#154 - Firas Modad: Who Actually Runs The American War Machine?
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The war in the Middle East is usually discussed as a military conflict. In this interview, Firas Modad argues the real consequences are far wider. We discuss how escalation could spread through energy markets, shipping lanes and commodity prices - and why the economic effects of war may hit far beyond the battlefield. Firas also explains how political incentives, donor networks and foreign policy alignments shape decisions in Washington, and why the incentives behind modern wars often look very different from the public narrative.
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Peter McCormack
Good morning, Fred Good morning. How are you? I am good, right. You're my expert on the Middle East. Why is America all with Iran? What do we not know? What are we not seeing in the press? I mean,
Firas Modad
we are seeing some of it, but it is fundamentally about Israel. The Iranians are a bit of a nuisance for the United States, but they're actually a threat to Israel, and the negotiations were going relatively well, according to the Omani mediators. The Omani Foreign Minister, after the war began, comes out and says, This is unnecessary. We had an agreement, or we had almost an agreement, the Iranians had conceded on every major point when it comes to the nuclear issue, including getting rid of their highly enriched uranium stockpile 60% so well below what's needed for A actual modern nuclear weapon, which is 90% limited enrichment at a very low level, they keep the capability to enrich, but they give up on everything else, meaning they really don't have a pathway to a nuclear weapon, because they would be under constant surveillance by the International Atomic Energy Agency. But it seems that the American negotiators were part of the problem. The negotiators are Steve Witkoff, who is a Jewish real estate New York tycoon, and Jared Kushner. Jared Kushner is associated with Chabad, which is a Jewish supremacist sect, essentially, and he's his family is also best friends with Benjamin Netanyahu, meaning that, essentially, the negotiations were being run by a Netanyahu family friend. They were never meant to work. And for the Israelis, the problem wasn't the nuclear because that is solved through the negotiations. The problem is Iranian ballistic missiles. Because the ballistic missiles, if they hit a small number of targets in Israel, they can wreck the country a couple of desalination plants. Israel has maybe four functioning ports, one major chemicals complex, couple of refineries, three civilian airports, etc. So a limited number of very vulnerable facilities. And if these are hit, they can collapse the state. So the negotiations were focused on the nuclear issue. The Americans bought into the Israeli demands when they solved the nuclear issue, as the Omani said they had done, instead of continuing down the line, or instead of figuring out a solution to the other stuff, they went to war, and this is the second time they do this. In June 2025 the Israeli attack happened two days before, or one day before, the Americans were supposed to meet with the Iranians to negotiate, and it was going well. And now, as the negotiations were going well, the attack began. So you've ended up in a position where diplomacy is used as cover to conduct attacks in the same way that the Israelis tried to destroy the Hamas negotiating team in. Qatar, when the negotiations seem to be going well. So now, if you negotiate with the Americans or with the Israelis, you're an idiot, because they've done this three times.
Peter McCormack
And is this because the Israel considers the Iranian regime a existential threat to Israel. It is an enemy of Israel, but an existential threat, if they
Firas Modad
consider it an existential threat, if they become powerful enough. But they'd already kicked them out of Syria, and now the Israelis are saying something that I've said a bunch of times, which is that Turkey is going to become the next Iran for them.
Peter McCormack
Okay? Because
Firas Modad
the view, according to Israel, is that all of their enemies need to be weak and in chaos, because any one of them becoming sufficiently powerful is, in fact, automatically
Peter McCormack
a threat. So Israel wants to be surrounded by failed states,
Firas Modad
essentially or poor, dysfunctional states like Jordan and Egypt that are kept on a tight leash by the fact that they are in insane amounts of debt. So what they want, really is no functioning, strong states anywhere near them, except that this circle keeps expanding. So initially, they made peace with Egypt, and then Egypt got into all kinds of debt traps. They made peace with Jordan, and Jordan gets into all kinds of debt traps. The US backed the Sunni jihadis to overthrow the Syrian government and cut off the supply line from Iran to Iraq through Syria into Lebanon. Now, the Syrian jihadis have been moved to Iraq, and they're probably going to be used against Iran and its allies again, in the same way that they were used in Syria, in the same way that they were used in Bosnia, in the same way they were used in Chechnya, in the same way that they were used in Afghanistan. So you have a radical Sunni threat, and then you use it against your enemies, and then domestically, you say the answer to this threat is to clamp down on people and to police their speech and to police their opinions and control their bank accounts and so on and so forth. So the blowback from this is also domestic, especially at a time when you're endlessly importing immigrants from countries that you're wrecking. Yeah, see,
Peter McCormack
I imagine the people listen to this show, it'd be broad group of people, but the American listeners we have, which there is a good percentage, will be split between those who are the, you know, America, fuck yeah. Let's go to war people. But also a large group of people will be like, Why are we in another war in the Middle East? Spending, which is estimated at a billion dollars a day when our economy, yeah, it's under a huge amount of stress, there's a huge amount of debt, and we're already seeing soldiers come home in boxes. Why are we doing that? And I think people, even in the UK, I know some right wing parties, one called reforms, specifically says, Well, this is special relationship we should be supported in America. But I think I kind of side probably with the leftists here in that why are we getting sucked into another conflict in the Middle East which could destabilize the region again and bring immigrants and terrorism back to our shores? The traditional
Firas Modad
conservative position is to one stability, yes, and to say these nations have a different culture, a different history, a different way of doing things, so long as they are not a direct threat, leave them be. That's the traditional conservative thing. So it's kind of worrying that a party like reform will take a NEO conservative who believes in precisely the opposite, like Alan Mendoza and make Him their chief foreign policy advisor.
Peter McCormack
But do you know what I do? Wonder Faraz if Keir Starmer had come out immediately and said, America, we got your back. You can use our bases. We'll support you in this war against Iran. I'm pretty sure the reform leadership would have come out and said, This is reckless. Yes, this is crazy. What you're doing, it's reactionary
Firas Modad
bollocks, in the same way as Trump won the presidency by railing against unnecessary wars and saying that this is a stupid idea and that the United States should not be involved in the Middle East. Guess what? That's how Obama won his presidency, and then he gave us Syria and Libya. So there is this tradition. Even George Bush was critical of Bill Clinton for having supported. The war against Serbia unnecessarily when it wasn't a threat, and he promised a more restrained foreign policy. So everybody promises the same exact thing, and then everybody implements the same exact playbook.
Peter McCormack
Why is it the deep state? Is it the bankers? Is it the is
Firas Modad
it APAC? When you look at the Epstein network, it kind of reveals it, because you figure out that this group of donors is actually in control of elected officials, we have evidence essentially that Marco Rubio, who's the head of the National Security Council and the Secretary of State, was vetted by the Israelis to see whether or not he supports them properly, and then Larry Ellison of Oracle decides to finance him. Okay, that's a bit weird. The Obama administration is deeply connected to the Epstein network, and they're doing deals with the Rothschilds and helping them get out of fines and things of that nature. So is the Trump administration. So is labor through Peter Mandelson. And who's Peter mandelson's friend, George Osborne of the right wing
Peter McCormack
Tory Party, who generic is a personal friend
Firas Modad
of, who generic is a personal friend of, and generic is sending his economic policy for approval and support by George Osborne. Like, if George Osborne agrees with your economics, that's a bad thing. So you get this impression that there is this massive club of people who are essentially facilitating war profiteering and implementing an Israel first policy in every single foreign policy decision, and the average taxpayer has the privilege of funding it and paying for it with a degraded living standard brought about by endless flows of migrants and refugees coming from these conflicts, and inflation and the ratios are going to be expensive, like this is going to be if the Iranians go all out against energy, which they haven't done yet, the repercussions of this war will break the system as we know it because so far, the Iranians have done a couple of small hits against Qatar on the razla fan and Sayyid gas infrastructure. And the Qataris had to decide to shut down gas production completely and to shut down aluminum production. They've also hit a couple of ports in the UAE, Fujairah and Jabal Ali. Fujairah is where a lot of the oil bunkering happens before it's exported, and it's intended to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. So the Iranians said, no, don't you dare. They hit refineries in Rasta, Nura in Saudi Arabia, which is where the bulk of Saudi oil exports happens.
Unknown Speaker
And the message is, no, you're not exporting anything.
Firas Modad
And now it seems they've hit a ship off the coast of Kuwait, and they're probably going to make an example of Kuwait and wreck the energy industry there to say to the region, if you don't stop the Americans, we're going to just destroy everything and bring this all down on everybody's heads. So a kind of economic Samson option that parallels the Israeli nuclear Samsung option. So more chaos, not just more chaos. Like the extent of chaos, when you think it through, is genuinely scary. The Energy shutdown that is currently underway can last for quite a long time, because if you look at the map, when the Houthi shut down the Red Sea, they did that from north of taez, which you see on the map, all the way to the border with Saudi Arabia. And so the ships have to pass next to their territory. When you look at the Strait of Hormuz, it's different. The ships have to pass through this bend that hugs, or is hugged by Iranian territory, meaning that as a ship passes, it can be attacked from three different directions. What's that
Peter McCormack
small piece of land, the north of UAE? Not that one, the one below
Firas Modad
it, that's Oman. So they fought a small battle over there to figure out who gets the tip of the Strait of hurws and the Omanis came out on top, right in the same way that there's a bunch of contested islands in the strait between the UAE and Iran, and they are under Iranian. Control. So how
Peter McCormack
does the politics of this work? Because this is obviously terrible for the KU eights. It's a problem for Saudi Arabia. It's a problem for Qatar, UAE and Oman. How does the how does
Firas Modad
this work? Well, by shutting down shipping, they're saying to them, you can't export anything, and you can't import anything, and the Gulf exports a huge amount of chemicals, including stuff like aluminum, including chemicals that are necessary for every industry you can think of, from automotives to medicine to fuel to what have you. And they also and that stuff is also necessary for fertilizers, meaning that there's going to be a knock on effect on agricultural commodity prices, and obviously on energy prices and on the price of any industrial product that you buy. So we're going to pay through for this war through inflation. You're going to pay for this war through inflation, exactly, if it lasts for a long time, and we can talk about the scenarios, and you know what might happen and how this might actually
Peter McCormack
play out. Am I right in saying there's about 20 to 30% of the world's oil goes through that yes, passage.
Firas Modad
20% of oil of or all oil exports go through that passage, and so and most of it goes to Asia. So it really hurts Asian markets, most of all, which the Americans might think that suits us, and the rest goes to Europe. That also works for the United States. So it weakens their two big industrial rivals, but everybody's going to pay for the inflation.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah. Okay, okay,
Peter McCormack
so sometimes you have to remember governments are just made of people, just people who make stupid decisions. Is this? Is this a war that America can win, and what would a win for them be? Or should I? Should I reframe that is this as a war Israel can win? What is a win here?
Unknown Speaker
Well, if you start from first principles,
Firas Modad
the Americans can't lose this war because nobody can bomb the United States. The Iranians can't hit New York. They can't hit Miami. They can't hit DC. They can't cause direct damage to the United States. They can wreck military bases in the Middle East, which it seems they've done a decent enough job on. A bunch of them, Uday and Qatar has been very badly hit. The bases in Kuwait have been hit. The naval support base in Bahrain that's been smashed to bits. A bunch of very expensive radars have been hit so they've degraded, to some extent, some American capabilities in the region.
Peter McCormack
But isn't it more complicated than that? It's not about whether America wins. It is whether the what the impact is on the administration, because a war that drags on, that sees bodies coming back in boxes that sees a cost to the American people. Could cost both Trump in the midterms and could cost the Republicans in the next election. Yes, yeah, so that can always that sense.
Firas Modad
Yeah, you've achieved Israel's objectives, or at least some of them, but you've wrecked the United States, and you've discredited the Maga movement, and you've discredited every single right wing party that isn't sufficiently radical on Israel, and every party that is sufficiently radical on Israel and says it is none of the West's business what the Israelis do. We don't care, ends up being labeled anti semitic. So it's a lose situation, essentially. And if you get the anti Israel left, well, they will destroy your lives and destroy your economies, and you destroy pretty much everything else. So it is lose. And what it does, essentially, is that it tells voters that there is no bloody point in voice voting. It doesn't matter who you vote for. You get you get Israel, you get Israel first. And if it's not Israel first, then they're anti semitic. And so it traps politics in a day, in a dynamic that is deeply radicalizing, and we've already spoken about the risk of civil war in the West. And this is really becoming a problem because you're convincing people that no matter what you do, it doesn't matter. And this is before we think about your original question, which. Is, how does this play out? And let's go through the scenarios here.
Unknown Speaker
One scenario is the Iranians give up.
Firas Modad
Now, if you understand Shia theology, it's based on the idea that the Shia abandoned the grandson of the Prophet of Islam, Hussain Ben Ali, in a battle at Karbala, and he was martyred fighting an army of 1000s with a group of maybe 40 or 200 or whatever the figure is, a deeply uneven battle, sort of and the thinking is that if you're a genuinely devout Shia, you never give up, because doing that means that you've abandoned Hussein again. And so their slogan is often repeated, death rather than humiliation, or death over humiliation.
Peter McCormack
Sorry, what percentage of the Iranians is this? Because we know there are many, everybody with a gun, everyone with a gun. So it's the administration
Firas Modad
exactly what and they have a piece of support, and they have a social base of support, okay? So the way the Iranian regime works is that, like any regime, it co opts all kinds of other interests. So there is a merchant class that backs them, which is obviously not happy with the war. There is a class of poor people that they provide welfare to in exchange for their devoutness. There is a class of workers that they employ. There is legions and legions of state employees. There is legions of security forces and their families. And you could estimate that at, I don't know 20, 30% of the population, but it's a big enough and committed enough group to make the others who are not committed less relevant.
Peter McCormack
It's a regime change. Is naive. And I mean, it
Firas Modad
took 10 years, 14 years, to get rid of Assad. Yeah. And this is Syria with full on airstrikes against Gaddafi, okay, you got rid of the regime. And that brings the second scenario, if the Iranians don't capitulate, which they probably wouldn't do, which is that this becomes a failed state, and now the Americans are talking about backing Kurdish insurgents, and that's going to suck in Turkey into a war, because they lack the last thing that Turkey wants is an autonomous Iranian Kurdish region on their border, especially with the Israelis saying that Turkey is the next Iran because that will then be used as A base against Turkey. And the Iranians are hitting Azerbaijan as of this morning. And in Azerbaijan there is a bunch of well, in Iran, there is something between 15 to 25% of the population that is also Azari and so you could see the azaris moving in towards Tabriz, and then this becomes a civil war. But to add insult to injury, they're also arming groups on the border with Pakistan, the Baloch. And these guys have been used to blow up the China, Pakistan Economic Corridor, and they've been backed by the United States, obviously, and so you end up with a situation where all of the countries in the region are sucked in. But collapsing the Iranian regime in full isn't that easy, because if you look at the Caspian Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative has one has, obviously many ports and land ports in Russia, but also in Kazakhstan, which can then be used to transfer things by rail and ship from China all the way to northern Iran, and then it connects through the same route to Volgograd in Russia, and from that onto the Black Sea through the canal system that the Russians have, meaning that Russia and China can back Iran as much as they want to. Are they at the moment, so far, the problem has been historically. The problem has been the Iranians. They've insisted on being fully autonomous. Now, China has a spy ship next to Iran, and is providing Iran with updated satellite data on their targeting. So they're helping the Iranians with their strikes. And there is at least one report that the Russians are helping them with the drones. So these drones, like I saw someone saying that they date back to Nazi technology that was then refurbished and updated a bunch of times, with the Iranians mastering them and sending them to Russia, and then the Russians upgrading them further, using them in Ukraine, and then sending them back to the. Iranians. And if this becomes a drone war against energy in a failed state, what you kind of get is the assassins. But with drones, the assassins in, you know, between 1000 something and 1200 something dominated the Middle East basically by having a bunch of forts surrounded by radical Shia, and they would just go around assassinating random people and kept up a state through that threat of violence. That we won't attack you with an army because we haven't got one, but we can murder you in your sleep. And if you give the same kind of radicals drones and put them on top of the energy lifeline of the world, and make them into a failed state, that does sound like a stupid thing to do, because it is so that would be considered success, because they would have brought Iran into a civil war and dragged in a bunch of regional countries into that civil war and created absolute chaos for the Iranians. But then they have infinity drones sitting on top of the Persian Gulf, lobbing them at every bit of energy infrastructure and at every bit of shipping that goes their way with the ability to extort anyone
Peter McCormack
and everyone. Strategically for Iran, the best option for them is to drag this out as long as possible,
Firas Modad
to raise the cost as much as possible to the United States, because as a state, they can't live with the idea that every year or every few months, the United States sends over a bunch of aircraft carriers and starts bombing their stuff. And so they have to make this as expensive as possible for the United States, regardless of the cost to them, so that they re establish deterrence. So we have a very unusual situation where a nation state which Iran is behaving like an insurgency and breaking all of the rules of state behavior, but the people who broke those rules first were the Americans and the Israelis, by using negotiations as cover to prepare for military strikes and by attacking The top leadership. I mean, it isn't the done thing that you just murder all of their political leadership and plunge them into chaos, because you need people to talk to if you're going to end the war. Well, no one's going to trust you. No one's going to trust you. So they broke so it has to be said, the Iranians are breaking the rule book, absolutely, but it wasn't them that started. It was the Israelis that bombed negotiation teams and used negotiations as cover to conduct military strikes.
Peter McCormack
But Faraz, are you just siding with Zach Polanski and protecting the mullahs?
Firas Modad
I hate them Allah. No, I don't think anybody's as critical of Islam as I am, but I can still see what a stupid idea is when I see it.
Unknown Speaker
And this is a stupid idea,
Peter McCormack
I know I take my a lot of my direction from who is influential on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it, but I've been surprised how pro this war so many people are, and how those who've questioned it have been like radically attacked as being defenders of mullahs and but that's what happens every single time. It just feels more this time like Have We not learned our lessons. If you if you say
Firas Modad
that trying to ethnically cleanse Gaza by bombing every civilian structure in Gaza is actually a bad thing, then you're a Hamas apologist. Yep, if you say that having a stable Syria is better than running a bunch of jihadis who are now going to invade Lebanon, by the way, which is something that we should talk about. If you say that having Assad run Syria instead of a bunch of jihadis is a better outcome, then you're an Assad apologist. If you say that destabilizing Saddam's regime is going to unleash the Iranians, then you support baathism and the sort of fascist socialist ideas of Saddam, if you say letting the Libyan Civil War be and let it play out, then you're a fan of Gaddafi. But every single time the argument is focused on your person. And on your integrity. It isn't focused on the policy and the consequences and the consequences and if you can't think of the second and third order consequences of a war that can suck in the Turks and the Azeris and the Pakistanis and the Arabs and the Russians and the Chinese sitting on top of the world's energy lifeline, then you have no business speaking about politics or questioning my integrity. Shut up. Thank you very much. I don't want to hear from you, but this is what it is. The second and third order consequences of this are insane. And again, the Iranians haven't gone full tilt when it comes to attacking energy, and they still have another option, which is to bomb the Gulf's desalination plants and power plants, which they can do and they've done it twice already With relatively small hits intended to signal that we can blow this whole thing up and make the entirety of the Gulf uninhabitable. But then you think about, what if they cause enough damage and you're the ruler of a small Gulf principality?
Unknown Speaker
Well, everyone can turn on them. It's
Firas Modad
not just that everybody can turn on them. They've decided that's a risk they're willing to take fair enough. But there's the economic dimension, which is that golf money is propping up all kinds of equities and all kinds of real estate and all kinds of stupid stuff, like, you know, no offense, but football clubs, yeah, no, you're right. And if they have to draw that capital down and repatriate it to the west at a time when you have very high inflation due to energy and you're going to have to adjust your interest rates, but you can't, in fact, raise interest rates because of the size of the debt and what that does to your interest Bill, you end up with a genuinely economic explosive situation where there is a chain reaction that kicks off on the back of this, if the Iranians Just go full tilt against all of the energy, which we're still in the first week of the war.
Unknown Speaker
How accurate is the information we're getting
Firas Modad
coming out from the war? Because
Peter McCormack
I obviously, my limited memory of wars is what happened in the Balkans, what happened in Iraq, but really the information you got was from your main primary TV sources, the BBC, news, Sky News or whatever. And yeah, they're not always accurate. And yeah, there's, there's, there's the right kind of criticism that you can label at those channels. But now is even more complicated, because we obviously have endless propaganda bots on social media channels. We now have aI slop the number of videos I've seen which seem to be claiming incidents in the region which are clearly, well, not always clearly, actually sometimes not clearly, but it turns out they're AI created videos and people having to then delete the tweets and apologize like it's a big mess. Yeah, do we have any idea what is really
Firas Modad
going on? We have a sense of some things. We have a sense that the air defense over Tehran has collapsed. We have a sense that this isn't a full collapse of all Iranian air defense. We have a sense that the rate of missile fire has slowed down, probably because some of these missile launchers have been destroyed, but probably because the Iranians wanted to deliver a very quick, big hit initially, and then wanted to maintain the ability to keep on striking for a long time, to make the war more costly, we have basically a sense that the Gulf states are overusing their interceptors. If you look back at how the Syrians behaved, I think in the 73 and 82 wars against Israel, they pretty much just fired everything as quickly as they could, and it didn't work, and it was very expensive, but now you see that there is a lack of training, because a lot of the regional armies that go get trained in The West are kind of given passes without passing. And we just saw a Kuwaiti aircraft shoot down through three American jets, which, I mean, it shows you that you have a problem with how these guys are trained, because the PI. Pilots are supposed to be the best that your military has to offer, given how technical and difficult this is and still, some guy in the first couple of days of the war ends up shooting down three American jets. So plus, you have things like CENTCOM saying that they need to hire a lot more intelligence workers, which shows that, okay, now, what do you mean? You did all of this military buildup, and now you need to hire people to work intelligence. It means that you haven't properly prepared for this. And then you have to factor in things like, how many hours of maintenance that does each of these jets need, and that takes up, takes some time. Obviously, Western armies are the best at turning around these jets and maintaining them and keeping them up to scratch, but it's time consuming and expensive, and the more you use, the more, the more you need to do it. You have the fact that it seems that they're running out of interceptors already, which is a problem.
Unknown Speaker
Who's running out of
Firas Modad
interceptors, the Arab States and Israel. I mean, we know that in the 12 Day War in June 2025, 25% of the Terminal High Altitude air defense interceptors were just consumed. 25% of the entire stockpile. And these are built at a rate of, I've heard between 10 and 20 every year. So it takes a long time to stockpile them again. And Trump just summoned a bunch of the CEOs of defense contractors and said, Listen, you need to do something about production, because there isn't enough production.
Peter McCormack
This is great for the shareholders of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
Firas Modad
But who are these shareholders? A bunch of them are going to be BlackRock and Vanguard and so on and so forth. Which are all have their own Epstein networks, so the system is fundamentally rigged, and then to make sure that this passes and that there isn't enough damage to the Israelis, what did Larry Ellison do? He bought CBS and he bought Tiktok. And who's the rival? Well, it's Fox News. Who runs that one? Rupert Murdoch. So you end up in this situation where you see that the whole system is rigged, and if you say that there is this influence over finance and media and policymaking, well that's anti semitic, but this is what the facts say. This isn't like, I don't, I don't want, I don't hate anyone, and I don't want
Peter McCormack
to hate anyone. Oh, is Iran landing missiles in Israel and the people and innocent people dying? Yes, they are
Firas Modad
absolutely not at the rate that the Iranians are dying, but absolutely they are.
Peter McCormack
And we have, we got any idea of the scale of deaths in the region at the moment.
Unknown Speaker
So the Iranians are reporting,
Firas Modad
as of yesterday, I think 1000 plus people killed. Okay, and in Israel, it's less clear what the number is, but there's a bunch of people who are killed while sheltering, probably less a couple of dozen, which is, obviously, you don't want civilians dying on either side, if you have a heart, if you have a conscience. But the Israelis, there was a Chinese team that tried to film one of the impact sites in Tel Aviv, and within five minutes, security forces arrived and cleared them out. And it was only through CENTCOM that we learned that the Haifa refinery in Israel had been hit, which wasn't mentioned in any other media. And so you get the impression that, in fact, there are hits landing in Israel, but they are really controlling the narrative and making sure that this isn't revealed to the public, even within Israel, to the extent that Israeli media is being very critical of Israeli military censorship Everything that is published in Israel, and I mean, everything is under the authority of the military sensor. And so they have full control over the media ecosystem in their country and in Gaza, and in Gaza, obviously, and in if you're a mainstream Western journalist and you send a team to Israel, you have to obey the military censor. Now, every once in a while, people find workarounds, but the media institutions are generally supportive of Israel. The mainstream media is generally quite supportive. Of Israel. And if they aren't, there is an anti semitism scandal. And in some cases it's real anti semitism, and in some cases it is real anti semitism, but in a lot of cases, it's just saying, Guys, you know, this is a bit extreme. You shouldn't try to depopulate Gaza. You shouldn't try to depopulate South Lebanon.
Unknown Speaker
Tell me what's happening in Lebanon. Obviously, they're after Hezbollah.
Firas Modad
So Hezbollah, very stupidly, decided to join the war from their ideological position. This is perfectly coherent. The problem is that I don't agree with their ideology. I think it's just fake and wrong. And what they first did was try to target some of the radar stations in Israel, in mirun Air Base and near Haifa, with the idea being that they would disable some of the radars to enable the Iranians to score more hits. That's the logic behind it. And as a result, the Israelis ordered everybody south of the litani River in Lebanon, which is around 10% of Lebanese territory, to clear out, and maybe 10% of the population just go. You're not allowed to be here anymore. Now this is a consistent policy on the part of the Israelis. In the 1993 war, they tried to depopulate 10s of villages. In 1996 they tried to depopulate, I believe it was 78 villages in 2006 they did the same exact thing, and now they're doing it again. And after the Israelis and the Lebanese agreed to a cease fire, the Israelis didn't stop. First, they kept on attacking Hezbollah because they said Hezbollah wasn't adhering to the ceasefire, which entailed their full surrender, which is kind of true. And they then went around Southern Lebanon, flattening the villages that they had been unable to take in combat. They just sent tractors and diggers and just turned houses flat, turned entire villages flat to make sure that nobody could return. So Hezbollah said you didn't adhere to the ceasefire we want either. You've been bombing us for a year now. We're going to retaliate, and placed it in part as retaliation for the killing of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Khamenei and now, even before the war started, Syrian forces, that is, the jihadi head shoppers that currently govern Syria that are being received in the White House and in the UN the World Economic Forum, these guys are massing their forces along the border with Lebanon, and they are quite possibly going to invade Lebanon to try to subdue Hezbollah, because if the Israelis were to send their own forces on the ground, they would take too many casualties. But just as the Kurds are being used against Iran, the Kurds and the Baloch and perhaps the Azeris, these guys in Syria are expendable. And mind you, I don't mind seeing jihadis dying. I just don't want that to be part of a civil war in my country. But there is a level of cynicism here when it comes to policymaking That is insane? Well, there are insane alliances that get formed, yes, but it is fully and completely unprincipled, and the main objective is to sow chaos. Because if the Kurds are used successfully against Iran, which is a big if they are then going to be turned and used against Turkey, and the migrants in Europe are going to follow a Turkish call for jihad, and it will be presented as a defense of the West, but in reality, it is the destruction of the West, because these people should have never been in the West in the first place. And then you can't not notice that the Board of deputies keeps on insisting that asylum routes should be kept open, and pretty much every other parallel organization in the West says the same thing. In Australia, in France, in Germany, they insist on the same stuff. In the United States, obviously. And if you're anti immigration, you are far right. And you get to. In awards from Hope, not hate?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I was disappointed not to make the list.
Firas Modad
Yeah, I'm not relevant enough. Well, the Lotus Eaters made it, so I'd like to think that I contributed, yeah, but there is this reality that structurally, this system isn't working.
Peter McCormack
Yeah, you could say that, do we know? Do we know how what it's like on the streets, in the towns, the cities in Iran, in Iran, because we already know their currency has been decimated. That was part of the recent uprising. But people still got to eat. People still got a business. Do we know what's actually happening?
Unknown Speaker
By the look of it's really bad. Okay,
Firas Modad
we've seen protests against the government. We've seen media say that there were Mossad and CIA agents on the ground. Western media say that and taking credit for it. We've seen reports of 10s of 1000s killed. I don't think, I think that this is heavily exaggerated. Not that I doubt that the regime would shoot 1000s of people. They've done it a bunch of times. I just doubt the total figure that's all. I think it's the low 1000s. Some of the reporting is that it's 30,000 and then 80,000 and then 100,000 Are you kind of going? Guys, come on, stop.
Peter McCormack
Yeah, I think the gray zone came out. So again, I think the gray zone came out against those numbers, because it's one of those arguments. It's like, why are you? Why are you defending the mullahs? They've slaughtered 40,000 people on the streets, and I'm with you. I have no doubt. I mean, we've seen the footage of them shooting people on the street. We've seen the body bags. They do that.
Firas Modad
Yeah, they do that. But don't lie to me about it. It's like when Saddam invaded Kuwait we had this story come out about how the Iraqis were killing Kuwaiti babies and incubators and hospitals, and it turned out to be completely fabricated. But then if you say this is a stupid policy, you're defending people who kill babies and incubators.
Peter McCormack
How dare you. But are you trying to demand? No propaganda in warfare?
Unknown Speaker
Just trying to
Firas Modad
demand, Don't insult my intelligence? Yeah. And if you're going to talk about policy, talk about it without emotion, analytically, calmly, and think of the second and third order consequences of what you're doing, not in terms of stupid moral, moralistic slogans. And don't tell me you oppose the shooting of protesters in Iran, if you also support the flattening of Gaza, like be consistent. Show me principle. If you show me principle, and if you talk to me about policy, and if you talk to me about consequences, I will talk to you endlessly, and I hope we can reach a good faith agreement. Yeah, good
Peter McCormack
luck with that. You're asking for people not to have special interests. I'm just asking them to be Christian Peter, as I've always asked.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, which is fair. Okay, so look
Peter McCormack
at what point do the Warhawks realize? What time did? What point do they have buyer's remorse? What point do they realize? Okay, we fucked up again, because when you talk about interceptors running out and air defenses not being able to defend the air above them, that changes the entire dynamic of this war. It emboldens the Iranians to but only up to a
Firas Modad
point okay, because whatever production there is of air defense interceptors is going to be prioritized for Israel and the United States directly is not going to be hit. And there was zero buyer's remorse when it came to Iraq and Libya and Bosnia and Chechnya, not for the people who advocated for these wars and made money. There was buyer's remorse for the public.
Peter McCormack
The public the politics some of the politicians, sure, sure, but the
Firas Modad
politicians are not the decision makers, yeah, like, that's a key point here. You can take George, you can take Clinton and replace him with Bush, promising you restraint. He then goes into Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes. You can then take bush and replace him with Obama, and he promises you restraint, and he gives you Libya and Syria, and then you can take him and replace him with Trump, and he will give you Iran. And it never really actually matters. It never really makes a difference. So the politicians are not the decision makers, and they're not the beneficiaries. Are you saying they're making peanuts? Yes, I don't want to. I don't like being conspiratorial, because everybody in the Middle East is a retarded conspiracy theorist. But they
Peter McCormack
all come true. But they all come true. This fucking psychopath. They all come. They all come.
Firas Modad
True it is. It gets to a point where it is impossible not to see the pattern. Just look at the Epstein files. You had the Soros network, obviously instigating the unrest in Ukraine through their NGOs, and they played a huge part of it. You had IoT Kolomoisky, a Jewish billionaire who was given a governorship in Ukraine and used his billions to fund literal neo Nazi groups. Then it turns out that Zelensky is in touch with Larry Summers and Epstein, which is fundamentally weird. It turns out that after the 2014 escalation, Epstein and Rothschild are talking about how to profit from the Ukraine war, then Trump enters the scene. Jared Kushner goes to negotiate over Ukraine. And who does he bring with him? Larry Fink of Blackrock. I know, and it isn't anti semitic to say that this is wrong.
Unknown Speaker
They're rubbing it in our faces.
Firas Modad
This is an oligarchy, and this oligarchy is behaving in a way that fundamentally disregards not just the citizens of the Middle East, but also obviously the citizens of the West.
Peter McCormack
I did see Larry Fink discussing how to rebuild Ukraine.
Unknown Speaker
I mean, okay,
Peter McCormack
go on, Larry, thank you,
Firas Modad
and it's going to get 8 million migrants. Thanks. 20% of their population, of their pre war population.
Peter McCormack
How is that to the to the benefit of the Ukrainians? How do you think this plays out?
Firas Modad
I think we either end up with a failed either the Iranians hold the regime together somehow, or we end up with a failed state. But the problem with failed states is that they require constant intervention, and they bring chaos to our own shores, and they bring chaos to the west, and they bring chaos to all of their neighborhoods, and they it is a bad outcome to have a failed state. Nobody says, Yay, we became a failed state. We won. Nobody's ever said that.
Peter McCormack
It's the argument that Iraq was more stable and better under the sadistic regime of Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic sons than what we got
Firas Modad
after the war. What you replace Saddam with is a million different little Saddam little saddams. So if Iran becomes a failed state, each of the leaders of the Shia militias in Iraq is an aspiring Saddam. So are the leaders of the Kurdish militias, and supposedly, Kurdistan is the good part of Iraq, but so are the leaders of the Sunnis, and they can all make Saddam look good. I mean, after the invasion of Iraq, you had people who were torturing other Iraqis with drills. You imagine drilling people's bones and then drilling their skulls, but instead of having one torturer in chief who could at least put a leash on them and actually have an economic policy and actually say, Well, this is what I want for my society, good or bad, but functioning government. You had dozens of these running around, each one with his own militia. And so if the Iranians can no longer constrain these Shia militias, who all, by the way, hate each other because the nature of the competition between them, and nobody's constraining the Kurds and the Sunnis, it's chaos. And who is this chaos going to invite in the closest people are Turkey. But then the expansion of Turkey is going to be used to spin a narrative that Turkey has now become Iran. Let's go and fight them. And that narrative is already being spun by Israeli government officials.
Peter McCormack
This warfare, this war seems to be fallen on three fronts. There is the obvious kinetic war we're seeing now, but there is a economic war and an energy war. Which do you think is the most important part of the war? What do you think decides it the part
Firas Modad
that affects the West most is obviously going to be the energy and the economic war because of the chain reaction that gets triggered if the Iranians decide to go all out against the energy infrastructure, and that chain reaction sort of annihilates the GCC as we know it. It, especially if they also hit the desalination and power and it creates chaos in the entire Middle East, you have countries like India and Pakistan and Jordan and Egypt and Lebanon that are massively dependent on remittances from that part of the world. So it's not just the energy inflation and the industrial costs inflation and the agricultural commodities inflation. It's also their remittances, that sort of and that cascades to a huge range of countries all over the world if the Iranians go all out against energy again, and that's a big if, that is obviously going to break the Western system.
Unknown Speaker
Because politically,
Firas Modad
I can't think of a Western leader who isn't fully discredited, with the exception of naive bukele, all of the rest are fundamentally discredited, Mertz McCormack, Sanchez, Starmer and now Trump. And now Trump.
Peter McCormack
Did you see the bukele tweet that came out? No, the war started. No, I didn't. You might have to look up Connor. I'm pretty sure he just tweeted Game Theory. That's interesting. Yeah, yeah,
Firas Modad
if you put it in terms of how the Iranian response is going to be their only way of surviving this is to create chaos in the West.
Peter McCormack
I thought he, I assumed he was thinking wider than that, okay, yeah, there you go. Game theory, right. Scroll down. See what. See what comes in. Game 3101, yeah, explained.
Firas Modad
I mean, I'm not 100% sure what he means by this, but what do you think he means?
Peter McCormack
I think it's I think he's just telling the world that this is the way the world works. This is how geopolitics works.
Unknown Speaker
It doesn't have to work this way, I
Peter McCormack
know, but we're run by fucking psychopaths, yes, and pedophiles, yes.
Firas Modad
And that has to be said as the core part of the problem.
Unknown Speaker
But you're a conspiracy theorist. I mean,
Firas Modad
you have Howard lutnik sitting as Secretary of Commerce, Tom Barack, the envoy to Turkey and Syria. He's in the files. I want to know Barack in the files.
Peter McCormack
What's in the files we haven't seen? Where's the leverage right now? Like, is this war been fought on leverage from the Epstein files?
Firas Modad
No, I think a big part of it might be just the personal connections Trump ends up relying on Jared Kushner. Jared Kushner's family is best friends with Netanyahu, and so Netanyahu becomes part of the extended family as far as Trump is concerned, and that's how it's being run. But Jared Kushner's family loyalty isn't to the Trump family, that's the issue.
Peter McCormack
So why do you think Iran hasn't gone out and attacked the energy infrastructure yet again, is it's just like theirs can be destroyed just as badly. Okay, so, like it's so do you think they're trying to get the Israelis and Americans back to the negotiating table? I think they
Firas Modad
want this war to end. Yeah, because the strategy like lasting indefinitely as your leadership gets decapitated and your capital assets get destroyed. Isn't much of a strategy. It is a stupid play by the Iranians, except that all of their other plays are worse, because they involve capitulation, and capitulation is seen as a fundamental religious betrayal.
Peter McCormack
So their strategic advantage is time.
Firas Modad
Their strategic advantage is time and being crazier than anyone ever thought they could be, which is like, if you the problem with the madman theory, which Trump tries to play against China and against Russia and against Iran, is that at some point, the best counter strategy to the madman theory is to be even madder still.
Unknown Speaker
And at some point people call your bluffs
Firas Modad
and actually end up being crazier than you. And if you know anything about Shia theology, you kind of see why they did it. The issue is that the Iranians acted with restraint for so long over so many things, even as everybody accuses them of being too radical, which they are radical. But you. Also have to see the times where they acted with restraint. They didn't start the war with Iraq in Lebanon. They didn't back Hezbollah just because Israel had invaded and refused to withdraw. They'd invaded all the way to Beirut. They got the Palestinians out, but they didn't leave the country, and so the Shia were like, Okay, if you're not leaving, we're going to make you leave.
Unknown Speaker
So it didn't happen
Firas Modad
in sort of abstraction. It happened in a context. And the same with the Palestinians, like they massacred them in 1948 and they forced them to flee. And then the Palestinians started using terrorism, which is a bad thing, but they didn't have an army, and the armies that they did have were absolutely crap. So you could understand it without agreeing with it, while saying this is bad, while tracing the origin of it to the fact that these people were massacred and expelled, and people are vindictive, and in a Christian context they shouldn't be, but they're not Christian and it's stupid to expect them to behave as Christians if they aren't.
Peter McCormack
Are the Americans behaving as Christians? No,
Unknown Speaker
no, they're behaving the Republican Party is a Christian party. I mean, look, they say a prayer before everything. They start bombing
Firas Modad
all of this other stuff. Think about the wider context. You're not getting mass deportations. Trump backed out of Minneapolis for a long time, the Republicans refused to make abortion an issue which should be an issue from a Christian perspective, because they insisted that it would be bad for the coalition and bad for the base managing the debt. They just keep spending like drunken sailors. It doesn't matter when somebody says, Stop spending they do all kinds of things and attack them in all kinds of ways, as they do with Ron Paul and with Massey and with some others. When it comes to immigration, there was no real shutdown of immigration. There was maybe some improvement. They closed illegal immigration, they didn't shut down legal immigration, and the demographic change is mainly happening because of legal immigration, except under the Biden years. So on all of these other issues, they gave up. What is the what is the correct Christian position on immigration? It's to recognize that nations are nations and that they have the right to be nations, because this is how God ordained it to be. So there's a famous story about the king of Spain and Two Sicilies. The Two Sicilies being like, kind of the boot area of Italy and the island of Sicily. And one priest actually told him that what you should do is impose the Spanish language on all of these people and integrate them into one kingdom. And it was the king who corrects the priest and says, no, these are separate nations. I am the king of all of them, but I am the king of all of them separately, which is why the Austro Hungarian empire didn't have a problem with the fact that they had to issue orders with 14 languages. Obviously they had a logistics problem and all kinds of consequences for that, but they thought it fit and right to allow the diversity of nations within their population. And so if you recognize that these are diverse nations, and they have a right to exist as nations. You can say that you, the British, have the right to restrict immigration in accordance with your own needs and interests. It doesn't mean that anybody who comes in you can just take away their assets and enslave them or exploit them. You have to be Christian towards the stranger, but towards the stranger as an individual, towards the sojourner, usually, as in somebody who is there temporarily. You have no Christian duty to say, well, actually, I'm going to turn Tower Hamlets into Bangladesh like no there is no Christian theological defense of having people run for the BNP, the Bangladeshi National Party, also be on the Council of Tower Hamlets. Nothing in Christianity says that's a good idea. As a Christian,
Peter McCormack
when you sit at the White House are about to have a Trump's about to come out and give one of his speeches to the press. But before that happens, we have somebody given a prayer. When you see politicians talking about praying for the soldiers. How do you feel?
Unknown Speaker
He's fake Christians.
Firas Modad
I can't say that other people are fake Christians, because I myself am a bad Christian, and could be called a fake Christian. Okay, fair. I can say that it's good that they do it, and it is good to have prayer be a part of life in general, including political life, because I believe in the separation of church and state in terms of the authority of the Church versus the authority of the state. You don't want a full on theocracy, and you don't want the state deciding what religion says. These are both bad outcomes, but I do believe in the moral influence of Christianity over politics. I do believe in that firmly, and I think that politics should be informed by Christian values. The worst insult that Christ consistently used was hypocrites. And this was repeatedly said about the Pharisees, and it is true of all of us, on some level, we are all hypocrites because we all fall short.
Unknown Speaker
But if you're going to
Firas Modad
pray and endorse the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and of South Lebanon and the plunging of Iran into civil war and a policy of endless chaos that sees chaos as an end in itself, I would submit to you that you're being hypocritical.
Peter McCormack
You're probably gonna have a longer conversation at the pearly gaze.
Unknown Speaker
You got a lot, you got a lot to discuss. You're going to
Firas Modad
have to explain your choices. And Peter, isn't it as yes as we all are, my guy, as we all are, we're all going to have to be held to account, yeah, but you, I mean, I wouldn't call them fake Christians, but I would say that it is not obvious to me that Christian faith is truly playing a part in their policy choices, because you can't defend CHAOS as policy of if you're a Christian, if you're a Christian, you respect order, even unjust order. One of my favorite Proverbs is injustice is of lesser consequence than no government or weak government. In Arabic, it sounds nicer, but this is fundamentally true. If you have a bad actor keeping order, it is a better outcome for everybody involved, especially the poor, the weak, the downtrodden and the needy, to have stability than to have chaos.
Peter McCormack
We should see significant cues at the confession box. Some people are going to need a bit of time to repent for their sins.
Firas Modad
We all do, but this is quite jarring. Yeah, this is becoming quite jarring.
Peter McCormack
So I do always enjoy discussing Christianity with you. So as you observe the world as a more macro level about what is happening, the astronomical debt that Western nations have that keeps increasing, that's impoverishing people, the everything around the F steam files, which I still don't think we have nearly enough. We don't have a full understanding of it. No regional conflicts breaking out in we've obviously have Russia, Ukraine. We have now the Middle East, the threat of China and Taiwan, which, by the way, we should also discuss. How do you as a Christian assess this moment in time? Yeah,
Unknown Speaker
you. You have to take it on yourself to be a better Christian.
Firas Modad
It's you can't have people that evil governing you, except because the society isn't Christian, and it isn't Christian because you aren't you? I am not showing a good enough example. I am not being Christian enough towards my family and friends.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I.
Firas Modad
In a truly, in a society that is Christian. I mean, we see it in the Psalms all the time, where you have the psalmist saying, How long God will I have to suffer this? You see it in Jeremiah. You see it in Isaiah. You see it all over the Old Testament, when, essentially the corruption of society ends up leading to cataclysmic political outcomes, and it is always because we've all been corrupted and we aren't enough of servants of Christ, to actually inspire those around us to also be servants of Christ. And it is our responsibility to see the beam in our own eye first and to correct ourselves. And we do all fail at this responsibility. We all fail always, because faith is a covenant and a cons and a conscious choice. You choose faith and you genuinely commit yourself to God, and maybe down the line, you'll be saved. And all along the way, there are all kinds of pitfalls. And if you fall, if I fall, I encourage others to fall.
Unknown Speaker
And we end up in this chain reaction
Firas Modad
until it gets to a point where you can't walk anywhere without seeing people bragging about their homosexuality and their degeneracy, until you end up with a society where a third of all babies are killed, in a society where divorce is seen as The norm, and in a society where nobody takes responsibility for anything like nobody ever resigns anymore, nobody ever says I failed, and nobody says I'm sorry, and gives you the impression that They genuinely mean it, that no longer happens and it cast it comes bottom up and it cascades down. And if you want to be governed, well, you have to fulfill if I want to be governed, well, I have to fulfill my part of the covenant, and I have to do my duty. And I am failing at this, and I think that a lot of others are also failing with me, and I take my responsibility for my sins, but clearly not enough to be better.
Unknown Speaker
And I have to take some of this burden myself.
Peter McCormack
Is there a part of the Bible that you can refer to which is relevant to this period in time that we're living through? Yeah, you can, you can obviously look at Sodom and Gomorrah
Firas Modad
in the sense that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about everything being immoral, sensual, sexual and lacking commitment, and the end result is destruction. You can refer to the story of Noah, where the entirety of society is so corrupted that God decides to flood the earth. And what is a good man to do? A good man is to build an ark to save as many people as he can and as much of life as he can.
Peter McCormack
Ah, and
Firas Modad
you can see it in the Tower of Babel, where you have these lunatics trying to control every penny that you spend, trying to control your every movement, trying to make sure that you have no ability to dissent, and if you say I disagree, they will call you names and debank you and remove you from social media and ensure that you cannot speak. But the end result of that is chaos. But it's even worse, because even as these people are trying to build their own tower of Babel in centralized digital currency, in policing of all speech, in control of all media, and so on and so forth, they are also using chaos as policy against all of their enemies, and they see everybody as an enemy.
Unknown Speaker
I've read Dante's
Firas Modad
Inferno recently, right? I've been meaning to read that actually, yeah, but the bit that got me
Peter McCormack
is, do you know the story? It's about the journey through the rings of Hell, yes. And the bit that got me, which I was surprised about, because if you'd have asked me, like, the rings of hell, like, what is the worst place? You would have thought the rapists and the murderers, but the final ring is for the treacherous. Yes, yes.
Firas Modad
Because, I mean, firstly, we have that through Judas, who sees the miracles of Christ and decides to sell him for 30 pieces of silver. I think he's
Peter McCormack
there in the frozen lake, right, with Satan gnawing on his body. I mean, I could be someone. You might want to fact check that for me con, but I think that's true.
Firas Modad
I would imagine it would be, yeah, I mean, I can't imagine him not being featured there, but it's also, I mean, when you betray you also betray yourself, right? If I betray you, I've also betrayed myself. I've betrayed the relationship that we have between us. I've betrayed my own integrity. I've betrayed the reason that we have bonds with each other. We are loved, and therefore we love that's the nature of we are loved by God, and therefore we are ordered to love each other.
Unknown Speaker
And so I've betrayed God,
Firas Modad
and I've therefore betrayed my relationship with God. So betrayal and treachery is a sort of, it's a failure. Yes, it's, it's you rejecting the teachings. It's you will fail. I will fail. We will all fail.
Peter McCormack
The bottom of hell the ninth circle is called coccytus. It's a frozen lake. It's frozen lake. Is Judas there. I would imagine, I'm sure Judas is there being endlessly eaten by Satan punish those who betray their loved ones country? Yes. And Dante's in front of Judas is in the frozen bit, yeah. Is he being eaten by Satan? I'm pretty sure that's what it is. I mean, that makes for eternity. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. But it's not a fiery pit, frozen lake, so Paul of lucifer's Tears frozen by his wings flapping within the center, yeah? Yeah. It was an, it was an interesting read. Judas is indeed the eaten by eaten by Satan. Yeah, yeah. It was an interesting read. I was, I was driving to an interview, and I was listening to an interview between Tucker Carlson and Mike Cernovich, and it came up in that and so I ended up listening to it. And the treachery thing stuck with me for a long time, because at first I was thinking treachery to another man. But actually, if I'm I am a I'm christened and I am confirmed, but I am not a practicing Christian. But as you know, I feel this draw towards Christianity as a guide. You can fix that. Yeah, I know I have something I will tell you off camera an interesting story, but actually, like, if you are treacherous to Christianity, like, that's when you sin, right? And each time you sin, you are, you are adding to the compound interest of the evil things that happen in
Firas Modad
the world. And you can't tell me that Christian Zionism is not a betrayal of Christianity. You can't tell me that because it is because it is because the only way I mean when somebody like Mike Huckabee says that they can have all of it. Not only is this insane diplomatically, but you also have to look at what does that actually mean? It means ripping people out of their homes, scattering them to the winds as refugees. And to be able to do that, you. To do it with an enormous threat of force and a bunch of massacres that are intended to convince these people that they have to leave, as opposed to simply try and stay and suffer underneath your rule. And those who do manage to stay will be constantly punished and besieged and targeted, as the Palestinians are in the West Bank. And mind you, sometimes they bring it on themselves by doing terrorist attacks and suicide bombings. There is no denying that, but there is also no denying the other part of it, including the reality that not all of it is necessary, and a lot of it is genuinely intended to humiliate them and break them and convince them to leave. So when Mike Huckabee says, I'm a Christian Zionist, I think they should take all of the territory between the Nile and the Euphrates. I hope he doesn't know that this is what he's actually endorsing, but I think he does. But I think he does, and you can't tell me that this is not a betrayal of Christianity, and you can't tell me that Jesus Christ would approve of this behavior, because that is obviously not true. There is a just war theory in Christianity, and most of Israel's wars don't really fit that definition. You could argue that the War of Independence did. You could argue that, but you could maybe argue that 1973 war did, but the rest of them, and especially the wars on Lebanon, they really didn't fit that definition.
Peter McCormack
The last resort to defend against injustice, protect the innocent or restore peace. The Christian inside of me has this deep empathy for Jewish people going about their business, yeah, who want to protect their family put food on the table fair enough and honor their religion. And it also has deep empathy for Palestinians living in Gaza under constant bombardment, in a prison state. And it has empathy for Iranians now, after a failed currency being subjected to bombing campaigns, and I this is why I'm kind of like, I'm so I've become so anti war and every justification I just especially with this. I'm like, Are you fucking mad?
Firas Modad
This is completely a war of choice. Yeah, this is completely a war of choice, which, by definition, fails the just war theory test.
Unknown Speaker
There is no just war of choice.
Firas Modad
You just decide that we're going to go and kill a bunch of people. There is defensive war that is imposed on you, and even then, you must distinguish between combatant and civilian. It must be done under appropriate leadership for good reason, having exhausted other options, etc.
Unknown Speaker
So this as a complete war of choice.
Firas Modad
It doesn't fit any Christian definition. And if you say that you're Christian and you want to defend this because strategic interests, what have you. Well, if you cared about strategic interests, you would fix your economy, fix your debt, fix your immigration system.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah. Look, this is the thing like,
Firas Modad
etc, for us. When I
Peter McCormack
see I don't know, one of these fucking psychopaths within the US government say I'm only interested in things that advance Americans interests, America's interests, I'm like, Well, hold on a second. So you could under that slogan, you could justify, well, let's attack this country and steal their oil, because that advances America's interest, but it doesn't advance Christian interests. Yes. So like, what the fuck what this
Firas Modad
is why you have to be a Christian first and a patriot second. This is why the commandment is you have to love God with all of your mind and all of your heart and all of your soul. You have to put God first. You have to put Christianity first. You have to put Christian morality first and then seek your interests within a moral framework. But if you simply say, I will do what is in my interest, well, I'm going to go downstairs now and mug somebody because it's in my interests. That's stupid. So yes, you need a firm focus on the national interest, but you need a moral framework that defines what is in your interest, otherwise, anything and everything is permissible.
Unknown Speaker
So at a time like now,
Peter McCormack
do you ever question your religion, or do you feel even more drawn to your religion more it's is it the answer? If it really is the only answer, it really is the only answer.
Firas Modad
None of this is going to be fixed by tinkering at the margins of the economy. Because why are you tinkering at the margins of the economy? Because the debt numbers are high. Well, that makes you a slave to the financial markets. Nobody has benefited by being a slave to the financial markets.
Peter McCormack
Does the Bible talk about money and debt?
Firas Modad
It talks about usury being impermissible. And in the Old Testament, it says that usury is not permissible between Jews, but is permissible otherwise. And I think that develops in a way that generally condemns usury and people earning money from usury, and this condemnation of usury, I mean, it goes back to the Greeks, it goes to Islam, it goes to Christianity. Obviously, everybody understands that usury is bad. Everybody with any moral sense. You can't have stuff like Klarna, where you can just order Deliveroo and put that on debt, like, that's insane. And then when you fail to pay the penalty fees come in, and then, you know, it's it's interest free. It's interest free, yeah, but if you can't pay, it stops being interest free very quickly, and you shouldn't be behaving in this irresponsible way.
Peter McCormack
This is literally how the world runs now on debt. It completely
Firas Modad
runs on debt. If you don't have a credit score, you can't get a mortgage. The only way to get a credit score is to get a credit card and a car loan, and then you're stuck in the cycle where you must be borrowing all the time, constantly, and then maybe when you retire, you've paid off your mortgage, and
Peter McCormack
then you sell that to pay for your retirement home, because you look after yourself exactly. We are like we are. He's so funny. You grow up and you see these kind of like, what are considered like crazy conspiracy theorists, like the system is rigged against you. It's a rep race. You're gonna spend your life in debt. And then you observe it. No, that's exactly what's fucking happening. You see it with the student loans. Now, at the moment, it's like, you get all these people. You get half the population. The kids go to university. Those who can't pay for it, they've got 70,000 pound of debt. They spend a year paying off. They've now got 75,000 pound of debt.
Firas Modad
Think about it this way, forever. Think about it this way. You've taken the smarter half of your population, perhaps, arguably, yeah, arguably. But the policy is intended to take the smarter
Peter McCormack
half of your policy. You've taken the intelligence, not smarter, okay,
Firas Modad
and you've placed them in debt slavery from before they've actually properly developed. Because they are debt slaves, they can't afford to buy a house, meaning that they can't afford to start a family, meaning that they will reproduce less, meaning that you're going to get a dumber population with every generation that repeats this. Meaning that you're going to get an easier to control population with every generation that repeats this.
Unknown Speaker
So it's a fundamentally evil policy,
Firas Modad
and you have people trading in securities on the back of these loans, and Jeffrey Epstein tells us that he doesn't ever touches the real economy because by his identity, he will only ever touch financial markets to make money, which is condemned in the Bible as usury. You shouldn't be making money just off of money. I don't think Jeffrey Epstein was a Christian. What?
Peter McCormack
Obviously, obviously, he's gonna be, he's gonna be next to Judas be ignored on in
Firas Modad
that way, he ended up buying a copy of the of the Massacre of the Innocents When King Herod kills all of the babies to try to get to Jesus Christ. He ended up buying a very, that's a very Christian painting, and it's a very Christian theme, but he ended up buying a copy of that and putting it up in his New Mexico Ranch, I believe, which kind of makes you wonder, why does this guy want to see a painting of dead babies, satanic, Peter fall elite. I mean, maybe he has a strange taste in art, but if you look at some of his other art, from Clinton and address to Bush, playing with the two crash Jenga towers and a paper airplane, you kind of go, well, there is. He's signaling something to us. And in a way, if you dare say this is what it looks like, you are accused of being a conspiracy theorist because you can't provide definitive proof, and you're accused of being anti semitic, even though this is how Jeffrey Epstein talks about himself. And then you reach a conclusion, I don't want to be radicalized in this way. I don't want to be thinking about other religions honestly. I don't want to be thinking about that. I want to be thinking about my own religion and how I behave and what are my own duties, and how I'm failing in those duties. That's what I want to think about, but you're making me think things that I'm genuinely doing my best to avoid, and you're making me reach conclusions that I'm not happy about. And I'm not saying that this is true of everybody, and I'm not saying that you should go and attack people on the street or say mean things to them or anything, or that you shouldn't give them jobs, or that you shouldn't treat them fairly or kindly, or that you shouldn't be Christian to them. I am saying that I am noticing a pattern where a particular oligarchy is constantly acting in a way that it believes it's right, and that it believes is absolutely justified from its perspective, which is deeply at odds with everything that I think is right and good.
Peter McCormack
So evil is winning, Satan is winning. But we
Firas Modad
know this is a fallen world. I mean, we know that this is a fallen world.
Unknown Speaker
We know that we are born into sin,
Firas Modad
and we know that we carry the burden of our sins, and that if enough of us, like me aren't acting in a Christian enough way, all of society will end up becoming the cesspit that you see around you. So this isn't a surrender to evil. This is a call to fulfill our part of the covenant.
Peter McCormack
Okay, I appreciate you. Man, thank you. Thank you. I think I love you.
Unknown Speaker
I love you too. Man, I think I love you. Man, I do for as i
Peter McCormack
You're the first person to come on the show four times, and each time I leave deep in thought. Well, that's very kind of you. Thank you. I wish you the best. Don't carry too much of a burden. It's not yours to carry on your back alone.
Unknown Speaker
Thank you. Thank you. You. You.
