Unholy Alliance of the Antichrist (Erick Erickson)

Announcer: Just ahead, pastor and author, Dr. Michael Youssef, with a very unique episode of Leading The Way Audio. Western civilization is under attack. Discover the shocking alliance behind it all. Join Erick Erickson and Dr. Michael Youssef as they expose the truth behind this unholy alliance on Leading The Way.
Erick Erickson: Welcome, I'm Erick Erickson. I'm joined today by pastor, author, and cultural anthropologist, Dr. Michael Youssef for a very important and timely conversation. Across America and the West, something troubling is happening. Two ideological forces that once seemed incompatible are now working together to undermine something you and I cherish deeply, the biblical values that let our society to flourish. This movement, this unholy alliance, is playing out in nearly every news headline. And it should concern every freedom-loving Christian. Dr. Michael Youssef is uniquely qualified to speak into this. He's lived in Islamic and Western countries, has spent decades studying the forces shaping our culture. Dr. Youssef, thank you so much for joining me.
Dr. Michael Youssef: I am so honored to be with you and thank you Erick for— known each other for many years and it's a great honor for me to be here.
Erick Erickson: You and I have talked about the omni-cause that the left has certainly wrapped itself into and you can't have a gay pride parade and a free Palestine parade at the same time because it's the same people marching.
Dr. Michael Youssef: It's the most amazing thing to me and only an indication of the fact that we're facing one enemy behind all of these and that that's not flesh and blood, that is Satan himself. As Paul said in Ephesians 6, our struggle is not with flesh and blood, but is with the principalities and the powers and authority in the heavenly places. And if that is not a convicting argument that we are in a spiritual warfare, I don't know what. When you see people, and when you think what Iran and the Hamas did with homosexual people. They take them up to the high building and throw them out. And one of the captains, one of the Hamas army was tortured just simply for the suspicion that he may be homosexual. And yet all these LGBTQ community is going out saying free Palestine, free Palestine. And you say for what? Freedom from what? I don't know.
Erick Erickson: It reminds me of that passage in scripture where Jesus says the things of the world hate the things of God and you have a secular ideology and Islam both of the world, mutually incompatible and yet perfectly aligned in these times.
Dr. Michael Youssef: Yeah, they are and it's for a mutual cause. You see, and the cause is the destruction of Western civilization which is built, whether people believe that or not, really based on the Reformation. And I've done a lot of study on that when I was at Emory University. Reformation that gave us what Western civilization is. All the conveniences, all the things that we take for granted, but they came as a result of the Reformation and the respect of the human being and the importance of the individual to God, and that God came and died for even for one sinner. And so all of that is anathema to both groups, the Marxists and the Islamists. And by the way, we're talking about Islamists and not Muslims because I have many Muslim friends to this day. I have been with heads of states who are Muslim and they're probably as opposed to Islamists as much as anybody else. In fact, they outlaw them in their countries. I remember one time I was visiting with a very, very highly placed political leader in the Middle East, a country, and he just leaned over, this was I think 2017, and he said to me, Dr. Youssef, would you please explain to me, I cannot understand. We outlawed Muslim Brotherhood from our countries and yet they go to England and they get a satellite channel and they get all kinds of publicity, they get all kinds of— and I said, I'm sorry, I just have no answer other than pure stupidity, foolishness, and blindness. I saw a cartoon one time where a person's sitting on a branch of a tree but he's sawing it. Western civilization, I mean we're literally committing suicide by not taking this thing seriously. And I think for us as Christian believers, we must be boldly preaching the gospel. I told key pastors in Dallas, with all the impact in Dallas, and I said you guys need to train your people to go out there into the trenches and preach the gospel to them instead of sitting there and absorbing their invasion.
Erick Erickson: I'm reminded of in 1979 you had the Marxist-Socialists in Iran working with the Ayatollah to destabilize the regime. Within six months of the Ayatollah coming to power, most of the Marxist-Socialists had either been killed or fled.
Dr. Michael Youssef: Exactly, and that is the convenience of this unholy alliance. They try to use each other. They're wary of each other, they hate each other, but they kind of said okay I'll tolerate you in order to accomplish what I really want to accomplish. See that happened even before the Ayatollah, and I watched Bani-Sadr and all these guys, Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, very articulate leftists, and Khomeini basically used them. And then fast forward after that in 2011 with the so-called Arab Spring. There were two million people in Tahrir Square in Cairo, and of course it's a place I know it well. I was there every day when I was young. And I knew that the Muslim Brotherhood is behind that. The Islamists are behind that. But then all the leftist students were the ones who were creating the trouble and starting the so-called revolution. Until I read one of the documents, the magazines of the Muslim Brotherhood. They referred to them as the donkeys of the revolution. In a sense that once we succeed, we'll get rid of them.
Erick Erickson: So let's spend a little bit of time on the Muslim Brotherhood because I think people hear it and Brotherhood sounds so innocuous and yet it's actually a deeply nefarious group that most Middle Eastern countries have stopped. In fact, you mentioned them going to the UK from overseas. I've read now in the UAE, they're actively discouraging students from going to the UK for education because of the radicalization that the Muslim Brotherhood does there and here.
Dr. Michael Youssef: Exactly. And they come under different names. They're called CAIR here in the US and they have different names in different countries, but they're the same group, same ideology, and it started by a primary school teacher, a librarian by name Hassan el-Banna in Egypt in the 1920s. And he started this because he saw when the Caliphate, Turkish Ottoman Caliphate, collapsed after World War One and he was very disturbed about this, and the fact that the West carved the Arab world. Sykes-Picot Agreement where France took Lebanon and Syria and North Africa and they even gave Italy, Libya. And then the British took over Egypt, Iraq and Jordan and Palestine and so forth. And so he basically started as a revolutionary and wanted to bring back the seventh-century culture of Islam and the Caliphate. And here's another story because you'll be very fascinated by this. I lived it of course. I remember Ronald Reagan said you know people read history in books, I lived history. I'm old enough that I've lived history. And the Muslim Brotherhood worked together with the Free Officers, the revolution of Egypt under Mr. Nasser. There was a group of army officers who conducted a coup against King Farouk and they kicked him out and the British kicked the British out and so forth. But they worked closely together. In this case back in '52, '53, '54, while they were working together, these were more Socialists in most of them were and I knew some of them even as a young man. But then when the revolution succeeded and Nasser became president, he got rid of all the Muslim Brotherhood. He either put them in prison or killed them. And so one way or another they will turn on each other. And that is why we need to be wise as serpents. And they cannot survive, but we should be leery of the fact that they are using each other to create what this Karl Marx and Engels said, you know basically you create that division and then the society collapse and then you build your communist utopia. It's the same thing in Islam, that you create a division to create an Islamic society. So they have that in common.
Erick Erickson: One of the aspects that I think a lot of people don't understand is when you think of people of faith, you tend to think of honest, truthful people and yet in Islam you are given permission to lie to subvert other cultures, to embed within those cultures.
Dr. Michael Youssef: Yes. This taqiyya, what's known in the jurisprudence it's taqiyya, really started at the time when there was a Shia-Sunni war over the succession of the prophet. And so the Shiites came up with that, that it's okay to lie to your enemy until you succeed. But then it got adopted by all branches of Islam, Sunni, Shia, and it's okay to not only lie but deceive your enemy because that's a virtue. You're in a sabil Allah, you are fighting in the way of God and therefore you have God's blessing no matter what you do.
Announcer: You're listening to Leading The Way with Dr. Michael Youssef, author of the provocative book An Unholy Alliance. Learn more at LTW.org.
Erick Erickson: Now that's a perfect segue into what's happening directly in this country. You have around the country enclaves being started that are predominantly Muslim and I think most Americans believe in pluralism and would say it's okay, they can have their community, I can have mine. But what you actually find in a lot of these communities that this is something that intends to be subversive.
Dr. Michael Youssef: Absolutely because that is the very core of who they are, the Islamists particularly. Now there are Muslims in America who are integrated in society, they don't have anything to do with them. And this is where we need a lot of wisdom. Our politicians, unfortunately very few of them have wisdom to understand the difference. 20 years ago, I spoke to a small group of parliamentarians in England. I shared with them what the strategy was, their strategy from their material. I didn't make it up because I'm not that clever. They were. And they said what we're doing in England is that we're building a spine up and down the aisle of Islamic community. It's called no-go zones where policemen cannot go there and they have their own Sharia courts and they do everything according to the Sharia. And they said once that spine is strong enough we're going to be building ribs and eventually we'll choke the country and turn it into a Sharia-compliant nation. And literally they smirked and said oh Michael, you know we British, that doesn't ever happen here. And it's exactly what happened 20 years later. They had no-go zones where policemen cannot go there and then they expanded. Now there are 85 Sharia courts in England. There are 5,000 mosques. I mean it's just exploding because that's what you do, you give an inch they will take a mile because it is at the very core of who they are that they have to do that for God. And who does not want to do something for God and honor God, their God, Allah. And therefore they said oh we succeeded in England, now we try it in Canada and United States.
Erick Erickson: So now we have this divide between Islam, the advance of the Muslim Brotherhood and this working with progressive secular atheists who want nothing to do with religion into this unholy alliance. To what progressives see is advancing hostility towards traditional faith values, the biblical values, and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Medina Muslims if you would, riding on it to invade the country. And the progressives don't even see it coming it seems like.
Dr. Michael Youssef: No. And they choose those passages where it says fight against even the people of the book because in the first it says listen to them, get their advice. Later on it says fight against them, Jews and Christians because they're friends of one another. And so they use those passages, they take them out and said this is our day, this is our time, we're going to rule the world. And the only way we're going to rule the world is that we're going to create this chaos in order to have an opportunity. On the Shiites' point of view, it's an opportunity for the Mahdi to show up because the 12th Imam supposedly disappeared in infancy and he's hiding somewhere. He's going to come back when the world is in chaos. That's why the Iranians want to create a chaos so that they force the Mahdi to come in. From the Sunni point of view, this is the way to give a rise to a new caliphate, the successor to the prophet. And progressives in this country, not only do they not really get religion, they have their own religion. I would argue secularism is a religion, of course, that it can ride on the coattails of what the Muslim Brotherhood is doing and so now they're helping in places around the country where Christianity is treated as hostile, Islam is openly embraced by progressives. San Francisco, Michigan and now in certain parts of progressive territory in Texas where progressives are welcoming this in. In Canada, there are some churches that are inviting once a month they invite the local Imam to preach the sermon. Wow. And with this whole Chrislam thing started in Nigeria, but it's now in so many of the mainline denominations, all the apostates who have turned their back on the truth of the gospel and become universalist. And in showing how kind they are. They invite— oh, we're all going to heaven. Yeah. Well why don't you have the Imam invite the preacher come and give a sermon in the mosque once a— oh no. And the very reason why they want to not just build any building for as a mosque, particularly in England and here, the greatest victory is when they take a church and they'll buy it, and they just bought three in Northeast of United States. They buy big churches and convert them into mosque. That is the height of victory that ours is the true religion. And so if you give them a piece of land to build, yeah, it's okay, but not as victorious in their mind as to be able to buy a church, take the cross down, put the crescent, and make it a mosque.
Erick Erickson: You mentioned the Muslim masters historically. You mentioned Nasser earlier. The Muslim Brotherhood was chased out of almost every Middle Eastern country for their Islamism and radicalization. And a lot of them wound up in Qatar which to this day now is spreading a lot of money among both conservative and progressive political groups in the United States and secular voices, sending people to Qatar. It's deeply infiltrated Washington, D.C. on both sides and it's the closest country in the Middle East to Iran too. It seems to be a very dangerous play.
Dr. Michael Youssef: It is. And when we have a military base there and we just signed a joint defense agreement. And this is why I want to pull my hair sometimes. I said do these people know that what's going on. Al-Jazeera was founded by the Qatari royal family in order to promote Islamism, Islamization. When the Muslim Brotherhood got kicked out of Egypt, particularly, among them was a man named Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He is one of their spiritual leaders. I mean he's the man who really devised this third Jihad concept. And I've read a lot of his material. And he says, you know, the first Jihad was in the 700, 600, 700s, it came all the way to France, then we got stopped. Then in the 1400s the Turks came all the way to Vienna, occupied it for a while, then failed. The third Jihad is not going to be by the sword like it in the first two, but it's going to be by birthrate and investment of petrodollar. Well that appealed to members of the royal family in Qatar. So they brought al-Qaradawi and all of the Muslim Brotherhood who were kicked out of Egypt to Qatar. Started Al-Jazeera run by Muslim Brotherhood people and it's constantly, constantly day after day after day attacking the non-Islamists, the Muslims who are not Islamists. And that's why Qatar has tension with the Saudis, has tension with the Emiratis, has tension with Egypt, has tension with all the others because statistics says that they have spent $6.6 billion on educational institutions in the United States. That's not because of our blue eyes.
Erick Erickson: Right. Well and for a time there was more out rage in the United States over the Confucius Institutes funded by the Chinese Communist Party and there has been a real recognition that we needed to get rid of those in the US. There doesn't seem to be the recognition that Qatar is doing what the Chinese Communist Party had done.
Dr. Michael Youssef: No because there's a whole lot more money. I mean vast amounts of money. When you talk about billions of dollars and the moment one outspoken person from a university in the United States be on the media attacking and so forth, the next thing that university or that college will get $200 million as a grant to start a Middle East study, Middle Eastern study which is Islamization. And all of a sudden that professor's just silenced. I've documented many of those. And so yeah Qatar and in one stage I remember the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia was being interviewed in a press conference and he was asked about Qatar and he said it's not that we disagree with them, we just want nothing to do with them. That's circulating in the media, I mean I have clips of it. But sometimes these things change. And now I fear that Qatar's spreading a lot more money. They bought Harrods of London. They bought Barclays Bank. They have— they own so much that whatever Qatar says to the British government they have to listen to it very, very carefully. They gave the King suitcases worth of 500 euros, $3 million as just came in to his charity. While it's not illegal but they don't do this for just because they love the British. They do it because that's their agenda and they're driven by that group of people in Qatar, Muslim Brotherhood. Very few of them even Qatari. The Egyptians, the Syrians, the Palestinians, and Hamas headquarters and even the Taliban. They have a major presence in Qatar and they have an office there and they're constant speaking saying one thing about Afghanistan and the truth and the reality is exact opposite. But it's just all public relations stuff.
Erick Erickson: You do as Americans always love to say follow the money. You follow the money with the Qataris as well, showing how they're spreading it around.
Dr. Michael Youssef: Yes. And it's not just given to progressive leftists. It's given to conservatives whom they deceived that they are just, you know, religious people and they are— all they want is the friendship with America. And what kind of a price are going to pay for that friendship. What kind of a price we're paying for $6.6 billion that they're spreading around in universities around the country. And so that is extremely important. We live in a most critical time. I believe it's the most exciting time because as we trust in the Lord we're going to see some amazing things that he will do.
Erick Erickson: We live in a self-help society in the West. We can go buy a book and read. We can get our therapist on the internet and I don't know that even a lot of Christians who they're not regular church-goers but they do identify with Christ that they don't understand the real power of prayer in solving these problems.