 a new speaker series here at UW-Shabuigan. He's had two so far, looking at comments and talking about the First World War. Tonight, we talk about the Muslim Brotherhood. And our speaker this evening is Dr. Rich Edwards, who is in the philosophy department. He is both a philosopher and a theologian. He teaches some very popular courses here on campus, in particular, History of Worldly. We're not history, but I guess Philosophy of World Religions. Well, we don't teach that here. Philosophy of Religion and Intro to That. And at Oshkosh, I teach Global Ethics. And expertly in the Middle East, right? Yeah. And in Islam at Jihad, and I'm a consultant for the military on that, okay? And with that, I will turn the floor over to Dr. Edwards. Cut the lights down, and my students know that I rarely respond to Dr. Edwards, so they call me Rich. So, but I think I can get through this. I might throw you a lot of material. I may cut some parts short, but some of it you have to understand, to truly understand the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, I'm not gonna be radical one way or another. I'm not gonna say they're rabid conspirators that are invading the White House and all of that. And I'm not gonna go the other way, which a lot of young Egyptians felt in 2010, that they're just sweet, kindly old gentlemen who go out and do social services. I had a young friend from this area who his school had an exchange program in Egypt just before the year before the Arab Spring in Egypt. And we were, I was talking back and forth to him, and he said, Rich, you don't understand the Muslim Brotherhood. There are a bunch of guys like social workers that's all they do. And I said, you don't know their history then, that you don't know what their basic belief systems are. So there, I'm not gonna go to the extreme on either side, and I'm hopefully gonna give you an accurate understanding, but at the same time explain to you how Islamic jihadists, certain groups, don't like the Muslim Brotherhood, and why right now the Iranian Shia population is cooperating, they just initiated the first direct flight from Cairo to Tehran in 30 years. Why that's happening and what it really means. And so, but let's get started. The Muslim Brotherhood is in itself not a denomination or group within Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood are what are called Sunni Muslims, and we're going to get to that. I put the slide on my email and I was going to correct some things this morning and the system wouldn't let me in to correct it. So there may be some errors here and I apologize, but I'll point them out to you. The Brotherhood is first and foremost a political entity. They don't participate in jihadi actions. Now by jihadi actions, I mean jihad is a war and in Islam you have an energy hot and an outer jihad. More peaceful oriented groups within Islam emphasize the energy hot, the fight between good and evil in your life. In Islam you are encouraged to do good by good angels and encouraged to do bad by the other angels on your other side. It's a very Islamic concept of a spiritual warfare where you are encouraged to do things by these beings, these angels and these gen. Gen are actually genies and they're demons. They're not good nice big blue people who love you. They really are individuals who are demons. But what the Brotherhood decided to do after decades of attempting to have what's known as direct jihad or outer jihad, that's jihad, that's war. And you gotta understand in the history of the Brotherhood they attempted to assassinate two different Egyptian presidents. They have killed people before. They do not like cops, COPT, Christians and they don't really encourage them. They've had some real problems in Egypt with that. And many of the young people who were supportive of them are turning away from them in droves because of that. Their official position is that women and Christians should never be allowed to be a president of Egypt. It's an Islamic country. And that they should never be allowed to be president. They can be in the parliament, they can be in the cabinet but they can never be the leader of the country. They're a political group. And so they wised up in the 50s and the 60s on how best to approach and not have problems because in their early years when they were more oriented towards physical war like actions, they would end up in jail. And Egyptian jails are not good. Egyptians torture and torture well and many of the Muslim Brotherhood were tortured repeatedly. And they decided that it would be better to be more political. Their concept of Islam asserts that there is no separation of church and state. Islam is a way of life. And the faithful must accept and affirm their surrender to Allah and live as members of the total Islamic community. Since taking over in Egypt, they have now decided that they're going to institute an old tax in the history of Islam. And that is that if you are a Christian or you are a Jew or you are not a Muslim living within, in Islamic Egypt, you have to pay a tax because you are serviced by them through army and other things. This is an ancient way of doing things but that's how they feel that Islam is a community, both locally and worldwide. They call for instituting Sharia law. Sharia law is very specific law in Islam, you don't have big arguments like in Christianity over the nature of God, can God know this? Can God do that? Can God foresee the future? They don't argue that in Islam. What's argued in Islam is the nature of the law. And so they get in arguments over the law but they adhere to a very strict form of Sharia law and they believe that that will bring about a renaissance, a new rebirth in Islam, in particular Sunni Islam which I'm gonna explain to you in just a few minutes. But to give you an application of Sharia law in Saudi Arabia, there was recently a case where there was a problem between two men, a fight ensued, and one man was left paralyzed. Now, basic principle of Sharia law is an eye for an eye. And so the judge just ruled this week that the man who caused the other man to be paralyzed, his punishment is that he will be surgically paralyzed. That's Sharia law. It keeps you from doing things you don't wanna do because of the damage. The judge believes that if they do this, there will not be this continued type of problem. The brotherhood was born in Egypt in 1928. 1920s are a turmoil in the Middle East. The British and the French tried to get the Arab tribes to join them fighting in World War I and the Germans tried to do the same thing. Some fought with the Germans, some fought with the British and the French. The British and the French promised them all sorts of things when World War II ended and took the same document and promised exactly the same things to the Jews. Kind of typical of the Brits, and I can say that because I did my doctorate in the UK, they, typical of the Brits, at that time they felt they were in control. But 1928, they're born into a world where Egypt is basically under the thumb of the British Empire. But they began and their creed is a simple creed. Allah is our objective. The Quran is our law. The prophet is our leader, Muhammad. Jihad is our way. By that they don't mean energy hard spiritual warfare. They mean, if necessary, physical warfare. Okay, no disputed, they won't dispute it as well. And death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations. Now, so you'll understand, a recent poll in the last month in Egypt, and remember, these people were elected in Egypt, but their favorable rating is down to 15% as they began to start to install Sharia law as they have began to raid Christian churches and other things, their favorable rating is down, substantially. And so if there is another election and no one knows if there will be, there will be a challenge. Now the key in Egypt, by the way, is the military. If the military stays out of it, then the Muslim brotherhood will have their way. Most people who know the Middle East don't believe the Egyptian military would stay out of it because of various reasons, but we will see. Some basic things you need to know about Islam. And I'm assuming not a lot do. For one, the Arabic word, salam, means the same thing is the Hebrew word shalom. It means peace. Now, you may not realize this, but Arabic and Hebrew have as a root language, a semantic language. It's easy to learn Arabic if you know Hebrew and it's easy to learn Hebrew if you know Arabic. The characters are different, but very much similar. And the base meaning is submission. Islam means submission to a law. And that's what Islam is. It is a religion of submission to a God that is so beyond the comprehension of finite men and women that you can only submit to God. You can't argue about God's nature, but you can only submit to God. God's given you the law so you know what you have to do and you just simply have to submit to it. That is Islam. It's entering into a piece of security with God through all allegiance or surrender to the divine. It's what it is. You surrender to a law totally. Now, that having been said, Islam is the second fastest growing religion in how you understand it. It's second largest to Christianity in size. It is the fastest growing, although Hinduism is quite close. Arabic is the official language of God. And that's a problem if you are a Shia Muslim, which we'll see in a moment. Shia Muslims are Persians. They are not Arabs. Muhammad's children formed the Arab nations. The Arab tribes came from Muhammad. Shia Muslims cannot trace their lineage to Muhammad because they're Persians. And Persians under the Ottoman Empire was a very derogatory term. Persians, Shias were not allowed to have high positions of authority in the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish government. And if they would see them in the halls, people would walk by and they'd go Persian. It was a very derogatory term. They were not held in high regard. Although Persia is a wonderful history with art and history and science, it's sad but there is this disagreement, almost hatred between the two. But what we're gonna talk a little bit about tonight is that even with that, they do have a common purpose. Now why would they do that? There's a word called kaffir, K-F-R. Sometimes you spell it kaffir, K-F-F-I-R, but it's a concept of the unbeliever. Now in Quran it's clear you're not to kill another Muslim, especially in war. But we've had many Muslim upon Muslim wars. Iraq, Iran had a huge war. And the way they rationalized it was is that the Iraqis said the Iranians were kaffir, which means unbeliever, not true Muslims. And the Iranians said the Iraqis were kaffir, they're not true believers, not true Muslims. And so it's a way to rationalize around what the Quran says. But when they have goals in common, like worldwide domination by Islam, they will agree to work together, but ultimately what happens is they believe each of them that they will be the dominant group. But Islam is the principal interest or religion in 45 countries. It's the second largest constituency in France, the third largest in Great Britain. And within the next two to three years, Great Britain transitions to where the Muslims will be the largest single minority. And by 2020, they may actually have a large enough group that they can be a power in parliament. And we're having to strategically think through that if we can't depend on the British to go to war with us, how we have to handle that. And how we have to handle shared military hardware and research and things of that sort. Understand that Muslims are growing in number. The most common name for a male child born in England is Muhammad. Muhammad lived about 62 years. He was a basically illiterate. Shiites clearly state that. He was, his father died in early age. He was shipped off to be with his uncle and his grandfather so they could prepare, give him some sort of training. He became a caravan operator. He knew multiple languages. He knew his math, but he was still somewhat illiterate. And he married his wife. They had five to six children. We're not exactly sure because most of them died. And he became successful because she had been successful with the death of her husband. Quran are the very words of God. They were dictated by a law to the angel, Jabril, Gabriel. And he dictated them to Muhammad. He refused to allow the words to be written down. He finally had people that began to go into the desert with him. They never heard Jabril recite these verses but Muhammad would set them to memory, recite them to his companions. And they would set them to memory. When Muhammad dies in 632, they do something they were forbidden to do. They sit down, put the laws on paper and try to make these verses mesh. It's called the Quranic black box for 18 years. They work out coming up with the final product that's the Quran, but we don't know what happened in the box. We don't know what verses came out. We don't know what verses went in. We don't know any of that. And, but these are the words of God. In theory, the direct words of God. The Quran may not be burned. It may not be thrown in the trash. It goes to a funeral home designed for the Quran. Some years ago, we had a Pakistani in Gitmo who came back to Lahore and told people that the American soldiers would tear pages from the Quran and flush them down the toilet. There was a huge set of riots that Americans were killed and property destroyed because you don't do that to the very words of God. And those are considered the words of God. The hadith basically means the words and sayings of the prophet, the sayings and doings of the prophet. And they're not a divine revelation, but they're things that you learn from watching Muhammad in his life. And I think the rest of that we can go through. Jihad, I did. And here's a timeline for Muhammad. Now having been said, give you a basic understanding where we're looking is in this area. Qatar, where we have a huge base is primarily Shia Muslim. This is Iran, this is Saudi Arabia. The largest oil fields are in this area up into Kuwait. But I'm gonna skip ahead and do some things that I know I can get through. There is a high regard for Christianity, though Islam asserts that the Jewish copyists changed some of the things. For example, instead of the Jews being the chosen people of God, in Islam it should have been the descendants of Ishmael, the first son of Abraham through his Egyptian wife, Hagar. Hagar was, according to the Bible, a concubine, which was a servant for the sole purpose of sex. But Islam asserts she was a wife. And there's a lot of disagreement at that point, but it's the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, are considered high order revelations of God but that they have been corrupted by humans. The Zabor is the Psalms of David. New Testament called in jail is dedicated to the prophet Jesus. Jesus and Mary are mentioned quite often throughout the Quran. They're held in high regard, especially Mary and the Hadith, again. Hadith vary from group to group. There are over 79 major and 30 minor Hadith authored by different people. Different parts of Islam use different Hadith to come to different conclusions. And we're gonna move ahead because I wanna get to where we need to be. We need to understand what happens where the two major divisions come from. Muhammad dies in 632. He did exactly what Alexander the Great did. He did not prepare for anyone to follow behind. There was no order of succession, no government in place, no line of sight in any way, shape, or form, and they began to fight. Now what they did do is institute what's called the caliph or the caliphate. The caliphate was to choose a leader and he would be in charge of all of Islam. And we're gonna see that again in a moment because one of the key understandings of the Muslim Brotherhood is they are committed to the caliphate. They want to restore the caliphate. The caliphate ended in 1924 after World War I and after Turkey made some choices, it ended. And that ending of the caliphate splintered all these Islamic groups. So they're not under control of any one person. And so when 9-11 comes along, an obscure cleric in the northern part of Saudi Arabia gives them permission to kill women and children, which would not have been done by most of Sunni Islam, but this obscure cleric did give the hijackers permission to kill women and children because women and children can only be killed in war as collateral damage and you have to try to avoid that damage, but he gave them permission to kill women and children. So the caliphs are individuals who seek to control all of Islam. When Muhammad dies, there's a fight between two factions. One faction believes that the caliphate should be drawn from the companions. These were the men who were with Muhammad in the desert. These were the men who helped form the Quran. These were the friends of Muhammad. People walked with him and fought with him. The other group believed that it should be a line of succession that was familial. And there was one family member that we know survived. Her name was Fatima and she married a man by the name of Ali who was actually a cousin to Muhammad. That group wanted Ali to be the head, the caliph. Well, the first person to get to be the caliph is the faithful friend, roughly equivalent to the beloved John to Jesus in the New Testament. That didn't last that long because Ali decided he was the rightful successor and a group of people wanted him to do that. And so they're ensued several battles, okay? Between the companions and between Ali and Ali's son Hussein. And after a while, they split. And there's a lot of differences. I can't go into all of them here, but for example, an Imam, an Imam in Shia Islam. Shia means party of Ali. An Imam in Shia Islam is a great teacher and they're limited in number. In Sunni Islam, as the mosque in Usper is, he's a local pastor. There are huge differences between the two, but these problems well over, they become huge challenges and ultimately Islam splits into two groups. Sunni Muslims, which account for the vast majority of Muslims. They are individuals who believe that Muhammad did not designate a successor. That the successor should be one of them. They are the majority in most Muslim countries. They are extremely conservative in some ways and extremely liberal in others. But they are not as committed to the way things are as Shias are. Shias have a clerical hierarchy. When the law comes down, it comes down. Sunnis have four major schools of law, some would argue five. At least two, maybe three minor schools of law. They don't argue over God. God is beyond their physical mental comprehension. And they will get together, argue and come to a consensus of what it means. And they try to come to a consensus. In Shia Islam, they don't. It comes down from the top what you believe. The grand Ayatollah, for example, it is believed has direct contact with a law and is in communication with a law. But the Shias that are primarily in Iran, Qatar and Eastern Iraq, they're different, quite different. And they have saints that they'll pray to. They have memorials to their saints and that they visit each year. They're very, very different and they hate each other. Sunnis don't like Shias as Shias don't like Sunnis. And you see this in potential for war in the Middle East right now. For example, I can tell you the Israelis have done two test runs in the Mediterranean on bombing the various Iranian nuclear sites. I can tell you that the United States, both under George Bush and under Barack Obama, have forbidden to allow them to refuel over Iraq. However, the Saudis have given the Israelis behind the curtain permission to refuel and land in Saudi Arabia. Why? Because they're afraid of a nuclear Islam in Shia, Iran. They're very afraid. Iran thinks that Saudi Arabia should not be in control of the city of Mecca. Iran doesn't like the Saudis. Saudis don't like them. And I can tell you for the last, well when George Bush was there, they pleaded with Bush, but in the last three years, the Saudis have backed the Israelis asking for help from the Americans to take out the nuclear facilities. They're afraid that they will be hit by nuclear weapons. Now you gotta understand the Saudis do not have nuclear weapons. However, they did fund the nuclear research for the over 70 weapons, nuclear weapons that the Pakistanis have. And I have been told by my contacts that they actually have told the Pakistanis if the Iranians go nuclear, they want some of those weapons that they paid for them by their production. Imagine yourselves, many of us are older, grew up in the time when they actually told us you could hide under your desk and you wouldn't be destroyed in a nuclear war. Seriously, I grew up in a town that produced fuel pellets for the Navy and we would practice not tornado drills, but we would practice leaving school and getting home and then we'd get in the car and leave. Well, there are only two ways into this little town that's surrounded by mountains and no one ever said, well, you're gonna get stuck in traffic, you're gonna get blown up. You're gonna get vaporized, okay? And my view was at that point, when I figured that out, I might as well just go out and stand and wait for it because I'm gonna get it. Never happened, but it's a challenge. But if you get a nuclear Iran, then you have a huge number of people in Sunni Islam that are unhappy. Now I go through all that to tell you that Iran is Shia, but the Muslim Brotherhood is Sunni. They rarely cooperate, though they have been lately, and the Iranians are masters at politics and delaying things, but they have met their match in the Muslim Brotherhood. These people make Democrats and Republicans look like child, children, seriously. They know how to manipulate a political system, and that's their goal. Their desire is to create a caliphate in the 21st century, a single overarching government with one person at the head who will direct all of Islam. Now this hasn't happened since 1924. Under the Ottoman Empire, there was a caliph, and the caliphate made all these religious choices and basically ran Islam. So in effect, the Quran and the caliphate is simple. The Quran never discusses the caliphate office. It's an office that's added but not in the Quran in any way. It does refer to Adam as God's caliph, and that's where they get the phrase, but there is nowhere where there is an office for a caliph. Some Muslim scholars assert the first four caliphs exercised greater religious authority, but the bottom line is that these were men whose job it was to interpret the law, to enforce the law, and to lead all of Islam. If you wanted to condemn someone, you went to the caliph. To declare jihad, you had to go through the caliph and these spacings are what I wasn't able to correct today and I apologize. They were the caliph controlled Islam, both Shia, Sunni, Wahhabi, Sufi, all of these various forms are controlled by the caliph. And one of the main desires of the Muslim Brotherhood, because the Brotherhood is not only in Egypt, the Brotherhood spans multiple countries, okay? They're pan Islamic, meaning they want to create an Islamic world country, so to speak. Nasser and the Assad's in Syria were pan Arabists, along with Saddam Hussein. They wanted to create a large, single Arab nation that would have excluded, by the way, the Iranians. They called it the United Arab Republic. It never happened and now the Muslim Brotherhood wants it to happen, but they're simply gonna call it the caliphate and it'll be a pan Islamic government. This is the last caliph, and this is the caliph declaring World War I, okay? Marks the World War I guy, although I don't think you were there, okay? I'm not quite that old. Okay, the Turks fought with the Germans. And the tribes of Arabia fought with the Turks and without the Turks and against the Turks and they were looking for the best deal possible, but they wouldn't go to war until the caliph okayed it. Now that's how much power the caliph had, and this is an individual, an office that the Muslim Brotherhood wants to reinstate. What they simply call the Worldwide Caliph and they have these conferences every two years, Australia, Indonesia, and they have hundreds of thousands of people who come as they plan out their desire to have a caliphate. Now the caliph was the overall leader of Islam until the end of World War II. One of the few soldiers, Turkish soldiers who came out of World War I with high regard was a colonel by the name of Mustafa Kamal Arditerk. The generals had shown themselves to be inadequate or absent, but Arditerk was not, and so he came in to after the war and he demanded that the Sultanate of the Ottoman Empire be broken up and that Turkey become a republic, a secular state, and he did that and it broke into about 50 constituent nations. They were divided by race and language and geography, ethnicity, politics, divergent theories. Palestine stayed under the mandate of the British, but Lebanon was created, Syria was created, Afghanistan was created, Jordan was created, Saudi Arabia was created, Qatar was created, the Arab Emirates were created, Iran was created, Afghanistan was created, all as part of the breakup and though in the ones Egypt and North Africa and other countries, what was thrust upon the Arab world at the end of World War I was the freedom to be who they wanted to be individually, where they had been led by one person in one office, now there's hope, go your separate ways and do what you wanna do. It was a huge challenge. Anybody know the one country that was democratic, had a democratic reelected president and everything and it lasted six years, anybody know? No, no, Afghanistan, okay, Afghanistan in the 30s and you look at Afghanistan now and you see a lot of divergence, all they have in common, these groups were simply, they had the caliph. Well, Arta Turk, when he did this, abolished the caliphate in 1924. The Ottomans had run Islam since 1517, 400 years and it eliminated the only legal, governmental and clerical structure recognized by all of classical Islam. That event, the ending of the caliphate is an event that the Muslim brotherhood looks at as one of the seminal events in dividing Islam and they will argue that Islam is divided when it should be united because there is no caliphate, that the West has had its ability to control and rule in many ways because they're divided nation. They're not one. Remember, the Ottomans got as close as Austria and then they were thrown back. A lot of students that we have here who are Albanians and Croatians are in fact what we call old world Muslims, old world Sunnis because they were part of the Ottoman Empire and they've grown up with that but when he dissolved the caliphate, Muslim brotherhood looked at that and said, he filled our fate, he divided us into individual countries. It would be like taking the United States, doing away with the federal government and letting each state do what they believed was right in their own eyes. Now, some of you may want that. I'm a libertarian, less government, better for me. Now, I'm not the libertarian with the funny aluminum hats and smoking marijuana because I don't go for either one of them but I don't like the government being in control but the thought that 50 states could protect themselves and have directed commerce, it's kind of weird. I mean, I don't know if it could happen in any way, shape, or form because there's too much division and this is what the Muslim brotherhood looks at as the seminal part point of the destruction of Islam in the 20th century, the removal of the caliphate and the fragmining or fracturing of Islam. Yes, sir. No, not Afghanistan, Iran. I'm not saying they're highly organized, they're disorganized today. They don't work together, okay? In any way, shape, or form. Iran, the... Are there any ways to do this? No, Iran. Have you got the bomb there? Iran's the closest to it. They have the ability to produce it. Bomb's not hard to make. Pakistan has bombs now. Iran is on the verge of doing that. And by the way, who knows about the Pakistanis? They too are Sunni Muslims. They too have an impact on the Muslim brotherhood and it's a changing world. I tell students, by the way, for those of you who are older, they are in greater danger than we were when we were young, okay? I'm telling you, with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, you may not realize this, the Chinese have called up their forces and put their air force and their ground forces on standby 300,000 Chinese soldiers at the border of North Korea. In theory to come in if there is a war between the US and North Korea. Some of you may have remembered that war. Some of you may have been in that war, okay? And to think that we could be looking at that again, looking at a nuclear Iran, a nuclear Pakistan, a nuclear Saudi Arabia, and everybody wants to be nuclear, somebody's gonna push the button someday. Yes, we gotta be ready for it. We gotta think that the Chinese who have so much of our debt are not dumb enough and the Chinese are not dumb to destroy us and lose all that debt, okay? We're in hope, hold them to them, hold them to them, but they have us too. There's a kind of a bond there, but who knows? But when you go to the Middle East, none of these people like each other, okay? And they just don't. And the reason they were formed together was because the Caliph did it. They all owed allegiance to him. There were not petty regional differences. They were all in the Ottoman Empire under the control of the Caliph, and the Caliph doesn't exist anymore. Islam splinters into different nations, and it's not good. Artiturk, who's not a Caliph, head of the Republic of Turkey, he ends the strict observance of Sharia law. And in Turkey creates a totally secularized government educational and judicial system. Turkey is considered by many in radical Islam to be the biggest target. If they can take out Turkey, and they can bring Turkey to a more radical view as happened in Libya and Tunisia and in Egypt, they would consider that the prize because of what happened. But religious law was replaced with secular law and for almost 90 years, Turkey has been a very secular nation. Now that's changing now. Istanbul is one of my favorite cities. I love it. I think it's beautiful. It's a lot of fun. But Turkey is becoming more and more violent. It's more and more strict jihadi Islamists try to overthrow the government and take control. And there's even a voting block that's growing in Turkey that is a minority now that is having a real impact on the government by using the elections and they're associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Because remember, the Brotherhood works politically. They want to bring this about. Now into the void that happened with the lack of the caliphate, we find people like Al-Swahiri and Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. That void caused real problems. Now, I won't be able to get all of the Muslim Brotherhood into you but they support the caliphate. And by the way, if anybody wants this, they just can contact Kerry Hope and I'll be more than happy to give you or email you the PowerPoint. But the caliphate is the desire, major desire of the Muslim Brotherhood. Because they feel that if they have a unified Islam, they can pull the she is in and all these groups together that one, they can stop uprisings like are happening in Syria. And trust me, Bashar Assad is no nice guy. He's a horrible guy. I have good friends in Syria and it's not easy to contact them anymore. Some of them I haven't been able to contact. And but Assad's favorite trick before this kind of rebellion, if someone or town was standing up against him, he'd go in, pick a hundred people, men, women and children, shoot them in the head, lay them on the major thoroughfare and pour asphalt over them and run a steamroller over them. And so as you drove down that major thoroughfare, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, you knew you were driving on people. He was not a nice guy. Bashar Assad is not a nice guy. But this is from their caliphate, their conferences, and they're having more and more of those. The real name for the Muslim Brotherhood, by the way, is the Society of Muslim Brothers. And some of the key people to look at with them, in 1928 to 38, they began to grow. It was started by a man named Hassan al-Bana and six other workers from the Suez Canal Corp company. They, Benal was a school teacher, as well as one of the other gentlemen I'll introduce you to. And he wanted to reintroduce within four years of the destruction of the caliphate, Syria law and a society based on Islamic law. And there was no real force to do this until the 1950s when one of his fellow school teachers was given the trip of a lifetime. Egypt had become very secular in the 50s. Nightclubs were abounding. Women were dressing like in the West and it was kind of a bawdy place. You wanted to go to Cairo was one of the places that the British would go to play. But one of them, school teacher by the name of Saeed Khatub, won a trip to observe American educational systems in Greeley, Colorado. Why Greeley, Colorado? I don't know. But he went to Greeley, Colorado and he became radical. And the two things that made him radical were American girls in Catholic school uniforms and cheerleaders. He believed that that exemplified what was wrong with America. That we were too oriented towards sex and towards material things and that Egypt needed to set itself apart. So the brotherhood will come back and do that. There was a period of time that they flirted with the Germans. We don't know really to what extent it was done. They did really assassinate one prime minister president in Egypt and then tried another. That was Gamal Abdul Nasser. And it really didn't work. They tried to do these things by warfare and political intrigue and they decided that they were getting beaten up, killed and tortured too much. But however, Saeed Khatub and his brother, Muhammad, were released after being imprisoned in 1964 and after being supposedly involved in another plot to overthrow the state, they were terminated, okay? Khatub was hung. Six other members of the brotherhood were hung on August 1966. Now, why is Khatub so important? He provides the intellectual basis for the brotherhood. He argued that Muslim society was no longer Islamic and must be transformed by Islamic vanguard through a violent revolution. Women didn't dress like Muslim women. They dressed like American Western tarts. And in 1980, for example, you go to Cairo and the women would be dressed like women that you would see going out to a cocktail party. 80% of the women dressed like that. Only 20% dressed in what's called the Egyptian Najib. The Najib is a full robe over you, but it has a veil and it even covers your hands. So really all you can see is eyes. As of 2004, the numbers have been reversed and this is before the spring, the Arab spring. And it was 80% of the women wore the Najib and only 20% dressed like Westerners. This was what they believed they had to do. They believed they first had to bring countries like Egypt and Lebanon back to their Islamic roots, okay? That these people had forgotten. They were ignorant of the divine guidance. They had relegated religion to a cultural thing and it needed to become part of them. They needed to submit to these things and the brotherhood bought into that full force. And Khatub's writings are well known because of that. It was, it is still rumored that no one can prove it. Anwar Sadat was the president of Egypt in 1970 who made peace with Israel and for that he was assassinated. Although a group of individuals who claimed the assassination were a splinter group, they were in fact part of the brotherhood, but they had so clouded the connections, no one could see it. And then the brotherhood became in 1982 a social institution. They ran clinics, they fed people. They changed their image totally from terrorists and hardline Islamists to old men who love to do good. That was a phrase common in Egypt at that time. Old men who love to do good. And people got enamored with them and they started allowing them back into the government. They started allowing them to have some votes and by 2005 the brotherhood itself begins to get people in parliament. And then most recently they were able to take over and form the government. Muslim brotherhood is a group of individuals whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel and the United States. And the preamble to their constitution which they have taken off of their website, they start with we are dedicated to the complete eradication of Israel and the United States. And yet we give them all sorts of money. We're in the middle of the sequester supposedly and we gave them $250 million, 15 new F-16 fighters. It's an amazing thing that they can convince American politicians and they convinced Republicans and Democrats that they're just old men doing good. But that's not their history. And in recent days that's not been what they've been doing in Egypt. Now what's gonna happen from here? I really don't know. I can tell you there are some of the smartest politicians around. It's kind of like, again I date myself but how many of you remember the Irish Republican Army? Shen Fenn that was the political arm. Well, we, Shen Fenn, they didn't do anything, right? They were just politicians. Well that's the new mode that the Muslim Brotherhood's moving into. That they're going to be an open political arm and they're going to try to encourage other countries and other Islamic jihadis to do the dirty work. And I doubt you're gonna see the fingerprints of the Brotherhood on anything because I hold them in high regard. They are not dumb people. They're very, very, very smart. It's just, I get irritated for example when I have people who look at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran and he's short, he's scruffy, he dresses like he's been to the Salvation Army and stuff and he always has an interpreter, okay? Problem is the man speaks five languages. The man has a PhD in transportation engineering. He uses the interpreter as I do in the Middle East. I wanna make sure they're not lying to me. And so I can get the gist and understand most of the conversation. If the interpreter lies to me, I know it and I know I can't trust him. And so that's what he does. He wants to come across as this little guy who doesn't know much, but he is one of the smartest men in Iran. And too often we fall for this. I am told, I've never met him, that Marci, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood is a wonderful conversationalist and really sweet and nice when you meet him. And just last week, three Christian churches were raided and people were tortured that because they were being Christians. Pardon me? Egypt. Egypt's a tough place to be a Christian today. Egypt used to have a large Christian population and it still does, but they are very persecuted, not only the cops, COPT, but evangelical Christians as well. They're very persecuted. Anybody know the country that had the largest Christian population? And let's give you a date, 2000? Take a guess. You can have another cookie if you can guess it, okay? I spare no expense in answering my questions. You said Babylon? Lebanon, no. Although I have a very good friend, I've been invited to a wedding there. I'm waiting for Hezbollah to give me a safe passage because if the Hezbollah don't give me a safe passage, they'll kill me. But no, Lebanon's choice because it used to be called the Paris of the Middle East. It was Iraq. And for all the bad things that Saddam Hussein did, he protected the Christians. He protected the Sias from the Sunnis and the Sunnis from the Shias. He didn't allow these types of things, but once we moved in to Iraq, it became impossible because of the way we fought the war. We had to fight the war and there's nothing to say about the soldiers who went. Soldiers went, did their duty and did what they, but the way we tried the nation build and things of that sort and Iraq now has one of the lowest Christian populations. People have had to flee. They've been killed. It's not good. So we actually brought part of that on Iraq. You said you had to go into Iraq? We didn't, no, I didn't say we had to go into Iraq. Well, if I did, I'ma spoke. When we went into Iraq, okay? We have one guy here who was in Iraq and in this room tonight and who was there firsthand and saw a lot of what went on. And we have wonderful soldiers who fought bravely and kind of like Vietnam, we didn't let them win everything. We should have let them win and we got what we got today because we didn't do that. We played politics. Would you agree with that, Darrell? May I bring you up? It's too late, I already did. Okay. Darrell was with the Marine Corps in Iraq, Gulf Two and the restrictions, rules of engagement put on our soldiers were enormous and the ability to bring peace was limited because of how we had to do it. We've never been a country to not have our politicians in charge of their wars and I'm not saying we shouldn't but when they get too involved, they screw it up. Up, I've gone from teaching to meddling now. And that includes Republicans and Democrats. So he was not elected. There was a ruling council and the ruling council would decide upon the caliph, okay? And that's exactly how the Muslim Brotherhood is set up. They have a ruling council. They are set up just like that and they're ready to go to declare a caliph. And you see, unlike Iran that they have client states in Syria and groups like Hezbollah and Lebanon and Qatar to some extent, the Muslim Brotherhood is just kind of all over the place. Okay, it's just not in one place. It's kind of everywhere and they've won the hearts and minds of people outside of Egypt and all sorts of countries. It's the Muslim Brotherhood, believe it or not, that has tried to put a reign on Hamas in southern Israel. They believe that Hamas is causing more trouble and that if they could do that. So they believe in the more stealthy warfare, let us bring unity and then we put the hammer down. So they're smart people. I'm always impressed by them. Someone else had a hand up? I wouldn't call themselves. There are members of the Brotherhood in the United States. They've had multiple meetings in this White House. There are estimated roughly 300 members throughout the entire Obama administration. They're not, I mean, they're not high up, but they are there. Hillary Clinton's personal secretary is, her family is part of the Muslim Brotherhood and good friends with the head of the Muslim Brotherhood. And just last week, the Muslim Brotherhood got an official White House tour. When they're not supposed to be there but they got an official White House tour. So there exists, they're in the open, they're not hiding who they are in any way, shape or form. They believe they can overthrow the US and take control of the US, overthrow is the wrong word. They believe that they can take control of the US by bringing the US to Islam. And then you gotta watch what they do. And they're active in Egypt. I mean, in the UK, they're active in France, really active in France in the UK. But they're a stabilizing force. They're not radical. They're not seen as radicals because they try to do things more politically and quiet. And they do take care of poor Muslims in France and in the UK. So it's, this is why I told you, I couldn't tell you they're great conspirators. They're gonna overthrow us and everybody needs to have a weapon and know how to use it and be good if you knew some Arabic, because I can't say that to you, okay? Just like when the mosque was formed in Usberg, I stood up and argued that the mosque should be formed, that they're not radicals. They're not Islamic jihadis. They're not Islamists. They had the right to be there. This is the land of freedom and they should have that right. I live in Usberg and I had all kinds of people who were unhappy with me. I went out the door at the meeting hall in the town of Wilson as I left. The guy took his elbow and stepped into me and hit me. He said, I know where you live. And I said, good. You're welcome to come any time, but don't expect me to be just sitting there. I may use a cane at times, but I'm real good at using it to walk and I'm real good at bashing in heads, but he never came back. And I lost a lot of friends in Usberg over that. Yeah. Oklahoma, North Carolina, New Jersey. Oklahoma actually passed a law against the use of Sharia law and it failed. I mean, and it was overthrown by the United States government in appeal. Look at UK and what the Brotherhood has succeeded in doing. They've taken sections of Liverpool, Pool, Manchester and Birmingham and they're not patrolled by the British police. There are no British courts in those areas of Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. There are Muslim Sharia courts with Muslim police and in these areas, the Brits don't go. No British government law is there and slowly this is starting to eat away at British power because they've done that. But in North Carolina, there's a real movement towards that and in New Jersey. Now I really don't wanna know who's North Carolina. I like Oklahoma and my wife is partly from New Jersey but I'm really not upset about New Jersey going away. Yeah. Sure, bring the lights up because we're, I thought I might have too much, I did so, but you can bring the lights up. This thought might be easier for the Zoom fans. Thank you Carl. Anyone else? Yes, sir. There are some people that would argue that the brotherhood is the founding parent of Al Qaeda. Al-Swahiri, who is now in control of Al Qaeda, is an Egyptian and he was an accomplished surgeon. Again, don't look at these people as crazy people sleeping in caves. They're very smart, speaks very good English and he was imprisoned and when he was imprisoned, the brotherhood supported his family, okay? And he still acted upon the tenets of the brotherhood. The brotherhood can be Shane Finn and they can be up front and political but let Al-Swahiri go and again, you look at Osama bin Laden, it drives me nuts when you underestimate your enemy. Osama bin Laden was a construction engineer. He had a bachelor's degree in construction engineering who worked for his dad who owns the largest construction firm in the Middle East, the bin Laden Group, okay? You wanna know how you can figure out to take down the World Trade Center? Wasn't hard. He had a construction engineer that looked at it and said this is the easy way to do it. And I had been told that in February of 1993, I was a corporate officer with a company called D. Witter Reynolds Discover. Our corporate offices were in two world trade and I was on the emergency committee. In unlike business, Carl and Mark will be very upset at this. You know, when it was a good year, I got to travel. I was suffering from my company in Boca Raton, Florida, okay, at the Breakers Resort and I think the most I've ever had to suffer for UW was the Holiday Inn in Wautoma. You know, I just don't seem to get the same level. And they called into a meeting. This was the first attempt to take down the World Trade Center with a bomb packed in a van and it wasn't sufficient to do it. It didn't take them down to get part of the Vista Hotel and it finally came back to the blind shake and the Brotherhood claims the blind shake is one of their own. And their lobbying the Obama administration to release the blind shake and his followers from prison. They in February of 1993 tried to blow up two world trade. Our plan worked, we moved all our data to an offsite building that was set up to hold data and move most of our people and we lost nothing off of it. But when two world trade center came down, the second time we should have moved. We argued for a year because I went into this presentation on the executive committee and they put out the plans and they say, hey look, you need to understand the World Trade Center was designed to do certain things and it's designed to take a hit from a 707, a 727 or 737. But if a 757, 67 that were on the drawing boards and 747 hits it with a full fuel load, it'll come down if they hit it right. And the first play hit one world trade too high. It almost didn't come down. That's why it came down after the other one because it needed the force up there. It needed these supports to buckle and that's why World Two came down so quickly was because they hit it lower. They hit it right where they wanted to do it. And when we found some of the engineering specs that someone had been logged and had been using in the Kabul office, they clearly had planned this out for hitting the World Trade Center in that way. You do not underestimate these people. They are intelligent, they are planned. I like immediate gratification. I want it done. I want it over with. And that's just me. I'm kind of a typical American I guess. I want it done. These people, short term for them is 20 years. Okay, you have to understand this mindset. They will work and continue to work and be slow about it because they believe that they'll chip away and they'll get where they want to be. Yeah, history of Islam and Khatub in particular. America is, same thing with Iran. America is the source of much of their pain and much of the degradation of their societies and of Islam. How should I put it? One form of jihad that's common to the Muslim Brotherhood. In theory, an outer jihad, a jihad that's a physical war is due to when the country is invaded. But the Muslim Brotherhood has expanded it to include cultural invasion and economic invasion. And this has spread throughout the entire Middle East and it rooted in the Brotherhood. Iran argues that, we call it the Great Satan because we introduce scantily applied women into Islam that we are actually launching jihad against them by exporting our culture to theirs. And that's the major reason. We are the major supporter of those things. And some have been lauded and hated us because we put an army on Solomon Islamic soil, Saudi Arabia and he felt that the Muslims should defend themselves. He was mad at Saudi Arabia because he was raising a Muslim army to take out Saddam Hussein but they went with the Americans and the British and the French and he hated them for it. But it's amazingly a cultural war that they see. Yes. Pakistan. Well, they are but Pakistanis do not have a missile capable of hitting Israel. Okay? President Obama does have a thing about the Pakistanis and I think it's due to the fact they have so many nukes and the fact that the Pakistanis really don't like us doing what we're doing in Eastern Afghanistan. Killing people with drones, taking out people who are our enemies. They don't like that but they are doing it. They're supposed to be our friends and they get huge sums of money and all sorts of stuff but they're not doing it. So Pakistanis have shown no willingness to go to war with Israel and the United States. They're too afraid of the Indians because the Indians have nuclear weapons as well and they don't want to waste their nuclear weapons going west when they're more worried about India. And so, because remember Pakistan was part of India at one time and the British freed Pakistan from India after World War II because the reason they gave independence was not Mahatma Gandhi. They couldn't afford it. They were bankrupt and they had to give them away and they divided them off and Pakistan was, Bangladesh was originally titled East Pakistan and now it's Bangladesh because what they did was move all most of the Muslims they could into Pakistan. And yes, there's no doubt about that. Israel has tremendous defense forces. They have the iron dome system using what's known as the arrow dart, which is much better defense system than our patriot. We helped fund it and the Israelis have tried to sell it back to us and the last four years we haven't bought it, but it can take out multiple rockets at a time and when they, Hamas earlier this year was shooting a lot of rockets at them, small rockets and medium rockets as well. They were overwhelmed with the system so they upgraded their software, put more missiles in the battery and they're prepared to defend themselves in a nuclear war but they know that the best thing to do is to stop it before it starts. And they've done that before. They did it in 1992, when Iraq had a nuclear reactor in a place called Osiris and they flew down from Bershiba down through the Red Sea and dropped down to 500 feet and turned east over Saudi Arabia and north towards Iraq at 500 feet. 500 feet at plus Mach 2, a missile or a bullet, a single bullet hits your airplane, it'll shear the wing off and they flew at 500 feet, went into attack formation over the Iraqi nuclear weapon, bam, wiped it flat. Then they turned east, flew over Jordan which at that time had the number one anti-aircraft system and they hit their afterburners and went faster than we thought those planes could go and they didn't even know the Israelis were there until they were landing back at Bershiba. And two years ago, the Syrians were building a reactor with the help of the Iranians and North Koreans and the Russians and the special ops groups in Israel called Syriot Maktel, Ben Ali Nath Yahu was a member of Syriot Maktel as well as the defense minister, Ehud Barak who also used to be prime minister at one time and these are very highly trained people. They flew them in in what they called whisper copters. They took over the facility, they called every North Korean, Korean, every Iranian, every Syrian and every Russian there and they blew it to smithereens and got out. You don't hear much about it because the Syrians were so upset over it that they just bulldozed the site but don't underestimate the Israelis as well. They're ready to go. My guess is though, I've been saying they're ready to go for the last two years but they were made some promises last year and what they didn't have were bunker buster bombs but in theory, Obama agreed to give them bunker buster bombs if they didn't attempt to take them out in October and the next time it's best to take them out as late May, early June. In theory, they have the bunker buster bombs to do it now. Who knows? Gotta keep everybody guessing. If you don't have it, you gotta make them think you got it. Well, a lot of the mosques that were created in this country in the last 30 years were created by funding by the Saudi Arabia's, Saudi Arabia with a very radical group called the Wahhabis. The Wahhabis want to return to the 14th century. Women do have a low role in society. They want to do away with technology, away with education for women and all of those things and the Wahhabis are quite very, most of the men who took out the World Trade Center in 9-11 were Wahhabis, okay? But they're here, they're everywhere but that, you know, I think a bigger danger is that there are 400,000 Iranians that are trained to go into American schools, padlock the doors and shoot everybody. Now, and the question is, if we make Iran mad, are they gonna bring these people in through our southern border and they'll just disseminate out and attack American schools? But they are trained. They're the Revolutionary Guard, the Al-Quds group of the Revolutionary Guard and about two-thirds of them are women because we have this thing about women. We don't think women will blow you up or shoot you. Okay? Trust me, they will. Oh, well, we've had a lot of extremists in Christianity too, okay? I gotta tell ya. Well, Islam did for a while. The Brotherhood has really tried to stop that and right now, for example, I was talking to Mark beforehand about Prague. Prague used to be a heavily Christianized city in Czechoslovakia. Now it's got the lowest percentage of Christians in all of Europe. The Christianity in Europe is effectively going on. The number one business in the UK right now is buying old churches and converting them into bed and breakfast. That's just the world. So yeah, we're on a decline. Christianity's on a decline. But Islam is moving quickly. Carl, did you hear me hand up? I did, actually, and again, I was thinking everything you said, you could replace Muslim Brotherhood with fundamental Christianity. You replaced that phrase. In fact, even the first three bolded points to your PowerPoint presentation. You could apply it exactly to that. And you know. That was the one comment I had. Carl's our, I'll call him wonderful. I don't know if he'll like that comment. Geography professor here. And he knows, as some of you know, very conservative in my personal religious faith. But yeah, I fundamentalist Christianity and druid fundamentalists can also be dangerous. Anybody can be that thing that way. But when Protestantism began in the Reformation, you had Catholic Protestant wars. One of the original leaders of the Protestant Reformation was a guy by the name of Ulrich Swingley. And he died on battle in battle with the Catholics. People can become radicalized out of anything. And most of the time it is divergent from the religion they propound. And I think radical Islam is divergent from Islam. As I think radical forms of Christianity are divergent if they're going to. But if your concern is with them actually, and I'm assuming your concern is the control of nuclear weapons and other. I'm concerned with. Other military technology, one can make the same argument that because you mentioned something about parliament, well one, the Muslim population in the UK is only about 4.8%. So- Right now. Right now. So the likelihood of them actually controlling parliament any time within the next 100 years- No, their birth rate is enormous. You're the geography. And it's still, even though it's a monarchy, even though the queen has no- Real power. No, real power. That's like saying I'm the head of my household and my life doesn't believe me. It's highly unlikely. So your concerns with, you know, No, my concern is- Let me finish. With losing the UK as an ally, that's very doubtful. But one could make the same argument that if you have a fundamentalist Christian who seeks the presidency in this country and receives it and is elected, then they are controlling the largest military power on the planet and they could likelihood create, you know- Well, it doesn't have to be a fundamentalist. It could be- It could be, yeah. It could be a Chicago lawyer. It could be a lawyer from Delaware. It could be a Tennessee hillbilly. It could be. Because we'd probably be more interested in bringing our stills up than anything else. But the reality is, radicals tend to form a small group of each one. But in Iran, it is a national system with a single goal. And that may be one reason we've treated Iran with kid gloves in a very real sense. I don't know why. Because Iran, when there was an attempted rebellion, we did nothing. We went to the aid of the Libyans and others. Well, we did nothing in Iran. I'm most concerned about the Iranians. And, see, Maqoud Ahmadidjad is a member of a group called the Twelvers. He believes that what will cause the last imam to appear is a nuclear war. That's what he believes. It's just like a red heifer in Israel, too. Yeah. So he believes that. But you can't make a red heifer a red heifer. The same argument of a friend of mine who was Christian. But you can't make a red heifer a red heifer. But if you've got a weapon that can start a nuclear war and you think God has called you to do that, and nobody's talking you down, he doesn't sit down with me, you and Maq, and we argue with each other. You call me an idiot, and I call you an idiot, I have never called you an idiot either. That's just a point, you know. That kind of dialogue is good. But in Iran, they don't have the dialogue. No, but I don't think anybody's disputing Iran because the point at the top was the Muslim Brotherhood. I understand, but you have to understand all of those. The Muslim Brotherhood is a master at political intrigue, but their goal is the establishment of a worldwide Islamic world. Well, and that may be the case, but my concern is with these good people here is that we have a lot of people who are Muslim who've migrated to this country, and I don't want them to undergo the misperception that every person they see walking down the street, whether they're wearing a hijab or a burqa, or a burqa, but I mean, but I think, and I'm just saying, and maybe this is my misperception, it seems that the rhetoric of your talk almost had that tint to it. I disagree. I don't want these people to think that every person they see who is a Muslim or they may perceive to be Muslim is going to go into a school and shoot it because that's the other thing that I take a look at. Karl, I stood up in fault for the mosque to be built in Newspurt, and so, no, I'm not doing that. I'm just telling you how the Muslim Brotherhood works. I'm saying a statistic that people are going to come from Iran and go in and lock the schools down and shoot them up. That seems a little inflammatory, and I'd like to see the source that you're seeing. I'd be more than happy to. But you approach it all geographically, but there are strategic considerations, Karl, that are there, that we evaluate all the time, but the Al-Quds do not hide the fact that if we get into war with them, it will be an asymmetrical war, and that's what that is. That's not just that they would come and do it. It's their response to us in a war. All wars are as it is. I want to make a comment, but I find you to be very accusatory of his remarks. I think he was very cautious in stating facts and whatnot, and very accusatory, and saying a red heifer is equivalent to this guy in Iran wanting a nuclear war. What's your deal with saying a red heifer in Israel? That has to do with building a temple, not something with nuclear war. The end time, so that's all. But the red heifer has nothing to do with blowing people up, harming anybody. It nearly means building a house of worship. And in a situation when he was referring to someone being crazy enough to think that God wants him to blow people up, it's really unfair in regard to what you were saying in regard to Israel. Okay, thank you, folks. We appreciate it. We hope you had fun. One day we'll have Carl up here, which is good. One of the things I enjoy about UW-Chaboya is that we can disagree. And your children get a wide viewpoint. Mark and I used to be on Facebook together, okay? We were Facebook friends. That totally destroys Mark's image, okay? But Mark and I got along fine arguing with each other, but our friends got mad at both of us, threatened both of us. We had to quit being Facebook friends, not because we weren't friends, but because our friends couldn't control themselves. Last one, yes ma'am. I think we made a major mistake. We should have gone in quickly. We should have surgically taken out Ben Laden. We knew where he was in Torobora, and we delayed doing it. And then left. Nation building in Afghanistan has always fell. The British fell, the Russians fell, the Mongols got absorbed. One of these days you gotta realize it's not gonna happen. Take out the bad guys, the guys that attacked us, and leave. Because I can guarantee you that after we leave this time, it's gonna all fall back apart. I'll buy you dinner at an expensive restaurant. If I'm wrong. But I won't make you buy me one if I'm right. Because I can tell your husband was sitting here thinking, I'm not gonna put that cash. I'm not taking you out. She's substantially more attractive. Within two years of us leaving, Afghanistan will be back to where it was. And it's a failure in our approach. Nation building didn't work in Iraq. It's not working in Afghanistan. We gotta get over this. If someone bloodies their nose, bloody theirs back. Get it over with. But don't sit down and try to make them our friends, because they're not. Hadn't heard that. May I use that sometime? Okay. And I'm just old enough to remember this song. Although I can't sing, so you wouldn't want me to try. One could argue, nation building didn't work in the Confederacy. Do what? When has nation building ever worked? Well, one could argue, nation building didn't work in the Confederacy. Nations have to build themselves. Well, you know, it's obvious to some of you that I'm not from Wisconsin. I can talk for a Southern if you want me to. I'm from that part of the world where it wasn't the civil war. It was the wall of Northern aggression. And it still called the wall of Northern aggression. Okay. So anyway, thank you guys. See you.