's not the only non-Western country.

And more importantly, we have members of the West in the EU and NATO, and it hates them.

So we have our strong ally, Greece, and we have Cyprus, and Turkey has almost destroyed half of Cyprus during the 74 war, but its occupation was deleterious.

And then in addition to that, it bullies Greece all the time.

And we're pledged, I hope, to the integrity of Greece, who has a lot of the Dodecanese islands that are right off the coast of Turkey.

And when you talk to Turkish journalists and they'll say, well, territorial waters extend X mile miles and, you know, Samosa roads are in our territorial waters.

They have 70 or 80 overflights a week.

And Greece has got better pilots.

It's got probably man for man, a better military.

But, you know, it's in a very perilous position like Israel is.

By the way, you know, the United States, I think, has certain obligations to pro-Western countries that are trying their best to emulate Western values, but they're surrounded in hostile neighborhoods.

I'm talking about 11 million person Israel, 12 million person Greece, 20 million person Kurdistan, I don't know what, eight or nine million, maybe it's more Armenia.

These are historically strongholds that were not quite Islamic.

Sometimes they were.

Saladin was Kurdish, but my point is they're all, they have many of the same enemies we do.

And something's gone wrong with Turkey after Erléan went on as Islamists Ottoman kick, and now it's very disruptive.

But the reason that somebody's listening so, why don't we get rid of the SOB?

We don't need them in NATO.

And indeed, when you take a poll of the few polls, or you take an internal Turkish poll and you ask Turks, do you like the United States?

65% say, hell no, we don't like them.

So why in the hell are they in NATO?

And the answer is: they've got a big army, they've got a big population, they fight very well, they control the Black Sea, and they kind of have our head in a guillotine.

And that is, we have, in our madness, have outsourced key components of our NATO strike fighter and other weaponry to Turkey.

They actually make one of the best drones for the money, very simple to operate, very deadly, very reliable, and they're sending them to Ukraine.

And so, their attitude is we're going to irritate the West by flirting with Russia.

But then privately, their attitude is we're not stupid enough to know that Russia operates on different premises than the West does.

So we like to irritate our friends and cozy up to our enemies.

But in the last analysis, our enemies we know will destroy us and our friends won't.

So they're kind of playing both sides and sending very effective drones to Ukraine.

All right.

You know, I would like to look at

Lebanon.

I know it's a very small country.

We almost never hear about it.

We used to hear about it a lot more in the 70s, I think.

But what's its position?

What I don't understand about Lebanon is how does it continue to exist, being so small as it is, and yet having so many enemies?

I know that it is not well liked, or it's always having trouble with Hezbollah and so the Iranian connection.

But how does it continue to exist?

Well,

before the rise of oil, if you ask somebody in the 1940s or 50s, what was the crown jewel of the Middle East, they would say Beirut.

I went there once in 73, in November, right before the violence started.

And the restaurants, the hotels, the seaside were superior.

I think it was a little earlier, superior to Athens, that standard of living.

And it was run by Marionists, sort of the descendants of, I don't want to be too simplistic, of crusaders from Europe.

So French was de facto the official language of the elite.

People looked pretty much European, and that was the phalangists were the private militia.

The problem with that is it was very productive, it was very affluent, it was a little Paris,

but there were a lot of other people that were not represented, mostly Sunni Muslims, but especially Shia Muslim.

And that led, and the Druze, so that led to all of these Muslim groups arming themselves and then attacking various times Israel.

And the result was that in the last 50 years, you'd need a brain surgeon that knew how to, you know, separate vessels in the brain to know which phalangite, Druze, Shia, Hezbollah, Sunni coalition is operative at the present.

And it's kind of sad because it was the entryway of Western goods before the rise of, you know, the Emirates and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and better.

It was a way that, because it was so close to Europe, right now it had these huge grain facilities and flour processing.

So when people talk about Ukraine, those things were blown up because they were being used, they were fertilizing.

So the outlet around the area of imported grain into flour

is not operative.

So people are, and they haven't got any capital.

Nobody wants to invest.

They don't have oil.

They're right in line of fire between Syria and Israel.

And Hezbollah basically runs the country now.

They had a very unique

constitution of rotating where you had Christian, Sunni, Shia, and then people would rotate.

And then the head of state.

would be different from the foreign minister, etc.

And that was a coalition that was worked out in the 60s and 70s that was pretty stable for a while.

Now it's completely ruined.

It's wrecked.

Yeah, when I think of Lebanon, I always think of that commentator, Brigitte Gabrielle, who was ethnically Arab, but she was a Christian, Lebanese Christian.

She's an American.

now today, but she is a Lebanese Christian.

She was really,

very much an activist in defense of the Christians in Lebanon and against the Arab state.

The thing is, when you meet Lebanese phalangists, that's a word that just come French for phalanx, but the descendants of Tyre and all of those so-called crusader kingdoms that survived the fall of Jerusalem, and you meet people who are Coptic Christians and they live under constant assault, then they have a barricade garrison mentality and they become unapologetic defenders of the West.

west and they're very interesting people to talk to because they're very easily caricatured by western intellectuals who consider them zealots or troublemakers but any of the western intellectuals that had to live in their enclave would be sorely

unfit wouldn't be able to do what they do because they're under constant attack i've had a lot of students over the years from lebanon and egypt and they're quite remarkable people and they're more pro-american than americans are Yeah, I remember one of your students, Ray Ibrahim.

Doesn't he write on,

because I think he can read Arabic, and he writes about the...

Well, he's fluent.

He not only is fluent in Arabic and he reads Arabic, but he's a Coptic Christian, so he knows various dialects of Arabic, and he reads classical Arabic.

And I taught him, I mean, he was in my Latin and Greek class, so he's very well trained.

He wrote the Bin Laden Reader, if anybody wants to look at it.

These were the untranslated and kind of hushed up documents.

And I wrote the introduction to that book.

It was very interesting to see the effect of Western leftists upon radical Islamicists.

When you read all the reasons that they attacked 9-11 from Dr.

Zawi Hurry and Bin Laden, among them are, we did this so you, because you don't have campaign finance reform, we did this because of your anti-green policies.

I thought,

where did they get that?

Michael Moore, maybe?

Who knows?

Yeah, exactly.

But they're smart, right?

They attack the United States with all of the ammunition, whoever gives them.

I remember the Iranian president coming to the United States at one point, and he was criticizing, I think it was George W.

Bush for the Katrina disaster.

And I thought, wait, you just had one of your cities leveled by an earthquake and haven't been doing much there yourself.

Who are you to talk?

Yeah, I think what Ray has been able to do is because he's so, he's an American citizen, he's so patriotic, nationalistic, traditional, he's a go-to person that spends most of his days scanning Arab newspapers and finding articles that the radical Islamic world does not want disclosed.

And his forte is showing what official spokesman for the Palestinian Authority or Hamas or Hezbollah says in English, and what they're really saying in Arabic and radio transmissions or programs or television programs are writing.

And what he's trying to show is this is a traditional radical Islamist technique where lying to the infidel is not lying.

It's an effective means of strategy.

And he exposes that.

That's why he's put himself into a lot of danger, to tell you the truth.

All right.

Well, Victor, I think the only state that we left untouched, and I don't know if you want to say a few words about it, is Syria.

And it's interesting.

I know that my impression of Syria is always that there's always something there that the Israelis are very uncomfortable about.

And so we hear about bombing of various things every once in a while, which, you know, of course, nobody wants to claim to have done, but it's usually kind of obvious that the Israelis wanted some weapons plant out or energy-producing plant gone, et cetera.

But did did you have anything on Syria you wanted?

Well, it's the Assad dynasty.

Hafez El-Assad, you remember, he made Thomas Friedman famous because Thomas Friedman's first book was about traveling through Syria and then going to Israel.

He pointed out that while we were trying to court Assad for the Middle East peace negotiations following various wars, you know, 73 war.

He had a Islamic group of dissidents in the town.

I think it was called Amma.

And I think in that first Friedman book, he has a point where he walked by and he saw a tennis shoe sticking out of the ground.

In other words, he didn't, he just destroyed the entire city, killed everybody and he shelled it and paved it open.

And that's how the Assads and Syrians ran that.

That was another, I haven't been to Damascus, but I knew a lot of people who went when I was in Beirut, they went on to Damascus and they said it was in the early 70s, it was sort of like Beirut.

That was another French colony.

It's tragic that the post-colonial era, which was necessary because, I mean, people have a right to national sovereignty and popular representation, but ideology and hatred soon took over and they did things that were counterproductive.

They flirted with all these isms.

One has been

pan-Arabism, which we talked about.

The other is Baathism, which is a concoction of Marxism

and neo-colonial studies.

And it's also bankrupt.

The Muslim Queyib, the Muslim Brotherhood is bankrupt.

All of these isms and ologies, and they were promoted by Marxist and Soviet communists.

One of the scariest things I remember being in Egypt right after the Yom Kippur War was sitting in a restaurant and having Russian, five big Russians, and they were about 6'3, they were military attaches.

This was right on the eve of Assad kicking them out, and they were just ordering everybody around.

They were were drinking really loud, they were kind of running the restaurant.

And I thought to myself, wow, for all the problems that America poses for people, the American military would never behave like that.

And so, I think when you talk to Egyptians, why did you kick the Soviets out?

And I met a lot of Egyptians in 2000, they'd always say the same thing: would you like to have them around you?

So, they were not very adroit in their colonial adventures abroad in the Middle East.

They were also atheists, right?

So that was always funny that all of these Islamicists were welcoming Soviet atheists and then telling us that, no,

you can't fight during Ramadan.

And then the Russians were saying, you know, Ramadan's a perfect time to attack, especially Yom Kippur.

So they didn't represent the religious, so-called peacetime holidays of the Jews.

And then they were even willing to fight during Ramadan.

Well, Victor, speaking of Ramadan, this is the first day of Ramadan, so perhaps it's a good day for us to.

We're recording on Friday, and this will be heard on Saturday, so it'll be the second day of Ramadan.

But this was a good day to record on the Middle East, I think, as we enter their Holy Month.

And we would like to thank you for all of your words of wisdom.

You're like a smooth ride on a turnpike and then stopping at all of the various side rest stops along the way to

explore a few things.

I think it's more Salma, a kid that lived on a farm and knew nothing, went, studied, just put his nose in a book of Greek and Latin for eight years, then suddenly decides to go to the Middle East with no Arab fluency and thinks the Middle East is somewhere around 31 AD or something.

And I'm going to go see all these antiquities and I'm going to know the ancient world better than anybody and had one misadventure after another.

And

always, oh, I'll go to Libya, no problem.

And then I remember somebody said, Victor, Qaddafi, it's a very dangerous country.

There's a reason you can't go there.

Are you sure you want to go there?

I'll go to Egypt.

I think it's a bad time to go there after the Yom Kippur war.

I'll go to Turkey.

I think the Cyprus invasion makes that an unwise proposition.

Well, I want to look at Smear.

I want to go look at the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, or I want to go to Priene.

I want to go stand between the two column flutes at the Temple of Apollo at Didyma.

And why can't I go look at the lighthouse at Pharaoh?

So, I mean, it was naivete, and I paid a big, I mean, it was always, it was like a bumbler, right?

Yeah.

I was in search.

I wanted to learn more about the ancient world, places and novels, you know, by Apuleius, or I wanted to know certain things about Cleopatra and Actium and everything.

So, and the Egyptian fleet sailing into Greek Actium from, et cetera, et cetera.

And it didn't work out too well.

If my children did what I did, I would have a fit.

I had a daughter who went to Chile and I just about died that she was there for two years.

But I think I must have caused a lot of grief to my parents.

But my dad, being an old B29 guy, would say, Well, hell, you don't know what you're doing, and it's a bad place of the world, but you were brought up right, and you learn how to farm, and you'll be okay.

Just check in every month or two.

Well, the listeners and I are glad glad you were a bumbler, a very knowledgeable bumbler, and you have a photographic memory or an extraordinary memory for all of these things.

And we'd love to hear the tales.

So we'd like to thank you for today.

Thank everybody for listening.

I really appreciate it.

And we'll catch you next time.

We'll catch you next time.

Bye-bye.