Robert Spencer (Jihad Watch), Marco Rubio

 I spoke with Robert Spencer about the current threat of Islam.

Then I played the speech by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that he recently gave in Greece regarding our American Heritage and it's debt to Western Civilization and Greece. Wonderful speech!

Ed Bonderenka:

Good afternoon and welcome back to Your American Heritage. My name is Ed Bonderanka, and as you know, I am a practicing -

White Christian, cisgender male.

Yeah. And Your American Heritage is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Music. If for whatever reason you want to review the show and why wouldn't you? Or share it with your friends and don't worry about hurting their feelings. They're your friends. They won't get offended. There's always the podcast. To find the podcast, go to waamradio.com, W-A-A-M radio.com. Click on the podcast tab at the top. 

Psalm 144 says, "Blessed be the Lord, my rock who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle." Please clasp those hands and your fingers as pray. Let's go to war. 

Psalm 35 says, "Plead my cause, oh Lord, with them that strive with me. Fight against them that fight against me. Take hold of shield and buckler and stand up for mine help. Draw out also the spear and stop the way against them that persecute me. Say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.

Let them be confounded and put to shame and seek after my soul and let them be turned back and brought to confusion that devise my hurt. Let them be as chaff before the wind and let the angel of the Lord chase them. Let their way be dark and slippery and let the angel of the Lord persecute them."

Wow, Them's fighting words. I'm glad to know our God is on our side. Joining us this hour is Robert Spencer. Robert's been on the show before a couple times. Last November he was on to talk about his book, Intifada on the Hudson about Mamdani. He's the director of jihadwatch.com. He's also the author of a number of books we talked about. A couple of them before. One of my favorites is The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades. I first read that 20 years ago. We talked to him last year about his book, Did Muhammad Exist: An Inquire Into Islam's Obscure Origins. Now, a couple of days ago was October 7th, and that's the anniversary of the date that Hamas attacked Israel on a murder spree. To call it a murder spree is mild considering what they did. So like I said, I want to have Robert come back on and talk about things Islamic threat.

And one of those of course is Abdul-Rahman Mohammed al-Sayed. Another is his friend Hassan Piker who seems to be friends to many democratic politicians. So welcome back to the show, Bob. You want to remind people of your biographical background?

Robert Spencer:

Sure. Thanks Ed. It's good to talk to you again and I am the director of Jihad Watch, which is at jihadwatch.org, updated daily on news, full of news and commentary on jihad activity. It's the only jihad news site in the world and the only daily jihad news site in the world. And as you have noted, have written quite a few books, including the latest, The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses, which is about how Islam doesn't work, that it is bad for individuals and bad for societies, that this is very clear in history. I explained it all in the book. And then there's no shortage of non-Muslims in the West who make excuses for it to try to make everybody feel better.

Ed Bonderenka:

Oh yeah. Yeah, I know. Exactly. I live just down the road from Dearbornistan and I can drive through Dearborn. I can go to dinner in Dearborn and I'm not threatened, but I do know that there is a threat in Dearbornistan. It just looks calm on the surface many times unless there's a pro-Islamic rally, right?

Robert Spencer:

Yeah. Well see, the thing is to say that Islam has doctrines of warfare and violence doesn't mean that every Muslim is going to be wanting to kill you or that every Muslim who even does want to kill you is going to be doing that at any possible opportunity. The fact is that most of the time daily life goes on the way it always does. The problem is that when there is this doctrine of jihad warfare against unbelievers, at any time it could become activated and lead to violence in a way that Americans are not used to, but I'm afraid they're going to become accustomed to in the coming years.

Ed Bonderenka:

Yeah. Yeah. And I have a couple guys that I count as my friends and they're Muslim. They're not jihadists to my knowledge and we get along just fine. But I often wonder what would happen in the context of if we were in a Sharia republic, or not even a republic, Sharia nation, then what would the attitude be towards me? That's the problem.

Robert Spencer:

They may be guys who just don't take all that business seriously, just like there are nominal Christians and so on. There are many people with different perspectives and priorities and all that. What the religion teaches is one thing and what any individual does about it is another. But also I can tell you, some years ago I was talking to a colonel who had served a colonel in the US Army who had served in Iraq. And when he was in Iraq, he was working with a colonel in the Iraqi army and they got to be good friends. And when he was transferred back home, he was saying his goodbyes and the Iraqi colonel said to him, "I've enjoyed working with you and we've been good friends. I'm going to be sorry when the time comes that I have to kill you." So you never know.

Ed Bonderenka:

Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of this black couple my mom had befriended and actually they came, this is back in the 60s and they were in the house visiting and I assume that the wife was joking when she turned to the husband and I saw it. When the revolution comes, I think we'll let these guys live. And I'm like, "Whoa." Yeah. You just never know. And I'm sure they were joking at that point, but there is that background there, that thought of a threat. I think one threat that we have is this, oh, I like to use his full name and I can't remember it exactly. Abdul Rahman Mohammed al-Sayed. I think he said it one time, "That's my name." Not the equivalent of don't wear it out. I forget exactly what he said, like spit it out of your mouth or something. He

Robert Spencer:

Said that non-Muslims in Michigan and elsewhere were afraid to say it. And so I think you're right. We should say it as much as possible because it's not that we're afraid of his name, it's that we're afraid of his policies and don't think he should be a US senator. But yeah, his name is Abdul-Rahman Mohammed El-Sayad.

Ed Bonderenka:

Yeah. Well, that reminds me of something I just heard today on another radio show or podcast, this guy was saying, "I'm not Islamophobic because a phobia is an irrational fear and actually a fear of Islam is not irrational."

Robert Spencer:

Well, there you go. I think I'd rather say I'm resolute against a threat than that I'm afraid, but there is absolutely reason to be concerned about Islam. It does have doctrines of warfare against unbelievers and anybody who thinks that those things don't exist or aren't coming to America is just naive.

Ed Bonderenka:

I was reading about Elsayed's half sister. Now it's his half sister had been separated, but she offered an October 7th blessing one year after the Hamas attack where she said. And she's a professor at the University of Chicago where, hey, Obama was from, Barack Hussein Obama. And her name is Ehman Abdul-Hadi, and she cast Muslim Palestinians as victims while wearing a kefiyah in the speech. On October 7th, it's in your face, right?

Robert Spencer:

Yes. Well, we just saw that. We just had the third anniversary and it was incredible how people are just openly proclaiming that they're in favor of this massacre. And at Columbia University, they even had on the menu for the day in the cafeteria at the college, October 7th blush sauce. I don't know what on earth food that is, but they were celebrating October 7th. And it's very clear that there was somebody who though October 7th was a great thing for the massacre of 1,200 Israelis who put that on the menu.

Ed Bonderenka:

Just after October 7th, the original, the massacre, it occurred to me, I had been reading Esther and I remember this guy, Haman, who wanted to kill all the Jews. Seems to be a common thing there. And I was joking, a friend of mine was on the show with me, Pastor Rick, and I said, "Hamas is the plural of Haman." And I laughed and he said, "You're absolutely right. It is. It actually is. There's the same root word." Well, there

Robert Spencer:

You go.

Ed Bonderenka:

Yeah. And then Saeed's mom worked for the Islamic American African Relief Agency, which the US Treasury designated in 2004 overties the terrorist financing, financing Hamas and the Taliban. So I mean, the family, the fruit's not going to fall far from the tree, right?

Robert Spencer:

Well, sure. And El Sayed himself has made this very clear in his refusal to denounce or separate himself from Hassan Piker who said America deserved nine eleven and all these other vicious things. And El Sayed won't distance himself from him. He wouldn't make any comment in terms of, what was it? The Ayatollah Khameini, and he had praised him in the past, and a reporter just asked him about it the other day and he said, "I want to talk about medicine prices." And he just sidestepped the question. He won't renounce the jihadis that he's associated with. He's spoken in organizations with ties to Hamas, ties to Hezbollah, all these radical Imams. He won't disassociate himself from any of them. All he does when people ask him about it is change the subject. And that just makes it clear that he believes everything that, as you noted, his sister does and his other associates do, his friends, his allies, his colleagues.

Mike Rogers, I was so proud. He gave it to him good in their debate, and he brought up all these things, how he's got all these ties to Hamas, to Hezbollah, to other designated terrorist organizations. And he hasn't done a thing to distance himself from them because he knows these things don't bother the people who are going to vote for him.

These things play to his base. They all support these terror groups.

Ed Bonderenka:

Yes, exactly. Boy, I was just reading about his former security officer has basically turned on a guy named, I think Domingue, has actually come out and leaked stuff that he saw internally about El Saeed's antisemitism. I mean, we know it's there, right? But when the insiders come out and say, "I can't work for this guy anymore because of his hatred for Jews, his hatred for America, and anti-republic views," and the guy's virtually a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and these are the people that have spoken about, they want to rid themselves of the Constitution, the Senate, and just basically our form of government. And so that just leaves, well, that's the Red-Green Alliance, right?

Robert Spencer:

Well, that's exactly it. The Red Green Alliance is a deeply authoritarian movement that combines the worst tendencies of both camps in terms of hatred of America and in terms of wanting to replace, as you noted, our free republic with an authoritarian system. Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, he said, according to a very famous tradition, "Abeyo ruler, even if he is an Ethiopian with a head like a raisin." Now, a lot of people quote that because they say, "Look, he's a racist," and that's fine. That's a valid point. But I think more important about that statement is that he's saying obey your ruler no matter what, obey your ruler even if, and he offers this as the most outlandish person he can think of, this Ethiopian with a head like a raisin. So the whole idea is to say you obey your ruler and in the history of Islam, you don't find democracies, you don't find free republics, you have authoritarian rule all the way from beginning to end.

And people say, "Well, what about Turkey? Turkey's a democracy." Turkey was actually established as a rejection of political Islam. And now because Islam is political, the president of Turkey, Recheptay Erdowan, is rolling all that back and re-imposing Islamic law. And so there still is no free republic in the Islamic world. So if we lose to the left and their Islamic allies, or if we give into them, then it's going to be the end of America as a free society.

Ed Bonderenka:

Yeah. I was reminded of Ataturk. When I lived in Turkey for a while, everybody told me about Adaturk was a hero because he brought in modern Turkey after secular Turkey after the Ottoman Empire fell. It's like they've totally forgot. These people worshiped Ataturk. I talked to them. They thought he was like their George Washington and now it's gone by the wayside.

Robert Spencer:

But he hated Islam Ataturk. And he said, "Islam is the theology, the immoral theology." No, I'm sorry, the dead theology of an immoral Bedouin. And he had no respect for it at all. He said, "The Ottomans lost World War I because they were following Islam and we have to discard Islam and organize our society according to the way the victors have their societies as secular republics." And he did, but it didn't last. And now it's all going by the wayside.

Ed Bonderenka:

I just read that 43% of young adults in America support Sharia and would help implement it in a city if the population wanted it. Have you heard that?

Robert Spencer:

Yes. Yeah, I had that Jihad Watch. They don't have a clue these people. They don't have any idea what Sharia is. See, this is the problem. Last February, I testified before Congress about Sharia and all of the Democrats who were present acted as if Sharia was just private religious law, like Catholic canon law. Abdul-Ahmal Mohammed al-Sayed said that also. He was with Jesse Waters and he said, "It's just like Roman Catholic canon law. Nobody who's not Roman Catholic has to care about it, and nobody who's not Muslim has to be concerned about Sharia." But the fact is that Sharia is not just private religious law. It is an all-encompassing political system that applies to non-Muslims and denies them basic rights. And this is why we are concerned about the advance of Sharia in the United States.

Ed Bonderenka:

They say about communism, it's never worked wherever it's been tried. And then it's, oh, well, it just hasn't been done right. But actually Sharia has worked everywhere it's been tried, hasn't it?

Robert Spencer:

Well, yeah. If what you mean is that, yeah, is Islamic law enforced? Absolutely. And yet Sharia states, the whole idea is to live off the non-Muslims. The Qur'an specifies that the non-Muslims have to pay a tax, the Jizia, to the Muslims. And that's the ideal situation in a Sharia state that the non-Muslims will be paying this tax. Once the non-Muslims are bled dry, you can track this historically, this is in my book, The Tragedy of Islam, that once the non-Muslims are bled dry, because the Islamic states depend on them, they go into decline. And so it's kind of a parasitical culture in society. It lives off the non-believers like the parasite lives off the host. When the host is bled and can't sustain the parasite, the parasite has to go find another host, and so there's more jihad.

Ed Bonderenka:

Oh man, it sounds like, would it be called the Ponzi scheme where it's just like you just have to keep finding more adherence, more people. The Ponzi scheme will work as long as you have continued growth and you're sucking in people's money. Yeah. And it must be you that I heard that from, so I'm glad to have some attribution for that because I heard about the bleeding dry and it was actually your book. I'd forgotten where I got it from. So Red Green Alliance, I hate that too because Red Green was one of my favorite TV shows where you fix everything with duct tape and make sure women find you, if they're not handsome, make sure they find you handy. That's red green. However, this red green is a much more deadly thing. And are we seeing that in the Paris riots right now? It's so hard to cut through the news reports like, "Oh no, they're just protests.

They're just burning all their schools because they don't like the condition of the schools or something else that made sense like that.

Robert Spencer:

There are a lot of videos out there. I carried a lot of them at Jihad Watch. They don't report on what's really going on on the ground where you see that the overwhelming majority of the protestors are migrants, are Muslim migrants from North Africa. They are not native French. Now, the BBC put a picture above the fold on the front page of its website of three white guys protesting and yelling at the cops. And they're probably the only white guys who are out there protesting because you look at these videos and everybody in them is a young Muslim migrant from Algeria or Morocco or Libya or Tunisia. And they are holding their flags, Palestine flags as well as Tunisia and Algeria and Morocco. And that makes it very clear. They are not French. They do not consider themselves French, and they consider this a rebellion against the French authorities in the name of Islam.

It's not that they are actually agitating for Tunisia or Algeria, it's that their national flags indicate that their primary identity is not French. And what unifies them, they're not fighting each other because they're Algeria first or something, so they're fighting the Palestinians. They're all out there together because actually it's their Islamic identity that is underlying all this and that unifies them. And so you've got that element and the leftists on the other side. And so it is a perfect indication of the Red-Green Alliance indeed, as well as a very serious challenge to the continued life of the French state.

Ed Bonderenka:

Yeah, it's very scary what's going on in Europe, and it's a shame that the populist, at least the native populist has been disarmed. Now, I'm sure that the invasion forces from across the Mediterranean that have invaded them, I'm sure

They're going to get access to weapons. There's just no two ways about that. The criminal networks that run through the organizations that brought them in. And so I'm not sure what's going to happen in France or England. You mentioned the BBC, and I read this today. A friend of mine's blog posted this about in Britain, a retired police officer, Stephen Gray was arrested after reposting a Facebook mem that said, "Fun facts about bacon. People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a nine-year-old." Well, Officer Gray, 65 years old, who served nearly 30 years with the Cleveland Police in England, he was later convicted under Britain's Communications Act after a judge ruled that the post was grossly offensive. He was ordered to pay more than a thousand pounds in fines and costs and ended up with a criminal record.

Robert Spencer:

Incredible. But it shows how Britain is on its last legs as a free society. I mean, in the first place, they can't take a joke. It's a joke. Relax, lighten up. You're fining a guy a thousand pounds. It's like $1,500 for a joke. And second, it's not just a joke, but it's factual. It's real. Yeah. Muslims don't eat pork. If you're a Sharia adherent Muslim anyway, if you're a Muslim in name only, sure, you might eat pork. But if you are a very serious Muslim, you don't eat any pork. And

Islam allows for child marriage. These things are not Islamophobia. This is facts. There is child marriage on a rampant basis in Afghanistan, for example, where when we first went in 2003, excuse me, then the aid workers went in with the troops and they went into the refugee camps. They found that half the girls of second grade age were already married and all the girls older than that were married. Third grade up. And this is because of Muhammad's example. And so this is not Islamophobia, this is the way the world really is. And so Britain is at war with reality and truth and is fining people for speaking unwelcome truths. No society can survive that.

Ed Bonderenka:

Wow. Well, thanks, Bob. I appreciate the input. We've come to the end of this segment and I've got to make room for... I'm having on Marco Rubio in the next segment. Tell

Robert Spencer:

Him I said hello.

Ed Bonderenka:

So that's jihadwatch.org, right?

Robert Spencer:

That's it. Yep.

Ed Bonderenka:

All right. Thanks a lot for all you're doing out there and I appreciate it and we'll have you back. Thanks a lot.

Robert Spencer:

Thanks. Always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

Ed Bonderenka:

Thanks. Bye. Welcome on back after the break, your American heritage.

 

This is your American heritage. This is where faith, freedom, and truth still matter. This is your American heritage.

Ed Bonderenka:

Welcome back to your American Heritage. I'll be brief. I want to play for you a recent speech by Secretary of State Marco Rubio given in Athens, Greece in front of the Acropolis. So I've edited a little bit out of this so I could fit it in. Not much. You won't miss it. Please listen and enjoy. As Secretary of State, Marco Rubio talks about our Western heritage.

Marco Rubio:

There are great ruins all across the world. In many cases, they are places where history seems to have exhausted itself, remnants of distant cultures that have long passed belong beyond a living memory. But the Acropolis is different. For thousands of years, the civilization that built what stands behind me has captivated the imagination of the Western world. Generations of our statesmen, artists and philosophers have looked to it. They've looked to it with wonder and they've looked to it with awe. Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American Republic halfway across the world from where I stand now, I stand here today as the secretary of state of that republic, and as the great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the new world from Spain, I stand here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space can ever extinguish.

The history of America, the history of my country is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity. Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city. The city where our constitution was born, Philadelphia, is itself a Greek name. The men who founded my country were fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours. They were exceptionally well read in history. They're vividly aware of their unique place in it, but no other age of the past held their attention or their imagination quite like that of antiquity. Many, many people are surprised to learn that the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was not an enlightenment philosopher or a political theorist. The most commonly cited author in the Federalist papers was Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Greece and Rome's great men. Now, much has been written and said about the influence of ancient Greece on the ideas of the American founders, and for that matter, on all of the Western philosophers and statesmen that preceded them.

Most of us are familiar with the basic history. Athens gave us democracy. Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy. Our ideas of law, a virtue of citizenship and Republican government were shaped in the Greek city states. Even much of our political vocabulary, words like democracy, tyranny, the word politics itself found its origins here. Now all of that is true, but the things we owe to this place as Americans and as Westerners are actually far, far deeper.

These institution and ideas were the outward expression of more fundamental qualities we see in the ancient Greeks, qualities that can't be reduced to any particular political system or theory. Here in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West, fierce individuality and relentless ambition, daring exploration and invention, a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory, an insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos and impatience with the notion of impossibility chafing at all boundaries, at all limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown. These were not just the formulas or precepts of a particular school of philosophy, they were the characteristic of a people. Expressed in their tradition, their stories, their imagination, and the qualities that they demanded of their citizens and the things they lived and fought and died for.

To know them is to know ourselves. What blossomed here in this place was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man.

The Greeks did not just shape history. The Greeks gave us history itself. Much of what we know about many ancient civilizations comes almost entirely from the records of Greek explorers and historians. Explorers and historians who didn't just chronicle the histories of their own people, but ventured outward to observe and record the sagas of foreign peoples and cultures all across the world. Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward, to chase the thrill and glory of seeing all that was strange and new. It was this trait. It was this trait that would push the West to create and build things that others could not, marking us out from so many other cultures and civilizations where stability and subsistence were the highest ends of life. But it is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks.

It is the conviction that the unknown can be known, the confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood, and that there is a rational order to the cosmos governed by certain fundamental laws, laws that men can observe and the mind can come to understand. This was the foundation of the Western mind. Our math, our science, our medicine, our philosophy, ethics, and religion, it paved the way for the gospel of Jesus Christ to find fertile soil in Europe and flourish into the empire of Christendom. It was the foundation of the riches of Christian theology of Augustine and Aquinas and the whole tradition of natural law. It gave birth to a civilization marked not just by a common culture, it was marked by a common anthropology, a common view of man and of his place in the universe. Its descendants would share not just the idea of a natural order, but a distinctive understanding of virtue, of destiny, of fate, of truth, of goodness and beauty, of a code that dictates how men ought to live, of objective standards and ideals to strive towards.

For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man's existence. They organized all of civic life around contest and ambition and competition and philosophy and poetry and sculpture and drama and athletics and art and war and statescraft. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle, to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection. Now I know that to modern years, what I just described, this way of life may sound odd. It may even sound cruel. The ideal of many ideologies in our time is frankly become a world of perfect safety, a world devoid of risk or failure or neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure that no one will lose.

We preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst and the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre, the men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things. The ancient Greek city states were filled. They were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict, but from that constant struggle for distinction, from that came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.

The Thuma says the ancient Greeks called it the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride is the heart of great civilization. And without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive. Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality. Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness. The word nationalism became a dirty word, and so we tore down our monuments. We condemned our own history, and in too many places we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.

And with every passing year, we seemed to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control. But others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left, the vacuum left behind by our weakness. And as the West's confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead. And now, today, we find ourselves at a crossroads because the next decade and the decisions we make will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline. We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all. Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice.

We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future. We choose to reach for new frontiers in advanced manufacturing and superintelligence in drones, weapons and warfare, in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility to unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon and launch a new age of exploration in space.

Now for all their lafty ideals, the ancient Greeks were not naive. They understood that nations have interest. They understood that statecraft requires prudence and diplomacy, but they also understood that it requires the ability to wield force when prudence and diplomacy fail. They understood that power requires not only having the means to defend yourself, it requires the credibility that you are willing to use it. This is the classical understanding of politics and of statecraft that the Trump administration hopes to reclaim, reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization. We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was here millennia ago. There are already signs. Across this continent, we are witnessing what we hope will be the beginning of a generational shift, skyrocketing defense spending, a flurry of new partnerships and programs, expanded manufacturing and production following on the historic defense commitments made last year in The Hague.

Greece has been at the center of this shift. The people of this nation have proved themselves once again to be an indispensable friend to Europe and to the United States alike on everything from energy to migration to defense where Greece has been a model ally. It is our sincerest hope that all of Europe will follow your example. Though passions may at times have strained the bonds of affection between the United States and Europe, it must not be allowed to break them. Together we must strengthen an alliance capable of confronting the threats of our age and we can because we do not believe the transatlantic friendship should be zero sum, quite the opposite. Our vision is an alliance whose strength is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a vision we saw in action just last month in an unprecedented new agreement between the United States, Denmark and Greenland, an agreement that will reshape the Arctic and bolster the security of all of NATO.

All three partners in that deal emerged victorious, all of Europe and NATO and the United States emerged safer, stronger and more secure because of it. We want to win together. We must win together. Now it's become fashionable today to believe that enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the global community over one's own people. And I think here too, we have much to learn from the men of ancient Greece because they knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests above all else. They believed fiercely in the ideal of the great man, the exceptional individual who obtains immortality through his own deeds, but they believed that glory and fame, those things were won through striving, sacrificing and achieving greatly for something larger than yourself. The recurring hero of the ancient Greek world was the man who was willing to pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.

We see this in Socrates who refuse to abandon the inquiry into truth even at the cost of his own life. We see it in the legendary stand of 300 Spartans surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by the vast armies of Persia who refused the chance to save themselves choosing to fight to the last man rather than abandon their post or abandon their duty. And we see it in the epic myth of Achilles who's offered the choice to return home and live a long and peaceful life but chooses instead to remain at Troy and perish in pursuit of eternal glory.

These are the qualities that would shape the Western moral imagination from the Christian martyr who refused to betray his faith to the patriot who gave his life or his country from St. Thomas Moore to the Battle of the Alamo, running through the immortal closing words of the Declaration of Independence of the United States, which says we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. It is from the Greeks that the West inherited its sense of duty and unbreakable loyalty to one's code, one's cause, one's country, our heroes. The heroes of the West are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so. The man who is bound by his word, the soldier who will not abandon his post, the captain, the proverbial captain who goes down with the ship.

This is wholly different from what we see even now. For example, from fanatics like the radical mulahs of Iran whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes and portrays martyrdom as an end to itself. Our heroes, our heroes may be willing to die for their cause, but our heroes do not worship death. It is precisely because we value life that we come to recognize the heroism in those who would sooner sacrifice it than to betray their principles. Now we take the west conception of these things, heroism, honor, duty, we take these things for granted. We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not.

They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it, the civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did. The men who built the Parthenon were succeeded by the architects of European Christendom who raised the cathedrals of Milan, Cologne and Florence. The quest to perfect the human form that moved the ancient Greek sculptors found a new expression in Michelangelo. The Greek philosopher's search for the structure of the universe was inherited by Copernicus and then Galileo and Kepler and Newton, the hunger for new knowledge, that's what gave birth to Magellan's first expedition around the world to Columbus's discovery of the Americas and ultimately to Apollo 11's journey to the moon. And the qualities that led Alexander to conquer the entire known world reappeared in Caesar and Charlemagne and Cortez.

And in America, that same tradition rediscovered itself anew, an open and wild land became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition. The Greek aspiration for new horizons became the American frontier spirit. The civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire. The greatest Americans of every generation have carried the unmistakable features of their forefathers, born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom, hardened in the furnace of medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty and then carried across the Atlantic to be reborn of the shores of a new world.

Together we must now rediscover that spirit. We are at an inflection point, an inflection point not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization. The threats we face today are every bit as real as they were on the dramatic stage of antiquity. National interest did not vanish in the face of international institutions. War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace. Other states continued to arm to seek influence, to compete for territory and technology and resources and markets and energy and power. And now there is war again. There is new competition between great powers again. There is vulnerability, aggression, terrorism, a whole universe of new threats and attacks again. And so we must rebuild our institutions and our alliances to face these threats together, understanding that the purpose of these things is not to abolish the sovereignty of the nations that constitute them, it is to defend them and that nations need not abandon their distinct identities in order to recognize their common interests.

We have built a model of that with our partners here in Greece, in our defense partnerships, in energy and technology, in our shared ambition to secure Europe's borders from the threats of mass migration. The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves. It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes and that we should be proud, that we should be intensely proud of where we come from. We should marvel at what our forefathers carved out of this countryside. The story of civilization is the greatest story ever known to man and it began here with the first men and women of the West from them. From them we can rediscover the virtues, the courage and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time. Thank you.

Ed Bonderenka:

Thank you. Once again, that was Secretary of State Marco Rubio talking about our Western heritage, its roots and the threats that it faces today. Come on back after the break. We're going to have Bill Federer, your American heritage.