Reclaiming Western Civilization

with me, and that woman is Melanie Phillips. Melani Philips is a long standing British conservative commentator, newspaper columnist, TV presenter, and also the author of the book that I currently hold in my hands, in which I recently read myself, The Builders Stone, How Jews and Christians built the West and why only they can save it now The Builderstone and my book is on civilization. There are some things that are a little different, I think Melani and I

don't necessarily agree on everything. We'll see if there are any areas where we disagree over the course of our conversation here in just a few moments. But certainly broadly speaking, we agree on the big questions. And the big question is essentially as follows in the aftermath of the Hamas program of October seven, twenty twenty three, And not just the pagram, but the world's reaction to the Pagram, And boy was that a horrific reaction. In the aftermath of that,

can the West recover? Can the West one understand what it is that which built it, which above all is a biblical inheritance. Can the West understand that? Can it come to appreciate that? And can it come to fight for that and take a stand for that? That is the most important thing, because the reaction to the program wasn't just quote unquote anti Israel or anti Semitic, it

was anti Western. When you are failing to distinguish between a culture that loves life and a culture that loves death, for a culture that flourishes and a culture that seeks destruction subjugation. When you can't distinguish, when you are incapable of logical you are morally discerning between these two dichotomous, completely opposing forces, then you have lost the plot. And if the West is to be saved, it must re understand the plot at its most basic, rudimentary level. Because

it was the Bible that gave us Western civilization. Sure, there is absolutely a role to be played for some no Biblical sources, namely ancient Greek and Roman Greco Roman thought. There's a role for that, certainly, no doubt about that, Aristotle, Cicero, any of the greats. But the West would not be the West where not for the Bible. It's not necessarily just free speech or the marketplace of ideas or the

economic market places in general. These things are important. There are key features of moderny is something that Melani Phillips emphasized in her book. But the core, the absolute bedrock of that which has made us great, and that which alone can actually still make us great. The core is the Bible. That is these shared inheritance of Jews and Christians.

That is, these shared inheritance of the original people of the book, the original folks led by Moses who stood there at the base of Mount Sinai during the Revelation, the shared inheritance of the children of Issiel, the Jews and Christiendom, the great gentile offshoot that spread the message and civilized what today is known as the West. Jews and Christians should both be proud of the role that their religions have played in the development of the West.

But if the West is going to stand up today against the forces that seek to subjugate it, against intersectional wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism. It's going to have to regain some confidence and appreciation of what it once was and what God willing will once again be in short order. Well, it's the end of the holiday season and it's the time of the year where we are all having those deep questions as to what should we believe, should we believe in anything at all? What is the basis of

our civilization? All the fun things that we discuss not just this on of the year, but oftentimes on a day day basis here on the Josh Hammer Show. And it's really a thrill to bring on a long standing writer, thinker and commentator who's been saying and writing about these very topics for many many years now, including most recently in the form of the book that I Hold in my hands, The Builder's Stone. Melanie Phillips is the author of The Builderstone. She's also a columnist at Times of London,

long standing British conservative commentator. I recently finished this book and thoroughly enjoyed it. So Melanie Phillips, thank you for joining the Josh Hammer Show.

Israel and civilization have a lot in common. There are some differences, to be clear that they're not exactly verbatim carbon copy, but very broadly speaking similar books written in a in a post October seventh milieu in this world, the world where the world has been morally confused as as to who to side with, not just between Israel and Hamas, but more broadly speaking, between civilization and barbarism.

More generally speaking, Melli, I think I think one thing that I would like to kind of start in and to get our conversation started here. For a while, right of center partisans such as myself, perhaps yourself as well. I'm not sure how you would self described, but conservatives, I think felt pretty reassured that we were unanimously on

the side of team civilization and not team barbarism. But unfortunately here in the United States there have been some signs that not everyone who thinks of him or herself as being conservative or on the right is necessarily part of teams civilization. I was told me that maybe you could kind of just dive in unpack some of these strands. Here, what is Western civilization as you can see and define it?

And then perhaps by extension, why do you think that some folks who think of themselves as being on the right seem to have lost the plot a little?

idea is modernity. To me, the West became the West, as it were, in the way that we think of it, when the modern world really emerged after the eighteenth century Enlightenment, when we had the division of church and state, the arrival of toleration of minorities, the development of what became democracy and the democratic nation state, and that powered what we now think of as the world, which was to be the cutting edge of technology, of science, of reason.

That's what I mean when I that's what I mean when I talk about the West. Now, your second question was what happened to the West and was that your question? What was your question?

several decades, which has caused this situation to occur. Because for sure, what has driven what we are now seeing, the eclipse of reason, the replacement of truth by power, ideologies based on power relations, and all those things which from which I think in large measure the animus against Israel has developed. It was the left that powered all

that through their ideological preconceptions and obsessions. But we should have been able to rely on conservatives to conserve, to understand what was at stake, what was at risk, and from where I was sitting, and I'm going back now to you may be shocked to hear this, but even in the time of Margaret Thatcher, when I was a young journalist and I was working for The Guardian, and it was considered by everybody on the left that she was, you know, totally dreadful and so right wing and so on.

And it was around that time that I began to realize something was going terribly wrong with the West, and I decide did I realized that she didn't understand what was going on at all, and that the right, the forces of conservativesm And I'm really speaking from Britain because from the perspective of Britain, because that's the country I know best. But I think this kind of crosses over to a large extent to what happened in America as well.

Maybe not quite the same time, but what happened was that this that when the Soviet Union collapsed, when the Berlin Wall fell, I remember conservatives in Britain saying, what do we do now for an encore? We've shot our fox, we don't have an enemy anymore. What banner are we now going to march behind? And I remember the answer the answer was, we will march behind the banner of liberty.

And at that time, at that point, I thought, oh, no, they don't get it, because if they are adopting liberty as their light motif, they are going to occupy exactly the same patch of ideological ground as the left. The left did liberty in the social sphere, lifestyle choice. Everybody makes up their own lifestyle. Nobody can tell anybody that their lifestyle or culture is better than anyone else, all

that sort of stuff. It's basically to do with the self. Me, I am an individual whose own subjective perspective trumps facts and evidence and reason. That was what the left was saying, and it was busily collapsing Western education as a result, because it decided that the nation's state, the Western nation state, was born in the original sins of colonialism and imperialism

and exploitation and whiteness and all the rest of it. Now, faced with this, the conservatives didn't really it didn't realize this because the conservatives only saw the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union disappeared, therefore there was no problem anymore. So what we they're going to do? They were going to have liberty as their load star. So they adopted liberty. From the point of view of economics. They decided that the free market was the solution to everything that was

wrong in the world. I remember missus Thatcher thinking saying, in fact that if everything in Britain was run like Marks and Spencer iconic store, which was at that time

very well run, then everything will be fine. And I remember thinking, none of these conservatives understands that what has gone wrong is a denial of the world springs of Western culture and Western civilization, which is rooted in biblical values, which consists of upholding a set of traditions rooted in history going back, in the case of Britain and the West, many hundreds of years. And if you get rid of that, if you get rid of that scuffolding, the society and

the culture will implode. It will just disintegrate. It will no longer know what it is, it will no longer love what it is, it will no longer want to defend itself. And that's exactly what happened. Scroll on down all these decades and we arrive at now, and there are elements on the on on, on what's called the right, which do understand this. They understand that in order for the Wester survive, it has to reconnect to its core

values rooted in its historic traditions, in its religion. It's it's its religious basis, uh, and in the institutions that

have kept it going, but they understand that. But at the same time, in America we have seen this faction or this this this, this this element in in conservatism which kind of got that I think correctly, has itself now splintered, and we've seen the emergence of I think you were alluding to this the Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentez, canda own tendency, which has gone down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, which is deeply, deeply anti Semitic and has an entirely false idea of what America is and what

the West is and how they should behave And so America is in a state of confusion. Britain is not in that state of confusion yet he doesn't have an equivalent to Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. It has a few fringe actors on the extreme white supremacist right, but they really are tiny. But Britain has a different trajectory that Britain has. Kind of if you can imagine America as being I see it in a sort of pictorial form.

America is kind of divided down the middle. You have the people who want to preserve America and Western civilization on one side, you have the people who want to destroy it and replace it by something else. On the other among the people who want to preserve it, they have shaded off into this lunatic tendency. But basically it's a line down the middle Republicans Democrats. In Britain, we don't have that line. It's not a line down the middle.

It's more a kind of diagonal line. The entire system has slid, nobody has got it, and so we see the arrival the emergence of a populist party reform led by a extremely charismatic politician called Nigel Farage, who at the moment is leading the polls amazingly in a two party a very very strong two party system. According to the polls, he become Prime minister. There's an election today. I don't think that's going to happen, But anyway, that's

not the point. The point is that he's come from nowhere because basically the British public has lost faith in the entire political system. Now in America, I don't think you have that. I think you have a division, a very sharp division. So it's a different kind of situation. But basically, can servatism has lost the plot for many, many years, and that's why we are where we are.

retelling of the Arthurian legend. The Pen Dragon Cycle Rise to the Merlin premieres January twenty second, exclusively on Daily Wire Plus, watch the new trailer and out at Pendragon Series dot com. Well, I really appreciate the deeply false manser. And again, folks, Melani Phillips, you fought Melanie on X at Melanie Latest. She also has a substack crent new book which I hold in my hand, The Builder Stone, How Jews and Christians built the West and why only

they can save it. I very strongly do recommend it. I spend the number of Shabots Jewish shabbitz reading it myself. So Melanie, I there's lots of compact there. To be clear, I'm not sure we have time for all of it. But one thing that you said that deeply resonate with me was this quip about Margaret Thatcher during the nineteen eighties, talking about this well run department store and how that could or could not solve solve all of our problems.

And this is something that I've been very critical of on this side of the pond as well in my own capacity. Is this notion that that conservatism is really just interchangeable with classical liberalism, and that that that that free markets could solve each and every one of our problems the world over, that there is no solution for which simply deregulating and cutting taxes is not merely necessary,

but is actually sufficient. I've been extraordinarily critical of of this myself because it seems to me and I don't need to I certainly don't need to describe this to

a well known British conservative commentator. But going back to to and Burk himself in so many great conservative statesmen, oftentimes from your side the pond, it seems to be that the that the that the essence of conservatism is this notion that we exist to conserve, as its name would imply, and to therefore culturally preserve, as Burke would have described it, in this social compact between the dead,

the living, and the yet unborn. And that raises then the obvious question as to what exactly are we conserving there. And there's a lot of ways to answer this question, but I think you and I would both agree that it really does ultimately start with the Bible. And this is itself something of a contentious point, because you do have some folks here, at least on this side of

the pond. Do you name some of them, folks like Tucker Carlson and so forth, who are trying to essentially write the original people of the book, that is to say, the Jewish people out of the story, out of the story of the United States of America, and by extension, out of the story of Western civilization. There's essentially an attempt in information operation to get rid of the Judeo from the Judeo Christian in the popular term has been

used in the United States for many decades now. Now you and I both push back on this very strongly

in our in our respective books. There I'm wondering if if you could just present that argument in very forthright Fams what is the unique contribute To be clear, we could speak for hours about this, but perhaps in more succinct fashion, what is the most forthright to the point case for the unique contributions of the original people of the book, the break tradition where generally the Torah and all that that entails.

I mean, it's such a thing in the West that you know, in one compartment is religion, and that stands for all bad things, you know, people who don't have education, people who are irrational, they're superstitious, authoritarian, And in the other box is all good things. And that is set.

It's rationality, it's reason, it's science, its progress. And this couldn't be more wrong because it wasn't the Greeks and it wasn't imprinted in our DNA as universal values, the values that everybody who is civilized in the West holds dear,

whether they're secular or religious, are Jewish values. Okay, Christianity is the foundational creed of the West, but Christianity doesn't come from nowhere, and the principles that animate the West, which were brought into the West through Christian Church, are basically Jewish values. What do I mean by that? They're moral values. They are the values that people take for granted. The idea that we all have should have respect for

every human life. Well, that's only because we believe, or the Bible tells us that every human being was made in the image of God. If you don't believe that, you don't respect every human being. The idea of personal freedom and political freedom, this is something that's not fully understood.

I mean people understand if they think about it, that you know, from the Mosaic Code in the Hebrew Bible, mediated through Christianity, we have things like compassion and putting other people first and stuff like that, and moral taking, moral responsibility. These are vital to the West. Without that, the West wouldn't have been the moral and therefore the

civilizational force that it became. But what people don't fully understand is that there was something else that was terribly important, which was that the principles of that animated the people in the eighteenth century Christian evangelicals, the Puritans, who were the people who are political thinkers in Britain, and they basically laid down the template for what became in due

course Britain's constitutional monarchy. It was where the power of the monarch and the church were constrained by the democratic institution of parliament. Now that arose in Britain because those thinkers, those eighteenth century evangelicals, drew explicitly on the Hebrew Bible and on the example of the Davidic monarchy in ancient Israel, which had certain key principles, of which perhaps the most

important were two. First of all was the idea that law which governs everybody was not something to be handed down by a ruler and imposed against everyone's will to make everyone do what the ruler wanted. Law. In the example of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Kingdom of Israel, law was founded in the consent of the people. Going back right to the point where Moses came down the mountain and said to the people, here's the law. What do you think, will you do it? And they said,

we will do and we will hear. And this idea that law had to have the consent of all the people is absolutely fundamental to modern democratic representative democracy, and it was revolutionary at the time it was given to the West by the Jews. That was the first really important point. The second equally important point was the idea

of limited government. Okay, there were plenty of monarchs kings in ancient Israel who were dreadful tyrants and you know, ghastly, but the template was limited government that the kings of ancient Israel understood, or should have understood, that above them was the Almighty. They were not the supreme ruler. I mean, in ancient civilizations, the ruler was supreme. Nobody was above

the ruler. The ancient kings of Israel believed that above them was the Almighty, and they were in turn surrounded at their level by people who constrained their power, people called prophets, people called judges, and people call priests. Now that principle also was understood by the framers of British parliamentary democracy. This idea of limited government, and the idea that again in the King David did this. You basically unite what would otherwise be warring tribes into a united kingdom.

These were revolutionary concepts, and those people in Britain who produced the template for what became Britain's parliamentary democracy went to America, founded America and founded your constitution. And you know, American constitutional documents are absolutely studied with the explicit references to the Hebrew Bible. So the importance of Judaism to the development of America and the development of the West

cannot be overestimated. That's ancient Israel and ancient Judaism or Judaism from ancient.

them as well. And the Devil's Adam. The question is essentially this, Let's say hypothetically that I am sympathetic to

Tucker Carlson's arguments here. And one of the reasons that I'm sympathetic is because, although, let's conceive the sake of argument that Genesis one twenty seven, Deuteronomy seventeen, which you're kind of alluding to, this notion that the ancient kings in Israel had to write Taurus roll because they are bound to off, let's kind of stimulate, just for the sake of argument, that all of these things are really important for Western civilization. You know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge,

They're really, really, really important. Okay, back to the hypothetical, Let's say that I agree that they're important, but I don't think that the jew Which people themselves, are necessary anymore because Christianity itself has existed for two millennia. Now, so what do we still need this Jewish Christian alliance? What do we still need this alliance between the United States and Israel and so forth there? How do you respond to that particular, that particular objection, let's call it.

of kind of the abstract thinking. More pertinently, perhaps for the Tucker Carlsons of this world, the Jews are vital today in Israel, the very country which he thinks is dragging America into pointless wars which are not in America's interest and from which America gets nothing. It could not

be more the other way around. First of all, in military terms, as successive American administrations have fully understood, Israel is the It's what's it called, you know, the the the the aircraft carrier, America's aircraft carrier in the Middle East. It is the forward salient. It's the forward troop carrier of the defense of the West against the Islamic world. If Israel weren't there, the Islamic world would have no barrier between it and the West. I e America. That's

the first thing. The second thing is that America, like Britain, unlike other countries which currently disdain Israel and are hostile to it. America gains an enormous amount from Israel, far more than it gives. Now that may see, aren't contentious.

But America relies, as does Britain, to a very great degree, on Israeli intelligence, Israeli military intelligence about the region, and not just about the region, but increasingly about Islamic extremism and terrorism that has come already planted itself in America to as a result of the negligence of successive American administrations. And I would say British administrations too. But Israel has the intelligence about this, or about a lot of this,

and America needs that. The next thing to say is that, you know the famous figure or the famous argument that America basically funds through billions of dollars every year Israeli military equipment and song and you know this is just, you know, a drain on America's resources for what, well,

this is completely untrue. I forget now the precise figure, but it's something like America gains something like more than one thousand times the value in terms of arms productions, and heaven knows what else that goes on in America as a result of this relationship which in which America pays whatever it is, thirteen billion, whatever it is I can't remember, and gets back in effect a vast amount.

More so, these things are tremendously important. And the last thing to say is that far from dragging America into fighting foreign wars, and you know, our boys are gonna die for what for our cause in which we have no skin in the game. This is obscene. It is Israeli boys and girls who have been dying to protect America. It is against you know, a Israel A has been fighting a desperate existential war of defense against basically Iran

and its proxies. Iran. I mean, I don't know whether people like Tucker Carlson even know about this, but Iran. When the Iranian regime came to power in whenever it was, seventeen nine, was it, it declared war immediately on America and subsequently, in all the decades since then, it has attacked American interests over and over again, American military basis over and over again through its proxies. But it's basically Iran and has caused the deaths of countless numbers of

American and other coalition forces in Iraq. Through roadside bombs they provided, and so on. Now it's a bit of a mystery to me why over all this time America and the West did not respond as any normal, sane society would have done to being under attack in this way and basically fought back. But it didn't. Okay, But nevertheless, it's been under attack all this time America. Iran has made no secret of its continuing ambition and aim to

destroy America and the West. It has said over and over again that it regards it as essential to destroy Israel first, to kill the Jews first, because then it thinks that the way will be open to destroy, to attack and destroy America and the West, not least because the Iranian regime believes that behind that, like other Islamists, people who wish to inflict or impose Islam upon the rest of the world, they believe that there may foe

is Western modernity, and they believe that behind Western modernity is the Jews. They're not entirely wrong, and they believe therefore that in order to defeat Western modernity, they first have to defeat the Jews and the nation state of Israel, the Jewish nation state of Israel, and then the way

will be open to attack and defeat America. So even if the Tucker Carsons of this world really loathe them, detest Jews, which clearly they do, and think they're of no value to humanity, nevertheless they are demonstrably vital to

American interests. And in this war of the last two years, it's been Israeli boys and girls in the Israeli Defense Forces who have been fighting Iran and its proxies and dying and getting terribly injured, taking the heat in order to enable Israel to survive, for sure, but also serving as the essential defense for America. It's not American boys who are dying for Israel. It's Israeli boys who've been dying for America.

Of you, if you go back a few years prior to the Communist Manifesto, there is a deeply anti Semitic treatise that Karl Marx pens on the Jewish question, because even he understood, you cut to the source, you cut to the scaffolding, as you say, before you actually get to the broader entity. And I couldn't agree with you more strongly that a lot, that a lot of these provocateurs, both left and right, because certainly do well to understand

this most rudimentary of concepts. But while while I have you, Melanie, I want to go on a related topic, kind of going more into into contemporary discourse, even outside the realm of foreign policy, because we're talking here, among other things, about the threat of radical Islam at jihad, about the

threat of jihadism and s Trea supremacism. And one of the things that becomes more obvious here by the day, it certainly becomes very obvious from a British perspective, by the day, by the month, by the year as well, is the the the ever thorny question, if we can even call it an unresolved question at this point, as to whether or not Islam and Western civilization are are

broadly speaking compatible. This is something that my tragically assassinated late friend Charlie Kirk was adamant about in the final year or two of his life. He was arguing bothciferously that that Islam and Western civilization and the United States specifically, where broadly speaking not compatible. And Melanie, have to be honest with you. I know you're you're British. I studied and I did a college semester of studying it at UCL University College London, right in the heart of London

in two thousand and nine. I have such fond memories. I've not been back to London since then. I'm frankly terrified to go because I think I'll barely recognize the place. So whether but whether it's the images we see of the streets of London, Paris, Brussels, this horrific recent massacre on the beach, and Bandai Beach and Sydney, Australia, there are all sorts of incidents here in the United States.

I don't want to get too dire, but you're kind of the right person to kind of turn this question to. And I guess the question is is as follows, speaking here necessarily about hard jihad but about soft, surreptitious forms of jihad, about jihad via immigration, there's actually a whole kind of obscure Islamic doctrine on exactly that actually on

kind of a softer form of spreading the message. I guess the question is this is is Western civilization salvageable or are we so far down the rabbit hole not just of the declining Church, not just of decline religiosity, but just from a purely kind of multiculturalist perspective. Can we actually undo Pandora's box this point.

Can it do it? Yes? It can. The problem has been too, has been has been a double headed problem. The Islamists, who are not stupid, and the Islamists, by which I mean Muslims who wish to take over the world for Islam. They understood a long time ago what the West never understood, which is that of a culture of society, a civilization destroys its religious scaffolding. It's finished. It no longer will know what it is, it will

no longer even like what it is. It will no longer be pare to defend what it is, it will no longer even understand what's happening to it. And it understood that Britain was very forefront of this. Britain is the most most advanced post religious nation, I would say, in the West, and it honed in on Britain. Britain was where al Qaeda was formed, because Britain was the most hospitable to Jihadis who Britain said, let them all in,

let them all in. It's multiculturalism, they're fine. We cannot possibly oppose them because that's racism and Islamophobia and all the rest of it. But nevertheless, this process happened, has happened across Europe, and it's happening more slowly but certainly surely in America too. So it is salvagible because in this sense that it's happened because there was never a

fight put up by the West. The West basically said, we can't assert the superiority of our values and our culture over Islam, or over any other society because any other minority in our midst because that's racism. Now, every single minority except for one, has understood that the bargain from the eighteenth century, from when modernity started, from when tolerance was invented, from when church and state were separated. In the West, the understanding has been that the or

Western civilization will tolerate minorities. It will say, you're welcome to form communities of faith and communities of culture, provided you uphold the core values of our society. We can all discuss what the core values are, but I would say one core value is the equality of women. Another core value, even more core than that, is the idea

that the entire society is governed by one law for all. Now, the problem has been that there's a very very significant number of Muslims who came into Britain and Europe who and now America, who do not accept that, who say that there can be no superior authority to Sharia law, Islamic law, because Islamic law, Sharia law is the word of God, and consequently we do not accept any secular

authority above it. Now, I think it's very important to say that in Britain and in the rest of the West, there are many many Muslims who don't agree with that, who have genuinely signed up to Western values, who live in the West because they value equality and freedom and all the good things that the West provides. But there is a huge, let's say a minority, but it is vast who don't sign up to those things and who

have set out to conquer the West. Now that you talk about ji Had, it is the jihad she Had is simply Islamic holy war to take over the non Islamic world for Islam. But it takes different forms, and they're not stupid. The Islamists. In some circumstances, they will use force, they will use intimidation, they will use terrorism in order to terrorize, in order to help subjugate people

through terror. But they will also use and they have used, particularly through the Muslim Brotherhood, they will use the most devastating weapon of all, which is, as you implied or you suggested, a kind of soft g had which is actually not soft at all. It is basically cultural takeover. It is where they use the openness and the democratic institutions of Western societies to infiltrate them and subvert them from inside. And it's like the frog being boiled in

the pot so slowly and so gently. The frog has no idea that it's being boiled until it's dead. And that is what has been happening. And so now you have this process has advanced to a very great extent. And even now, I mean you talk about the terrible atrocity at Bondai Beach. I read just today was it

or yesterday various people in Australia. I think it was a correspondent for the ABC News and I think it was one of their ministers saying or possibly in the prime minister saying that what happened at Bondai Beach had nothing to do with Islam, nothing to do with religion. I mean, what do they think it was? You know, these people were murdered for veganism. I mean, what are they talking about? And this has been the case in Britain. They will not accept that it's founded in the religion

because they think that. And it comes back to the very first question you are are asked. That would mean that, you know, we demonize all Muslims and we demonize Islam. Now this has to be picked aside a part very carefully. One should not demonize all Muslims, as I've said, there are many Muslims who are not signed up to this. But to argue that what we are living through, that

she had both terrorism and democratic infiltration and subversion. To say that that is not being done in the name of Islam, and to say that it's not being done in accordance, in strict accordance with the precepts of every jurisprudential authority in Islam is simply a lie, and it is a suicidal lie from the point of view of the West. So you know the question you ask originally, is Islam compatible with Western civilization? For sure? Radical Islam

is not compatible. By radical Islam, I mean the understanding the interpretation the religion which says it is a religious duty on all Muslims to make the non Islamic world and the not Islamic enough world Islamic. Now that is clearly, demonstrably, unarguably incompatible with Western civilization, and that is what we collectively in the West have harbored. So you know, yes, there are Muslims who, you know, they get a spiritual

and moral uplift from their Islamic faith. Fine, but an awful lot understand Islam to be as much a political ideology as it is what as it is a communion with the divine, which is how the West thinks of religion. The West has a very Western idea of religion. It is a communication between the individual and the Almighty, and that's fine. If Muslims wish to interpret it in that way,

that's great. And if they find you know, uplifting and positive and constructive moral principles from their faith, fine, no one's going to object to that. The problem is the understanding of Islam, which is rooted in the theology that it is simultaneously a political ideology of conquest and domination and war, and that, I'm afraid is its history, and that is unarguable.