Host Bill Heid speaks with his friend and expert on radical Islam, Patrick Poole. Poole uses his vast network of reporters and experts to guide us through the murky waters created by untethered political principles. He equates today’s modern political principles to the sheriff in Blazing Saddles holding himself hostage when he seems to have sacrificed his principles, but things just become confusing for the townspeople.
Poole brings forth several instances where government entities are doing things that would not be allowed by ordinary citizens including bringing members of known terrorist groups to the United States. He also brings up the FBI’s refusal to attend a Boston Marathon Bombing hearing. These are both crimes punishable by the court of law, but who is holding the entities accountable?
Off The Grid Radio
Ep165
Released: July 11, 2013
Bill: Welcome again to Off the Grid News. I’m Bill Heid, your host and my guest today is radical Islam expert and my good friend Patrick Poole. Patrick, welcome.
Patrick: Thanks for having me back.
Bill: Always great to have you, I mean you’re our inside guy when it comes to what’s really going on. And when you talk about news being off the grid, Patrick, it doesn’t seem like news really; at least the news in the Middle East, the real news gets to the main stream media. So I want to chat with you about a number of things today, but I’m wondering what your thoughts are as Egypt melts down. This is a huge deal for oil, for just the destabilization of that whole area. What’s going on?
Patrick: Well, popular protests back on June 30th, some of the largest protests in human history precipitated the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood President of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi. So the protests were Sunday June 30th. The following day, and again tens of millions of people on the streets of Egypt. I have a close associate who’s on the ground there who said it was just unlike anything she had ever seen or even heard about in terms of the response of the Egyptian people protesting. The US backed Islamist government in Egypt.
The following day Mohammed Morsi the President of… former spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood went on TV, gave a rambling address, refused a call for the elections that the protestors were calling for. And the following day the Egyptian military said that they were going to back the Egyptian people and announced that Morsi was no longer president. So… And since then there have been a series of, you know, attacks and people killed, and targeting of Christians by the Islamist groups, you know.
The interesting thing about the protests, Bill, is that the one ubiquitous theme that ran throughout both sides of the protest was the anti-US sentiment. The US Ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson – her picture was almost as ubiquitous as Morsi in terms of derision. And now, you know both sides are trying to claim that each respective side are US stooges. So four years after Obama’s Cairo speech which basically unleashed the Arab Spring, and the US is even more detested than it’s ever been in the Middle East.
Bill: Yeah, that’s remarkable. It’s just because of the policies and it seems like we’ve had nothing but friendly policies, at least our State Department has, with the more radical side of Islam. You’ve chronicled that before but how in the world did Morsi end up, I mean what was… if you have any knowledge of behind the scenes that really happened between the US and Morsi that sort of flung him into power?
Patrick: Well, the US had been backing The Brotherhood unfortunately going back to the Bush Administration when they reopened contacts with The Brotherhood. But as soon as Obama got into office Hillary Clinton ratcheted up the contacts in support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere. You know the Muslim Brotherhood is an international movement that was… came out of Egypt but they were supporting these groups in places like Tunisia, which was the first Arab Spring country. Now we’re backing the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood against Hasad. So this has been a cardinal initiative of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy. And the Middle East is backing these Islamist groups and Morsi’s ouster I think will go down as one of Obama’s biggest foreign policy embarrassments in a whole long line of foreign policy embarrassments.
Bill: But it doesn’t seem like they affect him very much. I mean we’ve lost that embarrassing feeling, right? It doesn’t seem like anyone gets embarrassed about anything. You have spokes people come and speech writers push right through it, no matter what happens. So in the midst of all this Patrick, you have this sort of amnesia or loss of reality which is in itself a dangerous thing, because you’ve got the situation and you have these idealistic beliefs about something. Meanwhile the real side of this is taking hold. And you can’t get your little… you know it’s like a little Harvard sociology experiment, right. And so now that little lab that you have at Harvard and your little think tank group, now there’s real lives and real bodies and real people dying, real people being raped. This is not a small thing at all.
Patrick: No, and the forces of violence have really been uncorked by this protest targeting Egypt’s Coptic Christian community. There was, in Luxor there was assaults on Christian homes. Several homes were burned down. In the Sinai region a Coptic priest was murdered on the streets. You know it’s been… and I just heard the other day there was an attack on one of the churches in the Cairo area. So it still remains to be seen how this is all going to shake out. I think it’s a good thing that Morsi’s gone, because I mean, we’ve been sending billions in military aid to Egypt. You know back in the regime there was… even worse than anything that Mubarak had ever have done. But how this all pans out really does remain to be seen.
Bill: As you say, at a minimum you’ve got sort of a cork being popped off. I want to play a clip for you, Jeramy’s got this clip up, and just how it pans out. Here’s a cleric talking about what the worldwide Muslim desire is. And I have to accept and believe that the same sort of extremist desires are inside Egypt but… you have that ready, Patrick? Listen to this once, Patrick.
“We believe as Muslims the East and the West will one day be governed by the Sharia, indeed we believe that one day the flag of Islam will fly over the White House, indeed there’s even a narration of the prophet (inaudible 08:22) the day of judgment will not come until a group of (inaudible 08:25) conquer the White House.”
So if that’s how much a lot of these guys, these extremists, want this country… “The flag of Islam must fly above the White House,” how much more even inside that country? And The Brotherhood is a pretty good faction, a pretty good number of people. It sounds like that’s not the majority of people, it sounds like it’s a fringe. But, you know, let’s face it wars have been won by fringes before. How do you see them come pushing back now?
Patrick: Well, this ouster of Morsi has really energized them. They’ve really dropped their mask, you know, their non-violent democracy loving mask and now they’re saying, “Well, we tried democracy and that didn’t work for us, so you know, we’re going back to what we know.” Which demonstrates that they were never principally dedicated to democracy, which is what, you know, analysts such as myself and others have been saying all along and yet the establishment talks about the moderate Muslim Brotherhood. And now they’re all trying to retreat from those positions and say that, “Well, you know it’s guys like Patrick Poole who were radicalizing all these Islamists all along with their conspiracy mongering,” etcetera. I mean it’s bizarre.
But in fact that clip you played of… he’s a UK based preacher by the name of Anjem Choudary with a group (inaudible 10:10) which does operate here inside the United States. In fact a number of their members have been arrested on terrorism charges. And Anjem Choudary in fact, one of his disciples was one of the two men who ran down the British soldier outside the barracks in London last month and beheaded him, if you recall. And now pictures of Anjem Choudary and, you know, one of the murderers who was hamming it up in for the cameras waiting for the police to arrive, you know the two of them together.
So this is definitely going to have a… what’s happening in Egypt is going to have a radicalizing affect for not just The Brotherhood but other Islamist elements. We see it in Egypt, but we’re also seeing it across the region. And across the Middle East we’re seeing – well, not just the Middle East, but really around the world – an escalation of the rhetoric by folks associated with the International Muslim Brotherhood movement, guys like Tariq Ramadan, Yusuf al-Qaradawi who’s basically as close as you get to an Islamic pope. He has a program every Friday on Al Jazeera called Shariah and Life. He’s probably the most recognizable Islamic cleric on the planet. Qaradawi is calling for Gihad in Syria, you know.
The whole Syrian situation is turned into a sectarian intra-Islamic war between the Sunnis and the Shia, and of course we’re now sending weapons. The United States is sending weapons into Syria backing the rebels who are by and large now very much in the Al Qaeda orbit. So we’ve basically switched sides in the war on terror and now we’re backing the Al Qaeda side in Syria. Not to say that there’s anything positive to say about Bashar Assad the president of Syria and who is a stooge of Iran. And at the same time we’ve had this whole debacle with the Taliban office in Qatar which was funded by United States tax payers. And it was supposed to be the base from which the Taliban was going to negotiate with the United States. And just here within the past couple of days they’ve had to close down the office.
The talks between the US and the Taliban were scheduled, and two days before those talks, which had been announced, the Taliban attacked the CIA station in Kabul. So we’re basically paying for these guys to live large in five star hotels in Doha Qatar, and at the same time they’re killing Americans in Afghanistan. I mean it’s just a snapshot of how utterly insane our foreign policy is under the Obama administration.
Bill: Wow, and Washington sort of, George that is, had this idea that, in his farewell address, that it might be better thing to think a little bit before you get involved in these wars. And when it comes to something inside of Islam, I think that really speaks to his perspective, because how are you as an American – now they’ve kind of turned on us right, they’re turning on Obama, and they’re turning on Hillary. I’ve seen pictures of them with… you know pictures of Hillary, big X’s on it and stuff and some nasty words being said. But Patrick, really how can an American go someplace and sort of reconcile to Islamic sort of forces inside this country? Let’s say Syria for example, what’s an American going to do other than a machine gun? How do you reconcile what’s the nature of Islam? In other words we’re talking about really kind of core principles right. What is it about Islam and about the nature of those two particular sects that creates this endless, endless conflict that we’ve been warned to stay out of?
Patrick: Well, the difficulty is, as soon as you start talking about Islam you start running into first amendment questions, you know free exercise and establishment questions. And so you know I think a lot of the focus ought to be on the legal, theological/legal/political system of Shariah that’s promulgated by Islam and goes back to the early days. It really heads up the system that creates second class citizens which institutional violence is used to keep those second class citizens in line. Violence against women – I mean just it’s basically a whole system of organized violence. And what we’re seeing is just that being played up on an international scale.
Bill, it’s funny writing on these issues and we talk about Shariah, and there are groups and media on the West side of the equation, group like Saint Progress and Centre for American Progress, the ACLU, People for the American Way, they say, “Oh, well wait there are, there millions of versions of Shariah, it’s not this hard and fast system.” And it’s all to deflect away from the administration’s agenda. But you go over in the Middle East and you mention Shariah, they have no problem understanding what you’re talking about.
And preachers like Anjem Choudary whose clip you just played a minute ago, you know they have no problem talking about Shariah. They’re not conflicted about millions of versions of Shariah because in fact there aren’t millions of versions, you know. There are basically six schools of Islamic thought and by and large they’re fairly homogenous. I mean it’s… The differentiation between these various schools is not a lot of difference, maybe 30 to 40% difference. And on the basic issues of Gihad they’re almost all identical, you know. And relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. You know they all embrace this basic institutional hostility to not just the non-Muslims but any system that doesn’t conform to the Shariah theological political system.
Bill: And the problem is of course, it’s just like whether we discuss Baptists or Presbyterians or something here there’s going to be nuanced shades, but we know what a Baptist is, definitionally for the most part, and a Presbyterian, like I said there’s some differences. But those cases are easily identifiable.
You know I’ve got to applaud the guy that gave that talk of the clip we played; at least he has a goal right. I mean this is like back in the old days when you and I would talk about world view a lot, at least there’s a teleology here right? I mean the guy wants… We seem to have lost any kind of idea that, look there ought to be the good life or when we say mission accomplished or something, it ought to look like something. It seems like there’s a prohibition against saying that this would be a good culture if X or Y. But this guy has no problem, Patrick, just saying what he thinks things ought to be.
Patrick: Well absolutely, and Choudary is… has a set of principles and he clearly articulates them, really, really without compromise and, you know he’s very self-conscious about who he is, what he believes and what the implications of that are. And that’s proved to be very attractive in a post-modern environment.
Bill: Well, I think you’re really on it there because people… If everything’s splintered when it comes to thought right, and there’s no absolutes people really start to wander. And so here’s a guy with some really hard, fast definitional items, and he comes in and people would say, “Hey, at least here’s something to hold onto,” right?
Patrick: Absolutely. And you know for those of us, which would include you and I, who remember an America where we stood for certain values and democracy, and freedom and human rights – Ronald Reagan standing at the Brandenburg Gate, seeing Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. And now you have President Obama who basically exemplifies the establishment thinking. You know back before the 2008 election he was asked about American acceptionalism, he said, “Well, of course I believe in American acceptionalism. You know just like a Greek believes in Greek acceptionalism.” And you know it’s lost in the sea of multiplicity that there’s nothing unique about the American tradition, the American political tradition and the struggles that we’ve gone through to become the society we are. And it’s hard, as I work on this issue day after day, and as you know, Bill, I do a lot of work inside the beltway, it’s hard for me at times to really see how we’re going to be able to find our way back, apart from some catastrophe.
Bill: Well, I was thinking as you mentioned that, Patrick, I concur, I guess it’s in God’s hands in that sense. So we have to just keep playing, you know what is it that we need to do while we’ve got time? What is it that God would require of us to do? And I was thinking of President Obama as you were talking earlier about American acceptionalism. And I’ve watched a lot of Jeremiah Wright’s sermons. And it seems to me that here’s a guy, and a family I guess, he took his kids there many times in the audience, who just got pounded week after week after week. And I know Barack has his own ideas of the world.
But if you listen carefully to these sermons and speeches by Jeremiah Wright which Barack Hussein Obama was certainly sitting in the pews for, it does explain a lot of things, doesn’t it? Because he pounded American acceptionalism. And maybe even to the point where there’s an occasional place where he’s right, maybe… There’s no perfection in American acceptionalism the same way there’s no perfection in Victorian England. So you have a few bad things. But to hear the things that Jeremiah Wright said about this country, I think explains a lot about why our president does what he does. He’s been inculcated into this…
Patrick: I think it’s even worse than that because Jeremiah Wright is much like Anjem Choudary. Jeremiah Wright has… the pastor of President Obama’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ up in Chicago or Father Flaggor… these individuals, they’re outspoken, they speak what they believe to be true uncompromisingly. And yet when Barack Obama was questioned about it, his response was, “Well, I wasn’t there for those sermons” or “I wasn’t…” You know Barack Obama even lacked the conviction to come clean that he was associated with this individual.
I mean Barack Obama is kind of the perfect post-modern politician in that he has the ability, by being completely untethered from any principle, to try and make himself attractive to anybody across the political spectrum. Again Jeremiah Wright has attachments to principles. I think you and I would disagree vehemently with those principles, but at least you know where he stands. But Barack Obama is even worse, is that he distanced himself. “Oh, I didn’t know that he was delivering these sermons. I didn’t know that he was republishing (inaudible 24:17) tracts in the… you know Trinity United Church of Christ bulletin.
There’s nothing that, in terms that Barack Obama use, you plant the flag in and as a consequence we’re just blown about by every… As we’ve seen with our Middle East policy, we’re just blown about by every movement, constantly reacting. We don’t have any presence; nobody tossed us in the region. We’ve abandoned all of our allies.
And Barry Rubin a columnist for the Jerusalem Post had a good article here the other day where basically the Obama administration’s policy in the Middle East is a lot like that scene out of Blazing Saddles where the Sheriff holds himself hostage and says, “Don’t move or he gets it.” And this is what they’ve done in terms of our Middle East policy of, “Okay, we’ve got to back The Brotherhood or else you’re empowering Al Qaida.”
And we’ve had senior members of the Obama administration – and I’m not going to let the Bush administration off the hook, their second term was nearly as bad as the Obama administration – but senior members of this administration go before congress and testify. “Look, if we don’t back these extremists then you’re aiding Al Qaida If we call Gihad what it really is, if we identify the enemy’s threat doctrine you’re really aiding Al Qaida. I mean that’s insidious. And all that goes back to this un-relatedness, untetheredness to any principle whatsoever, which is really the hallmark of our post-modern culture.
Bill: Yeah we certainly live in it and you’re certainly seeing it. And even the articles, Patrick, that you read about this, they don’t make any sense and they’re not, they’re never comprehensive. And they always assume something about what’s going on in the region that I’m always saying when I read those articles, “Could that really even be true?” So it’s to the point, I mean to your point earlier, the post modernity part has even made me, when I read the articles, think, “Why even read these anymore?” Because it’s so difficult to get to the truth and all these things are… they’re per paid piece in other words someone sort of arranged to have this particular view vented, and so that’s what you get. So finding good news is just really tough I think.
Patrick: Precisely. And you know that’s… here back on the June 30th protests in Cairo that led to Morsi’s ouster; I was live blogging in real time the protest at PJ Media. And I got some incredible response saying, “Look, you know, by following your Twitter feed I had a better idea of what was going on that watching CNN and Fox News,” because I was reading the real time Twitter feeds of people who are on the ground. I was giving reports from people who were there at (inaudible 28:05) Square or at the presidential palace, or in Alexandria. You know just me sitting here at my desk, me and my readers had to have a better idea of what was going on that watching any of the networks.
And getting back to this question of the untetheredness of our culture I think is exemplified by – and the problem in reporting and giving the real story – was exemplified in… first off our negotiations with the Taliban which is just absolutely scandalous. But there was a story last year by the Daily Beast News Week by Eli Lake about (inaudible 29:09) who is a member of (inaudible 29:11) which is a designated terrorist organization, was not only flown to the United States on taxpayer dime, but was escorted into the White House to meet with Obama’s National Security staff, where he was demanding the release of their terrorist leader (inaudible 29:33) who’s currently serving life in prison in here in the United States for his role in authorizing the 93 World Trade Centre bombing.
So you have a member of a terrorist organization being escorted into the White House to demand the release of his terrorist leader and the reporting on this was virtually non-existent. And when (inaudible 30:02), the homeland security secretary was asked about it back a year ago, last July in a house homeland security hearing, she said “Look, we’re going to be bringing more terrorists into the United States.” This is a violation of Federal law.
And not only are these members of designated terrorist organizations being allowed to walk in, it’s all being done on the US taxpayer dime. You know in any other context it will be considered material support for terrorism. There are people in Federal prison for the rest of their lives for doing the exact same thing that this administration is doing. But the reporting on Hani Nour Eldin’s visit to the White House was non-existent.
I mean there was a report at The Daily Beast. There was a blog post at the Washington Post. And there was an article at CNN but except for that that was it. A terrorist being invited into the White House and there was no media outrage. I mean we’re…as we’ve seen here with all this excessive Obama administration scandals we’ve really lost the capacity for outrage, because the outrages are occurring…
You know there was a period here a couple of weeks ago and all this stuff was rolling out about the IRS etcetera, I mean it was wasn’t just the outrage of the day, it was like the outrage of the hour that you had to keep track of what was going on. And again, if you were watching the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, you probably had no idea that any of this was going on, with the IRS targeting tea party groups and NSA spying and just all the various scandals that were rolling out here about six weeks ago.
Bill: Too many scandals to even report on and so they say, “Hey, this terrorism thing, it’s not that important so we’ll just put that way…”
Patrick: Because nothing’s important anymore. That’s the outworking of the post-modern narrative, is nothing is important anymore. It’s all lost in the sea of multiplicity, which (inaudible 32:53) we have a million versions of Shariah. We have no way to know what Shariah is because everybody has their… Well, point in fact is the rest of the world does not operate in our post-modern narrative. And that’s why we’re losing to radical Islam all over the world, not just in the Middle East. We’re losing to this, you know in Latin America.
Meanwhile here in this week I just saw that the FBI refused to appear at a house homeland security hearing on the Boston bombings. You know, how does congress do oversight when you have an administration which just says, “Hey, we’re just not going to follow the law anymore.” you know? Obamacare “Yeah it’s a law we’ll pass but for us to implement it right now would just be catastrophic so we’re not going to follow the law and enforce the employer mandates that…” It’s just… This is what civilizational decline looks like.
Bill: We’re getting this up-front and personal. But let me throw this at you, let me throw another idea because this really, I think is important and goes right to the bone of it in some sense; do you think, Patrick, that post-modernity could almost be selective? In other words it’s selective post-modernity because it’s used as a tool or a battering ram in some cases. But I challenge you to walk on a plane with a gun or to not pay your taxes or to say something about Islam in public than can be construed as hate speech, and then this loss of the idea of an antithesis… I mean all of a sudden things get real sharp, don’t they? They get real sharp and focused. So it seems this lens that we have goes from foggy to micro-manage, and if there’s Patrick Poole that says something, I’m going to find a way to bust him and destroy him, right?
Patrick: Yeah, but if Alec Baldwin says the exact same thing, well then he gets a pass because he has the… It’s the consummate identity politics. If you have the right… If you hold to the right political narrative, then you get an automatic free pass, regardless.
Bill: But he doesn’t even hold the right narrative. He says stuff about gays all the time, that doesn’t even… But no-one says a word to him about it.
Patrick: Yeah, but otherwise he holds to the narrative and he’s one of the enforcers of the narrative, and he promotes the narrative through his TV shows, his movies, etc. So he does get a pass from groups like Gladwin, he makes these anti-gay slurs.
Now, if you and I were to try that it would be on the Huffington Post within an hour. So that’s what we’re seeing, is that all sins… all the things that the (inaudible 36:25) attacked Bush for, some of which you know they had a point, but the very things that they attacked Bush for Obama is doing in spades. You want to talk about a drone war in the Middle East? You know look at Barack Obama’s record, but where is the (inaudible 36:43)? They’re nowhere to be found. You know they talked about free speech infringement.
Bill: Oh, you’re right, you’re right! They hated Bush’s drones, but they worship Obama’s drones, don’t they?
Patrick: Yes, yes!
Bill: They literally worship his drones.
Patrick: Yeah, they celebrate it. “Oh, you know, Barack Obama killed Osama Bin Laden with his bare teeth when he crawled through the window with a knife in his teeth.” You know, it’s absolutely; it’s a snapshot of the ideology… But I think it gets back to what you were saying that the media, the establishment is completely bought into this. So as a consequence they push this narrative, but it’s like standing in the water in the Gulf of Mexico and you have the shark bump up against you. They still have to rely on absolutes because you just can’t operate in the world without absolutes.
The law of gravity still applies. In terms of certain policies where… I mean they are trying to basically wage war against gravity. But I mean we haven’t redesigned our airplanes. They use…and Abraham Kuiper talked about it and (inaudible 38:34) talked about that it’s like a child sitting on the father’s lap, slapping him in the face, not realizing how much they’re dependent upon the very system that they’re trying to destroy. How much they have to use Christian capital to destroy Christian civilization. I mean what remnants are left of it.
And that’s the essence of the Alinskyist tactics, I Alinksy said unashamedly to have to use the very principles you’re trying to destroy. And so you end up in this revolutionary state where the revolution ends up eating its own. And this is the way civilizations die. And typically when civilizations die there are a lot of people who end up dying. And I think the consequences of this ideology that’s been allowed to play out, you know not just over the past fifty years but… Bill, you and I can trace it back going back to the new light theology back in New England in the 1800s…
Bill: Yeah I was thinking of Rossouw at the time just kind of introducing this idea of non-absolutes and trying to play that game, which is a difficult game to play and he didn’t really play it that well either, but for some reason we just keep holding on to his perspectives. It’s hard to see why we want to retreat. It’s like a dog to the vomit in the Biblical narrative, you know why go back and eat that that’s just been puked up? Which, that’s what we’re doing day in and day out in this country. These things don’t work, they don’t work, they don’t work – over and over and over. And yet we just worship that which doesn’t work.
And to the life of me, Patrick, you know I know this conversation has turned a little different direction and that’s kind of a cool thing but… because I like to go where these ultimacies lie. The one thing everybody hates, you talked about Islam, you talked about sort of the media elite. You’ve talked about Obama’s political aspirations and ideology and then there’s Americans in general; one thing they all have in common and they all really hate and that’s the law, right? God’s word and Lex Rex. I mean, that’s just the one thing that is… we know everything could be true except that. And we know, and that’s what’s post-modernity again, in other words we know that anything could be possible except the solution being in God’s word. That’s the one thing we’re positive that isn’t true.
Patrick: Right. All absolutes are wrong absolutely. I mean it’s the self-contradicting nature of humanist ideology. You know the promise that “You shall be as God.” I mean it really goes back to that in the Garden. And you know, I was thinking about Greg Singer, you know we were just talking about the new light philosophy and Greg Singer’s book The Theological Interpretation of American History is a great read. But one of his other books from Rationality to Irrationality he talks about going back to the heart, you know once you separate knowledge from revealed truth then you’re constantly in the flux of rational uncertainty that leads to irrationalism and loss of identity. And on that part of the spectrum is when genocides happen. You know, when you… I mean when millions of people die on the basis of ideology, like the Khmer Rouge or The Final Solution, or those kinds of things.
Bill: No that’s a brilliant perspective, Patrick, because I think that Van Till said that irrationalism and rationalism are two wash women doing each other’s laundry over and over and over. People didn’t realize at the time he was giving those lectures that that was the Khmer Rouge… you know I mean that the end game here was bloody, not just a philosophical statement in abstract.
Patrick: Yeah, but we, after the Third Reich, after the Soviet Union, after the Khmer Rouge we still have not learned our lesson. I mean that’s the really disappointing part. And will we find our way? Well, geez, you know, I don’t know. Apart from returning to Biblical truth, where do we go? I mean, we’re kind of at the end game here of the outworking of this ideology where we’re killing Bin Laden, but we’re negotiating with the Taliban. I mean there’s no sense to anything we’re doing and I talk with some of these people overseas and they say it just looks like the United States is flailing. Not just in the Middle East but just everywhere.
I know you were just down South of the border and I talked with some folks who live in Latin America and they’re just like, “What is going on?” Nobody trusts us, nobody trusts the United States anymore. We used to be attacked for holding onto our allies, and now we’re being attacked for undercutting our allies whenever it seems convenient. So nobody perceives us as an ally anymore and Barack Obama is the master at instituting that policy of being here today and there tomorrow.
And kind of bringing this back full circle here with the second Egyptian revolution or Revolution 2.0 as it’s been called, is we backed our ouster of our long-time ally (inaudible 46:10) – and (inaudible 46:13) was no prince – but again that’s… when you’re talking the Middle East, that’s what you’re talking about. I mean the only democracy in the Middle East is the one that they all want to destroy, and that’s Israel. So we backed the overthrow of Morsi and then we backed the Muslim Brotherhood. And now that the Egyptian people have overthrown the Muslim Brotherhood, we’re reluctant to back them. So everybody now in Egypt hates us.
Four years after Barack Obama went to Cairo when he gave his big speech and won his Nobel Prize, this is emblematic of this administration. I mean it’s a catastrophe. And to be honest, I don’t see anything happening in the Republican Party that makes me think that anything is going to be any better. I don’t know that under a Romney or the McCain administration that things really would have turned out differently, because it’s the entire establishment that’s imprisoned by this ideological narrative.
Bill: Well, I think it’s the narrative as you said, the narrative also runs down to the guy in the street. So the problem is, I mean, what’s the Republican Party and the Democratic Party other than the cumulative efforts of ‘the people’ as we say. So if you’ve got what kind of omelet are you going to make with those kind of eggs and I think really we’ve got to take a look. One of the reasons I don’t have a big, broad, huge radio show is because I like to emphasize on the things that we can do. Otherwise it’s easy for us; it’s easy for Americans to focus on things that are totally out of our control, Patrick.
And what President Obama does should be analyzed by people like yourself and others. But for most Americans I think, “What should we do?” And I think people would rather discuss Bush and Obama because then the sort of responsibility, you’re talking about (inaudible 48:28) in a way, but the responsibilities for self-government, that is exercising the things in life that God has given me and sort of being good stewards over what sphere of sovereignty I do have, it’s easier to abandon them and jump on the news talk circuit and then weigh in at the coffee shop the next morning, right?
I think that’s really a kind of a sickness America has, that we’re going to have to figure out a way to get out. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t pay attention to what our leaders do, that’s part of a representative government. But I think it’s almost in many folks a preoccupation. And Patrick, here’s where maybe even overly passionate about it, I think not only a preoccupation but almost an avoidance technique. A tactic by the average guy, by you and me, by Bill Heid, to not do what he should do with his own family and with his own local area, right? So I’m kind of feeling that way little bit that way about our country as well.
Patrick: And the ability for us to basically outsource our knowledge, you know we’ve gotten lazy where we’ve outsourced our understanding of what’s happening in the world to the establishment media. We’ve outsourced our responsibility for self-governance to the establishment political system. And as a consequence you have Barack Obama and John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid who are basically determining what… And Americans have grown fat and happy, you know, since the 50s and outsourced all the actual real knowledge.
I mean, I was just talking with somebody here, and we’ve even gone into a virtual world. I mean the world is now fantasy football. I mean where it’s not actual football games that are being actually played, it’s all just a world of statistics
Bill: You can even watch people; you can watch people play video games on TV.
Patrick: Yes!
Bill: I know you don’t watch that or have time for that but you can actually watch others play video games so that you don’t have to play them yourself.
Patrick: And I think that’s why so-called Reality TV is so attractive, is that people are outsourcing reality to the media, to Hollywood. And they’re finding that these false gods fail to deliver. I mean that’s why all these movies that Hollywood’s producing are just bombing at the office, at the box office, is because they’re not made for entertainment value. Now they’re made to push an ideological point of view. I mean watching Soviet propaganda films is not entertaining cinema, but that’s basically what Hollywood has become. It’s either that or they have to recycle movies from way back when, when movies used to mean something. And even at that these remakes end up just being horrible. Like Red Dawn, which I found back in the 80s was a good movie but I mean the remake of it was just horrible. Because the characters really couldn’t believe in anything anymore. It was just kind of, “Ah, hey of these guys showed up so we’ve got to fight them.” I mean it’s just…
Bill: Yeah, here’s the key that I’ve been thinking about, you know that I’ve been working on this Henty project and this Sir Francis Drake under Drake’s flag and all this. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and you can kind of… we’re running out of time but maybe we’re cutting it kind of close. It seems like, Patrick, that we’ve lost something that, in terms of Western civilization, that Hitler couldn’t take (inaudible 52:52) you know, all these great forces, the Keizer, whoever you want to say as a bad guy that sort of maybe attacked the forces of good. We kept what we had – that sense of character and conviction, throughout all of the most horrendous battles. And yet somehow, like you said, since and maybe after the World War II, we’ve lost something that all the villains in the history of the world couldn’t by force take from us. Now that’s just plain bizarre.
Patrick: Well, and point in fact is that there’s… the real danger is that nature abhors a vacuum. And while we’ve been able to move that out of our system, there are very dangerous things actively working to replace, to fill that vacuum in our social and civic structures. And it won’t be pretty. And the only way to combat that is to get back to some first principles, to reveal truths.
And like you said, beginning to exercise responsibility on the immediate level. I mean, picking up your own trash kind of stuff, caring for your own family, taking care of your neighbors, taking care of your extended family, getting involved in local politics. Everybody wants the lose-20-pounds-in-a-week solution, and it just doesn’t exist. So we have to root ourselves in that which is true, and if we don’t…
I mean, the world is raging and I think the take-home is what’s happening in Egypt, what’s happening in the Middle East, what’s happening around the world, we’ve been fairly disconnected from it. But a lot of what’s happening in the world is a result of what’s been happening here. I mean, we’ve been exporting our Godless, rootless culture all over the world. The first time I saw Bay Watch was in Albania, and that corrosive effect that really the world is not able to address, most of the people don’t even live there, has had this erosion effect and at the end of the day that’s going to come back to bite us. And so we need to get ready. We need to take care of our families. We need to do all that to keep the life boat going.
Bill: Well said, Patrick, and I think we probably should close on that. Thanks a lot for spending some time with us today, and we really appreciate it, we know you’re a busy guy and you’ve got a lot going on. We also know that our listeners are very busy as well and you know, God doesn’t ask us to win these wars. God asks us just be faithful, and in some wars soldiers die but that’s our calling, right. We have to hang in there and be faithful. So from everybody here at Off the Grid Radio, I’m Bill Heid; thanks again for tuning in.