Bernard Lewis

And then they threatened everybody.

And then they had an election, as Bernard Lewis, the great Islamic scholar at Princeton said, they had an election one time.

One election, one time.

And we're supposed to believe that these people are sympathetic? It's absolutely absurd.

But there was another document that came out a couple months before the speech, and that was the 2002 Arab Human Development Report, published by the United Nations.

And so this, again, this is about nine months after the 9/11 attacks, when everyone was wondering where did the attacks come from? Where did Bin Laden come from? Bernard Lewis published his great book, What Went Wrong, about the Middle East.

And this UN report, the Arab Human Development Report, looked at the region of, in the Middle East and said-- and admitted that this region was a mess.

It was, uh, undeveloped, it was uneducated, it ha- was, uh, bereft of democracies, with one exception [chuckles] that the, the...

The Muslim world is particularly prone to, to conspiratorial thinking because it's a f- it's a source of flattery to itself to explain why they have created so few successful societies.

Um, and, and Bernard Lewis made this point many years ago that the problem in the Muslim world is that there's a, they ha- is that they have to find ex- explanations because if you're given the revelations of Muhammad, and you're told it's the last revelation ever from God, and that you are the people who have received this revelation, and everything's going to go great for you because you've got the revelation, and then, like the Jews sh- you have one country and it does much better than any of your countries, and, you know, you can't get the economy of most of your countries going at all, and you can't provide for most of your citizenry, and nobody's coming up the ladder, and the economy's in the dust, and all this, you've got to find an explanation for it because, like, what? We were given the revelation, and they're doing much better.

So I mean, there's massive things like that that sit underneath the movements of our time, which m- m- maybe billions of people on the planet believe, and they believe them because it flatters themselves.

It flatters the governments who aspire to run these countries or claim to run these countries.

And that's how you start to look at the entire world.

Other than the fanaticism that we see in the Middle East and the Bernard Lewis was very controversial, but he pointed out that there were Western contacts with the Ottomans and there was an Ottoman science with indigenous roots.

But when they wanted to make, let's say, a lighthouse at Constantinople based on Western designs or even improve on it.

There were sure enough clerics and mullahs that said, "You're rivaling the primacy of Allah.

Calling Islam a religion of peace as George W. Bush did is kind of strange.

Historian Bernard Lewis spent a career explaining Islam's spread.

The spark notes are these, Muhammad ruled in Medina, which is located on the Arabian Peninsula in modern-day Saudi Arabia.

Muhammad's caliphate expanded out of the Arabian Peninsula through conquest into the Levant, that'd be modern-day Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, Persia, which is now Iran, Egypt, North Africa, all the way to Iberia, which is modern-day Spain and Portugal, all within a century.

Both treat America and the West and Judeo-Christianity as enemies.

Bernard Lewis, in his book, The Roots of Muslim Rage, say that this is no less than a clash of civilizations.

the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.

Samuel Huntington, in the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, wrote, The underlying problem for the West is...