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President Trump has been threatening to “take back” the Panama Canal since he regained power. In this episode, listen to testimony from officials serving on the Federal Maritime Commission who explain why the Panama Canal has become a focus of the administration and examine whether or not we need to be concerned about an impending war for control of the canal. Please Support Congressional Dish – Quick Links Contribute monthly or a lump sum via Support Congressional Dish via (donations per episode) Send Zelle payments to: Send Venmo payments to: @Jennifer-Briney Send Cash App payments to: $CongressionalDish or Use your bank's online bill pay function to mail contributions to: Please make checks payable to Congressional Dish Thank you for supporting truly independent media! Background Sources Recommended Congressional Dish Episodes Current Events around the Panama Canal March 5, 2025. the Associated Press. Sabrina Valle, Suzanne McGee, and Michael Martina. March 4, 2025. Reuters. Matt Murphy, Jake Horton and Erwan Rivault. February 14, 2025. BBC. May 1, 2024. World Weather Attribution. World Maritime News Staff. March 15, 2019. World Maritime News. July 29, 2018. Reuters. Panama Canal Treaty of 1977 U.S. Department of State. The Chinese “Belt and Road Initiative” Michele Ruta. March 29, 2018. World Bank Group. The Trump-Gaza Video February 26, 2025. Sky News. Laws Audio Sources Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation January 28, 2025 Witnesses: Louis E. Sola, Chairman, Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) Daniel B. Maffei, Commissioner, FMC , Professor, Scalia Law School, George Mason University Joseph Kramek, President & CEO, World Shipping Council Clips 17:30 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): Between the American construction of the Panama Canal, the French effort to build an isthmus canal, and America's triumphant completion of that canal, the major infrastructure projects across Panama cost more than 35,000 lives. For the final decade of work on the Panama Canal, the United States spent nearly $400 million, equivalent to more than $15 billion today. The Panama Canal proved a truly invaluable asset, sparing both cargo ships and warships the long journey around South America. When President Carter gave it away to Panama, Americans were puzzled, confused, and many outraged. With the passage of time, many have lost sight of the canal's importance, both to national security and to the US economy. 18:45 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): But the Panama Canal was not just given away. President Carter struck a bargain. He made a treaty. And President Trump is making a serious and substantive argument that that treaty is being violated right now. 19:10 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): President Trump has highlighted two key issues. Number one, the danger of China exploiting or blocking passage through the canal, and number two, the exorbitant costs for transit. 19:20 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): Chinese companies are right now building a bridge across the canal at a slow pace, so as to take nearly a decade. And Chinese companies control container points ports at either end. The partially completed bridge gives China the ability to block the canal without warning, and the ports give China ready observation posts to time that action. This situation, I believe, poses acute risks to US national security. 19:50 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): Meanwhile, the high fees for canal transit disproportionately affect Americans, because US cargo accounts for nearly three quarters of Canal transits. US Navy vessels pay additional fees that apply only to warships. Canal profits regularly exceed $3 billion. This money comes from both American taxpayers and consumers in the form of higher costs for goods. American tourists aboard cruises, particularly those in the Caribbean Sea, are essentially captive to any fees Panama chooses to levy for canal transits, and they have paid unfair prices for fuel bunkering at terminals in Panama as a result of government granted monopoly. Panama's government relies on these exploitative fees. Nearly 1/10 of its budget is paid for with canal profit. 21:25 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): Panama has for years flagged dozens of vessels in the Iranian ghost fleet, which brought Iran tens of billions of dollars in oil profits to fund terror across the world. 21:40 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): And Chinese companies have won contracts, often without fair competition, as the infamous Belt and Road Initiative has come to Panama. China often engages in debt trap diplomacy to enable economic and political coercion. In Panama, it also seems to have exploited simple corruption. 32:40 Louis Sola: The Panama Canal is managed by the Panama Canal Authority, ACP, an independent agency of the Panamanian government. The ACP is a model of public infrastructure management, and its independence has been key to ensure a safe and reliable transit of vessels critical to the US and global commerce. 33:25 Louis Sola: In contrast, the broader maritime sector in Panama, including the nation's ports, water rights, and the world's largest ship registry, falls under the direct purview of the Panamanian government. 33:35 Louis Sola: Unfortunately, this sector has faced persistent challenges, including corruption scandals and foreign influence, particularly from Brazil and China. These issues create friction with the ACP, especially as it works to address long term challenges such as securing adequate water supplies for the canal. 33:55 Louis Sola: Although the ACP operates independently, under US law both the ACP and the government of Panama's maritime sector are considered one in the same. This means that any challenges in Panama's maritime sector, including corruption, lack of transparency, or foreign influence, can have a direct or indirect impact on the operations and long term stability of the canal. This legal perspective highlights the need for diligence in monitoring both the ACP's management and Panama government's policies affecting maritime operations. 34:30 Louis Sola: Since 2015, Chinese companies have increased their presence and influence throughout Panama. Panama became a member of the Belt and Road Initiative and ended its diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Chinese companies have been able to pursue billions of dollars in development contracts in Panama, many of which were projects directly on or adjacent to the Panama Canal. Many were no bid contracts. Labor laws were waived, and the Panamanian people are still waiting to see how they've been benefited. It is all more concerning that many of these companies are state-owned, and in some cases, even designated as linked to the People's Liberation Army. We must address the significant growing presence and influence of China throughout the Americas and in Panama, specifically. 35:20 Louis Sola: American companies should play a leading role in enhancing the canal's infrastructure. By supporting US firms, we reduce reliance on Chinese contractors and promote fair competition. 36:55 Daniel Maffei: Because the canal is essentially a waterway bridge over mountainous terrain above sea level, it does depend on large supplies of fresh water to maintain the full operations. Panama has among the world's largest annual rainfalls. Nonetheless, insufficient fresh water levels have occurred before in the canal's history, such as in the 1930s when the Madden Dam and Lake Alajuela were built to address water shortages. Since that time, the canal has undertaken several projects to accommodate larger, more modern ships. In the last couple of years, a trend of worsening droughts in the region, once again, has forced limits to the operations of the canal. Starting in June of 2023 the Panama Canal Authority employed draft restrictions and reduced the number of ships allowed to transit the canal per day. Now the Panama Canal limitations, in combination with the de facto closure of the Suez Canal to container traffic, has had serious consequences for ocean commerce, increasing rates, fees and transit times. 39:30 Daniel Maffei: Now, fortunately, Panama's 2024 rainy season has, for now, alleviated the most acute water supply issues at the canal, and normal transit volumes have been restored. That said, while the Panamanian government and Canal Authority have, with the advice of the US Army Corps of Engineers, developed credible plans to mitigate future water shortages, they also warned that it is likely that at least one more period of reduced transits will occur before these plans can be fully implemented. 41:55 Eugene Kontorovich: We shall see that under international law, each party to the treaty is entitled to determine for itself whether a violation has occurred. Now, in exchange for the United States ceding control of the canal which it built and maintained, Panama agreed to a special regime of neutrality. The essential features of this regime of neutrality is that the canal must be open to all nations for transit. That's Article Two. Equitable tolls and fees, Article Three. An exclusive Panamanian operation, Article Five. The prohibition of any foreign military presence, Article Five. Article Five provides that only Panama shall operate the canal. Testifying about the meaning of the treaty at the Senate ratification hearings, the Carter administration emphasized that this prohibits foreign operation of the canal, as well as the garrisoning of foreign troops. Now, Article Five appears to be primarily concerned about control by foreign sovereigns. If Panama signed a treaty with the People's Republic of China, whereby the latter would operate the canal on Panama's behalf, this would be a clear violation. But what if Panama contracted for port operations with a Chinese state firm, or even a private firm influenced or controlled in part by the Chinese government? The Suez Canal Company was itself, before being nationalized, a private firm in which the United Kingdom was only a controlling shareholder. Yet this was understood to represent British control over the canal. In other words, a company need not be owned by the government to be in part controlled by the government. So the real question is the degree of de jure or de facto control over a Foreign Sovereign company, and scenarios range from government companies in an authoritarian regime, completely controlled, to purely private firms in our open society like the United States, but there's many possible situations in the middle. The treaty is silent on the question of how much control is too much, and as we'll see, this is one of the many questions committed to the judgment and discretion of each party. Now turning to foreign security forces, the presence of third country troops would manifestly violate Article Five. But this does not mean that anything short of a People's Liberation Army base flying a red flag is permissible. The presence of foreign security forces could violate the regime of neutrality, even if they're not represented in organized and open military formations. Modern warfare has seen belligerent powers seek to evade international legal limitations by disguising their actions in civilian garb, from Russia's notorious little green men to Hamas terrorists hiding in hospitals or disguised as journalists. Bad actors seek to exploit the fact that international treaties focus on sovereign actors. Many of China's man made islands in the South China Sea began as civilian projects before being suddenly militarized. Indeed, this issue was discussed in the Senate ratification hearings over the treaty. Dean Rusk said informal forces would be prohibited under the treaty. Thus the ostensible civilian character of the Chinese presence around the canal does not, in itself, mean that it could not represent a violation of the treaty if, for example, these companies and their employees involved Chinese covert agents or other agents of the Chinese security forces. So this leads us to the final question, Who determines whether neutrality is being threatened or compromised? Unlike many other treaties that provide for third party dispute resolution, the neutrality treaty has no such provision. Instead, the treaty makes clear that each party determines for itself the existence of a violation. Article Four provides that each party is separately authorized to maintain the regime of neutrality, making a separate obligation of each party. The Senate's understanding accompanying to ratification also made clear that Article Five allows each party to take, quote, "unilateral action." Senator Jacob Javits, at the markup hearing, said that while the word unilateral is abrasive, we can quote, "decide that the regime of neutrality is being threatened and then act with whatever means are necessary to keep the canal neutral unilaterally." 46:35 Joseph Kramek: My name is Joe Kramek. I'm President and CEO of the World Shipping Council. The World Shipping Council is the global voice of liner shipping. Our membership consists of 90% of the world's liner shipping tonnage, which are container vessels and vehicle carriers. They operate on fixed schedules to provide our customers with regular service to ship their goods in ports throughout the world. 47:15 Joseph Kramek: As you have heard, using the Panama Canal to transit between the Atlantic and Pacific saves significant time and money. A typical voyage from Asia to the US or East Coast can be made in under 30 days using the canal, while the same journey can take up to 40 days if carriers must take alternate routes. From a commercial trade perspective, the big picture is this. One of the world's busiest trade lanes is the Trans Pacific. The Trans Pacific is cargo coming from and going to Asia via the United States. Focusing in a bit, cargo coming from Asia and bound for US Gulf and East Coast ports always transits the Panama Canal. Similarly, cargo being exported from US and East Coast ports, a large share of which are US Agricultural exports, like soybeans, corn, cotton, livestock and dairy also almost always transits the Panama Canal. The result is that 75% of Canal traffic originates in or is bound for the United States. 48:55 Joseph Kramek: We've talked about the drought in 2023 and the historic low water levels that it caused in Lake Gatún, which feeds the canal locks, a unique system that is a fresh water feed, as contrasted to an ocean to ocean system, which the French tried and failed, but which is actually active in the Suez Canal. These low water levels reduced transits from 36 transits a day to as low as 22 per day. Additionally, the low water levels required a reduction in maximum allowable draft levels, or the depth of the ship below the water line, which for our members reduced the amount of containers they could carry through the canal. This resulted in a 10% reduction in import volumes for US Gulf and East Coast ports, with the Port of Houston experiencing a 26.7% reduction. 51:10 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): Are you aware of allegations from some vessel operators of disparate treatment such as sweetheart deals or favorable rebates by Panama for canal transits? Louis Sola: Thank you for the question, Mr. Chairman, we have become aware through some complaints by cruise lines that said that they were not getting a refund of their canal tolls. When we looked into this, we found a Panamanian Executive Order, Decree 73, that specifically says that if a cruise line would stop at a certain port, that they could be refunded 100% of the fees. And as far as I know, that's the only instant where that exists. 53:05 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): So Panama was the very first Latin American country to join China's Belt and Road Initiative, and right now, China is building a fourth bridge across the Panama Canal for car traffic and light rail. Chairman Sola, why should Chinese construction of a bridge near Panama City concern the United States? Louis Sola: Mr. Chairman, we all saw the tragedy that happened here in the Francis Scott Key Bridge incident and the devastation that had happened to Baltimore. We also saw recently what happened in the Suez Canal, where we had a ship get stuck in there. It's not only the construction of the bridge, but it's a removal of a bridge, as I understand it, called the Bridge of the Americas. It was built in 1961 and that would paralyze cargo traffic in and out of the canals. 53:55 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): Panama also recently renewed the concessions for two container ports to a Chinese company, Hutchison Ports PPC. Of course, Chinese companies are controlled by the Communist Party. How does China use control of those ports for economic gain? Louis Sola: Mr. Chairman, I am a regulator, a competition regulator. And the Chinese ports that you're referring to, let me put them into scope. The one on the Pacific, the Port of Balboa, is roughly the same size as the Port of Houston. They do about 4 million containers a year. They have about 28 game tree cranes. The one on the Atlantic is the same as my hometown in Miami, they do about 1 million containers. So where Roger Gunther in the Port of Houston generates about $1 billion a year and Heidi Webb in Miami does about $200 million, the Panama ports company paid 0 for 20 years on that concession. So it's really hard to compete against zero. So I think that's our concern, our economic concern, that we would have. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): Commissioner Maffei, anything to add on that? Daniel Maffei: Yeah, I do too also think it is important. I would point out that you don't have to stop at either port. It's not like these two ports control the entrance to the canal. That is the Canal Authority that does control that. However, I think it's of concern. I would also point out that the Panamanian government thinks it's of concern too, because they're conducting their own audit of those particular deals, but we remain very interested as well. 56:25 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): Would the facts discussed here be considered violations of the neutrality treaty in force right now between the United States and Panama? Eugene Kontorovich: So I think Senator, I think potentially they could, but it's impossible to say definitively without knowing more, in particular, about the degree of Chinese control and involvement in these companies. I think it's important to note that these port operation companies that operate the ports on both sides, when they received their first contract, it was just a few months before Hong Kong was handed over to China. In other words, they received them as British companies, sort of very oddly, just a few months before the handover. Now, of course, since then, Hong Kong has been incorporated into China, has been placed under a special national security regime, and the independence of those companies has been greatly abridged, to say nothing of state owned companies involved elsewhere in in the canal area, which raised significantly greater questions. Additionally, I should point out that the understandings between President Carter and Panamanian leader Herrera, which were attached to the treaty and form part of the treaty, provide that the United States can, quote, "defend the canal against any threat to the regime of neutrality," and I understand that as providing some degree of preemptive authority to intervene. One need not wait until the canal is actually closed by some act of sabotage or aggression, which, as we heard from the testimony, would be devastating to the United States, but there is some incipient ability to address potential violations. 58:10 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): If the United States determines that Panama is in violation of the treaty, what is the range of remedies the United States would have for that treaty violation? Eugene Kontorovich: So I think it may be shocking to people to hear today, but when one goes over the ratification history and the debates and discussions in this body over this treaty, it was clear that the treaty was understood as giving both sides, separately, the right to resort to use armed force to enforce the provisions of the treaty. And it's not so surprising when one understands that the United States made an extraordinary concession to Panama by transferring this canal, which the United States built at great expense and maintained and operated to Panama, gratis. And in exchange, it received a kind of limitation, a permanent limitation on Panamanians sovereignty, that Panama agreed that the United States could enforce this regime of neutrality by force. Now, of course, armed force should never be the first recourse for any kind of international dispute and should not be arrived at sort of rationally or before negotiations and other kinds of good offices are exhausted, but it's quite clear that the treaty contemplates that as a remedy for violations. 1:03:20 Louis Sola: I believe that the security of the canal has always been understood to be provided by the United States. Panama does not have a military, and I always believed that there's been a close relationship with Southern Command that we would provide that. And it would be nice to see if we had a formalization of that in one way or another, because I don't believe that it's in the treaty at all. 1:05:05 Daniel Maffei: While we were down there, both of us heard, I think, several times, that the Panamanians would, the ones we talked to anyway, would welcome US companies coming in and doing a lot of this work. Frankly, their bids are not competitive with the Chinese bids. Frankly, they're not that existent because US companies can make more money doing things other places, but even if they were existent, it is difficult to put competitive bids when the Chinese bids are so heavily subsidized by China. 1:06:10 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): What would China's incentive be to heavily subsidize those bids to undercut American companies and other companies? Daniel Maffei: Yeah, it's not a real short answer, but Senator, China's made no secret of its ambitious policies to gain influence of ports throughout the globe. It's invested in 129 ports in dozens of countries. It runs a majority of 17 ports, that does not include this Hong Kong company, right? So that's just directly Chinese-owned ports. So it has been a part of their Belt and Road strategy, whatever you want to call it, the Maritime Silk Road, for decades. So they believe that this influence, this investment in owning maritime ports is important to their economy. 1:07:05 Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE): In 2021, Hutchison was awarded those two ports, Port Balboa and Port Cristobal, in a no-bid award process. Can you tell me, does the United States have any authority or recourse with the Panama Canal Authority under our current agreement with Panama to rebid those terminal concession contracts. And perhaps Mr. Kantorovich, that's more in your purview? Louis Sola: Senator, both of those ports were redone for 25 years, until 2047, I believe. And they have to pay $7 million is what the ongoing rate is for the Port of Houston- and the Port of Miami-sized concessions. Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE): And it can't be rebid until after that date? Louis Sola: Well, I believe that that's what the comptroller's office is auditing both of those ports and that contract. That was done under the previous Panamanian administration. A new administration came in, and they called for an audit of that contract immediately. 1:20:10 Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK): Are the companies now controlling both sides of the Panama Canal, the Chinese companies, subject to the PRC national security laws that mandate cooperation with the military, with state intelligence agencies. Does anyone know that? Eugene Kontorovich: They're subject all the time. They're subject to those laws all the time by virtue of being Hong Kong companies. And you know, they face, of course, consequences for not complying with the wishes of the Chinese government. One of the arguments -- Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK): Wouldn't that be a violation of the treaty? And isn't that a huge risk to us right now that the Chinese -- Eugene Kontorovich: That is a threat to the neutrality -- Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK): If they invaded Taiwan, invaded the Philippines, they could go to these two companies saying, Hey, shut it down, make it hard, sink a ship in the canal. And wouldn't they be obligated to do that under Chinese law if they were ordered to by the PLA or the CCP? Eugene Kontorovich: I don't know if they'd be obligated, but certainly the People's Republic of China would have many tools of leverage and pressure on these companies. That's why the treaty specifically says that we can act not just to end actual obstructions to the canal. We don't have to wait until the canal is closed by hostile military action. Thatwould be a suicide pact, that would be catastrophic for us, but rather that we can respond at the inchoate, incipient level to threats, and then this is up to the president to determine whether this is significantly robust to constitute -- Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK): So aren't we kind of walking up to the idea of a suicide pact, because we've got two big Chinese companies on both ends of the Panama Canal, who, if there's a war in INDOPACOM, Taiwan that involves us and China, these companies would be obligated to do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party and PLA? I mean, are we kind of walking up to a very significant national security threat already? Eugene Kontorovich: Yeah, certainly, there's a threat. And I think what makes the action of the Chinese government so difficult to respond to, but important to respond to, is that they conceal this in sort of levels of gray without direct control. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK): Let me ask you on that topic, as my last question, Professor, let's assume that we find out. And again, it wouldn't be surprising. I think you can almost assume it that these two companies have Chinese spies or military officials within the ranks of the employees of the companies. Let's assume we found that out, somehow that becomes public. But I don't think it's a big assumption. It's probably true right now. So you have spies and military personnel within the ranks of these two companies that are controlling both ends of the Panama Canal for you, Professor, and Chairman Sola, wouldn't that be a blatant violation of Article Five of the neutrality treaty, if that were true, which probably is true? Eugene Kontorovich: Yeah, I do think it would be a clear violation. As former Secretary of State, Dean Ross said at the ratification hearings, informal forces can violate Article Five as well as formal forces. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK): Is there any evidence of Chinese spies or other nefarious Chinese actors embedded in these companies? Louis Sola: Senator, we have no information of that. That's not under the purview of -- Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK): But you agree that would be a violation of Article Five of the neutrality treaty? Louis Sola: I do. 1:26:25 Daniel Maffei: Senator Sullivan was talking about Hutchison Ports. That's actually the same company that runs terminals on both ends of the canal. I am concerned about that. However, if we want to be concerned about that, all of us should lose a lot more sleep than we're losing because if there are spies there, then there might be spies at other Hutchinson ports, and there are other Hutchinson ports in almost every part of the world. They own the largest container port in the United Kingdom, Felix Dow, which is responsible for nearly half of Britain's container trade. They control major maritime terminals in Argentina, Australia, the Bahamas, Germany, Indonesia, Mexico, Myanmar, the Netherlands, South Korea and Tanzania. If owning and managing adjacent ports means that China somehow has operational control or strategic control over the Panama Canal, they also have it over the Suez, the Singapore Straits, the Mediterranean Sea and the English Channel. 1:35:45 Louis Sola: The fees that I think we are looking at, or have been looked at, the reason that we went there was because of the auctioning of the slots. And so what Panama did is they had a smaller percentage, maybe 20% allocation, and then they moved it up to 30% and 40% because it became a money maker for them. So as they were doing -- Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN): Okay, let me interject here. The auctioning of the slots gives these the right to skip the queue? Louis Sola: Yes, ma'am. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN): Okay, so just for the record there. Continue. Louis Sola: So the auctioning of the slots. Under maritime law, it's first come first serve, but Panama has always put a certain percentage aside, and they started to put more and more. So we got a lot of complaints. We got a lot of complaints from LNG carriers that paid $4 million to go through, and we got a lot of complaints from agriculture that didn't have the money to pay to go through, because their goods were gonna go down. So if you look at the financial statements -- I'm a nerd, I look at financial statements of everybody -- the canal increased the amount of revenue that they had from about $500 million to $1.8 billion in the last three years just because of those fees. So this is what is very concerning to us. 1:39:20 Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN): Do you know of any instances where the United States has been singled out or treated unfairly under the neutrality treaty in the operation of the canal? Daniel Maffei: I do not. I would add that one of the reasons why saying the US is disproportionately affected by raises in Canal fees and other kinds of fees at the canal is because the United States disproportionately utilizes the canal. 1:44:55 Louis Sola: We have a US port there, SSA, out of Washington State that I actually worked on the development of that many years ago, and helped develop that. That used to be a United States Navy submarine base, and we converted that. As far as the two ports that we have, they're completely different. One is a major infrastructure footprint, and also a container port that's moving 4 million containers a year. That's really phenomenal amount. That's more than Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and you've probably got to get Tampa and a little bit of Jacksonville in there to get that type of volume. And on the other side, we have a very small port, but it's a very strategic port on the Atlantic. So how are the operations done?I don't know how they don't make money. I mean, if you want to come right down to it, if they've been operating the port for 20 years, and they say that they haven't made any money, so they haven't been able to pay the government. That's what concerns me is I don't believe that we're on a level playing field with the American ports. 1:58:50 Eugene Kontorovich: I think the charges and fees are less of an issue because they don't discriminate across countries. We pay more because we use more, but it's not nationally discriminatory. 1:59:00 Eugene Kontorovich: The presence of Chinese companies, especially Chinese state companies, but not limited to them, do raise serious issues and concerns for the neutrality of the treaty. And I should point out, in relation to some of the earlier questioning, the canal, for purposes of the neutrality treaty, is not limited just to the actual locks of the canal and the transit of ships through the canal. According to Annex One, paragraph one of the treaty, it includes also the entrances of the canal and the territorial sea of Panama adjacent to it. So all of the activities we're talking about are within the neutrality regime, the geographic scope of the neutrality regime in the treaty. 2:00:30 Daniel Maffei: I actually have to admit, I'm a little confused as to why some of the senators asking these questions, Senator Blackburn, aren't more concerned about the biggest port in the United Kingdom being run by the Chinese. Petraeus in the port nearest Athens, one of the biggest ports in the Mediterranean, is not just run by a Chinese-linked company, it's run directly by a Chinese-owned company, and I was there. So you're on to something, but if you're just focusing on Panama, that's only part. 2:01:45 Louis Sola: About a year ago, when we were having this drought issue, there was also a lot of focus on Iran and how they were funding Hamas and the Houthis because they were attacking the Red Sea. What the United States has found is that Iranian vessels are sometimes flagged by Panama in order to avoid sanctions, so that they could sell the fuel that they have, and then they can take that money and then they can use it as they wish. Panama, at the time, had a very complicated process to de-flag the vessels. There was an investigation, there was an appeals process. By the time that OFAC or Treasury would go ahead and identify one of those vessels, by the time that they were doing the appeals and stuff like this, they've already changed flags to somewhere else. So when we went to Panama, we met with the Panamanian president, and I must say that we were very impressed, because he was 30 minutes late, but he was breaking relations with Venezuela at the time because the election was the day before. We explained to him the situation. The very next day, we met with the maritime minister, with US embassy personnel and Panama actually adjusted their appeals process so to make it more expedient, so if the United States or OFAC would come and say that this Iranian vessel is avoiding sanctions, now we have a process in place to go ahead and do that, and 53 vessels were de-flagged because of that. 2:06:05 Sen. John Curtis (R-UT): Is there any reason that China can't watch or do whatever they want from this bridge to get the intel from these containers? And does that concern anybody? Louis Sola: Well, it definitely concerns Southern Command, because they've brought it up on numerous occasions that there could be some sort of surveillance or something like that on the bridges. 2:20:30 Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT): We segregate ourselves artificially in a way that they do not. We segregate ourselves. Let's talk about military. Let's talk about intelligence. Let's talk about economics. They don't. China doesn't work that way. It's a whole of government approach. They don't draw a delineation between an economics discussion and a military one. And their attack may not look like Pearl Harbor. It may look like an everyday ship that decides, you know, it pulls into the locks and blows itself up. And now the locks are non-functional for our usage, and we can't support an inter ocean fleet transfer, and our ability to defend it, as you referred to Chairman, is now inhibited by the fact that we no longer have the military infrastructure around the canal that we did just as recently as 1999. 2:21:10 Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT): So from a commercial perspective, do the shipping companies have concerns over the security of the narrow waterways? We've the Strait to Malacca, we've got the Suez Canal, we've got Gibraltar, we've got Panama. Is that a concern that's thrown around in the boardrooms of the largest shipping corporations in the world? Joseph Kramek: Senator, I think it's something they think about every day. I mean, really, it's drawn into sharp relief with the Red Sea. It was what I call a pink flamingo. There's black swans that just come up and there's pink flamingos that you can see, but you don't act. But no one really thought a whole lot that one of the most important waterways in the world could be denied, and moreover, that it could be denied for such a sustained period. The good news is that -- Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT): And denied, I might add, by a disaffected non-state actor of Bedouins running around with rocket launchers, who also managed to beat us in a 20 year war in Afghanistan. My point to saying all this is we're just debating operational control of the canal, yet it seems very clear to all of us that a very simple act can debilitate the canal and eliminate our ability to use it in a matter of minutes with no warning, and we have no ability to intervene or stop that. To me, that means we do not have operational control of the canal. 2:30:40 Daniel Maffei: I will say that certainly we need to look at other kinds of ways to get US companies in positions where they can truly compete with the Chinese on some of these things. Blaming it all on Panama really misses the point. I've seen the same thing in Greece, where Greece didn't want to give the concession of its largest port to a Chinese company, but because of its financial difficulties, it was getting pressure from international organizations such the IMF, Europe and even maybe some of the United States to do so. So I just ask you to look at that. 2:31:20 Daniel Maffei: Panamanians are making far more on their canal than they ever have before. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as it's going to the right place. But where they're really making the money is on these auctions, and that is why it remains a concern of mine and I'm sure the chairman's. That is where we are looking at, potentially, using our authority under Section 19 of the Merchant Marine Act where we could, if we can show that it is a problem with the foreign trade of the US, it's interfering with foreign trade of the US, there are certain things that we can do. Senate Foreign Relations Committee January 15, 2024 Clips 4:01:40 Marco Rubio: The thing with Panama on the canal is not new. I visited there. It was 2016. I think I've consistently seen people express concern about it, and it's encapsulized here in quote after quote. Let me tell you the former US ambassador who served under President Obama said: "the Chinese see in Panama what we saw in Panama throughout the 20th century, a maritime and aviation logistics hub." The immediate past head of Southern Command, General Laura Richardson, said, "I was just in Panama about a month ago and flying along the Panama Canal and looking at the state owned enterprises from the People's Republic of China on each side of the Panama Canal. They look like civilian companies or state owned enterprises that could be used for dual use and could be quickly changed over to a military capability." We see questions that were asked by the ranking member in the house China Select Committee, where he asked a witness and they agreed that in a time of conflict, China could use its presence on both ends of the canal as a choke point against the United States in a conflict situation. So the concerns about Panama have been expressed by people on both sides of the aisle for at least the entire time that I've been in the United States Senate, and they've only accelerated further. And this is a very legitimate issue that we face there. I'm not prepared to answer this question because I haven't looked at the legal research behind it yet, but I'm compelled to suspect that an argument could be made that the terms under which that canal were turned over have been violated. Because while technically, sovereignty over the canal has not been turned over to a foreign power, in reality, a foreign power today possesses, through their companies, which we know are not independent, the ability to turn the canal into a choke point in a moment of conflict. And that is a direct threat to the national interest and security the United States, and is particularly galling given the fact that we paid for it and that 5,000 Americans died making it. That said, Panama is a great partner on a lot of other issues, and I hope we can resolve this issue of the canal and of its security, and also continue to work with them cooperatively on a host of issues we share in common, including what to do with migration. 4:38:35 Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT): Now, President Trump has recently talked a little bit about the fact that there are some questions arising about the status of the Panama Canal. When we look to the treaty at issue, the treaty concerning the permanent neutrality and operation of the Panama Canal, we're reminded that some things maybe aren't quite as they should be there right now. Given that the Chinese now control major ports at the entry and the exit to the canal, it seems appropriate to say that there's at least an open question. There's some doubt as to whether the canal remains neutral. Would you agree with that assessment? Marco Rubio: Yes. Here's the challenge. Number one, I want to be clear about something. The Panamanian government, particularly its current office holders, are very friendly to the United States and very cooperative, and we want that to continue, and I want to bifurcate that from the broader issue of the canal. Now I am not, President Trump is not inventing this. This is something that's existed now for at least a decade. In my service here, I took a trip to Panama in 2017. When on that trip to Panama in 2017 it was the central issue we discussed about the canal, and that is that Chinese companies control port facilities at both ends of the canal, the east and the west, and the concerns among military officials and security officials, including in Panama, at that point, that that could one day be used as a choke point to impede commerce in a moment of conflict. Going back to that I -- earlier before you got here, and I don't want to have to dig through this folder to find it again, but -- basically cited how the immediate past head of Southern Command, just retired general Richardson, said she flew over the canal, looked down and saw those Chinese port facilities, and said Those look like dual use facilities that in a moment of conflict, could be weaponized against us. The bipartisan China commission over in the House last year, had testimony and hearings on this issue, and members of both parties expressed concern. The former ambassador to Panama under President Obama has expressed those concerns. This is a legitimate issue that needs to be confronted. The second point is the one you touched upon, and that is, look, could an argument be made, and I'm not prepared to answer it yet, because it's something we're going to have to study very carefully. But I think I have an inkling of I know where this is going to head. Can an argument be made that the Chinese basically have effective control of the canal anytime they want? Because if they order a Chinese company that controls the ports to shut it down or impede our transit, they will have to do so. There are no independent Chinese companies. They all exist because they've been identified as national champions. They're supported by the Chinese government. And if you don't do what they want, they find a new CEO, and you end up being replaced and removed. So they're under the complete control of their government. This is a legitimate question, and one that Senators Risch had some insight as well. He mentioned that in passing that needs to be looked at. This is not a joke. The Panama Canal issue is a very serious one. 4:44:30 Marco Rubio: In 2016 and 2017 that was well understood that part of the investments they made in Panama were conditioned upon Panama's ability to convince the Dominican Republic and other countries to flip their recognition away from Taiwan. That happened. Jen Briney's Recent Guest Appearances Travis Makes Money: Give and Take: Music by Editing Production Assistance

Phoenix experienced a 113-day streak of temperatures at or over 100 degrees, and an annual average high temperature of 90 degrees in 2024. The city's extreme heat is the worst in the nation and has equally resulted in staggering increases of climate-related health emergencies and deaths. Greater resilience to such rising temperatures requires clear, verifiable information that can guide communities in effective decision-making. Researchers at Arizona State University are working to fill this gap, using the Phoenix metro as a laboratory in which to measure, study and document the complex variables that determine thermal risk or safety for humans.  Using novel technologies—like ANDI, the only thermal manikin in the world customized for testing outdoor environments—these scientists are building a detailed understanding of how heat affects the human body under a variety of real-world conditions. The results inform local governments' urgent heat risk mitigation work, identifying and prioritizing high-impact opportunities for public cooling center facilities and augmented built or natural shade.  Listen in as Ten Across founder Duke Reiter the award-winning climatologist Jennifer Vanos and human thermoregulation expert Konrad Rykaczewski about progress and direction in this groundbreaking heat research at ASU, and how its results may help other heat-vulnerable cities in the I-10 corridor and beyond.  Related articles and resources  National Centers for Environmental Information Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters 2024 tally  Phoenix Shade Action Plan  “Phoenix closed popular hiking trails for 45 days in 2024. That could rise in 2025.” (Arizona Republic, Jan. 2025)  “Meet ANDI, the world's first outdoor sweating, breathing and walking manikin” (ASU News, May 2023)  “What Some of the Hottest Cities on The 10 Are Doing to Address Deadly Heat” (Ten Across Conversations podcast, Aug. 2024) “Local Experts Answer: Why Are People Still Moving to Phoenix?” (Ten Across Conversations podcast, Feb. 2024)  “Why do Bedouins wear black in the desert?” (The Guardian, Aug. 2012)

Today, we're speaking with Vanessa Abbe, a travel advisor who joined me on my trip to Jordan last October. In this conversation, which we had live on Instagram recently, I wanted to hear her take on what it's like traveling in the country right now. Reminder: I'm running a 10-day group trip to Jordan this May. The trip runs from May 18th to 27th and you can get all the information by visiting here. Throughout February, you can save $150 off your booking by using code GOINGPLACESFEB when you join our trip. The code expires on Fri, Feb 28. What you'll learn in this episode:How Vanessa approached the safety question of traveling to JordanGaining a new perspective on the region through long conversationsThe impact of tourism cancelations on Jordan's tourism communityWhat it's like traveling in proximity to PalestineMeeting the people of Jordan: an Ammani photographer, a sustainable farmer in Madaba, the Bedouins of Wadi RumWhy hospitality looks like home-cooked meals in JordanWhy Petra By Night was one of the top experiences for VanessaWhat Vanessa has to say to someone considering going to JordanFeatured on the show:Follow Vanessa on Instagram: @adventures_vkabbeLearn more about our upcoming trip to Jordan in May hereGet more information at: Going Places website Join our Going Places newsletter to get updates on new episodes and Yulia's travel storytelling work. Subscribe at goingplacesmedia.com/newsletter!For more BTS of this podcast follow @goingplacesmedia on Instagram and check out our videos on YouTube!Please head over to Apple Podcasts and SUBSCRIBE to the show. If you enjoy this conversation, please share it with others on social and don't forget to tag us @goingplacesmedia!And show us some love, if you have a minute, by rating Going Places or leaving us a review wherever you listen. You'll be helping us to bend the arc of algorithms towards our community — thank you!Going Places with Yulia Denisyuk is a show that sparks a better understanding of people and places near and far by fostering a space for real conversations to occur. Each week, we sit down with travelers, journalists, creators, and people living and working in destinations around the world. Hosted by Yulia Denisyuk, an award-winning travel journalist, photographer, and writer who's worked with National Geographic, The New York Times, BBC Travel, and more. Learn more about our show at goingplacesmedia.com.

'Saint Anthony, the Father of monks, was born in Egypt in 251 of pious parents who departed this life while he was yet young. On hearing the words of the Gospel: "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor" (Matt. 19:21), he immediately put it into action. Distributing to the poor all he had, and fleeing from all the turmoil of the world, he departed to the desert. The manifold temptations he endured continually for the space of twenty years are incredible. His ascetical struggles by day and by night, whereby he mortified the uprisings of the passions and attained to the height of dispassion, surpass the bounds of nature; and the report of his deeds of virtue drew such a multitude to follow him, that the desert was transformed into a city, while he became, so to speak, the governor, lawgiver, and master-trainer of all the citizens of this newly-formed city. But the cities of the world also enjoyed the fruit of his virtue. When the Christians were being persecuted and put to death under Maximinus in 312, he hastened to their aid and consolation. When the Church was troubled by the Arians, he went with zeal to Alexandria in 335 and struggled against them in behalf of Orthodoxy. During this time, by the grace of his words, he also turned many unbelievers to Christ.   'He began his ascetical life outside his village of Coma in Upper Egypt, studying the ways of the ascetics and holy men there, and perfecting himself in the virtues of each until he surpassed them all. Desiring to increase his labours, he departed into the desert, and finding an abandoned fortress in the mountain, he made his dwelling in it, training himself in extreme fasting, unceasing prayer, and fierce conflicts with the demons. Here he remained, as mentioned above, about twenty years. Saint Athanasius the Great, who knew him personally and wrote his life, says that he came forth from the fortress "initiated in the mysteries and filled with the Spirit of God." Afterwards, because of the press of the faithful, who deprived him of his solitude, he was enlightened by God to journey with certain Bedouins, until he came to a mountain in the desert near the Red Sea, where he passed the remaining part of his life. Saint Athanasius says of him that "his countenance had a great and wonderful grace. This gift also he had from the Saviour. For if he were present in a great company of monks, and any one who did not know him previously wished to see him, immediately coming forward he passed by the rest, and hurried to Anthony, as though attracted by his appearance. Yet neither in height nor breadth was he conspicuous above others, but in the serenity of his manner and the purity of his soul."   'So passing his life, and becoming an example of virtue and a rule for monastics, he reposed on January 17 in the year 356, having lived together some 105 years.' (Great Horologion)   Speaking of the demonic temptations and struggles with the passions that beset those who seek their salvation, St Anthony said: "All these trials are to your advantage. Do away with temptation and no one will be saved."

From Leaders to Bedouins: How Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) Changed Lives With His Wisdom | Hisham Abu YusufBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/learn-about-islam--5484193/support.

In this episode of 10x Your Team with Cam & Otis, Eileen Isola joins the conversation to discuss the power of perspective and the importance of eliminating the word "should" from our vocabulary. Eileen shares her insights on how shifting perspectives can lead to personal and professional growth, and how embracing change can enhance leadership effectiveness. The discussion also touches on the significance of celebrating milestones, such as the upcoming 50th anniversary of women attending military service academies. Tune in for an inspiring conversation that encourages listeners to rethink their approach to challenges and opportunities.More About Eileen:An international pilot, Eileen is also the Lead Author for USAFA Women Writers and a debut author of her own memoir who knows the transformative power of storytelling. Eileen was the first woman to serve as an Advance Agent to the President of the United States. A decorated US Air Force pilot, she flew high-performance jets, trained combat pilots and instructors to evade being missile-locked on combat missions, airlifted humanitarian relief to war-torn regions, resupplied radar sites on dirt strips in the Amazon jungles, cut the ribbon opening the Military Women's Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, commanded a squadron, and crumbled barriers to women serving their country. Following her retirement from the Air Force, Eileen joined a Fortune 500® before founding and leading her own firm. She eventually divested it to focus all of her “Tenacious She-Warrior” life energies on surviving breast cancer.Remaining a sought-after consultant, she was brought into the C-suite of a Texas firm experiencing scaling challenges. While being treated and healing, she built and successfully executed Operation High Flight, her personal campaign to return to the flight deck. As she rejoined life, she was an active member of the North Texas General Aviation community, flight instructed, taught as a college adjunct, flew volunteer Angel Flight missions, and lent her considerable expertise to the organizing and executing of airlift relief operations to South Texas and Florida following Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. She subsequently returned to Virginia to fly Boeing 767s for a global charter enterprise, and now flies corporate executive aircraft. The daughter of an international airline pilot, Eileen grew up immersed in the cultures of our world across three continents, from British primary education and picnicking in the Hindu Kush; to sharing fish with Bedouins, tea with Kazakh merchants, and shopping in the sooqs of Jeddah; to thwarting the nuns while attending boarding school in Italy. She holds an undergraduate degree from the US Air Force Academy and two post-graduate degrees.All that said, she is happiest when lost amidst the giggles of her granddaughters, or cloud-chasing without spilling passenger drinks. When she's not at 40,000 feet in her front-row seat to the Universe, she makes her home in the Northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.#10xYourTeam #LeadershipEffectiveness #PerspectiveShift #EmbraceChange #CelebrateMilestones #WomenInLeadership #MilitaryService #StorytellingPower #PersonalGrowth #ProfessionalGrowth #InspiringConversations #EileenIsola #WomenInAviation #LeadershipJourney #OvercomingChallenges #TenaciousSheWarrior #AviationPioneer #GlobalPerspective #Empowerment #Resilience #BreakingBarriersChapters:Introduction and Eileen's BackgroundThe Impact of Perspective ShiftsTime: 00:00 - 05:00Description: Opening remarks and introduction of Eileen Isola, highlighting her journey and expertise.Eliminating "Should" from VocabularyTime: 05:01 - 15:00Description: Discussion on how changing perspectives can lead to growth and improved leadership.Celebrating MilestonesTime: 15:01 - 25:00Description: Eileen shares the importance of removing "should" from our language t

Fluent Fiction - Hebrew: A Spark of Discovery: Saving the Negev's Endangered Flora Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.com/he/episode/2025-01-01-08-38-19-he Story Transcript:He: כשהשמש החורפית שוקעת על מדבר הנגב, אורות מחנה המחקר מנצנצים באופק.En: As the winter sun sets over the Negev Desert, the lights of the research camp twinkle on the horizon.He: אראל, אקולוגית מסורה, בוחנת את הנוף המדברי.En: Aral, a dedicated ecologist, surveys the desert landscape.He: יחד איתה נמצאים נועם ושירה, שני חברי צוות נאמנים, המשכימים קום בכל בוקר למען פרויקט שימור חשוב.En: With her are Noam and Shira, two loyal team members who rise early every morning for the sake of an important conservation project.He: החורף בנגב יותר קריר, והלילות אפילו קרים, אך אור החנוכיה נותן חום וחגיגיות.En: Winter in the Negev is cooler, and the nights are even colder, but the light of the Hanukkiah provides warmth and festivity.He: אראל רצתה לגלות תגלית מדעית משמעותית שתסייע בהגנה על צמחים בסכנת הכחדה.En: Aral wanted to make a significant scientific discovery that would help protect endangered plants.He: היא האמינה בנגב, אך הספקות לא הרפו ממנה.En: She believed in the Negev, but doubts did not let her go.He: כשהתפשטו שמועות על תקלות בציוד, הלחץ רק גבר.En: When rumors of equipment failures spread, the pressure only increased.He: המממן דרש תוצאות מהירות, אך המחקר דרש זמן וסבלנות.En: The sponsor demanded quick results, but the research required time and patience.He: יום אחד, לאחר שיחה עם אחד מאנשי הקהילה הבדואית המקומית, עולה רעיון חדש במוחה של אראל.En: One day, after a conversation with a member of the local Bedouin community, a new idea dawned on Aral.He: אולי הם יודעים איך להתגבר על הקשיים במדבר?En: Maybe they knew how to overcome the challenges of the desert?He: הם ידעו כיצד לקרוא את האותות של הצמחים, כיצד לשרוד בתנאי הקיצון.En: They knew how to read the signals of the plants, how to survive in extreme conditions.He: אראל ביקשה מהבדואים לכוון את צוות המחקר לשיטות הישנות.En: Aral asked the Bedouins to guide the research team to the old methods.He: הלילות עברו, וחג החנוכה הגיע.En: The nights passed, and the holiday of Hanukkah arrived.He: סביב החנוכיה, שירה ונועם הציעו חגיגה קטנה כדי להרים את מצב הרוח.En: Around the Hanukkiah, Shira and Noam suggested a small celebration to lift their spirits.He: האור בחשכה נסך נחמה, וסיפורי מכבים ותיפוח שביב התקווה עודדו את אראל.En: The light in the darkness offered comfort, and stories of the Maccabees and nurturing a spark of hope encouraged Aral.He: היא התעמקה במחקר, חקרה מסמכים ושוחחה עם חברי הצוות בשגרירות האנושיות והידע.En: She delved into the research, studied documents, and communicated with the team, rich in humanity and knowledge.He: בלילה השמיני והאחרון של חג החנוכה, נצנץ רעיון חדש במוחה של אראל.En: On the eighth and final night of Hanukkah, a new idea sparkled in Aral's mind.He: המשלבת הישנה והחדש, אראל ופיתחה טכניקה חדשה לאסוף נתונים קריטיים.En: Combining the old with the new, she developed a new technique to collect critical data.He: הטכניקה שילבה בין ידע מדעי עדכני לבין מסורות עתיקות למדידת דפוסי צמיחה בצמחים המדבריים.En: The technique blended up-to-date scientific knowledge with ancient traditions for measuring growth patterns in desert plants.He: כשעלה היום המחרת, אראל והצוות החלו לאסוף את הדגימות.En: As the next day dawned, Aral and the team began collecting the samples.He: שעה אחר שעה, התגלו דפוסים חשובים על הצמח המדברי בסכנת הכחדה.En: Hour after hour, important patterns about the endangered desert plant emerged.He: התגלית העניקה לצוות כספים נוספים להמשך המחקר.En: The discovery provided the team with additional funds to continue the research.He: אראל, שנאבקה בלבטים, מצאה כעת ביטחון בעצמה ובעבודתה.En: Aral, who had struggled with doubts, now found confidence in herself and her work.He: ההתנסות למד אותה ערך השיתוף והקשבה לאחרים.En: The experience taught her the value of sharing and listening to others.He: השילוב בין ידע מדעי ומסורתי פתח בפניה דלתות חדשות.En: The combination of scientific and traditional knowledge opened new doors for her.He: המאמץ השתלם, והאור של חנוכה לווה את הצוות בדרכם להצלחה בשימור צמחי המדבר היקרים.En: The effort paid off, and the light of Hanukkah accompanied the team on their path to success in preserving the precious desert plants. Vocabulary Words:desert: מדברecologist: אקולוגיתdedicated: מסורהsake: למעןconservation: שימורendangered: בסכנת הכחדהdoubts: ספקותspread: התפשטוpressure: לחץincreased: גברsponsor: מממןpatience: סבלנותcommunity: קהילהchallenge: קשייםsurvive: לשרודextreme: קיצוןguide: לכווןcelebration: חגיגהduplicate: שילבהspark: שביבtechnique: טכניקהcritical: קריטייםtraditions: מסורותemerged: התגלוdawn: שחרconfidence: ביטחוןexperience: התנסותsharing: שיתוףlistening: הקשבהeffort: מאמץBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/fluent-fiction-hebrew--5818690/support.

In this episode, we reflect on the idea of "vibe"—the way our presence leaves an impression on others. A recent discovery in Petra, Jordan, along with memories of joyful Bedouins and the hospitality of Father Albert Haase, inspired us to consider how our interactions reflect who we are at our core. Whether bubbly or reserved, introverted or extroverted, each of us exudes something that others feel when they encounter us. What if, at our best, that "vibe" could mirror the Fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, and kindness? Through communion with God, we can allow the Spirit to transform our way of being, shaping the essence we carry into the world. Jesus modeled this beautifully: fully present, compassionate, and deeply connected to the Father. His “vibe” drew people in and brought healing and hope. How might we create space for the Holy Spirit to move in and through us, allowing the fullness of God's love to flow naturally in our daily lives? Join us as we explore how to embody this life-giving presence in a world longing for peace, joy, and love.   _______________________________________________________ Connect with Gem on Instagram and learn more on the Unhurried Living website and her new book, Hold That Thought: Sorting Through the Voices in Our Heads Learn about PACE: Certificate in Leadership and Soul Care Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

“I'm dangling 250-feet above a canyon, and I'm about to get dropped. This is what AlUla is all about. It's got desert treasures, it's got 200,000 years of history, but it's also got adventure. And we're going to start ours by soaring through the air. Are you ready? Let's do this …” Aaron Millar, host  In this series, we're going to take you on a journey into the heart of one of the most ancient kingdoms on Earth. Located in the northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia, Alula is an oasis in the desert layered in 200,000 years of human history.  But, until recently, it was closed to outsiders, and to this day only a handful of visitors have ever been. In this immersive documentary, recorded on location, we'll take you to the heart of one of the great wonders of Arabia and give you a glimpse of what it feels like to be there for real. Each episode in the series explores the destination through the lens of a different element: the heritage of Earth, the community of Water … and today, the adventure of Air.  Highlights include: Flying over the UNESCO world heritage site of Hegra in a hot air balloon – only a handful of people have ever visited this ancient city. Even less have seen it from the sky.  Climbing via ferrata to the top of a 250-foot canyon and then screaming all the way down. Off-roading on sand dunes through one of the most deserts in the world. Stargazing with Bedouins and hearing their legends of the stars, which they used as a map to guide them through one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. FIND OUT MORE Our on-location Immersion documentaries are designed so that you can experience everything we did in this episode. Find out more at ExperienceAlula.com. Check out @experiencealula on Instagram, Facebook and X for more inspiration and ideas. CONNECT WITH US If you enjoy the show, please subscribe on whatever podcast player you're reading this on right now. Go on, do it. It means you get to choose what episodes you listen to, rather than the algorithm guess (wrongly) and kick us off your feed.  Following the show on socials will definitely maybe bring you good travel karma! Instagram: @armchairexplorerpodcast  Facebook: @armchairexplorerpodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode we meet Dr. Pat Brittenden.Pat grew up in Algeria, served in Tunisia and has recently completed his PhD on the emerging Muslim-background church of North Africa. He works now for the Hikma Partnership, a partnership committed to encouraging BMB (Believers from a Muslim Background) research and writing.Pat shares some of the lessons learned from his years in Tunisia, amazing stories from colleagues around the 'Muslim world' (including an embodied visitation of Jesus to some Bedouins in Libya) and much more.For some excellent resources for helping us reach out to Muslims, to welcome BMBs/MBBs into our fellowships and to disciple those from Muslim backgrounds, check out the Word of Life website.Another great space for churches that are wanting to integrate believers from different cultural backgrounds in the UK is the Intercultural Church network.Neighbours & Nations Conference: Saturday 23rd November 2024High Wycombe, UKTo sign up for free tickets: http://geni.us/frontiers2024_________________________________________________________________________________Do get in touch if you have any questions for Matt or for any of his guests.matt@frontiers.org.ukYou can find out more about us by visiting www.frontiers.org.ukOr, if you're outside the UK, visit www.frontiers.org (then select from one of our national offices). For social media in the UK:Instagram: frontiers_ukFacebook: @frontiersukfriendsAnd do check out the free and outstanding 6 week video course for churches and small groups, called MomentumYes:www.momentumyes.com (USA)www.momentumyes.org.uk (UK) _________________________________________________________________________________

Candyman and Cultural Contradictions: Grateful Dead's Egypt AdventureIn this episode of the Deadhead Cannabis Show, host Larry Mishkin highlights two key topics: a favorite Grateful Dead show and his recent experiences at Goose concerts. First, Larry talks about an iconic Grateful Dead concert that took place on September 16, 1978, at the Sun et Lumiere Theater in Giza, Egypt, near the pyramids and the Sphinx. This event is special not just for its unique location but also for featuring collaborations with Egyptian musician Hamza El Din, who joined the Dead for a jam session. The Egypt shows are remembered for their blend of American rock and ancient Egyptian culture, marking a historic moment in music history.Larry also reflects on the song "Candyman" by the Grateful Dead, exploring its themes of melancholy and contradiction within the counterculture of the 1960s. He discusses how the song portrays a sympathetic yet flawed character, and how it resonates with the complex dynamics of that era, blending elements of peace, revolution, and criminality.Switching gears, Larry shares his recent experiences attending two Goose concerts in Chicago. He highlights Goose's cover of Bob Seger's "Hollywood Nights" and talks about the band's growing popularity. Larry attended the concerts with family and friends and praises the outdoor venue in Chicago, noting its impressive atmosphere and the city's skyline as a backdrop. He fondly recalls his connections to Bob Seger's music from his youth and marvels at how younger bands like Goose continue to bring classic rock into their performances.   Grateful DeadSeptember 16, 1978  (46 years ago)Son Et Lumiere Theater (aka Sphinx Theatre)Giza, EgyptGrateful Dead Live at Sphinx Theatre on 1978-09-16 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive Giza (/ˈɡiːzə/; sometimes spelled Gizah, Gizeh, Geeza, Jiza; Arabic: الجيزة, romanized: al-Jīzah, pronounced [ald͡ʒiːzah], Egyptian Arabic: الجيزةel-Gīza[elˈgiːzæ])[3] is the third-largest city in Egypt by area after Cairo and Alexandria; and fourth-largest city in Africa by population after Kinshasa, Lagos, and Cairo. It is the capital of Giza Governorate with a total population of 4,872,448 in the 2017 census.[4] It is located on the west bank of the Nile opposite central Cairo, and is a part of the Greater Cairo metropolis. Giza lies less than 30 km (18.64 mi) north of Memphis (Men-nefer, today the village of Mit Rahina), which was the capital city of the unified Egyptian state during the reign of pharaoh Narmer, roughly 3100 BC. Giza is most famous as the location of the Giza Plateau, the site of some of the most impressive ancient monuments in the world, including a complex of ancient Egyptian royal mortuary and sacred structures, among which are the Great Sphinx, the Great Pyramid of Giza, and a number of other large pyramids and temples. Giza has always been a focal point in Egypt's history due to its location close to Memphis, the ancient pharaonic capital of the Old Kingdom. Son et lumière (French pronunciation: [sɔ̃n e lymjɛʁ] (French, lit. "sound and light")), or a sound and light show, is a form of nighttime entertainment that is usually presented in an outdoor venue of historic significance.[1] Special lighting effects are projected onto the façade of a building or ruin and synchronized with recorded or live narration and music to dramatize the history of the place.[1] The invention of the concept is credited to Paul Robert-Houdin, who was the curator of the Château de Chambord in France, which hosted the world's first son et lumière in 1952.[1] Another was established in the early 1960s at the site of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and a star attraction in Egypt, the pyramids of Giza offer a completely different experience at night, when lasers, lights, and visual projections bring their history to life. Here's how to visit the pyramids after dark. The sound and light show at Giza takes place every night for 55 minutes by the Great Sphinx of king Kephren, it is a laser show with history narration of your own language.  Kyle FitzgeraldThe National Standing under a total lunar eclipse at the foot of ancient power by the Great Pyramid, the Grateful Dead were concluding the final show of their three-night run at the Sound and Light Theatre in Giza in 1978.His hair in pigtails, guitarist Jerry Garcia wove the outro of the percussive Nubian composition Olin Arageed into an extended opening of Fire on the Mountain. “There were Bedouins out on the desert dancing … It was amazing, it really was amazing,” Garcia said in a 1979 radio interview. The September 14-16 shows in Giza were the ultimate experiment for the American band – the first to play at the pyramids – known for pushing music beyond the realms of imagination. And just as the Grateful Dead were playing in the centre of ancient Egypt, a landmark peace treaty was being brokered in the US that would reshape geopolitics in the Middle East. For as the Grateful Dead arrived in Egypt as cultural ambassadors, on the other side of the world US president Jimmy Carter had gathered his Egyptian counterpart Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to broker the Camp David Accords that led to an Egyptian-Israeli peace settlement. “No show that they have ever done has the international significance of their three performances in Egypt,” said Richard Loren, the Grateful Dead's manager from 1974-1981. “When we left the stage on the last show, everybody was high on acid, and the first news that came on: They signed the Camp David agreement. Sadat, Begin and Carter signed the agreement in Camp David. This happened during those three days.” Loren, who produced the shows, credited his friendship with Jefferson Airplane vocalist Marty Balin, who had a keen interest in Egypt, for developing his own fascination with the country. “The lead singer for Jefferson Airplane is the seed that resulted in the Grateful Dead playing in Egypt,” he said. Loren recalled riding a camel around the pyramid site during a three-week visit in 1975. To his right were the pyramids. In front of him, the Sphinx. “And I look down and I see a stage, and a light bulb went off in my head immediately. The Grateful Dead ought to play in Egypt,” he said. Loren, associate Alan Trist and Grateful Dead bass player Phil Lesh formed a scouting committee that would be responsible for liaising with American and Egyptian officials, Secret Service members and Egyptian first lady Jehan Sadat to allow the Grateful Dead to play in front of the pyramids. After the mission to the proposed site, meetings in Washington and Egypt, discussions with government officials and a party for the consulate, the band still needed to convince officials the purpose of the show was to make music – not money. And so the Dead paid their own expenses and offered to donate all the proceeds.Half would be donated to the Faith and Hope Society – the Sadats' favourite charity – and the other to Egypt's Department of Antiquities. “It was a sales pitch by the three of us – Alan, Richard and Phil,” Loren said. A telegram was sent on March 21, 1978, confirming the Grateful Dead would perform two open-air shows at the Sound and Light in front of the Great Pyramid and Sphinx. They would go on to play three shows. Describing the planning, bassist Phil Lesh said, "It sort of became my project because I was one of the first people in the band who was on the trip of playing at places of power. You know, power that's been preserved from the ancient world. The pyramids are like the obvious number one choice because no matter what anyone thinks they might be, there is definitely some kind of mojo about the pyramids."[11]Rather than ship all of the required sound reinforcement equipment from the United States, the PA and a 24-track, mobile studio recording truck were borrowed from the Who, in the UK. The Dead crew set up their gear at the open-air theater on the east side of the Great Sphinx, for three nights of concerts. The final two, September 15 & 16, 1978, are excerpted for the album. The band referred to their stage set-up as "The Gizah Sound and Light Theater". The final night's performance coincided with a total lunar eclipse. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann played with a cast, having broken his wrist while horseback riding. The King's Chamber of the nearby Great Pyramid of Giza was rigged with a speaker and microphone in a failed attempt to live-mix acoustical echo.[12] Lesh recalled that through the shows he observed "an increasing number of shadowy figures gathering just at the edge of the illuminated area surrounding the stage and audience – not locals, as they all seem to be wearing the same garment, a dark, hooded robe. These, it turns out, are the Bedouin, the nomadic horsemen of the desert: drawn in by the music and lights... each night they have remained to dance and sway rhythmically for the duration of the show."[13] Kreutzmann recalls "Egypt instantly became the biggest, baddest, and most legendary field trip that we took during our entire thirty years as a band... It was priceless and perfect and, at half a million dollars, a bargain in the end. Albeit, a very expensive bargain."[14] The concerts weren't expected to be profitable (proceeds were donated to the Department of Antiquities and a charity chosen by Jehan Sadat). Costs were to be offset by the production of a triple-live album; however, performances did not turn out as proficient as planned, musically, and technical problems plagued the recordings.[10] The results were shelved as the band focused instead on a new studio album, Shakedown Street.   INTRO:                     Candyman                                    Track #3                                    2:54 – 4:50 From Songfacts:  the American Beauty album is infused with sadness. Jerry Garcia's mother was still seriously injured and her still fate uncertain following an automotive accident, while Phil Lesh was still grieving his father's passing. The melancholic aura comes through in "Candyman" as much as any other song on the album.The effect of the melodic sadness on the song's context is interesting, to say the least. It makes everything about the candyman character in the song seem sympathetic, when the lyrics suggest that he is anything but. Dead lyricist Robert Hunter said he certainly didn't resonate with the character's penchant for violence (more on that below).The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang defines the term "candyman" primarily as a drug dealer and secondarily as a man who is lucky in general and lucky with women in particular. The latter version seems to fit better with the song, as the character announces his arrival to all the women in town and tells them they ought to open their windows (presumably to let him in). While there's no evidence to suggest that Hunter was getting at anything too deep with the song, "Candyman" does provide an interesting perspective on the contradictions of the 1960s counterculture. Mixed in with all the peaceniks and flowers were hard-drug pushers, violent revolutionaries, and common criminals. By 1970, this stew had long since become so mixed-up that its attendant parts could no longer be cleanly extracted from each other. The fact that American Beauty came out in the midst of the Manson Family "hippie cult killings" trial says just about all that needs to be said about the complicated reality that had arisen out of the 1960s counterculture.Beyond all that, though, the outlaw song that romanticizes criminality is a long-held and cherished tradition in American music. With American Beauty, Jerry Garcia wanted the Dead to do something like "California country western," where they focused more on the singing than on the instrumentation.  So the sang Hunter's lyrics: Good mornin', Mr. BensonI see you're doin' wellIf I had me a shotgunI'd blow you straight to HellThis is an oddly violent line for a song by the Grateful Dead, who sought to embody the '60s peace-and-love ethos about as sincerely and stubbornly as any act to come out of the era. It always got a raucous applause from the audience, too, which seems equally incongruous with the Deadhead culture.Hunter was bothered by the cheers. In an interview published in Goin' Down the Road by Blair Jackson (p. 119), he brings this phenomenon up when asked if any of his songs has been widely misinterpreted. He mentions that he had first witnessed an audience's enthusiastic response to violence while watching the 1975 dystopian film Rollerball and "couldn't believe" the cheers.Hunter tells Jackson that he hopes fans know that the perspective in "Candyman" is from a character and not from himself. He stresses the same separation between himself and the womanizer in "Jack Straw." As far as the Mr. Benson in "Candyman," David Dodd in the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics makes a great case for that being Sheriff Benson from Leadbelly's "Midnight Special" (who may very well have been based on a real sheriff). If true, this might place "Candyman" in Houston, Texas (though Hunter might not have had anything so specific in mind). Almost always a first set song.  Often featured in acoustic sets, back in the day. This version features this awesome Garcia solo that we were listing to.  Maybe he was inspired by the pyramids or whatever magical spirits might have come out from within to see this American band the Grateful Dead.  Hopefully, it made those spirits grateful themselves. Played:  273First:  April 3, 1970 at Armory Fieldhouse, Cincinnati, OH, USALast:  June 30, 1995 at Three Rivers Stadium, Pittsburgh, PA, USA  SHOW No. 1:         Hamza El Din                                    Track #10                                    7:30 – 9:00 Hamza El Din (Arabicحمزة علاء الدين) (July 10, 1929 – May 22, 2006) was an Egyptian Nubian composer, oudplayer, tar player, and vocalist. He was born in southern Egypt and was an internationally known musician of his native region Nubia, situated on both sides of the Egypt–Sudan border. After musical studies in Cairo, he lived and studied in Italy, Japan and the United States. El Din collaborated with a wide variety of musical performers, including Sandy Bull, the Kronos Quartet and the Grateful Dead. His performances attracted the attention of the Grateful Dead, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan in the 1960s, which led to a recording contract and to his eventual emigration to the United States. In 1963, El Din shared an apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area with folk musician Sandy Bull. Following his appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964, he recorded two albums for Vanguard Records, released 1964–65. His 1971 recording Escalay: The Water Wheel, published by Nonesuch Records and produced by Mickey Hart, has been recognized as one of the first world music recordings to gain wide release in the West, and was claimed as an influence by some American minimalist composers, such as Steve Reich and Terry Riley, as well as by Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart.[1] He also performed with the Grateful Dead, most famously during their Egypt concerts of 1978. During these three shows, Hamza El Din, performed as a guest and played his composition "Ollin Arageed" He was backed by the students of his Abu Simbel school and accompanied by the Grateful Dead.  After Egypt, hamza el din played with the dead in the U.S. On October 21st, back in 1978, the Grateful Dead were in the midst of wrapping up a fiery five-night run at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom. This string of shows was particularly special for the band, as they marked the first shows played by the Dead following their now-legendary performances near the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt a month prior. n an effort to bring their experiences in Northern Africa home with them to share with their fans, the Dead's '78 Winterland run saw sit-ins by Egyptian percussionist, singer, and oud player Hamza El Din. On October 21st, El Din opened the show solo, offering his divine percussion before the Grateful Dead slowly emerged to join him for an ecstatic rendition of “Ollin Arageed”, a number based off a Nubian wedding tune, before embarking on a soaring half-acoustic, half-electric jam, that we will get to on the other side of Music News: MUSIC NEWS: Lead in music:                  Goose — "Hollywood Nights" (Bob Seger) — Fiddler's Green — 6/8/24 (youtube.com)                  0:00 – 1:10             Goose covering Bob Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band's Hollywood Nights, this version from earlier this year but Goose did play it Friday night in Chicago at the Salt Shed's Festival stage outside along the Chicago river with the Skyline in the background. Very impressive. "Hollywood Nights" is a song written and recorded by American rock artist Bob Seger. It was released in 1978 as the second single from his album, Stranger in Town. Seger said "The chorus just came into my head; I was driving around in the Hollywood Hills, and I started singing 'Hollywood nights/Hollywood hills/Above all the lights/Hollywood nights.' I went back to my rented house, and there was a Time with Cheryl Tiegs on the cover...I said 'Let's write a song about a guy from the Midwest who runs into someone like this and gets caught up in the whole bizarro thing.'" [1] Seger also said that "Hollywood Nights" was the closest he has had to a song coming to him in a dream, similar to how Keith Richards described the riff to "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" coming to him in a dream. Robert Clark Seger (/ˈsiːɡər/SEE-gər; born May 6, 1945) is a retired American singer, songwriter, and musician. As a locally successful Detroit-area artist, he performed and recorded with the groups Bob Seger and the Last Heard and the Bob Seger System throughout the 1960s, In 1973, he put together the Silver Bullet Band, with a group of Detroit-area musicians, with whom he became most successful on the national level with the album Live Bullet (1976), recorded live with the Silver Bullet Band in 1975 at Cobo Hall in Detroit, Michigan. In 1976, he achieved a national breakout with the studio album Night Moves. On his studio albums, he also worked extensively with the Alabama-based Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, which appeared on several of Seger's best-selling singles and albums. A roots rock musician with a classic raspy, powerful voice, Seger is known for his songs concerning love, women, and blue-collar themes, and is one of the best-known artists of the heartland rock genre. He has recorded many hits, including "Night Moves", "Turn the Page", "Mainstreet", "Still the Same", "Hollywood Nights", "Against the Wind", "You'll Accomp'ny Me", "Shame on the Moon", "Roll Me Away", "Like a Rock", and "Shakedown", the last of which was written for the 1987 film Beverly Hills Cop II and topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart. He also co-wrote the Eagles' number-one hit "Heartache Tonight", and his recording of "Old Time Rock and Roll" was named one of the Songs of the Century in 2001. Which leads us to: Goose plays three nights in Chicago: Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night at the Salt Shed.  I caught the Thursday and Friday show.  Went with my wife on Thursday and hung out with good friends John and Marnie, her brothers Rick and Joel, Stephan and others.  Friday with my son Daniel and good buddy Kevin who got us rock star parking and even more impressively killer seats dead center at the bottom of the grandstands in the back of the floor, a few feet off the floor and dead center so we could see everything, hear everything and have a place to sit and rest for a few minutes when needed. I have to say, I've now seen Goose five times and enjoy them more and more.  Great musical jams, great light show, lots of good energy from the band and the fans.  Rick Mitoratando is a first class guitartist and singer, Peter Anspach on keyboard and guitar and vocals, Jeff Arevalo, percussionist, Trevor Weekz on bass and newcomer, Cotter Ellis on drums, replacing original drummer, Ben Askind. Began playing in 2014 in Wilton Connecticut so this is their 10 year and they are just getting stronger.  They really love what they do and its shows in their live performances. Great set lists in Chicago: Thursday night they were joined on stage by Julian Lage, a jazz composer and guitarist for the last two songs of the first set, A Western Sun and Turned Clouds. If you have not yet seen Goose you need to see Goose.  Soon.  Jane's Addiction Concert Ends Abruptly After Perry Farrell Punches Dave Navarro Onstage 3.     Jane's Addiction Offer ‘Heartfelt Apology' for Fight, Cancel Sunday's Show Phish announce 3 night run in Albany Oct. 25 – 27 to benefit Divided Sky Foundation A residential program for people recovering from drug and alcohol abuse. The Divided Sky Foundation, a 46-bed nonprofit recovery center spearheaded by Phish frontman Trey Anastasio, will be an abstinence-based, nonmedical residence, one of the first ofits kind in Vermont. The Divided Sky Foundation is a charitable nonprofit founded by Anastasio; it purchased the Ludlow location to create a substance-use disorder treatment center back in 2021.  Anastasio, Phish's lead guitarist and vocalist, has dealt publicly with his own drug and alcohol use and later sobriety, a journey that brought him under the supervision of drug court in Washington County, New York, in the mid-2000s. There, he met Gulde, who worked in the court system at the time, and the two have stayed friends since.  Together, Gulde and Anastasio used their personal experiences with treatment facilities to implement a vision for the Ludlow space, she said.   Very cool organization, deserves everyone's support.  Trey turned it around which is why he is now 5 years older than Jerry was when he died in 1995 and Trey and Phish are just getting stronger and stronger. SHOW No. 2:         Ollin Arageed                                    Track #11                                    13:10 – 14:42 Musical composition written by Hamza El-Din.  He and members of the Abu Simbel School of Luxor choir opened the shows with his composition Olin Arageed on nights one and two, and opened set two of night three with the song as well.  Joined on stage by the band.  Fun, different and a shout out to the locals. The Dead played it a few more times with Hamza and then retired it for good.  SHOW No. 3:         Fire On The Mountain                                    Track #12                                    13:00 – end                                     INTO                                     Iko Iko                                    Track #13                                    0:00 – 1:37 This transition is one of my all time Dead favorites.  Out of a stand alone Fire (no Scarlet lead in) into a sublime and spacey Iko Iko.  Another perfect combination for the pyramids, sphinx and full lunar eclipse.A great reason to listen to this show and these two tunes. MJ NEWS: MJ Lead in Song            Still Blazin by Wiz Khalifa:  Still Blazin (feat. Alborosie) (youtube.com)                                                                        0:00 – 0:45 We talked all about Wiz Khalifa on last week's episode after I saw him headline the Miracle in Mundelein a week ago.  But did not have a chance to feature any of his tunes last week.  This one is a natural for our show. This song is from Kush & Orange Juice (stylized as Kush and OJ) is the eighth mixtape by American rapper Wiz Khalifa. It was released on April 14, 2010, by Taylor Gang Records and Rostrum Records. Kush & Orange Juice gained notoriety after its official release by making it the number-one trending topic on both Google and Twitter.[1] On the same day, a link to the mixtape was posted for download on Wiz's Twitter.[2] The hashtag#kushandorangejuice became the number-six trending topic on the microblogging service after its release and remained on the top trending items on Twitter for three days.[  1.                   Nixon Admitted Marijuana Is ‘Not Particularly Dangerous' In Newly Discovered Recording2.                  Marijuana Use By Older Americans Has Nearly Doubled In The Last Three Years, AARP-Backed Study Shows3.                  Medical Marijuana Helps People With Arthritis And Other Rheumatic Conditions Reduce Use Of Opioids And Other Medications, Study Shows4.                  U.S. Marijuana Consumers Have Spent More Than $4.1 Billion On Pre-Rolled Joints In The Past Year And A Half, Industry Report Finds   SHOW No. 4:         Sunrise                                    Track #162:08 – 3:37             Grateful dead song written, music and lyrics by Donna Jean Godchaux.  Released on Terrapin Station album, July 27, 1977             There are two accounts of the origins of this song, both of which may be true. One is that it is about Rolling Thunder, the Indian Shaman, conducting a ceremony (which certainly fits with many of the lyrics). The other is that it was written by Donna in memory of Rex Jackson, one of the Grateful Dead's crew (after whom the Rex Foundation is named). The song is about a Native American medicine man named Rolling Thunder, who spent a lot of time with the Dead."'Sunrise' is about sunrise services we attended and what Rolling Thunder would do," Godchaux said on the Songfacts Podcast. "It's very literal actually. Rolling Thunder would conduct a sunrise service, so that's how that came about."Donna Jean Godchaux wrote this song on piano after Jerry Garcia asked her to write a song for the Terrapin Station album. She said it just flowed out of her - music and lyrics - and was one of the easiest songs she ever wrote.The drumming at the end of the song was played by a real medicine man. "We cut it in Los Angeles, and he came and brought the medicine drum, so what you hear on the end is the real deal," Godchaux told Songfacts. "It was like a sanctuary in that studio when he was playing that. It was very heavy." It was played regularly by the Grateful Dead in 1977 and 1978 (Donna left the band in early 1979).This version is the last time the band ever played it. Played:  30 timesFirst:  May 1, 1977 at The Palladium, New York, NY, USALast:  September 16, 1978 at the Pyramids, Giza Egypt                                   OUTRO:                   Shakedown Street                                    Track #17                                    3:07 – 4:35                                   Title track from Shakedown Street album November 8, 1978 One of Jerry's best numbers.  A great tune that can open a show, open the second set, occasionally played as an encore, but not here.  It is dropped into the middle of the second set as the lead in to Drums.  This is only the second time the song is played by the band. Played:  164 timesFirst:  August 31, 1978 at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Morrison, CO, USALast:  July 9, 1995 at Soldier Field, Chicago, IL – opened the second set, the final set of music ever performed by the band.  Shout outs:             Karen Shmerling's birthday                       This week my beautiful granddaughter, Ruby, is coming to town to visit.  Can't wait to see her and her parents.  .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast

One of the Seven Wonders of the World, the ancient city of Petra in Jordan welcomes several hundred thousand tourists each year. It dates back to 300 BC and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985. For centuries, Bedouins have inhabited its caves, but many have recently been forced to leave and relocate to government housing. Some families have chosen to remain, although they could be expelled at any moment. It's becoming increasingly difficult for them to make a living through tourism, their main source of income. Our Jordan correspondent went to meet them.

We start this season of International Horizons with an interview with Dr. Eli Karetny, an American political scientist and administrative director of the Ralph Bunche Institute who spent the last academic year in Israel with his family. The plan was to do research on the Israeli Bedouin in the Negev desert – until the Hamas attacks of October 7 upset those plans. Karetny begins by discussing the changing moods of the Israeli population and the fading of internal divisions after the October 7th attacks in the midst of evacuations and drills. Karetny describes a highly militarized society that more recently has been worried about the expected retaliation from Iran and the possibility of escalation of conflict in the region.  Finally, Karetny discusses the problematic situation of the Bedouins and how the hopes for reconciliation between the Bedouin and Israeli society have been diminished by the Jewish-Arab polarization during the Israeli-Hamas war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

We start this season of International Horizons with an interview with Dr. Eli Karetny, an American political scientist and administrative director of the Ralph Bunche Institute who spent the last academic year in Israel with his family. The plan was to do research on the Israeli Bedouin in the Negev desert – until the Hamas attacks of October 7 upset those plans. Karetny begins by discussing the changing moods of the Israeli population and the fading of internal divisions after the October 7th attacks in the midst of evacuations and drills. Karetny describes a highly militarized society that more recently has been worried about the expected retaliation from Iran and the possibility of escalation of conflict in the region.  Finally, Karetny discusses the problematic situation of the Bedouins and how the hopes for reconciliation between the Bedouin and Israeli society have been diminished by the Jewish-Arab polarization during the Israeli-Hamas war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

We start this season of International Horizons with an interview with Dr. Eli Karetny, an American political scientist and administrative director of the Ralph Bunche Institute who spent the last academic year in Israel with his family. The plan was to do research on the Israeli Bedouin in the Negev desert – until the Hamas attacks of October 7 upset those plans. Karetny begins by discussing the changing moods of the Israeli population and the fading of internal divisions after the October 7th attacks in the midst of evacuations and drills. Karetny describes a highly militarized society that more recently has been worried about the expected retaliation from Iran and the possibility of escalation of conflict in the region.  Finally, Karetny discusses the problematic situation of the Bedouins and how the hopes for reconciliation between the Bedouin and Israeli society have been diminished by the Jewish-Arab polarization during the Israeli-Hamas war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

We start this season of International Horizons with an interview with Dr. Eli Karetny, an American political scientist and administrative director of the Ralph Bunche Institute who spent the last academic year in Israel with his family. The plan was to do research on the Israeli Bedouin in the Negev desert – until the Hamas attacks of October 7 upset those plans. Karetny begins by discussing the changing moods of the Israeli population and the fading of internal divisions after the October 7th attacks in the midst of evacuations and drills. Karetny describes a highly militarized society that more recently has been worried about the expected retaliation from Iran and the possibility of escalation of conflict in the region.  Finally, Karetny discusses the problematic situation of the Bedouins and how the hopes for reconciliation between the Bedouin and Israeli society have been diminished by the Jewish-Arab polarization during the Israeli-Hamas war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

We start this season of International Horizons with an interview with Dr. Eli Karetny, an American political scientist and administrative director of the Ralph Bunche Institute who spent the last academic year in Israel with his family. The plan was to do research on the Israeli Bedouin in the Negev desert – until the Hamas attacks of October 7 upset those plans. Karetny begins by discussing the changing moods of the Israeli population and the fading of internal divisions after the October 7th attacks in the midst of evacuations and drills. Karetny describes a highly militarized society that more recently has been worried about the expected retaliation from Iran and the possibility of escalation of conflict in the region.  Finally, Karetny discusses the problematic situation of the Bedouins and how the hopes for reconciliation between the Bedouin and Israeli society have been diminished by the Jewish-Arab polarization during the Israeli-Hamas war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

We start this season of International Horizons with an interview with Dr. Eli Karetny, an American political scientist and administrative director of the Ralph Bunche Institute who spent the last academic year in Israel with his family. The plan was to do research on the Israeli Bedouin in the Negev desert – until the Hamas attacks of October 7 upset those plans. Karetny begins by discussing the changing moods of the Israeli population and the fading of internal divisions after the October 7th attacks in the midst of evacuations and drills. Karetny describes a highly militarized society that more recently has been worried about the expected retaliation from Iran and the possibility of escalation of conflict in the region.  Finally, Karetny discusses the problematic situation of the Bedouins and how the hopes for reconciliation between the Bedouin and Israeli society have been diminished by the Jewish-Arab polarization during the Israeli-Hamas war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

We start this season of International Horizons with an interview with Dr. Eli Karetny, an American political scientist and administrative director of the Ralph Bunche Institute who spent the last academic year in Israel with his family. The plan was to do research on the Israeli Bedouin in the Negev desert – until the Hamas attacks of October 7 upset those plans. Karetny begins by discussing the changing moods of the Israeli population and the fading of internal divisions after the October 7th attacks in the midst of evacuations and drills. Karetny describes a highly militarized society that more recently has been worried about the expected retaliation from Iran and the possibility of escalation of conflict in the region.  Finally, Karetny discusses the problematic situation of the Bedouins and how the hopes for reconciliation between the Bedouin and Israeli society have been diminished by the Jewish-Arab polarization during the Israeli-Hamas war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/israel-studies

Welcome to The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what's happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world. Military reporter Emanuel Fabian and Arab Affairs reporter Luca Pacchiani join host Amanda Borschel-Dan for today's episode. Mossad chief David Barnea, Shin Bet head Ronen Bar, Maj. Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon, and Netanyahu adviser Ophir Falk were sent to Doha to participate in two days of hostage release negotiations. We hear how the Arab press is covering their chances of success. On Tuesday, Hamas launched rockets toward Tel Aviv for the first time in months. Fabian discusses what we know about the conflict on the ground as well as what this recent rocket attack could symbolize. And as Hezbollah projectiles continue to batter the north, Fabian updates. Yesterday, five Palestinian gunmen were killed in a 12-hour Israeli counter-terrorism raid in the northern West Bank and four soldiers were also wounded during the operation after a roadside bomb hit their vehicle. Fabian debriefs on how the IDF is carrying out a long-term strategy with this type of operation. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken okayed the sale of fighter jets and other arms to Israel in deals worth over $20 billion, the Pentagon said Tuesday. What is expected and when? On April 13, Amina Hassouna, a 7-year old Bedouin girl, was the sole victim of the Iran attack and was seriously wounded in the head by shrapnel from an intercepted ballistic missile. We hear how her unrecognized Bedouin community in the Negev, Al-Fura, and many others still lack basic infrastructure, but also sirens, rocket shelters and cover from the Iron Dome missile defense system. As Israelis wait in uncertainty and trepidation for an Iranian attack that may or may not materialize in retaliation for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, some media outlets in the Arab world have begun to ridicule Tehran's perceived empty threats and grandstanding. Pacchiani describes a few. For news updates, please check out The Times of Israel's ongoing live blog. Discussed articles include: Israel sending high-level team to Doha talks, seen as possible last chance for deal Hamas fires rockets at Tel Aviv, a first since May, as IDF advances in Khan Younis 5 Palestinian gunmen killed, four troops hurt in West Bank raid US approves $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel, including 50 fighter jets As Iranian retaliation looms, thousands of Bedouins still vulnerable to rockets  Satirical cartoons in the Arab press lampoon Iran for delaying attack on Israel Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by Ben Wallick.  IMAGE: Jordanian cartoonist Emad Hajjaj, who regularly publishes in the Qatari-owned Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, draws an Iranian tank carries a gigantic missile launcher, which only ends up ejecting a small drone carrying a miniature rocket, August 10, 2024. (screenshot, used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This recording captures my connection with a Bedouin tribe in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, where an unconditional love for the land is ever-present. Bedouins persist in leading a traditional, subsistence lifestyle, moving from place to place and engaging in trade between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Isolated from the rest of Egypt, their settlements are nestled among high mountains, including Mount Sinai and Oum Shomar, providing Bedouins with a profound sense of solace in solitude. Today, the land they call home is revered as one of the most spiritual places in Egypt. Despite enduring discrimination, stigma, and stereotyping over the years, many modern Bedouins have adapted to a semi-nomadic or settled lifestyle. During the Israeli occupation between 1967 and 1982, Bedouins insisted on remaining on their land, earning them the label of traitors from the larger Egyptian public.  Recorded by Rafael Diogo. Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world's first collection of the sounds of human migration.  For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration

 "Using snippets of the vocal samples, recordings from my phone of me playing a Taylor guitar (tuned to drop D), some improvised recordings of Ciat Lonbarde synths (Esoterica Chainlock PCB “Made by Tripping on Wires” Sheffield Uk), I created circa 90 samples I could pitch down and play live.  "Next I built layers of sounds inside a sampler that would give the impression of radio waves, desert vistas and sounds from a transistor radio drifting in and out of range with voices and further sample snips creating more layers. Finally I reduced content down to 5 distinct pieces that became the framework for the song.  "I really wanted to capture the vastness, beauty and isolation of some of the places these people live in and interact with. Reversed guitar samples shimmer and synths try and imitate wind as it blows around sand or grains of musical data.  "The latter part of the song sounds at times like a rattle snake battling the elements. In total, Bedouin Radio takes the listener on a 15 minute journey forwards and backwards in time as song and voice act as anchors in the desert sea…" Bedouins in South Sinai reimagined by Andy Billington. Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world's first collection of the sounds of human migration.  For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration

Desciframos músicas de códigos ancestrales desde la más auténtica tradición y también jugamos a recodificarlas en variadas recombinaciones, con diferentes experimentaciones y tecnificaciones. Comenzamos con sones ibéricos, que nos pasean por sones flamencos, también de Andalucía, Castilla y Portugal, con conexiones francesas, para después pasar un buen rato en Sicilia, con grabaciones de artistas populares y también nuevos proyectos. Continuamos con una conexión afroiraquí en Canadá, con electrobeduinos en Francia y terminamos solazándonos con el evocador canto drupad de la India. We decipher music of ancestral codes from the most authentic tradition and we also play to recode them in varied recombinations, with different experimentations and technifications. We start with Iberian sounds, which take us through flamenco sounds, also from Andalusia, Castile and Portugal, with French connections, and then spend some good time in Sicily, with recordings of traditional artists and also new projects. We continue with an Afro-Iraqi connection in Canada, with electro-Bedouins in France and end enjoying the evocative dhrupad singing of India. – Código Jondo – Romance del cisne blanco – Taifa norte – Trío Fernández – Te recuerdo, Amanda – Cante gitano – Sandra Carrasco & David de Arahal – Luna del mes de enero (serrana) – Recordando a Marchena – Vigüela – We – We – Marion Cousin & Éloïse Decazes – Dona Filomena – Com a lanceta na mão – Boémia – Esgueiro-me em repasseado – Génese – Felice Currò & Salvatore Vinci – Sunata – Italie-Sicily: Musiques populaires [V.A.] – Angela Cucinotta & Giuseppa Cucinotta – Stanotti cci passai malanuttata – Italie-Sicily: Musiques populaires [V.A.] – Areasud Electric Roots – Tarantella iblea – Areasud Electric Roots – Ahmed Moneka – Oh mother – Kanzafula – Bedouin Burger – Nomad – Ma li beit – Niloy Ahsan – Bhairav (bandish) – Breathing raga 📸 Vigüela (Araceli Tzigane)

Joining me once again today is Zachary Foster PhD, here to discuss the true origin of Hamas and how this is central to many of the lies being promoted currently by the Israeli government and its supporters. We also discuss the history of peaceful resistance of the Palestinian people, even in the face of brutal oppression, as well as the overall decline of the Apartheid state of Israel.  !function(r,u,m,b,l,e){r._Rumble=b,r[b]||(r[b]=function(){(r[b]._=r[b]._||[]).push(arguments);if(r[b]._.length==1){l=u.createElement(m),e=u.getElementsByTagName(m)[0],l.async=1,l.src="https://rumble.com/embedJS/u2q643"+(arguments[1].video?'.'+arguments[1].video:'')+"/?url="+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+"&args="+encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify([].slice.apply(arguments))),e.parentNode.insertBefore(l,e)}})}(window, document, "script", "Rumble");   Rumble("play", {"video":"v4somz6","div":"rumble_v4somz6"}); Source Links: Zachary Foster PhD Interview - The Documented (And Suppressed) History Of Palestine & Zionism New Tab Israel's Ceasefire Long Con & Rafah Massacre (23) Marwa Fatafta مروة فطافطة on X: "“My little son was jumping yesterday with extreme joy after the good news about the truce. Today we buried him.”" / X New Tab (43) Zachary Foster on X: "6

Jason Caplan, creator of Universal Language Room, sits down with us in studio to describe his experience playing music with Bedouins in Libya and other middle eastern muslims, the Israel and Hamas conflict, and his documentary. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Israel has been accused of unfairly targeting its Arab population after parliament moved a step closer to passing sweeping budget cuts. While the measures aim to plug the financial hole caused by Israel's war in Gaza, they also mean a string of government programmes created to invest in Arab communities could see their funding slashed by up to 15 percent. Critics say the move may have drastic consequences, as more than 55 percent of Israel's Bedouins live in poverty, and violent crime is on the rise in many Arab-majority cities. FRANCE 24's Andrew Hilliar and Claire Duhamel report.

'Saint Anthony, the Father of monks, was born in Egypt in 251 of pious parents who departed this life while he was yet young. On hearing the words of the Gospel: "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor" (Matt. 19:21), he immediately put it into action. Distributing to the poor all he had, and fleeing from all the turmoil of the world, he departed to the desert. The manifold temptations he endured continually for the space of twenty years are incredible. His ascetical struggles by day and by night, whereby he mortified the uprisings of the passions and attained to the height of dispassion, surpass the bounds of nature; and the report of his deeds of virtue drew such a multitude to follow him, that the desert was transformed into a city, while he became, so to speak, the governor, lawgiver, and master-trainer of all the citizens of this newly-formed city. But the cities of the world also enjoyed the fruit of his virtue. When the Christians were being persecuted and put to death under Maximinus in 312, he hastened to their aid and consolation. When the Church was troubled by the Arians, he went with zeal to Alexandria in 335 and struggled against them in behalf of Orthodoxy. During this time, by the grace of his words, he also turned many unbelievers to Christ.   'He began his ascetical life outside his village of Coma in Upper Egypt, studying the ways of the ascetics and holy men there, and perfecting himself in the virtues of each until he surpassed them all. Desiring to increase his labours, he departed into the desert, and finding an abandoned fortress in the mountain, he made his dwelling in it, training himself in extreme fasting, unceasing prayer, and fierce conflicts with the demons. Here he remained, as mentioned above, about twenty years. Saint Athanasius the Great, who knew him personally and wrote his life, says that he came forth from the fortress "initiated in the mysteries and filled with the Spirit of God." Afterwards, because of the press of the faithful, who deprived him of his solitude, he was enlightened by God to journey with certain Bedouins, until he came to a mountain in the desert near the Red Sea, where he passed the remaining part of his life. Saint Athanasius says of him that "his countenance had a great and wonderful grace. This gift also he had from the Saviour. For if he were present in a great company of monks, and any one who did not know him previously wished to see him, immediately coming forward he passed by the rest, and hurried to Anthony, as though attracted by his appearance. Yet neither in height nor breadth was he conspicuous above others, but in the serenity of his manner and the purity of his soul."   'So passing his life, and becoming an example of virtue and a rule for monastics, he reposed on January 17 in the year 356, having lived together some 105 years.' (Great Horologion)   Speaking of the demonic temptations and struggles with the passions that beset those who seek their salvation, St Anthony said: "All these trials are to your advantage. Do away with temptation and no one will be saved."

'Saint Anthony, the Father of monks, was born in Egypt in 251 of pious parents who departed this life while he was yet young. On hearing the words of the Gospel: "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor" (Matt. 19:21), he immediately put it into action. Distributing to the poor all he had, and fleeing from all the turmoil of the world, he departed to the desert. The manifold temptations he endured continually for the space of twenty years are incredible. His ascetical struggles by day and by night, whereby he mortified the uprisings of the passions and attained to the height of dispassion, surpass the bounds of nature; and the report of his deeds of virtue drew such a multitude to follow him, that the desert was transformed into a city, while he became, so to speak, the governor, lawgiver, and master-trainer of all the citizens of this newly-formed city. But the cities of the world also enjoyed the fruit of his virtue. When the Christians were being persecuted and put to death under Maximinus in 312, he hastened to their aid and consolation. When the Church was troubled by the Arians, he went with zeal to Alexandria in 335 and struggled against them in behalf of Orthodoxy. During this time, by the grace of his words, he also turned many unbelievers to Christ.   'He began his ascetical life outside his village of Coma in Upper Egypt, studying the ways of the ascetics and holy men there, and perfecting himself in the virtues of each until he surpassed them all. Desiring to increase his labours, he departed into the desert, and finding an abandoned fortress in the mountain, he made his dwelling in it, training himself in extreme fasting, unceasing prayer, and fierce conflicts with the demons. Here he remained, as mentioned above, about twenty years. Saint Athanasius the Great, who knew him personally and wrote his life, says that he came forth from the fortress "initiated in the mysteries and filled with the Spirit of God." Afterwards, because of the press of the faithful, who deprived him of his solitude, he was enlightened by God to journey with certain Bedouins, until he came to a mountain in the desert near the Red Sea, where he passed the remaining part of his life. Saint Athanasius says of him that "his countenance had a great and wonderful grace. This gift also he had from the Saviour. For if he were present in a great company of monks, and any one who did not know him previously wished to see him, immediately coming forward he passed by the rest, and hurried to Anthony, as though attracted by his appearance. Yet neither in height nor breadth was he conspicuous above others, but in the serenity of his manner and the purity of his soul."   'So passing his life, and becoming an example of virtue and a rule for monastics, he reposed on January 17 in the year 356, having lived together some 105 years.' (Great Horologion)   Speaking of the demonic temptations and struggles with the passions that beset those who seek their salvation, St Anthony said: "All these trials are to your advantage. Do away with temptation and no one will be saved."

Paul Gotel - INNERPOWER - THE BIG U (Author, Life Coach, Inspirational Speaker, & Ecstatic Dance facilitator) Certifications include - Starfire Transformational Leadership; Fire-walk Instructor, Hypnotherapist; 7th level Reiki master; Tantra - ISTA and Quodushka Graduate After a very successful 20-year career in the music industry, Paul retired at 33. Disillusioned with the world of Money and fame, he took a 5-year spiritual odyssey to over 92 countries, visiting Sacred Sites and Religious communities. Living with Aborigines in Australia, Bedouins in Egypt, and monks in Tibet he drank up all their ancient wisdom and distilled it into a new operating system for life, which he calls OS3 for Humans.  Now living in Maui, Hawaii, Paul completed his book The BIG U - A Guide to Self-Revolution and travels the world igniting Self Revolution in all he meets, speaking at events and unearthing the limitations we all live with to liberate us from our identities. Supporting people to live as a Fluidity, without the restriction of attachment to our personas, we can truly play BIG in our world.   Watch The Art of Vibrant Living Show LIVE! - Did you know that this "podcast" is actually a LIVE video show?  Register (completely SPAM-Free) to receive automated announcements whenever we go live.  Then simply click and engage.  We welcome your questions and real-time participation.  Go to http://ryps.tk/avl-register and register (free) now!

Shownotes and Transcript The question 'who is indigenous' comes up a lot while discussing demographics and immigration.  And no country has this been asked more than Israel. Brian of London joins us to discuss a Twitter/X post and article titled "Israel Palestine: Who's Indigenous?". For some reason this question is contentious. Brian breaks it down (according to anthropologist Jose R Martin-Cobo) under a series of headings of Land, Culture, Common Ancestry, Language, Religion and Blood. Basically we are looking at a historic continuity. Brian uses these headings to look at whether it is the Jews or the Palestinians that fit this indigenous definition  Brian of London completed a PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics just as the Web was emerging. But then he left academia to do management consulting and eventually moved to Israel to do business. Brian's working on the cutting edge of the new Podcasting 2.0 to make sure this relic of the early web, stays free from capture by the centralising forces of Web 2.0 and their dangerous desire to turn us all into dairy cows. Brian was also the admin on Tommy Robinson's Facebook account that had over a million followers before it was nuked! In his spare time, he assists with a gigantic class action lawsuit in Australia on behalf of the entire crypto industry. Interview recorded 2.1.24 Connect with Brian... X                        https://x.com/brianoflondon?s=20 Connect with Hearts of Oak... WEBSITE            https://heartsofoak.org/ PODCASTS        https://heartsofoak.podbean.com/ SOCIAL MEDIA  https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ Support Hearts of Oak by purchasing one of our fancy T-Shirts....  SHOP                  https://heartsofoak.org/shop/ *Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast. Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and on X https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20  Transcript (Hearts of Oak) And it's wonderful to have Brian of London join us once again. Brian, thanks so much for your time today. (Brian of London) Well, thank you very much for having me on.  Not at all. There's lots to discuss in your neck of the woods, as they would say in the Brits, in your part of the world. And obviously we have had, we have a Tera Dahl who was just back from Israel. She'd been there three, four weeks for Real America's Voice reporting. We had Bridget Gabriel on actually discussing. But I think we want to go on a slightly different tact, and it was one of your tweets looking at, and I think part of it was from another article, Israel-Palestine, who's indigenous? and I've always had a very firm understanding because of biblical history and where I come at this from a Christian but even there's confusion amongst parts of the Christian world and community but that may mess this conversation up even more. But let's, Israel-Palestine, who's indigenous? Maybe tell us why this was of interest to you, and then we can go with some of the categories and how you define this term indigenous. Yeah, and I just realized I've got my window open. So if you're hearing background noise, tell me, otherwise I'll leave it open. I'm in my bomb shelter, which everyone should know. And fortunately, we actually haven't been in it for about 10 days now and the last major barrage of rockets was just to the south of us on midnight on new year's eve obviously they did the fireworks for us and that.  We we had our Muslim mayor, Sadiq Kahn do the fireworks for us as well in London but it was different firework.  Different and the thing with that was actually it was, they fired them. They always fire them at exactly on the hour. In fact, there's a joke that the guy controlling the missiles, his name is Abu Dekar. Dekar means on the minute. So we say, oh, Abu Dekar is firing again. Because they fire at exactly 12, so then the alarm goes at sort of 12.01, and the missiles arrive at sort of 12.01 or 12.02. Anyway, I didn't hear an alarm because it was south of me. I just heard the booms when we intercepted.  But yeah, I'm in my bomb shelter. But what I sent you, I sent you an article which actually was published in 2014 by a friend of mine. And I helped get this published because Israeli Cool, the blog that it's on, the guy who runs that and me both found this guy who is a Métis Canadian indigenous person. Or they call them First Nations in Canada. That's the politically correct term. He doesn't mind being called an Indian. He's quite happy with that or whatever terminology, but he's Métis, which is a tribe that its original area was sort of somewhere in Canada. But he put out this article in a very obscure kind of place, and I just grabbed it and I said to him, can you just say all of this stuff again for the Israeli audience? And that's what we did. And because he has studied properly the way the UN came to regard what an indigenous person was. Because indigenous means something completely different from people than it does for plants and animals. Plants and animals are indigenous when they've been in the same place for thousands or millions of years. But people is a totally different beast. We have moved around the world ever since we were people. Vast migrations out of Africa. The term indigenous just doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean the same thing for a person as it does for a plant. The kind of way that this is seen in the academic literature, and remember, this is infused with leftism, so we're picking and choosing here a little bit. And this guy, Jose Martinez Cobo, he came up with this definition. And this has stuck. And this really is the way the entire field looks at indigenous. And I'll just read or direct from the summary of his work what these rules are. Self-identification as indigenous peoples at the individual level and acceptance as a member by the community. Okay, so you have to actually feel that you're indigenous, okay? Historical continuity with pre-colonial and or pre-settler societies, okay? I'll read them off and then we'll sort of go through them and what they mean for Jews and Israel and what they mean for Palestinians, for example, and then we can sort of look at this in relation to Brits and Irish people and, you know, English, Welsh, Scottish, and, strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources, distinct social, economic, or political systems, distinct language, culture, and knowledge. I'm going to skip one, and then I'm going to say resolve to maintain and reproduce ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities. Okay, this is anthropology language. But the basics are, and my friend summarizes them like this, land, language, culture, spirituality, and the last one is blood. And we'll get back to that because that's actually that's the one that's just the least important actually for Jews, especially for Jews. So Jews self-identify this is obvious it's like, we've been three and a half thousand years or so I mean the the numbers claim there's a book to my right, if you go full screen there's a book the atlas of Jewish history just behind me. And in that, this one here, the Atlas of Judaism, okay, we can go back to. If you go back to that, if you start looking for dates, Abraham kind of is dated at about 4,000 years ago, to 2,000 BC. He walked from Mesopotamia all the way down across the Middle East, Iran, Iraq. It's mixed up because none of those are real. Well, Iran and Persia became real soon, you know, later. Basically, none of it is what is there today. And he walked across that. And then he walked down through Israel. And he walked on a road that we have in Israel today called Highway 40. It's the road that runs down the backbone of what we call Judea-Samaria, what the Jordanians renamed the West Bank, that road follows the path that Abraham took and is described in the bible as the path that Abraham took and when you when you drive quickly down that road today you see the road signs in the order in which they appear in the bible. It's as real as that and that is 30 or 40 kilometres that way I'm pointing off to the east, the sea is that way that's my west, this stuff is real. Now, whether you believe the story of Abraham was real or not to the Jewish people, it is foundational. It is our ethnogenesis. It's the start of what led to being Jewish, but that's really. But I just want, actually, when you say it, it depends what you believe is real or or not, the level of documentation to actually prove that actually the Old Testament story and New Testament story is more documented than nearly any other historical event. And yet the world believes parts of history, but you've got this mountain of evidence and they say, oh no, that's just fables. So when you say, if you want to believe it or not, actually, it's there staring you in the face that there is no more evidence for the biblical events than there is for anything else in the world. Correct. And it's even more than the biblical events. It's that the book that was woven around it, the Hebrew Bible, it was something that Jews preserved through an enormous act of preservation that I don't think has a parallel in the world. Okay. The Torah, as we call it, the way it is passed down is we write it out by hand. And the people who write the Torah, they write it without making a mistake. And if they make a mistake, they throw it away and start again. And there's no tippex and there's no scratching it out and there's no backspace key. This is and this document is so unbelievably well preserved that when you dig up the dead sea scrolls that were that were, you know in the caves of Qumran for three thousand years or two and a half thousand years when you dig those up, actually I don't know they might be a bit more modern than that but when you dig them up I can go and look at them and my Hebrew is not great but I can read the words. Biblical Hebrew is different from modern Hebrew, but I recognize the words. And if I open a modern Torah, they are the same. The transcription errors down the Torah is… We have this record. Abraham ends up in Hebron. He buys a cave to bury his wife in. That purchase of the cave in Hebron again. It doesn't matter whether you believe it happened exactly. That purchase forms the basis of our property rights in the modern world. That purchase of a cave is the oldest recorded land transaction that follows the modern form of transactions, offer, consideration, acceptance. Our whole edifice of modern contract law is built around that cave purchase. And that's part of Judaism. Judaism, then, of course, and I'm no biblical scholar, but Joseph goes to Egypt, the children of Israel become numerous, they leave Egypt in a hurry, which is also a story of the emancipation of slavery. Again, Jews led the way in that. What's interesting about our civilization today is not that we had slavery. It's not that the Americans had slavery. It's that it was abolished, and Jews abolished slavery within their own systems a millennia before. What's interesting about the West is not having had slavery. What's interesting is having got rid of slavery. I'll put forward that that's a Jewish. You get that because eventually, and it took the South Africans a lot longer than anyone else to realize this, but when you read the Bible and you read all men are created in the image of God, you just have to get rid of slavery. It doesn't work. Again, a Jewish thing. All of these stories, and then the Jews come back to Israel, and yes, there's wars and stuff, and there's Canaanites and Philistines and battles and Jericho, and the walls come tumbling down. All of these phrases I can just throw at you. The majority of a reasonably educated Western populace, they just understand those cultural references in a way. I don't need to explain Jericho. You know, I don't need to explain a lot of this stuff. David and Goliath, that's David the Jew versus Philistine Goliath. It happened actually near Gaza. Well, in the hills, sort of inland from there. But Samson, Samson and Delilah, that story is in Gaza. All of these foundational stories for Jews, which Christianity also adopts, the whole of the Hebrew Bible is basically part of the Christian canon. That happens here. Those are place names. Into the New Testament, Armageddon is Megiddo. It's 80 kilometres that way. I can drive there. Yes, I think I can still drive there. It's not closed. We have such ties. We have our ancestors buried. The reason why Hebron is special today and why Jews want to live there is because there's a massive building that Solomon built. It's the same era as the famous Western Wall, the Temple Mount. That building is built on top of this cave that Abraham bought. That's why it's there. That's where we buried our matriarchs and our patriarchs. This is a, and you know when when Martinez talks about historical continuity and strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources, the strongest link you can have is ancestral burial sites, you know everybody sort of knows the kind of, from America, the you know, how, oh this is this is ancient burial lands, well Hebron is the burial site of Abraham's family, basically. Nablus, who is the modern name. The old biblical name is Shem. That's actually closest to me. That's literally inland from me now. That's the burial site of Joseph. There's a building there called Joseph's Tomb. Now, the Muslims sort of revere it because they stole our prophets and stuff. But they only revere it because we do. The site of the temple in Jerusalem is the site on which Abraham was supposed to sacrifice Isaac, where the whole story of the ram and the burning bush, the.. sorry, the ram caught in the bush, not the burning bush, that's Moses. That story happens on what is now today the temple mount. That was the position of the high holies. That's why we built the temple there, twice. That's why the Romans destroyed it. That's why the Muslims came along when they conquered it and built a mosque and a mausoleum on that spot, because it matters. Those are elements of colonization. These other components like distinct language, culture, and knowledge. Now, yes, we revived Hebrew as a modern language. That was controversial because some very religious Jews would say that Hebrew is the language of prayer. It's the language of the Torah. are we shouldn't use it for day-to-day stuff when we're going to be obscene and tell jokes and in fact what tends to happen is we use Arabic for the worst stuff but um, that was controversial but it was also hugely important that there is continuity that any Jewish child living in Israel, any Israeli child, can pick up an ancient scroll that was buried in the desert, and all the letters look familiar. That's amazing. Nobody reads hieroglyphics. The Roman Catholic Church teaches their clergy to read Latin, but it's not a day-to-day language anywhere. Hebrew is a day-to-day language, and it has biblical continuity back 3,000 plus years. Now, when I read through this list, which we'll post later, I missed one. I said I was going to miss one. In the UN, they've got this one line, status as a non-dominant social group. I can't help, and I've discussed this with Ryan. Ryan Bellerose is the Métis Canadian. That's almost like they had to put that in to try and find some way to make Jews not indigenous in Israel. Because we are, Jews are now the dominant social group in one place in the world, Israel. It's like we we won, we're the only ones actually, we're really the only indigenous people that lost our land and got it back and that is essentially, Zionism is that, it is the return of Jews to Zion, you know, by the rivers of Babylon, where, you know, that psalm, that's, what, 600 years BCE? That's Zionism. We've been trying to get back to Zion, Jerusalem, Israel, for thousands of years, ever since we were cast out by the Romans. I think the last time Jews really ran the place was up until when we revolted too much and the Romans kicked us out on 135 or 132 or whatever it was, and changed the name. And again, this is colonizer versus indigenous. What do colonizers do? They bring a new language, they try to crush whatever markers there are of indigenousness. And then they destroy, they build their new stuff on top of old stuff. They try and erase indigenous identities. And that's what's actually happened all over the world. You know, Native Americans cling on in America. Across Europe there are sort of lots of indigenous identities that were crushed by the Romans that never reappeared. I would say that the EU itself was trying to do this, it's it's trying to sort of flatten Europe and you all become Europeans in a horrible Marxist sense and I think that's one of the reasons why Israel is so hated by this globalist elite type thing, is that we are just this total exception. We are the indigenous people that came back, made it work, and made it work. And it doesn't mean, and let's just sort of circle back to the blood, and then I'll let you get a word in edge ways. Blood. This is the bit that gets thrown at us all the time on the internet. Okay? Every time I post indigenous, oh, you're from Europe. Well, actually, I was born in South Africa, so I'm African. You know, bite on that, you chumps. I'm second generation. My parents were born in Africa. I'm second generation African. So I don't know where you think I should go back to. I grew up in London. Yeah, that's true. My accent is London, but I never felt English actually. I've got my British citizenship, but am I English I don't think so. I'm Jewish, Jews belong here, so blood is uniquely unimportant to Jews for one good reason and the reason is Ruth, the story of Ruth in the bible is the story that actually to this day means that Jews accept converts. As soon as you accept conversion, it means blood doesn't matter. Now, we do not have an easy conversion process, okay? And in fact, you know, whenever I've, and I know some of my best friends here are converts, and they're more orthodox than me, more, you know, they observe of Sabbath, Shabbat, more than I do. And in many ways. But there's no hint or there's no feeling for me personally, or you don't find it anywhere in Israel, that if somebody has gone through the process of an Orthodox-recognized conversion, nobody here looks down upon them. In fact, many of us realize that's a lot harder than just being born. So blood. I don't know where his blood is from. In fact, I think the two converts I know the best, Australians and both, I think, from Catholic families, doesn't matter. So I don't care about blood. Now, it turns out I actually am Kohanim, and you can check, but there's DNA markers. But that's not what makes me Jewish. What makes me Jewish is self-identification, keeping the rituals, doing Shabbat dinners. And it doesn't even matter the level of observance. It's some level of observance and some recognition that it means something to be Jewish. So when they throw at you this Khazar crap and go back to Europe, and I mean, even that is ala panim, on its face. That doesn't mean the same thing. On its face, it's just ridiculous, because more than half the Jews in Israel are of Middle Eastern backgrounds. Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria. All of these places is where Jews came from. Right now, and Ethiopia, of course, we've airlifted them. All of these things mean that we're just a mongrel mix these days. And our kids are all meeting and intermarrying between different... There really isn't a level of racism that I can certainly recognize in America. So blood, what does blood mean? It doesn't... It's important. It's one of the markers. But it is not who makes you a Jew. Well, I think, yeah, there are a lot of points to pick up. For me, actually, it's the history. Abraham 4,000 years ago, David 3,000, establishing Jerusalem as the capital. So you've got 2,000 years of history on the land, in effect, before the Romans took over. The renaming of that land as Palestine to remove Israel off the face of the earth, just like Iran want to do..  That's deliberate.. Just exactly. Syria, Palestina and yeah of course the word came from the Greek from palash invaders from the sea, you can, it's like you can get you can get locked in all that crappy silly detail, it doesn't matter and it doesn't matter if it's Israel or the kingdom of David, it was or Judah or Samaria. Today it's Israel because when you form a modern nation, within the framework of modern nations that arose in the 1850s onwards. I can't remember the philosophical name for this, but Israel slots in within modern nationhood as the land of the Jews. Should there be a Kurdish nation? Yeah, sure. I just want to tell you something else about this. indigenous status is not zero sum, because there are indigenous people does not mean that nobody else is indigenous. Now, and I'm not coming to the Palestinians by any means next. We have Aramaic Christians living in the Galilee region. They are following a kind of Christianity that emerged very soon after Jesus died. And they are speaking Aramaic, or they're doing their liturgy in Aramaic. I've met one. There's a famous picture of Tommy Robinson standing next to a bearded guy with a big hat wearing his Mossad t-shirt. That's Father Nadav, and we went to meet him in Nazareth. That's in Nazareth. He lives there. There's a community of Aramaic Christians. The only place you can be an Aramaic Christian safely in the whole Middle East is Israel. And then we've got Druze. Druze is a kind of, it's wrong to call them completely Muslim. They're something else entirely. And their geographic region encompasses Syria and Lebanon and Israel. But where are they best off? Most of them, realize, in Israel. We've got some Baha'is who came from Iran, settled here. They're up in Haifa. We have Samaritans, actually. That's very close to me. This town of Nablus, okay? What's the Palestinian town of Nablus? Well, it comes from Neopolis, the Roman for new city. So even their name in Arabic of Nablus, it's a corruption of a Roman word. It's not Arabic. And you know this because Neopolis, anything with a P is not Arabic.  So the P gets converted to a B. It's just like the Palestinians, when they say it, they call it a phalestini, because they can't say P, so they change it to E. So Nablus, which is the place of Shem, again, Romans, they knew Shem is in the Bible many times, but they have to rename the place Neopolis to assert Roman dominance, and that's what you do. The Samaritans live on a place called Mount Gruzine, which overlooks that. They're there. We've got Bedouin Arabs who have lived here for a long time, but Bedouins have moved across the whole Middle East for centuries. To call them indigenous, they have parts of their culture here, but it's not unique to Israel. That's the point, the Bedouin culture is across the whole of the Arab peninsula all the way out. So did any part of their culture arise in Israel? Not really. But they have something called rights of longstanding presence, for sure. And they serve in our armed forces, and we have all sorts of internal political disputes over where they live and how they live and what their place. But again, that's stuff we can deal with. It's not sort of virulent hatred all the time. But this point of, is Islam indigenous to Israel? No, nothing of it. The only bit that they talk about is the farthest, there's a passage in the Quran that talks about the farthest mosque, and that has been reinterpreted. And there's a very famous clip from Al Jazeera from years and years ago. Professor Mordechai Kadar, he went on Al Jazeera in Arabic and he asked the host, how many times is Jerusalem named in the Quran? And the Quran was written 700, 800 years after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. Everybody in the whole world, the known, educated world, knew the name Jerusalem. But yet it does not appear once in the Quran. Not once. There's an oblique reference to a night journey by Muhammad to the furthest mosque. And he tied his horse up outside and ascended to heaven. That is the entire basis for Islamic claim to Israel and Jerusalem. Other than the fact that they assume everything. They're a replacement theology. So they brought in all of Christianity. They brought in all of Judaism. They then tell us we forged it to take out Muhammad. And they write their book, the Quran, which they then say, we're the corruptors of. Jews are worse than Christians because we went astray. Jews are the ones who went astray. Christians are the ones who were just led astray. You followed us instead of the Muslims so we're both cursed but Jews are cursed a bit more. But that's that's not the claim, that's the claim, that's what we're fighting over. And of course well yeah and of course you'd, you've got the period of the Romans and then the period of Arabs or Muslims from what 600... And crusaders, Sala in the Kurd, This history just goes, but all of it, the constant theme throughout is, one, there were Jews always here. Jews never left. There were Jews in Sfat. They came back in 1200 and 600. The only people who ever regarded this land as the place of genesis of their entire civilization is Jews.  Yeah. And then you go through, you're right, all those histories with the Ottoman Empire, whatever morphing of Arabness or Muslimness there was on there. And then you're right that Muslims tie Jerusalem to a story about a flying donkey, but we'll not even go into that. We'll not have to base what you believe in that. But the issue, I guess, you have now is that the clash between Romans and the Jews living there was a land grab and dominance. It's something much deeper in terms of Islam, and I 100% believe that Islam was started. One of the main reasons is to eradicate who Jesus is. You can't say Jesus, son of God. You cannot, that he was simply a man. And at its heart, and that means at its heart is also hatred of the Jews and the Jewish people, because without Judaism, you do not have Christianity. It's impossible. But that hatred we have seen over the whole time, and 1948, it is an absolute miracle to see what happens. I think maybe the hatred is from, one, the hatred that Islam has against Judaism. That's one. But also there's a second hatred that I think the miracle of modern-day Israel, that many people cannot accept that, and they look for something darker. You know, Israel being the centre of everything, being in control. And they come up with this idea to remove any understanding that actually you can't explain. 1948, when you read about what happened, I've read it in 67, 73, and all of those, it is a miracle. It could not happen, should not happen. And yet Israel stands there as a proud country, hugely successful in the midst of basket cases of countries. But yeah, talk to us about that level of vitriol against Israel and against the Jewish people that exists not only in the Middle East, but actually exists in the media and across the world, really. Well, I, you know, every Jew does, you know, I guess my kids are starting to do it now. You start, you know, when you're brought up Jewish, eventually at some point you understand that this thing called the Holocaust happened.  And what it does to a lot of us is you go through a phase where you try and, why? What's with the hatred? Why the hatred? And Islamic Jew hatred, I can see that in the Quran. I can see the hundred and whatever verses it is that mention Jews. And whereas we start off a little bit favourable in the early stuff, once Jews reject Muhammad and say no you're not a prophet we're done with our era of prophets, that was a thousand years ago, you're not one of them, once that happened he really then just goes on a the rest of his life is like, how can I f these Jews? And you know he kills a lot of Jews in Khaybar he takes their wives, their daughters, their and then also in Khaybar this other story, this very pivotal battle, after the battle when he kills all the men and he's got the women and one of the stories that's not well, it pretty authoritative, but again this doesn't matter whether it happened or not, it matters whether Muslims believe it, is that he was poisoned by this Jewish woman that he'd taken prisoner before he rapes her and that he died five years later from the poison he was was given then. Now, again, you get all sorts of scholars saying this is unlikely and it probably didn't happen. It doesn't matter. Do Muslims teach their children that a Jew killed Muhammad? Yes, they do. In large numbers, very large numbers. And so Jews rejected the prophet Muhammad. We don't call him a prophet. He isn't a prophet. He's their prophet. He's not our prophet. We rejected that. He fought lots of battles against us. He killed a lot of Jews, and eventually he was poisoned by a Jewess. These are not good things to teach your kids for coexistence. That's what they do. That kind of antisemitism, I understand that. That's ancient and it really hasn't changed. It can be dialled up or dialled down depending on the authoritarian rulers. UAE today might be dialling it down a lot. Great. In two or three generations, I'll feel a lot happier. Now, Nazi anti-Semitism, European anti-Semitism, again, Christianity had its creation stuff, and Christianity for a long time said that Jews killed Jesus. Despite Jesus being one of us, we, you know, and it took until, when did the Catholic Church change that? I mean, it was like in 1960 something or other, was the papal, you know, it's like, okay, thanks. It was the Romans. We can all agree on the Romans, but yes, Jews are stood accused of killing Jesus. That was one thing. Jews are successful. I don't know what it is. I personally have come to believe that Intel, the guy who founded Intel, Andy Grove, his autobiography was called Only the Paranoid Survive. I think Jews have been bred to be paranoid. There's other reasons which are genetically passed down. Whereas the Catholic Church, for a lot, makes its priests celibate, they become the most highly educated members of society, but yet they don't procreate. Jews did the opposite. You become a rabbi, the town supports the rabbi, and the smartest people who become rabbis then have 18 children. Perhaps that's the reason why we've got higher IQ. I don't know. We certainly value, as a culture, we value learning. We value books. We value, the fact that we've got troops in Gaza. What do they do at the weekends? Some of them, they drive armoured personnel carriers into Gaza with a gigantic Torah scroll so that they can stand in some house with bullet holes all around and do the Shabbat service with a real giant Torah scroll. First, they take in little ones, but once the roots are secure, what are we doing? Are we taking a book? This is the most ridiculous. And then what we do is, we do Talmudic rituals, as the Nazis and the anti-Semites would say. We're not doing it. It's not because, we're not out looking for the blood to drink and make my matzah. That's just utter crap. We're doing it because we value these traditions. We passed them down, and the continuity of Jews as a people has depended on us revering those words. That's why copying the Torah accurately for 3,000 years by hand, that's an astonishing cultural achievement that no culture on earth has managed. You know, Aborigines in Australia might have told stories orally, and that's a great sort of pass down. But we wrote it in a book, and the story of Abraham buying the cave becomes the root of Western civilization. So, you know, you can argue Judeo-Christian civilization for sure. And, you know, some people will say that democracy comes from the Greeks or whatever.  Much more of our morality comes from the Jewish Hebrew Bible, the Ten Commandments, than any other foundational thing. And again, the Americans, I'll criticize the Americans and I'll criticize the West in a very specific way. Rights versus responsibility. Okay? If you read the Ten Commandments, what you are reading is not a charter of rights. You do not have the right to life. You do not have the right to property. You do not have the right to your wife. You read a responsibility. You read about honouring your parents. You read about not murdering people. You read about not coveting the other guy's ox or wife. Those are responsibilities. You follow those responsibilities within your tribe. Your rights are implied. And I think America and the whole Western notion of human rights and stuff, it puts the cart before the horse. What are your responsibilities? Your responsibility is not to lob rockets at civilian areas on midnight of new year's eve, your responsibility is not to break out through a fence and go murder and rape people in the most horrible way, if you follow the responsibility of not being complete and utter bleeps then you can have a right to life, we are going to remove we, you do not have a right to life when you commit those acts against us. That's what we're seeing now. We're not Christians, and the whole turn the other cheek thing, it's not in our book, and quite rightly. There's too much of that, and the modern Western Christianity has gone too far. Yeah. Yes. That's an interesting. Here, I'll not go down that route, but actually, I want to finish off with, I'm sure you've had, well, you face, I'm sure, a lot of abuse. And if you are a Zionist Shill, maybe you can share some of that, Brian, because I'll happily be a Zionist, but never get paid for it, which is a bummer.  None of us get paid for this. It costs me a fortune living here.  I know it would be much easier if we did get paid, but that's not how life works. But it's interesting what's happened. Maybe the backlash you get whenever you talk about Israel's existence and the history and that clash, and also what we are seeing at the moment. It's interesting, what's the term? Proportionality is the term that's used. And I always wonder, what's proportional to rape or murder of children? Do you really want to go down that? Because that's a very perverse path if you want to go down that. But yeah, tell us about that, the backlash, but also then Israel doing what it has to do to exist. And if other countries want to be peaceful, then that makes life a lot easier for everyone, including the Arab countries around. Well you know the backlash, first of all, hurty words on the internet doesn't doesn't hurt me, you know I'm very much a bit of a free speech absolutist, I'll block and I'll mute if they're boring. I mean but mostly I like, you know and I'll spar with a few of them you know. I'm just looking to my left, I've got a screen here, sort of one of these things that kicked this off was because someone said, so I get that a lot of Israeli Jews are scared right now. So here's an idea. Why don't we offer them refuge in our own countries? Invite them to Britain, the States, and Canada. It's a win-win. Israelis get to live somewhere they feel safe, and the locals get their land back. Now, after everything I've just said to you, firstly, we've tried living in other people's countries. It doesn't always go so well. You know, German Jews felt great in 1929, and Polish Jews felt great also. This was not a long-term, tenable solution. And so what I replied was, lol, no, we're home. When you dig up London, you find Roman stuff. When we dig up Jerusalem, we dig past that crap to the city of our Jewish King David. Pithy, short, you can't put all the history of the Middle East in a tweet or an x-post or whatever we're supposed to call it. Praise be to Elon. Now, so I get this back. This isn't how the world works. Just because you've owned something thing doesn't mean you always will. Also, the Celtic tribes inhabited London long before the Romans, and Canaanites existed in Palestine long before Israel. Well, as and when some Canaanites show up, and as long as they're not still doing the child sacrifice shit, we will give them a nice little bit of the country, and they can live and practice their whatever Canaanite religion. But the point is, there is no continuity of Canaanites, because probably because Jews genocided them, whatever, I don't care. Canaanite was absorbed into the Jewish tribes. That's what happened. There's nobody doing Canaanite today, so they don't exist. The Palestinians are not Canaanites. They're not Philistines either. They don't know anything about Canaanites or Philistines. But, you know, you get all of this stuff. David, this is a good one, actually. Chrissy, David was a corrupt criminal whose family came from Iraq. That's the Koran version of David. I was wondering. I missed that. I know. I know. That one's just brilliant. And it's just very simple. And it's with a little Canadian flag. And Chrissy is the name. Compassion, confidence, something about a sire. 170,000 followers.  You kind of and then you know you get from sama Lebanese when you check your DNA it's east European, okay my yes yes my DNA did come a bit, because before South Africa we were somewhere in northeast Europe but again and then you know when I look through all of this telling me that I don't belong where I know I belong. Look, I came to Israel when I was 39 years old. I married my Israeli wife some years before that, tried to learn Hebrew in London. I'm crap at Hebrew, okay? I can barely read. I can sort of read, but more often than not, I'm copy-pasting into... Oh, Apple. Apple does not translate Hebrew by default. It's like not not one of their default languages. It's like, get with this. Anyway, I arrive in Israel as a 39-year-old PhD physicist, basically illiterate, but I feel more at home than I did in London. Explain that. I can't explain that. There's this woman, Eve Barlow, she's here visiting right now. She lands and she immediately feels at home. She lives in LA, She's a writer or she wrote, and writes about music. Why does she feel at home? And so many Jews you talk to, and this is a funny thing, when non-Jews come here and feel at home, they then start looking through their family tree and discover that four generations back, they are Jewish. And they start questioning their self. There's something that I can't explain to you that is is magical about being in Israel. Because it's tough. It is more comfortable to live in America and Britain. It really, it wasn't the easiest place to move to, but it just felt better. 100%. I think we'll finish it there. I think it's good to get a short conversation about this in Israel. And of course, you could take it wider into other countries. But that makes it very convoluted. And I think this perfectly fits to this current time. But, Brian, thank you so much. All the links for these will be in the description and our social media posts so people can follow the article and your post on it and have fun at the replies, which is sometimes the best part of Twitter posts. It certainly is. Anyway, yeah, we can do updates about the whole situation another time. But, yeah, thank you. This was really good. This is stuff I like talking about. This is positive. This is the reasons that people need to understand why Israel's not going anywhere. And that's the other. The last thing I'll say is this. You know, for 75 years, the Arabs have fought the correct, well, since 67 in particular, and through the 60s, basically, with the rise of Arafat and the PLO, which was a creation of the Soviet Union, the whole Palestinian identity. That's another point, but I'll just finish with this. They fought the correct battle to remove a colonial occupier from land. They fought the right battle that would have got the British out of India. Or the French out of Algeria, or half a dozen European countries out of bits of Africa. They fought the correct guerrilla warfare tactics, sort of terrorism, murders, all of this stuff. And it spectacularly fails to move Jews out of Jerusalem and Israel, because we are not colonial settlers. We will never be colonial settlers. The mindset, you know, and that's the other thing is, you know, when the Americans come here and tell us that we're not fighting the ground war in Gaza the correct way, and they're going to tell us how well they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were fighting thousands of miles from home. Our soldiers can actually stand at the top of a building with binoculars and see their homes. They go home, you know, if they're released at the weekend, they get taken to the border and they're home in 25 minutes. We are not projecting power as an imperial conquering army trying to make Iraqis be Democrats. It's not that. And so that the whole way in which the Palestinians are fought, encouraged by the entire world, encouraged by people shouting free Palestine from the river to the sea. When you do that, you encourage millions of poor Arabs to fight a war that they will never, ever win by the methods that they're fighting. They will never, ever win. They will never commit an act so atrocious that I will wake up in the morning and say, because believe me, October 7th was that act, that I will wake up in the morning and say, you know what? I think I'm going to go live in Berlin. That's not going to happen. You're not going to force me off my land with these acts. They don't work. it's wrong it's just totally the wrong approach, killing us doesn't matter, how many you rape, how many you kill, the only thing that will happen is the scale of our response and the sheer biblical nature of the response will come out, go read the story of Dinah, the men of Shechem, that's the story that's what's going on in Gaza right now, go read that story if you don't know your Bible. One woman was raped in the Bible. Dinah, go read that. Well, maybe those who live in Gaza, the Muslims or the Arabs, if they took this indigenous rights, then maybe they can move the refugee camp to Mecca. I'm sure it would be wonderful and they can enjoy that.  Here's a little bit about Yemen. Yemen is Arabia, Arabs to Arabia. 

Now, we've driven some pretty desolate stretches of the U.S. For a guy who used to wait 'til the last minute to get gas, those stretches were life-changing. A couple of bad experiences and you become mister "fill up at half a tank." But America's desert and wilderness stretches take a back seat to some of the wilderness of the Middle East; especially some of the desert traversed by God's ancient people as they went from Egypt to the Promised Land. Recently, a writer named decided to physically retrace some of the geography of the first five books of the Bible. Including the still-challenging Sinai wilderness where God's people wandered for forty years. He spent time with the nomadic Bedouins who make that wilderness their home. He walked the hot sands, the daunting mountains of that wilderness. And, in the process, he found himself on an unanticipated journey of spiritual discovery. And he learned something about why God led His children through the desert - and why He still does. Here's what this author said: "In the desert, there's no such thing as independence - only dependence." I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Treasure In Your Desert." I think it started when we were little kids with words like these, "I can do it myself!" And we've been trying to do it ourselves ever since - even when it comes to totally trusting God. Oh, we believe in Him. We go to His meetings. We try to live by His commandments, but we want to drive. We're control freaks, especially when it comes to the things or people that really matter to us. We can make it happen. We can make it work. We can think of something. We can fix it. Then comes the desert; a season in your life when the bottom drops out. Things and people that you've depended on either aren't there or aren't enough. It's dry. The heat is intense. You're worn out physically and emotionally, and there's no road to show you the way to go. Welcome to the wilderness. But before you give up or give in, remember the desert is part of the plan. It was for God's ancient people. It was for John the Baptist. It was for Paul. It was for the Son of God, and it is for you. Here's what God says about the desert stretches; it's in Deuteronomy 8:2-4, our word for today from the Word of God. He says: "Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert...to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep His commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord." Ok, God says He leads us into the desert to humble us; to bring us to a place where the Lord is all we have. Because that's when we learn that the Lord is all we need. "In the desert, there's no such thing as independence - only dependence." When you come to your Lord in total desperation, running on empty, you open yourself up to an experience of God's power and God's grace you can't get any other way. And just in case you're not sure you can make it through this desert, listen to what your Heavenly Father will do for you there - Deuteronomy 1:31 says this: "In the desert...you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way." And like any tired little child, you'll go much further with your Father carrying you than you could ever go on your own. The desert may not be pleasant. It may stress you, it may strip you, but there's treasure you'll only find there. Because you'll find the treasure that is discovered only when God is all you've got.

In this podcast I am sharing in my AMSR voice the energy of the full illumination of the moon on November 27 at 11:16 EET and 9:16 GMT. On the night before, I am sharing Skystronomy in an authentic Bedouin Tent, Lialy Lounge directly in the Red Sea this Sunday November 26th from 7pm. The Bedouins unfortunately lost their StarLore roots. I invite everyone to look up on this evening of the 26th as the full moon energetically grows and you can see it amongst the stars of Taurus because when it is for in this part of the world it will be daytime and you cannot see it But if you are in Australia or California you will be able to see the full moon amongst the stars of Taurus on the 27th It was seven years ago when everyone in the mainstream were saying that the full moon was in Gemini that I was sitting on the beach in Sahl Hasheesh alone and realised that astrology was completely misleading and a kind of sorcery in a way. I witnessed the full moon amongst the stars of Taurus not Gemini. Now seven years later I am so grateful to have evolved the concept of Skystrology be free of the controlling mentality of astrology and I am grateful to share Skystronomy on the RedSea, no longer alone, but in a beautiful place with special guest from all over the world. If you would like a voice activation to support you from a Skystronomical lens or you would like to say thank you……feel free to contact me on IG at AkaCloudette. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/skystrology/message

Harry McGee and Pat Leahy join Hugh to look back on the week in politics:The dire situation in Israel and Palestine continues to dominate Irish political discourse.UK home secretary Suella Braverman's controversial opinion piece may cost her her job. Sinn Féin's annual conference or Ard Fheis takes place this weekend. A new Irish political party was born this week - Harry McGee has the details.And the panel pick their favourite Irish Times articles of the week:A brilliant piece about displacement of Bedouins in the West Bank by Hannah McCarthyMartin Wall's coverage of Donald Trump's legal woes contrasts with the former president's growing chances of winning a second termShould religion get out of the classroom? A debate in our pages set out both sides. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One of the large sectors of Israel's society that is absent from the social demonstrations that have been sweeping the country for the past six month are Israel's Bedouin community. A survey conducted by the Rifman Institute found that over 80% of Israel's Bedouin population is not well-versed in Israel's proposed judicial reform, with only 6% of respondents saying they knew about the situation on a deeper level. Israel's roughly 300,000 Bedouins do not seem bothered by the issue that has divided the country. Only 5% of respondents said they would participate politically regarding the judicial reform bill, though 8% said they would if there was the backing of an organization behind them. Elul Rifman, head of the advising committee of the Rifman Institute, said that the survey shows that the Bedouin community of Israel was largely disconnected from the broader Israeli society. He said lack of promotion of the Bedouin society in the Negev was a barrier to the development of the region and that had to change. (photo: flash90)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr. Margit Gabriele Muller is a veterinarian and Executive Director of Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital. She is also an award-winning author of the book "Your Pet, Your Pill" and a professional certified coach and speaker.Margit tells a captivating tale of her journey from overcoming childhood trauma to becoming a highly respected veterinarian. She also shares a personal aspect of her life, growing up with a mother diagnosed with schizophrenia and how animals have therapeutic benefits for mental health. Imagine being the only Western woman working at the largest Falcon hospital in the Middle East. Margit became the first female falcon doctor in the male-dominated world of Arab falconry. She tells of her remarkable experiences at the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital, where she faced resistance from staff and falconers but succeeded through resilience and her knowledge of German veterinary practices. Under her leadership, the Falcon Hospital has become a major tourist attraction, sharing knowledge about this fascinating tradition. Our conversation takes us on an insightful journey through the mesmerizing world of falconry in the Middle East, where these majestic birds are deeply embedded into the daily life of the Bedouins. Margit's narration of the bond between a falcon and its owner, the preventive measures for a falcon's long life, and the protective glove for the handler's arm is nothing less than fascinating. As we wrap up our conversation, Margit discusses her coaching program, Deep Inner Transformation in 30 Days, and how regression therapy can bring about powerful changes. You will surely be captivated by Margit's experiences and the unique insights she gets from her world.Enjoy!To connect with Dr. Margit Gabriele Muller https://www.coachformentalhealth.com/Support the showTo Share - Connect & Relate: To be on the show Podmatch Profile Email us at behas.podcats@gmail.com Thank you for listening - Hasta Pronto!

https://youtu.be/1K6-GwxfxMk jesus built his church on a rock called Petra... Cain and Abel... #2023 #art #music #movies #poetry #poem #photooftheday #volcano #news #money #food #weather #climate #monkeys #horse #puppy #fyp #love #instagood #onelove #eyes #getyoked #horsie #gotmilk #book #shecomin #getready 

Members of Palestine's Muslim community have long honored al-Nabi Musa, or the Prophet Moses. Since the thirteenth century, they have celebrated at a shrine near Jericho believed to be the location of Moses's tomb; in the mid-nineteenth century, they organized a civic festival in Jerusalem to honor this prophet. Considered one of the most important occasions for Muslim pilgrims in Palestine, the Prophet Moses festival yearly attracted thousands of people who assembled to pray, conduct mystical forms of worship, and hold folk celebrations. Palestinian Rituals of Identity: The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948 (U Texas Press, 2023) takes an innovative approach to the study of Palestine's modern history by focusing on the Prophet Moses festival from the late Ottoman period through the era of British rule. Halabi explores how the festival served as an arena of competing discourses, with various social groups attempting to control its symbols. Tackling questions about modernity, colonialism, gender relations, and identity, Halabi recounts how peasants, Bedouins, rural women, and Sufis sought to influence the festival even as Ottoman authorities, British colonists, Muslim clerics, and Palestinian national leaders did the same. Drawing on extensive research in Arabic newspapers and Islamic and colonial archives, Halabi reveals how the festival has encapsulated Palestinians' responses to modernity, colonialism, and the nation's growing national identity. Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Members of Palestine's Muslim community have long honored al-Nabi Musa, or the Prophet Moses. Since the thirteenth century, they have celebrated at a shrine near Jericho believed to be the location of Moses's tomb; in the mid-nineteenth century, they organized a civic festival in Jerusalem to honor this prophet. Considered one of the most important occasions for Muslim pilgrims in Palestine, the Prophet Moses festival yearly attracted thousands of people who assembled to pray, conduct mystical forms of worship, and hold folk celebrations. Palestinian Rituals of Identity: The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948 (U Texas Press, 2023) takes an innovative approach to the study of Palestine's modern history by focusing on the Prophet Moses festival from the late Ottoman period through the era of British rule. Halabi explores how the festival served as an arena of competing discourses, with various social groups attempting to control its symbols. Tackling questions about modernity, colonialism, gender relations, and identity, Halabi recounts how peasants, Bedouins, rural women, and Sufis sought to influence the festival even as Ottoman authorities, British colonists, Muslim clerics, and Palestinian national leaders did the same. Drawing on extensive research in Arabic newspapers and Islamic and colonial archives, Halabi reveals how the festival has encapsulated Palestinians' responses to modernity, colonialism, and the nation's growing national identity. Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Members of Palestine's Muslim community have long honored al-Nabi Musa, or the Prophet Moses. Since the thirteenth century, they have celebrated at a shrine near Jericho believed to be the location of Moses's tomb; in the mid-nineteenth century, they organized a civic festival in Jerusalem to honor this prophet. Considered one of the most important occasions for Muslim pilgrims in Palestine, the Prophet Moses festival yearly attracted thousands of people who assembled to pray, conduct mystical forms of worship, and hold folk celebrations. Palestinian Rituals of Identity: The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948 (U Texas Press, 2023) takes an innovative approach to the study of Palestine's modern history by focusing on the Prophet Moses festival from the late Ottoman period through the era of British rule. Halabi explores how the festival served as an arena of competing discourses, with various social groups attempting to control its symbols. Tackling questions about modernity, colonialism, gender relations, and identity, Halabi recounts how peasants, Bedouins, rural women, and Sufis sought to influence the festival even as Ottoman authorities, British colonists, Muslim clerics, and Palestinian national leaders did the same. Drawing on extensive research in Arabic newspapers and Islamic and colonial archives, Halabi reveals how the festival has encapsulated Palestinians' responses to modernity, colonialism, and the nation's growing national identity. Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Members of Palestine's Muslim community have long honored al-Nabi Musa, or the Prophet Moses. Since the thirteenth century, they have celebrated at a shrine near Jericho believed to be the location of Moses's tomb; in the mid-nineteenth century, they organized a civic festival in Jerusalem to honor this prophet. Considered one of the most important occasions for Muslim pilgrims in Palestine, the Prophet Moses festival yearly attracted thousands of people who assembled to pray, conduct mystical forms of worship, and hold folk celebrations. Palestinian Rituals of Identity: The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948 (U Texas Press, 2023) takes an innovative approach to the study of Palestine's modern history by focusing on the Prophet Moses festival from the late Ottoman period through the era of British rule. Halabi explores how the festival served as an arena of competing discourses, with various social groups attempting to control its symbols. Tackling questions about modernity, colonialism, gender relations, and identity, Halabi recounts how peasants, Bedouins, rural women, and Sufis sought to influence the festival even as Ottoman authorities, British colonists, Muslim clerics, and Palestinian national leaders did the same. Drawing on extensive research in Arabic newspapers and Islamic and colonial archives, Halabi reveals how the festival has encapsulated Palestinians' responses to modernity, colonialism, and the nation's growing national identity. Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Members of Palestine's Muslim community have long honored al-Nabi Musa, or the Prophet Moses. Since the thirteenth century, they have celebrated at a shrine near Jericho believed to be the location of Moses's tomb; in the mid-nineteenth century, they organized a civic festival in Jerusalem to honor this prophet. Considered one of the most important occasions for Muslim pilgrims in Palestine, the Prophet Moses festival yearly attracted thousands of people who assembled to pray, conduct mystical forms of worship, and hold folk celebrations. Palestinian Rituals of Identity: The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948 (U Texas Press, 2023) takes an innovative approach to the study of Palestine's modern history by focusing on the Prophet Moses festival from the late Ottoman period through the era of British rule. Halabi explores how the festival served as an arena of competing discourses, with various social groups attempting to control its symbols. Tackling questions about modernity, colonialism, gender relations, and identity, Halabi recounts how peasants, Bedouins, rural women, and Sufis sought to influence the festival even as Ottoman authorities, British colonists, Muslim clerics, and Palestinian national leaders did the same. Drawing on extensive research in Arabic newspapers and Islamic and colonial archives, Halabi reveals how the festival has encapsulated Palestinians' responses to modernity, colonialism, and the nation's growing national identity. Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/israel-studies

In this Ramadan series of lectures, Shaykh Saleem reviews Surah al-Fath (48) - The Chapter of the Victory. In part 11, he goes over the fifteenth verse: "When soon, you, Muḥammad and the Muslims that took part in the Peace treaty of Ḥudaybiyyah, will travel towards Khaybar and will be victorious so that you can take the spoils of war, those Aʿrab Bedouins who were left behind, and did not accompany you in the Umrah and the Peace Treat of Ḥudaybiyyah, will soon say, “Allow us to follow you to also benefit from the spoils of war.” They, those Aʿrab Bedouins, seek to change the decision of Allāh which was that other than those present at Ḥudaybiyyah, no others are allowed to come and share in the spoils of war of Khaybar. Say to them O Muḥammad: “You shall never  be allowed to follow us in the expedition to conquer the fortress of Khaybar and have a share of the spoils of war; this is what Allāh had said earlier about all of you.” Then they, the Aʿrab that did not accompany you at Ḥudaybiyyah, will soon say: “You are jealous of us and you don't want us to also have a share in the spoils of war and your not wanting to share the wealth with us has nothing to do with a command from Allah.” However this is not the case as inreality,  indeed they, the Aʿrab, were not capable of understanding except a little due to their own spiritual state - as if they had understood your status, Muḥammad they would not talk in this way.”

From all accounts, Nietzsche did not read nor comment upon the work of Ibn Khaldun, outside of a few remarks from Schopenhauer in one of his essays that Nietzsche might have read. But what we find in his Muqaddimah is a theory of cyclical history, in which many of the key principles of Nietzsche's political philosophy would find agreement. Ibn Khaldun was a historian from North Africa whose work sought to explain why it was that the same pattern seemed to repeat ad infinitum. The Bedouin desert tribes would overwhelm one of the settled cities of the Mediterranean, from time to time, then establish a new city there. For a time, the culture of the new city would be like that of the Bedouins in the desert. But, eventually, a sedentary culture set in, over the course of several generations, and the inhabitants grew complacent, became incompetent, and eventually found themselves overthrown by another desert tribe, and the process would then repeat. In his studies, Khaldun arrives at the concept of asabiya, or the capacity for collective power, which can be very useful for a Nietzschean perspective on social power structures. This concept of asabiya means, literally, 'group feeling', and describes the extent to which the individuals feel themselves to part of a unified, coherent group, and are thus able to act as instruments of the group, and coordinate their actions as a team. Asabiya increases in harsh conditions, and declines in conditions of luxury, and thus the cycle of empires is set into motion - "This is how God proceeds with His creatures." Just as Nietzsche suggests the idea of all things returning eternally, Khaldun's writing brings this idea into the historical and political sphere. But Ibn Khaldun is significant because he presents this not only as a poetical idea, but as a pattern based on observable facts. There are many, many observations and anecdotes in the Muqaddimah, and we will not be able to cover it all, so we shall focus on the points most relevant to the ideas covered this season. This will be our first journey into a work outside the Western Canon, into one of the most important thinkers of the Near East. Join me in exploring the dynamics of history, as we jump into the basic ideas of the Muqaddimah. 

Walter's: First ever programme to educate his listeners. Learn Why? How: Bedouins are used as pawns and second class citizens by the Palestinian Authority. Why: Our legal system, based on Ottoman, British, and Jordanian laws is confusing, outdated and discriminates against our Jewish citizens. How: The EU, the European Union, finances, supplies and illegally erects housing structures for Bedouins, and threatens legal action if Israel would dare to remove them. More About: The PA's policy of inviting Bedouins to settle in strategic locations of area ‘C' to establish facts on the ground in preparation for a Palestinian State and to hinder Jewish settlement. Learn: About the Palestinian Authority's flagship outpost of Khan al Ahmar and the long running government's refusal to comply with time-table set by the Supreme Court order, to demolish or relocate it.. Also: More pro-Arab discrimination on farm land and grazing rights. And : How the Gulf States realised the importance of Israel in the greater scheme of world politics and formed the Abraham Accords, that are widening slowly, leaving the “Palestinians” out in the cold, pondering their future. The Walter Bingham File 28FEB2023 - PODCAST

This week we meet Keziah, a Californian girl who moved to Jordan to live among poor, illiterate, nomadic Bedouins for 8 years before relocating to the Arabian Peninsular, where God called her and her husband to reach out to highly educated, wealthy elites.These two different locations meant exchanging a world of sheep, goats and camels for skyscrapers, SUVs and designer clothes. But the task remained the same, to invite Muslims, with love and respect, to follow Jesus the Messiah.It was a part of the world that she was initially frightened of, based upon the media and films she had been exposed to growing up in the USA. But her love for Arabs and that part of the world grew and grew, as she submitted to God's call on her life and experienced the Middle East for herself.You'll hear about dreams, wearing the veil, friends who were murdered, an emerging fellowship of believers, a unwelcomed interference by other gospel workers that hindered the growth of the church and much more.As ever, do get in touch with you comments, questions & suggestions: matt@frontiers.org.uk-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Book & Film recommendation, addressing the big question: "Is He worth it?" The Insanity of God by Nik RipkenThe Insanity of God Movie-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

'Saint Anthony, the Father of monks, was born in Egypt in 251 of pious parents who departed this life while he was yet young. On hearing the words of the Gospel: "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor" (Matt. 19:21), he immediately put it into action. Distributing to the poor all he had, and fleeing from all the turmoil of the world, he departed to the desert. The manifold temptations he endured continually for the space of twenty years are incredible. His ascetical struggles by day and by night, whereby he mortified the uprisings of the passions and attained to the height of dispassion, surpass the bounds of nature; and the report of his deeds of virtue drew such a multitude to follow him, that the desert was transformed into a city, while he became, so to speak, the governor, lawgiver, and master-trainer of all the citizens of this newly-formed city. But the cities of the world also enjoyed the fruit of his virtue. When the Christians were being persecuted and put to death under Maximinus in 312, he hastened to their aid and consolation. When the Church was troubled by the Arians, he went with zeal to Alexandria in 335 and struggled against them in behalf of Orthodoxy. During this time, by the grace of his words, he also turned many unbelievers to Christ.   'He began his ascetical life outside his village of Coma in Upper Egypt, studying the ways of the ascetics and holy men there, and perfecting himself in the virtues of each until he surpassed them all. Desiring to increase his labours, he departed into the desert, and finding an abandoned fortress in the mountain, he made his dwelling in it, training himself in extreme fasting, unceasing prayer, and fierce conflicts with the demons. Here he remained, as mentioned above, about twenty years. Saint Athanasius the Great, who knew him personally and wrote his life, says that he came forth from the fortress "initiated in the mysteries and filled with the Spirit of God." Afterwards, because of the press of the faithful, who deprived him of his solitude, he was enlightened by God to journey with certain Bedouins, until he came to a mountain in the desert near the Red Sea, where he passed the remaining part of his life. Saint Athanasius says of him that "his countenance had a great and wonderful grace. This gift also he had from the Saviour. For if he were present in a great company of monks, and any one who did not know him previously wished to see him, immediately coming forward he passed by the rest, and hurried to Anthony, as though attracted by his appearance. Yet neither in height nor breadth was he conspicuous above others, but in the serenity of his manner and the purity of his soul."   'So passing his life, and becoming an example of virtue and a rule for monastics, he reposed on January 17 in the year 356, having lived together some 105 years.' (Great Horologion)   Speaking of the demonic temptations and struggles with the passions that beset those who seek their salvation, St Anthony said: "All these trials are to your advantage. Do away with temptation and no one will be saved."

'Saint Anthony, the Father of monks, was born in Egypt in 251 of pious parents who departed this life while he was yet young. On hearing the words of the Gospel: "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor" (Matt. 19:21), he immediately put it into action. Distributing to the poor all he had, and fleeing from all the turmoil of the world, he departed to the desert. The manifold temptations he endured continually for the space of twenty years are incredible. His ascetical struggles by day and by night, whereby he mortified the uprisings of the passions and attained to the height of dispassion, surpass the bounds of nature; and the report of his deeds of virtue drew such a multitude to follow him, that the desert was transformed into a city, while he became, so to speak, the governor, lawgiver, and master-trainer of all the citizens of this newly-formed city. But the cities of the world also enjoyed the fruit of his virtue. When the Christians were being persecuted and put to death under Maximinus in 312, he hastened to their aid and consolation. When the Church was troubled by the Arians, he went with zeal to Alexandria in 335 and struggled against them in behalf of Orthodoxy. During this time, by the grace of his words, he also turned many unbelievers to Christ.   'He began his ascetical life outside his village of Coma in Upper Egypt, studying the ways of the ascetics and holy men there, and perfecting himself in the virtues of each until he surpassed them all. Desiring to increase his labours, he departed into the desert, and finding an abandoned fortress in the mountain, he made his dwelling in it, training himself in extreme fasting, unceasing prayer, and fierce conflicts with the demons. Here he remained, as mentioned above, about twenty years. Saint Athanasius the Great, who knew him personally and wrote his life, says that he came forth from the fortress "initiated in the mysteries and filled with the Spirit of God." Afterwards, because of the press of the faithful, who deprived him of his solitude, he was enlightened by God to journey with certain Bedouins, until he came to a mountain in the desert near the Red Sea, where he passed the remaining part of his life. Saint Athanasius says of him that "his countenance had a great and wonderful grace. This gift also he had from the Saviour. For if he were present in a great company of monks, and any one who did not know him previously wished to see him, immediately coming forward he passed by the rest, and hurried to Anthony, as though attracted by his appearance. Yet neither in height nor breadth was he conspicuous above others, but in the serenity of his manner and the purity of his soul."   'So passing his life, and becoming an example of virtue and a rule for monastics, he reposed on January 17 in the year 356, having lived together some 105 years.' (Great Horologion)   Speaking of the demonic temptations and struggles with the passions that beset those who seek their salvation, St Anthony said: "All these trials are to your advantage. Do away with temptation and no one will be saved."

Welcome to a bonus episode of ArtCurious featuring my interview with Paul Fisher about his latest book, The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World. An iconic American artist, John Singer Sargent was also a complicated and mysterious man. While presenting himself as a reserved, buttoned-up businessman, he scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work. He charmed the possessors of new money and old, while reserving his greatest sympathies for Bedouins, Spanish dancers, and the gondoliers of Venice. At the height of his renown in Britain and America, he quit his lucrative portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes—and on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself and that were left undiscovered until after Sargent's death.  In his groundbreaking new biography, the scholar Paul Fisher offers a vivid life of the buttoned-up artist and his unbuttoned work. Sargent's nervy, edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sitters—feelings that London, Paris, and New York high society was fascinated by yet kept at bay. Masterfully researched and stunningly written, The Grand Affair brings back to life one of our most beloved artists and solidifies Fisher as a master of the genre. Please SUBSCRIBE and REVIEW our show on Apple Podcasts and FOLLOW on Spotify Instagram / Facebook / YouTube Buy The Grand Affair here! SPONSORS: BetterHelp: Get 10% off your first month of counseling The Barnes Foundation: For a limited time, get 10% off your first Barnes Class when you visit our link Canvasprints.com: Get 25% off of your entire order of canvas prints, canvas wall displays, metal prints, photo tiles, photo blankets and pillows, and much more when you use code ARTCURIOUS25 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices