Leading The Way

Announcer: Just ahead, pastor and author Dr. Michael Youssef with a very unique episode of Leading The Way Audio. Western civilization is under attack. Discover the shocking alliance behind it all. Join Erick Erickson and Dr. Michael Youssef as they expose the truth behind this unholy alliance on Leading The Way.

Erick Erickson: Welcome, I'm Erick Erickson. I'm joined today by pastor, author, and cultural anthropologist Dr. Michael Youssef for a very important and timely conversation. Across America and the West, something troubling is happening. Two ideological forces that once seemed incompatible are now working together to undermine something you and I cherish deeply: the biblical values that led our society to flourish.

This movement, this unholy alliance, is playing out in nearly every news headline, and it should concern every freedom-loving Christian. Dr. Michael Youssef is uniquely qualified to speak into this. He's lived in Islamic and Western countries and has spent decades studying the forces shaping our culture. Dr. Youssef, thank you so much for joining me.

Dr. Michael Youssef: I am so honored to be with you. Thank you, Erick. We have known each other for many years, and it is a great honor for me to be here. It is the most amazing thing to me and only an indication of the fact that we are facing one enemy behind all of these. That is not flesh and blood; that is Satan himself.

As Paul said in Ephesians 6, our struggle is not with flesh and blood, but it is with the principalities and the power and authority in the heavenly places. If that is not a convicting argument that we are in a spiritual warfare, I do not know what. When you see people and when you think what Iran and the Hamas did with homosexual people—they take them up to the high buildings and throw them out. One of the Hamas army was tortured simply for the suspicion that he may be homosexual.

Yet, all this LGBTQ community is going out saying, "Free Palestine, Free Palestine." You say, free from what? I do not know. They just joined in.

Erick Erickson: It reminds me of that passage in Scripture where Jesus says the things of the world hate the things of God. You have a secular ideology and Islam, both of the world, mutually incompatible and yet perfectly aligned in these times.

Dr. Michael Youssef: They are, and it is for a mutual cause. That cause is the destruction of Western civilization which is built—whether people believe that or not—really based on the Reformation. I have done a lot of study on that when I was at Emory University. The Reformation gave us what Western civilization is: all the conveniences, all the things that we take for granted.

But they came as a result of the Reformation and the respect of the human being and the importance of the individual to God, and that God came and died for even for one sinner. All of that is anathema to both groups: the Marxists and the Islamists. By the way, we are talking about Islamists and not Muslims, because I have many Muslim friends to this day. I have been with heads of states who are Muslims, and they are probably as opposed to Islamists as anybody else. In fact, they outlaw them in their countries.

I remember one time I was visiting with a very highly placed political leader in a Middle East country in 2017. He leaned over and said to me, "Dr. Youssef, would you please explain to me? I cannot understand. We outlaw Muslim Brotherhood from our countries, and yet they go to England, they get a satellite channel, and they get all kinds of publicity." I said, "I am sorry, I just have no answer other than pure stupidity, foolishness, and blindness."

I saw a cartoon one time where a person is sitting on a branch of a tree, but he is sawing it. Western civilization is literally committing suicide by not taking this thing seriously. I think for us as Christian believers, we must be boldly preaching the Gospel. I told key pastors in Dallas with all the impact in Dallas, I said you guys need to train your people to go out there into the trenches and preach the Gospel to them instead of sitting there and absorbing their invasion.

Erick Erickson: I am reminded in 1979, you had the Marxist socialists in Iran working with the Ayatollah to destabilize the regime. Within six months of the Ayatollah coming to power, most of the Marxists and socialists had either been killed or fled.

Dr. Michael Youssef: Exactly. That is the convenience of this unholy alliance. They try to use each other. They are wary of each other, they hate each other, but they kind of say, "Okay, I will tolerate you in order to accomplish what I really want to accomplish." That happened even before the Ayatollah.

I watched Abolhassan Banisadr and all these guys—prime minister and foreign minister, very articulate leftists. Khomeini basically used them. Then fast forward after that in 2011 with the so-called Arab Spring. There were two million people in Tahrir Square in Cairo, and of course, it's a place I know it well. I was there every day when I was young.

I knew that the Muslim Brotherhood is behind that. The Islamists are behind that. But then all the leftist students were the ones who were creating the trouble and starting this so-called revolution. Until I read one of the documents of the magazines of the Muslim Brotherhood. They referred to them as the "donkeys of the revolution" in the sense that "once we succeed, we will get rid of them."

Erick Erickson: Let's spend a little bit of time on the Muslim Brotherhood. I think people hear it, and "Brotherhood" sounds so innocuous. Yet, it's actually a deeply nefarious group that most Middle Eastern countries have stopped. In fact, you mentioned them going to the UK from overseas. I have read now in the UAE they are actively discouraging students from going to the UK for education because of the radicalization that the Muslim Brotherhood does there and here.

Dr. Michael Youssef: Exactly, and they come under different names. They are called CAIR here in the U.S. and they have different names in different countries, but they're the same group, same ideology. It started by a primary school teacher, a librarian by the name Hassan al-Banna in Egypt in the 1920s. He started this because he saw when the Caliphate, the Turkish Ottoman Caliphate, collapsed after World War I.

He was very disturbed about this and the fact that the West carved the Arab world—the Sykes-Picot Agreement—where France took Lebanon and Syria and North Africa and even gave Italy Libya. Then the British took over Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, and so forth. He basically started as a revolutionary and wanted to bring back the seventh-century culture of Islam and the Caliphate.

Here is another story because you will be very fascinated by this. I lived it, of course. I remember Ronald Reagan said people read history in books; I lived history. I am old enough that I have lived history. The Muslim Brotherhood worked together with the Free Officers, the revolution of Egypt under Mr. Nasser. There was a group of army officers who conducted a coup against King Farouk and they kicked him out and the British out.

But they worked closely together. In this case, back in '52, '53, '54, while they were working together, these were more socialists. Most of them were, and I knew some of them even as a young man. But then when the revolution succeeded and Nasser became president, he got rid of all the Muslim Brotherhood. He either put them in prison or killed them.

So one way or another, they will turn on each other. That is why we need to be wise as serpents. They cannot survive, but we should be leery of the fact that they are using each other to create what Karl Marx and Engels said. Basically, you create that division, then the society collapses, and then you build your communist utopia. It is the same thing in Islam. You create a division to create an Islamic society. They have that in common.

Erick Erickson: One of the aspects that I think a lot of people don't understand is when you think of people of faith, you tend to think of honest, truthful people. Yet, in Islam, you are given permission to lie to subvert other cultures, to embed within those cultures.

Dr. Michael Youssef: Yes. This Taqiyya, as known in the jurisprudence, Taqiyya really started at the time when there was a Shia-Sunni war over the succession of the prophet. So the Shiites came up with that, that it's okay to lie to your enemy until you succeed. But then it got adopted by all branches of Islam—Sunni, Shia.

It is okay to not only lie but deceive your enemy because that is a virtue. You are on the Sabil Allah, you are fighting in the way of God and therefore you have God's blessing no matter what you do.

Announcer: You're listening to Leading The Way with Dr. Michael Youssef, author of the provocative book, An Unholy Alliance. Learn more at LTW.org.

Erick Erickson: Now that is a perfect segue into what's happening directly in this country. You have around the country enclaves being started that are predominantly Muslim. I think most Americans believe in pluralism and would say it's okay, they can have their community, I can have mine. But what you actually find in a lot of these communities, particularly this development building in Texas, is that this is something that intends to be subversive.

Dr. Michael Youssef: Absolutely, because that is the very core of who they are, the Islamists particularly. Now there are Muslims in America who are integrated in society; they don't want to have anything to do with them. This is where we need a lot of wisdom. Our politicians, unfortunately, very few of them have wisdom to understand the difference.

20 years ago, I spoke to a small group of parliamentarians in England. I shared with them what the strategy was. Their strategy, from their material. I didn't make it up because I'm not that clever; they were. They said what we're doing in England is that we're building a spine up and down the aisle of Islamic community. It's called "no-go zones" where policemen cannot go there and they have their own Sharia courts and they do everything according to the Sharia.

They said once that spine's strong enough, we're going to be building ribs, and eventually we'll choke the country and turn it into a Sharia-compliant nation. Literally, they smirked and said, "Oh Michael, you know, we British, that does not ever happen here." It is exactly what happened 20 years later. They had no-go zones where policemen cannot go there. Then they expanded. Now there are 85 Sharia courts in England. There are 5,000 mosques.

It is just exploding because that is what you do: you give an inch, they will take a mile. It is the very core of who they are, that they have to do that for God. Who does not want to do something for God and honor God, their God, Allah? Therefore, they said, "We succeeded in England, now we try it in Canada and the United States."

Erick Erickson: So now we have this divide between Islam, the advance of the Muslim Brotherhood, and this working with progressive secular atheists who want nothing to do with religion in this unholy alliance. Progressives see this as advancing hostility towards traditional faith values, biblical values, and the Muslim Brotherhood—the Medina Muslims, if you would—are riding on it to invade the country. The progressives don't even see it coming, it seems like.

Dr. Michael Youssef: No, and they choose those passages where it says fight against even the People of the Book. Because in the first, it says listen to them, get their advice. Later on, it says fight against them, Jews and Christians, because they are friends of one another. So they use those passages. They take them out and they say, "This is our day, this is our time. We are going to rule the world."

The only way we're going to rule the world is that we're going to create this chaos in order to have an opportunity. From the Shiite point of view, it's an opportunity for the Mahdi to show up. Because the 12th Imam supposedly disappeared in infancy and he's hiding somewhere. He's going to come back when the world is in chaos. That's why the Iranians want to create a chaos so that they force the Mahdi to come in.

From the Sunni point of view, this is the way to give a rise to a new Caliphate, the successor to the prophet. Progressives in this country not only do they not really get religion—they have their own religion, I would argue secularism is a religion—they can ride on the coattails of what the Muslim Brotherhood is doing.

Now they are helping in places around the country where Christianity is treated as hostile. Islam is openly embraced by progressives in San Francisco, Michigan, and now certain parts of progressive territory in Texas where progressives are welcoming this in.

In Canada, there are some churches that are inviting, once a month, they invite the local imam to preach the sermon. With this whole Chrislam thing, it started in Nigeria, but is now in so many of the mainline denominations—the apostates who have turned their back on the truth of the Gospel and become universalists. In showing how kind they are, they invite imams. Well, why don't you have the imam invite the preacher to come and give a sermon in the mosque? Oh no.

The very reason why they want to not just build any building for a mosque, particularly in England and here, the greatest victory is when they take a church and they'll buy it. They just bought three in the northeast of the United States. They bought big churches and converted them into mosques. That is the height of victory, that ours is the true religion. So if you give them a piece of land to build, yeah, it's okay. But not as victorious in their mind as to be able to buy a church, take the cross down, put the crescent, and make it a mosque.

Erick Erickson: You mentioned the Muslim masters historically. You mentioned Nasser earlier. The Muslim Brotherhood was chased out of almost every Middle Eastern country for their Islamism and radicalism. A lot of them wound up in Qatar which to this day now is spreading a lot of money among both conservative and progressive political groups in the United States and secular voices sending people to Qatar. It's deeply infiltrated Washington D.C. on both sides and it's the closest country in the Middle East to Iran too. It seems to be a very dangerous play.

Dr. Michael Youssef: It is. We have a military base there and we just signed a joint defense agreement. This is why I want to pull my hair sometimes. I say, do these people know what's going on? Al Jazeera was founded by the Qatari royal family in order to promote Islamism, Islamization. When the Muslim Brotherhood got kicked out of Egypt, particularly among them was a man named Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

He is one of their spiritual leaders. He is the man who really devised this "Third Jihad" concept. I have read a lot of his material. He says the first jihad was in the 600s, 700s. We came all the way to France then we got stopped. Then in the 1400s, the Turks came all the way to Vienna, occupied it for a while, then it failed. The Third Jihad is not going to be by the sword like the first two, but it's going to be by birth rate and investment of petro-dollars.

Well, that appealed to members of the royal family in Qatar. So they brought Qaradawi and all of the Muslim Brotherhood who were kicked out of Egypt to Qatar. They started Al Jazeera run by Muslim Brotherhood people, and it's constantly, day after day after day, attacking the non-Islamists, the Muslims who are not Islamists.

That is why Qatar has tension with the Saudis, has tension with the Emiratis, has tension with Egypt, has tension with all the others because the statistics say that they have spent $6.6 billion on educational institutions in the United States. That is not because of our blue eyes.

Erick Erickson: For a time, there was moral outrage in the United States over the Confucius Institutes funded by the Chinese Communist Party and there's been a real recognition that we needed to get rid of those in the U.S. There doesn't seem to be the recognition that Qatar is doing what the Chinese Communist Party had done.

Dr. Michael Youssef: No, because there's a whole lot more money. Vast amounts of money. When you talk about billions of dollars. The moment one outspoken person from a university in the United States be on the media and attacking and so forth, the next thing that university or that college will get $200 million as a grant to start a Middle East study, Middle Eastern study, which is Islamization.

All of a sudden, that professor is just silenced. I have documented many of those. So yeah, Qatar. In one stage, I remember the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia was being interviewed in a press conference and he was asked about Qatar. He said, "It is not that we disagree with them, we just want nothing to do with them." That was circulating in the media. I have clips of it.

But sometimes these things change. Now I fear that Qatar is spreading a lot more money. They bought Harrods of London. They bought Barclays Bank. They own so much that whatever Qatar says to the British government, they have to listen to it very, very carefully. They gave the King suitcases worth of 500 euros—$3 million just came in to his charity.

While it's not illegal, they don't do this just because they love the British. They do it because that's their agenda and they're driven by that group of people in Qatar, Muslim Brotherhood. Probably very few of them are even Qataris: they're Egyptians, they're Syrians, they're Palestinians, and Hamas headquarters and even the Taliban. They have a major presence in Qatar and they have an office there. They are constantly saying one thing about Afghanistan and the truth and the reality is the exact opposite. But it's just all public relations stuff.

Erick Erickson: As Americans, we always love to say follow the money. You follow the money with the Qataris as well, showing how they're spreading it.

Dr. Michael Youssef: Yes, and it's not just given to progressive leftists. It's given to conservatives whom they deceive that they are just religious people and all they want is a friendship with America. What kind of a price are we going to pay for that friendship? What kind of a price are we paying for $6.6 billion that they're spreading around in universities around the country?

That is extremely important. We live in a most critical time. I believe it's the most exciting time because as we trust in the Lord, we're going to see some amazing things that He will do.

Erick Erickson: We live in a self-help society in the West. We can go buy a book and read, we can get our therapist on the internet. I don't know that even a lot of Christians who are not regular churchgoers but they do identify with Christ, that they don't understand the real power of prayer in solving these problems.

Dr. Michael Youssef: In reality, what I believe that we're coming into this age where there's a demarcation. God is making the separation. I think the nominal Christians, the Christians in name only, they're not going to survive. But the core, the elect, the faithful people—those are the ones that I am really very burdened about and with, to get serious about their faith and to take the Gospel seriously and take the preaching of the Gospel seriously.

The sad part about, at least in my experience, I used to be part of a mainline denomination that used to be two and a half million people in America. There are some 400,000 now, which is an indication to me that God is moving on. You rejected Me, you reject My divinity, you reject My resurrection, I'm moving on.

So I want to focus on the remnant and I want to encourage the remnant that the time is urgent. The hour is now, and we cannot back down. We cannot go to sleep. We cannot sit back. I remember a journalist interviewing me in London and she said, "People your age"—and this was several years ago—"are sitting on the beach, putting their feet up or playing golf." I am more intense about the Gospel now than ever and there's no retirement for me. I am trying to lead by example but also I'm trying to lead by motivating people that our reward in heaven is going to be so great when we don't ignore the Gospel and we don't just live for self and we don't focus on our own needs. There's nothing wrong with having needs and praying to God about the needs, but seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness is now more urgent than ever.

Erick Erickson: Dr. Youssef, don't stop doing it. Thank you so much for spending time with me. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much. The book is An Unholy Alliance by Dr. Michael Youssef. If you're interested in this topic and how Islamists are spreading in the Western world subversively, using politicians on both sides of the aisle, lying even in places like Texas to be able to expand their agenda, and also spreading around the world to disrupt the Western order and also to begin persecuting Christians—this is an excellent book for you to read. It's easy to understand, it is not a long read, but it will open your eyes to what's happening but also give you the motivation to take action and to also be able to understand the Holy Spirit still works.

Announcer: Speak with a ministry representative at the Leading The Way call center about getting your copy of An Unholy Alliance. Call 866-626-4356 or online at LTW.org. This program is furnished by Leading The Way with Dr. Michael Youssef.