03/30/09 – Charles Featherstone – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Charles H. Featherstone.
He's a Washington, D.C.
-based journalist and a minister.
He's got an archive at lewrockwell.com.
And his blog is called The Feather Blog.
That's thefeatherblog.blogspot.com.
Good to talk to you again.
How are you, sir?
Welcome back to the show.
Good morning.
Thanks for having me.
It's good to be here again.
Well, it's good to talk to you again.
I noticed this thing that you'd written on your blog here about the war crimes in Gaza and some of the religious, or so-called at least, religious justification for some of the war crimes in Gaza.
I guess, you know, as background here, there have been army soldiers, IDF soldiers, coming forward and saying that more religious and right-wing elements within the Israeli army there were encouraging war crimes against women, children, and other helpless civilians.
And one of the major quotes that has been brought up in much of the American news media is something that a rabbi named Brigadier General Ronski supposedly said, or repeated over and over to the troops there, he who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful.
And I thought, well, what a bunch of perfect nonsense.
But I guess if it's in a really old book, then it's true.
So, you know, why not have Charles Featherstone come on and maybe give me a little bit of background knowledge so I can understand exactly where this comes from and what this is all about.
Well, I first noticed this.
There were some reports in January, actually, about this.
In the Israeli press in particular, not Haaretz, I'm trying to remember exactly, I think it was the Jerusalem Post, and it was another rabbi, a former army rabbi, the Sephardic rabbi of Israel, who sent a letter to the Prime Minister basically stating that because of his interpretation of a 12th century writing, the entire population of Gaza was at fault for the Qassam rockets being launched, and therefore the Israeli defense forces would be OK if they killed civilians, because all of the people living in Gaza were responsible.
And he advocated this particular approach.
The document he was citing, which I found online, I haven't actually been able to go to a proper theological library and take a look at any of these yet, given the situation I'm in, but he was citing a medieval Jewish scholar by the name of Maimonides, who was very influential, particularly for Thomas Aquinas.
And he wrote a commentary, it was something called the Law of Kings, in which he was dealing with the laws that apply to states and sovereigns, and in effect he was citing a story in Genesis, which effectively stated that because all of the people in a particular place knew of a certain crime that had taken place, therefore it was acceptable to kill them all, even though they were not.
The story is Genesis 34, I said it in my story, it's the rape of Dinah.
And you even say there, too, that by the end of that story, it's left kind of ambiguous whether what they did was the right thing or not.
But if it wasn't that, and forgive my ignorance, because that's all I've got on this subject, but isn't the Old Testament replete with examples of singularizing an entire group of people as the enemy to be wiped out at God's command?
Doesn't that happen over and over again?
It does.
It happens over and over again.
It happens when God commands Israel to conquer Canaan, and it happens when Israel is at war with particularly Babylon, and Babylon is in the process of conquering Israel.
Well, and so if it wasn't this quote, there's always a quote that someone can find in the Old Testament that says God says it's okay for really whichever group, not just Jews and Israel, but pretty much anybody, can walk around citing the Bible as an excuse to kill people, right?
Absolutely.
The quote that General Ronski is quoting, apparently, and I've not been able to find this, comes from an early medieval commentary, actually from late antiquity, from the 6th or 7th century, commentary on Ecclesiastes, which is kind of strange because Ecclesiastes is this sort of wonderful little book in which the author of Ecclesiastes concludes that whatever God gives you, your labor, your work, just be satisfied with that, because bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people, and you can't really figure out why.
So to come up with this, he who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful, getting that from Ecclesiastes strikes me as strange, but I would like to see how that whole thing happens.
But you've got...
One of the points that I make that I think is very, very important is that you, in effect, for the civilization warriors, for Jews and Christians, but also for secular modernists, who talk about war with Muslims, war with Arabs, it becomes, in effect, modernity versus antiquity, civilization versus barbarism, in which we, the Westerners, the Jews, the Christians, the secularists, are at war with medieval people, people whose rooting is in the Middle Ages or earlier.
Right.
Oh, don't forget, we believe in democracy.
Absolutely.
And so then to have, in particular, Israeli rabbis consulting 1,400-year-old documents to justify actions they want the Israeli army to take is fascinating.
Well, and actually, it seems like it would be more credible if it was 2,000 or 3,000 years old, rather than 1,200 or something, right?
Well...
I mean, the biblical times were long over by the time this guy Manomides or whatever wrote whatever he did.
Yes, but he was writing a commentary, and the commentaries are all, you know, the canon of the text is only about 1,000 years old.
I mean, 2,000 years old.
So he was beginning to write, you know, sort of a second or third set of commentaries on things.
And this is what Jews did.
They did commentaries like the Talmud to comment extensively on the text.
Muslims, in many ways, imitated this.
So the way Muslims do things about the Koran is very, very similar to the way the Jews handle both the Torah but also the other writings that they have.
Well, one thing that shouldn't be lost here is I think at least it's pretty obvious that these wars aren't really religious wars.
They're all very political and all very human, and all sides can invoke religion.
We've seen within the U.S. Army, of course, or I guess especially, they say, the Air Force, a major infiltration of Haggaite, even forcing people under their command to be baptized and things or change their religion, and invoking, you know, my God.
I knew my God is the right God.
His God is a false idol.
Was that Boykin?
It was General Boykin who said our God is bigger than their God.
Right.
Well, so let's switch around from...
I mean, basically what we're talking about here is one God that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all agree on, but apparently each side thinks that they can find reason in their religion to believe that that one God wants them to kill the other people who believe in them, but in a different way than they do or something.
Right?
Yep.
Absolutely.
Well, so what about the Christians?
What does Jesus say about war?
Jesus actually doesn't say a lot about war.
Jesus is more anti-empire than I would state is anti-war.
He was the occupied rather than the occupier.
Exactly.
And the experience of the communities in the four Gospels who then wrote about their encounter with Jesus, in effect Jesus becomes a different way to deal with the empire, because they are also writing about this in the shadow of the failed revolt of the late 60s against Roman rule by the Jews of Palestine.
And so they're looking at a different way of dealing with the empire, a way that doesn't demand or insist upon violence.
Well, at the same time though, I guess is there a dearth of quotes then to back up the modern sentiment that, well, if it's the Muslims against us Christians, well then it's a matter of identity and us versus them, rather than a time when we're supposed to go look to the book of Matthew or whatever about what we're supposed to do in this situation.
Or what we're supposed to do is fight back or else we won't be us anymore, that kind of thing.
I'm not entirely sure exactly what the question is here.
Well, I'm just saying, I'm not sure there really is a question.
I guess I'm just commenting.
Well, the question I guess was, is there anything in the New Testament that would justify that kind of thing?
You know, like right-wing conservatives say, you know, let's go kick some butt, it's us versus them.
And the Christianity becomes not so much a way of looking at the world and, you know, that kind of thing from the actual text of the Bible, what you're supposed to do in these situations, but it simply becomes an identification factor of, you know, we're Christendom, we're the West, we believe like this, and the people who are our enemies are different than us and believe different than us.
There is nothing I can get from the Old Testament, and I don't think there's anything much anybody can get from the Old Testament that supports that.
It's simply for no other reason than the Church was in an empire that kept the peace to the extent that the Roman Empire kept any peace.
We're talking New Testament now, right?
Yes, we're talking New Testament.
And the Roman Empire maintained order and there was no challenging that order.
So the idea of we are Christians, we have to defend ourselves is an alien idea to the New Testament.
Well, and when all the talk about love your enemy, is that supposed to mean other nation-states too, and that makes that injunction null and void?
Is that just for dealing with individuals?
Ethicists and theologians have struggled with this.
I would take that as, in effect, that is what we are commanded to do, but there is also a reality of human sinfulness, which is people collect themselves into nation-states and they think in tribal ways, and they end up thinking it's us versus them.
So, you know, at the core there is forgiveness for even the worst of sinners, but there is also a call to be something other than a tribal person.
Well, now, what about Islam?
A lot of people say that it says right there in verse this, that, and the other thing that all Muslims are supposed to kill all the infidels until they rule the whole world.
The history of Islam is a great deal more like the history of early Judaism, which is that there was no empire keeping the peace where Islam grew up, any more than there was an empire keeping the peace where Judaism, where the Israelites settled, and so they had to fight for their survival, which meant that there ended up being a different understanding of how one survived in Scripture.
That said, Muslims have always generally understood those commandments as ones that applied to particular times and particular places.
In the Hebrew Bible, for example, then when you have early Israel, you have a lengthy history that goes from God giving the land to Abraham to the final destruction of the state, the original Israelite state, and its conquest by Persia that then allows for the temple to be rebuilt.
The final words, fascinating, the final words of the Tadach, the way the Hebrew Scriptures are arranged, the final words are words from Cyrus, the king of Persia, commanding that the temple in Jerusalem be rebuilt.
Not an Israelite king, but the emperor of Persia commanding this.
So there was eventually Israel within an empire that was fairly tolerant.
They didn't have political sovereignty, but they had religious sovereignty.
So that would end up changing, for example, how Jews ended up dealing with empire.
Muslims quickly conquered and had to deal with not as ruled people, but as rulers.
So in essence it has, I guess because of the circumstance of its origin, as being in the position of power, not resistance, it is sort of from its baseline a more violent way of looking at the world than...
In some ways Islam assumes that Islam will rule the world, although the history of Islam is broad enough and varied enough, for example, when Islam spread throughout North Africa and the Middle East, it spread through conquest.
It spread because Muslims conquered non-Muslim polities and took them over.
But when Islam spread to Central Asia, when Islam spread to South Asia, and by South Asia I mean Malaysia, Indonesia, it spread largely through missionary efforts.
So the history is varied, there's enough experience.
Among the Islamists there is a sense that, yes, Muslims have an obligation to rule, and that's a triumphalist reading of their history, which is somewhat in line with scripture, much like a triumphalist reading is for some Jews who look at the early part of God commanding Israel to conquer the land.
But not all of the history is triumphalist.
The history is more interesting than that, and it is dealing with the entirety of history.
And part of the problem with fundamentalism, as I understand it, is that fundamentalism essentially doesn't like history, because history ends up making the religion more complicated and more complex.
So it's better to just go with what the words on the page say without the context.
And what you think they say, and primarily an appeal to an aboriginal community.
For example, an ideology becomes a part of this too.
There is, for example, a belief among many right-wing Jews and a number of Christians who support the State of Israel that there is a biblical command, a set of injunctions, that the Israelites cannot surrender any of the land that God has given to them.
Rabbi V. Yehuda Kook, right after the Six-Day War, he was the founder of Gush Emunim, the settlers' movement, published what he believed were roughly 50 verses or thereabouts that basically, when interpreted properly, said that you can't give up the land.
And he was referring to everything Israel had conquered in 67.
The West Bank, the Golan, the Sinai, in addition to the land of Israel prior to the war.
But in order to accept that there is a biblical injunction, you have to ignore the entirety of the history that follows, which is, in effect, Israel gives up the land through conquest.
God gives this land, but it is entirely conditional.
Conditional on Israel obeying the law, and under the prophets, it's completely conditional under being just and merciful.
Well, see, this is where it gets really messy, is when you get into prophecy and whether Israel was created by European refugees because, well, they needed a place to go and anybody in their way, get the hell out of the way kind of thing, or whether this is all the Book of Revelations coming true and all this kind of thing.
Because this is how you get millions and millions of American Protestant Christians to take basically what you just cited as the settler's view of the West Bank.
You know, John Hagee, I've heard John Hagee on the radio in Texas talking about, you know, America, the nation of America, will be damned if we don't put Israel first in our foreign policy forever and make sure that they don't ever give up one inch.
Yeah, and that is a popular, again, as I said, that is a very, very popular view.
It is one that has the basis in bits and pieces of scripture, but it fails to take into account the entirety of the story.
And sometimes it's kind of hard to take into account the entirety of the story when you have a very fine little piece, you know, Genesis chapter 12, which says, I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse those who curse you.
And God is talking to Abraham.
Yeah, that's the one they cite all the time.
Yep.
That, again, is one of those bits in which, in order to understand what that might mean, you have to look at the whole story.
I am in the camp who says that, effectively, that the regathering of Israel was done with Jesus, and it is the Church.
The Church is Israel, and Israel is the Church.
There's not a new Israel and an old Israel.
It is one and the same thing.
God's chosen or called out people.
I am in that camp.
And so thus, the state of Israel as we see it today is not the fulfillment of any prophecy.
Hmm.
All right, yeah, well, I think you just lost me.
The different churches, or what now?
The Church, the Church that Jesus called.
When Jesus came and he called a group of people together to follow him.
The Church, the Assembly.
That that is the regathering of Israel that was foretold what happened by the prophets.
That the prophets were promised.
Oh, I see.
That as Babylon is busy conquering Israel, you get a number of visions, many of which promise that even in these horrific times, God has made a promise to Israel and God will regather Israel.
So then I guess 50 years after that is when the European Union and the United Nations and the Antichrist should have taken over the world, right?
Yeah, well...
Like in my Walmart theology that I got?
It's interesting.
I have, the one time I had a collection of this stuff dating from the late 60s because after the 67 war, all kinds of people go nuts.
And it's interesting how many Antichrists there have been, how many forecast that this is the time.
It's happening.
The end is near.
Good Lord.
The rapture is coming.
There have been raptures in the 72s.
Forecasters, 72, 73, 78, 82.
Antichrists have been the likes of Brezhnev and Saddam Hussein and Pope John Paul II.
Ronald Wilson Reagan, 666.
Exactly.
So being in that particular forecasting business, and it's fascinating the likes of how Lindsay is an example, and he's still around.
He can be wrong, and he's been wrong for a good 40 years now, and that still doesn't seem to hurt his ability to peddle his wares.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing, though, is we're dealing with subject matter that is not really a matter of scholarship.
It's a matter of, I feel like, believe in that or not.
I'm just as likely to get, in fact, when I talk politics with people, I'm just as likely to get a tangent off into either the Bible, the Mayan calendar, or Nostradamus, or people would rather have belief in what the future is going to be rather than try to actually analyze what's going on in the world and maybe try to make it go this way or that.
Yeah, exactly.
It's all part of God's plan.
The Mayan calendar's plan or whichever, you know, Nostradamus' plan.
Well, so tell me this.
I know you used to be a Muslim.
Now you're a Christian.
Obviously you're very well versed in the three major monotheistic religions here.
Does this one God that the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims agree on, does he want everybody to love each other or not?
I would say yes.
It's not just the objective reality of God, but the subjective reality of God as well.
In addition to being called to love one's neighbor as oneself or want for your brother what your brother wants for himself, there is also the matter of, but you are also a community set aside, called to be apart from the world.
So there is just going to be that tension.
And oftentimes it's going to be hard to get along because there are some very, very different subjective understandings of God and who God is and what it means to be God's people in each of these faiths.
So it'll just be like this for the rest of mankind as long as that lasts, huh?
Probably.
And this isn't to say that we can't get along, we can't work on things that we share or common interests that we have.
But in the case, for example, of Israel and Palestine, you have claims that cannot be negotiated.
Meaning that, for example, if you have a group of people who are Jews who say this is our land, God gave it to us, we have a right to it that goes back far beyond any right that people who are currently living in it have, and we are entitled to take it and entitled to keep it regardless of what the cost is, then there's not really going to be any negotiating that.
Any more than, for example, a group of Muslims who might say that under our understanding of our law and our scripture, we cannot give this land up because once a land falls under the rule of Dar al-Islam, it cannot be given up.
And there's going to be no negotiating that.
There will be people who will be willing to negotiate and more often than not, it's more difficult to try to kill people than it is to live uneasily with them.
So this struggle is going to go on for a while, unfortunately.
And there will be people who will justify it any number of ways, religiously, philosophically, politically, emotionally, and it will continue, unfortunately.
Well, you brought up the whole thing about us moderns versus them brown backwards funny hat wearing savages and that kind of thing.
Well, I think it's interesting that as you note, here are these rabbis going way, way, way back to try to find these quotes to justify war crimes in Gaza.
At the same time, the whole thing about Muslims not being hit to digital technology or whatever is a giant myth, right?
I mean, there's nothing about Islam that says that it's forbidden, not that any large number of people follow that say you have to be a Luddite and not participate in humanity on earth.
Absolutely.
And within the Muslim Middle East, there's a fairly high penetration of computers, lots of engineers, software designers, and a high cell phone penetration as well.
Lots of people using all of those things.
I have a little piece for my Mac, a little piece of Quran software that was put together by I think a group of Sufis who probably do programming in addition to everything else as a religious devotion, which I think is a neat way to do programming.
What I'm getting at is that Jerusalem notwithstanding, there's no need for white Christian Westerners to feel like they're in some pitched battle against the forces of rising Islam, whatever, like in the right-wing kukri on the radio.
No, and there never has been, and it's actually kind of funny.
I have done a fair amount of study, particularly the Reformation.
I am Lutheran, and it was a much more existential issue back when Martin Luther was doing his thing, antagonizing the church, because the Turkish army was only a couple hundred miles away, not all that far away in Vienna, besieging Vienna.
And that was, you would think, a much more existential threat.
Here is this powerful Muslim state advancing and attacking into Europe, and it was not an existential dilemma.
If anything, the Ottoman advance into Europe made the success of the Reformation possible.
So if Luther didn't worry about it, and it was a much bigger deal, and in fact there were German Christians at the time who said that for Jesus to come back, the Muslims do have to conquer us.
There were some who even welcomed it.
Yeah, it's on the Mayan calendar.
You can basically just plug in whatever you want.
You just make whatever fit that you want, right?
Exactly, exactly.
You know, the end could come tomorrow.
The rapture could happen.
I think it's bad theology, but the rapture could happen, and Jesus could come back tomorrow.
I just think it's very unlikely.
All right, well, so through all of this and all of your understanding of all these religions, obviously you're an anti-empire kind of guy.
I am.
Are you completely a pacifist?
By pacifist, I am not a supporter of any state war.
But I also understand that war happens.
And I am not one of those people who says that a soldier who goes off to fight war puts his salvation at risk.
Just because it's not convenient to think so, or because you really don't believe it, or what?
Well, because I don't believe that.
First off, I don't believe that there is any human action or human activity that is so sinful that puts us out of the reach of God's grace.
Okay, well, so that's a pretty big catch-all, then.
God's forgiveness is for everybody.
But that said, when it comes down to acting, I don't believe that we as followers of Jesus, and I'm now speaking about myself, are called on to engage in violence because Jesus didn't give us that power.
I believe that quite firmly.
When faced with the empire, Jesus surrendered to the empire.
And in doing so, showed the powerlessness of the empire's ability to take life.
That that, in the end, has no meaning.
And that was really the interpretation of the early Christians for how long?
For probably a couple of centuries.
Until they got power.
Yep, until they got power.
And then it became convenient.
But that said, there were early Christians who wanted that bite.
In effect, who were saying, why are you persecuting us?
We are the empire's best citizens.
Just give us an opportunity.
There were some early Christian thinkers who were thinking along those lines.
So, that said, you know, where were we?
Well, I was basically just going to get back to, well, because I guess I was kind of wrong earlier when I was trying to emphasize that this is all very human and political and not really religious wars.
When, in essence, when we're talking about, you know, in the Israel-Palestine situation, God gave this land to us, no, God gave this land to us, then, you know, that really is the whole, you can't resolve that in a civil court.
You're not talking about any regular land deed.
You're talking about a magical land deed.
And people can only fight about that forever, really.
That is where we are, huh?
Until someone runs out, and I am one of those people who believes that, given the current course, the state of Israel is probably doomed.
There will come a point in time where it will cease to exist.
Just as a matter of demographics?
Just as a matter of demographics, and that Israelis are going to be forced to make one of a couple of choices.
They will be forced to make choices.
But they're going to look at genocide as an option.
I don't think they're going to choose it, but some are going to want to.
They're going to look at expulsion as an option.
And I don't think they're going to choose that either, but they're going to want to as well.
And in the end, they will decide not to do the only things that will preserve the Jewish nature of the Israeli state.
And half-majors aren't going to do it.
Eventually, a Palestinian Arab will be prime minister of the state of Israel.
It seems like there's the other option, which is to just give up the West Bank and Gaza.
Personally, my own opinion is that everybody's an individual.
It doesn't matter what religion you have.
And if you're so unfortunate to live within a state, which pretty much everybody on earth is, then it ought to treat everyone like individuals, regardless of any of those things.
But if the Jews in Israel do want, if that is their priority, it seems like if they were to just give up the West Bank and Gaza, then they could keep their majority Jewish state and not have to be an apartheid state, not have to ethnically cleanse, which I hate that euphemism.
Pardon me for deploying it.
Except that there is a tension within Israeli politics, and that is that enough Israelis, enough Jews in Israel want to maintain control over the land, but have no responsibility for the people who live in it.
And that because they want to keep the land, but want to cut the people loose, but there's no way to do one without doing the other.
If you keep the land, you have to keep the people, and if you cut the people loose, you have to get rid of the land.
But they want the land without the people in it.
And because they want that and want somehow to square it, then you can't just simply sign off on it.
And unfortunately, the only politicians who are willing to talk about this are the ones who have no stake in anything anymore.
I just thought it was beautiful that Ehud Olmert did that wonderful interview in which he said we have to get off the West Bank and Gaza, but it's also a beat your head against something moment, because you could have said this two years ago.
Yeah, it was one of those beware of the military-industrial complex.
All right, I'm out.
Y'all have a good one.
I'm taking my pension check and going back to wherever it is I'm going, and now I can afford to be candid because I never have to contest an election again.
And that's wonderful, but it also tells us something about the nature of politics in contesting elections, which is if you've got to win an election, you cannot say things that are going to honk off people who are significant enough that they could get you unelected.
Yep, well, and so here we are with the Likudniks just coming into power and with the guy from the right-wing secular fascist party as foreign minister.
It's going to be very, very interesting to watch how Washington deals with this next Israeli government, because I suspect that there is no great love between the folks in the Obama regime and Bibi Netanyahu and his people.
And it's going to be very, very interesting to watch how Abigdor Lieberman works in America, because there are going to be a lot of American Jews.
Understand, American Jews are generally progressive, generally left-leaning and liberal in their outlook, and Abigdor Lieberman is not going to be one of their favorite people.
Yeah, well, in fact, did you see the J Street poll that came out last week?
No, I did not.
Well, they had a new J Street poll that had sizable majorities and even super majorities of American Jews saying that they were in favor of dealing with a unity government between Hamas and Fatah.
They were willing to recognize the legitimacy of Hamas as the elected government, at least in cooperation with Fatah.
Therefore, giving up the West Bank and Gaza in a final peace deal and all these things.
They take the peacenik approach and at least majorities, in some cases super majorities, on virtually every question.
And I would suspect that even a majority of Israelis are probably there, although less so given the immediacy and the experience.
But that doesn't matter, because there are enough people who don't want to do either.
And they can gum up the work.
They can make it not work.
That is one of the pitfalls of democratic governance.
Let me ask you about, and I'm sorry I'm jumping all over the place here, but it just occurred to me that I want to know more about Saudi Arabia.
If America did not have a war guarantee to protect that Saudi kingdom regime, would they be the government or would the people of Saudi Arabia overthrow them or replace them with some kind of religious rule?
What would be the so-called natural state of governance in a place like that without American intervention?
The natural state of governance would be the Assad family.
They are about as legitimate as it comes in that part of the world.
And most of the Gulf state governments are reasonably legitimate.
The idea that there is somehow some great revolutionary firmament in Saudi Arabia of people willing and want just anything to overthrow their government is, I understand where it comes from, but it's wrong.
They're actually an awful lot like Americans, not particularly revolutionary.
And while there are many Saudis who are not happy with their government, they also understand that the alternatives are probably much, much worse.
And the government has a kind of legitimacy because it knows how to govern.
One of the problems about being an American is that you only tend to see legitimacy in the form of formal democratic institutions, meaning are there elections, is there civil society, quote-unquote.
It works a little different in Saudi Arabia.
The institutions are different.
The government is accountable in a different kind of way, which is not to say that it can't or isn't autocratic and in some fundamental ways is not accountable, but I would argue that in fundamental ways the United States government is not accountable to Americans either.
But that if you are an ordinary Saudi, there are ways you can get your government to listen to you or people within the government to listen to you.
So no, I don't think it's in any particular danger.
One of the interesting things that has happened since 2001 is that in effect Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, reasonably well-armed and reasonably well-organized, was doing what it had at the Saudi state.
And the Saudi state was able to defeat it, which is not to say that Al-Qaeda still can't organize in Saudi Arabia, but they can't get any traction.
Once they started having gunfights in cities and blowing things up, many ordinary Saudis said, let's see, the devil we know versus the devil we don't know.
We're going to take the devil we know.
When you talk about the Western view of the legitimacy of states like that in terms of democratic institutions, it seems like another important way, or really the most important way that Americans view legitimacy over there is how moderate, so-called, the leaders are in their international relations, particularly with us in Israel.
Like Hosni Mubarak can be all the dictator he wants to be in Egypt and can start to throw an election and then cancel it and arrest everybody and do whatever he wants, but as long as he continues to accept our money to pretend to not hate Israel, then he's a moderate leader.
And the Saudis are moderate leaders.
And yet if the Saudis are cutting your head off, they're not that moderate.
Well, moderate again is the particular, as you said, it's the difference between, say, for example, Saudi Arabia and Egypt versus Syria or Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
It's how pro-American you are, as you noted.
I would not call the government particularly moderate.
On the other hand, I wouldn't call Saudi Arabia a police state.
There aren't enough cops in Saudi Arabia for Saudi Arabia to be a police state.
Well, that's encouraging to hear.
It's pretty authoritarian, but it's not panopticon.
I am the kind of libertarian who is interested in seeing where freedom is rather than where it isn't.
And there were a lot of nice little edges where people could be free in Saudi Arabia.
And that was an important thing.
That, I think, is an important thing as well.
Is it libertarian paradise?
By no stretch of the imagination.
But so long as you are willing to accept that society works in certain ways, it's a Muslim society, you're not going to be able to talk about any religion other than Islam in public.
And as long as you are discreet about some things, then there is a fair amount of freedom.
So basically America's empire, well, I guess if we didn't have the security guarantee and we didn't back up their country, they would still face foreign threats, I guess, from Iran supposedly or something.
But basically this government, the Saud government, that family kingdom that we've been dealing with, our country's been dealing with all this time really, I guess since World War II days, or maybe even before, basically they would continue in power.
We could deal with Saudi Arabia just as easy ten years into the libertarian future from now without our government intervening over there.
Without our government intervening over there.
And it would still be all right.
Most likely.
Most likely.
Again, the fact that Saudi Arabia sits on so much oil, particularly in the eastern part of the country, would be tempting to some other powers.
And I frankly think that the primary reason we back the government up is because they sit on all that oil, and because when push comes to shove, they would be incapable of defending themselves against foreign threat.
They can handle internal threats just fine.
Right.
Well, and then I guess there's the question of even what foreign threat.
Because the Iranians, I don't know, they don't even really have enough army to be an offensive army to invade and occupy other countries, do they?
Well, the foreign threat that mattered was the Soviet Union, and there hasn't been a Soviet Union in the world for almost 20 years.
Right.
Yeah, well don't tell anybody in D.C., all right?
You're going to ruin their whole day.
All right.
Everybody, that's Charles Featherstone.
He's a Lutheran minister.
He writes at lewrockwell.com.
Not a minister, just a seminarian.
Oh, not a minister, a seminarian.
And the blog is thefeatherblog.blogspot.com.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Thanks, Scott.