Barry Nussbaum: Hello, and welcome to ATP Report on this very special anniversary week of 9/11. We have two very special expert guests that I’m very honored to introduce to you today. First, Clare Lopez is an internationally recognized expert on terrorism. She’s a writer and a frequent expert commentator on that subject and has an extensive background representing the United States around the world, especially being overseas with the CIA. Our second terrific guest is Dr. Bill Warner. He’s a former college professor, a prolific writer, and the creator of The Theory of Political Islam. Welcome, Clare, and welcome, Bill.

Clare Lopez: Thank you, Barry.

Bill Warner: Thank You.

Barry Nussbaum: On the day of and the day’s directly after 9/11, there was no doubt that Saudi Arabia and its citizens were behind the attack, and I mean, quite frankly, it was the home and the training ground for almost every single one of the hijackers. We did nothing to or about Saudi Arabia, and we went to war with Saddam Hussein. Millions of Americans, for the life of them, still can’t understand how a war got justified with the one country that had almost nothing to do with it. Bill, what are your thoughts?

Bill Warner: Well, I don’t really know, but I can’t help but suspect that George Bush Jr. thought he could finish the job that George Bush senior started. Because if you were going to go to war, you needed to go to war against people who were actually harming us, and I mean, I didn’t understand it the whole time it happened. I’m looking at it going, why are we doing this? Because none of it made sense to me, but I’ll tell you, if you stay in this game very long, you’ll run across a lot of things that don’t make sense to you. As a matter of fact, you can become believers in things operating behind the camera.

Barry Nussbaum: Absolutely.

Bill Warner: We know it’s happening.

Barry Nussbaum: Clare?

Clare Lopez: I’ll jump in here really quickly to say that while, yes, the regime then in Saudi Arabia was very deeply involved in the plotting for 9/11, the one who actually went to Saudi Arabia in late 2000 and early 2001 to recruit the 15 out of the 19 hijackers who were Saudi was none other than the Hezbollah chieftain Imad Mughniyeh on orders from Iran, certainly with the acquiescence of the Saudi regime, but it was Imad Mughniyeh and Hizbollah who actually recruited those Saudi hijackers and then escorted them all over the Middle East, Iran, Beirut, Afghanistan, for their training and their operational briefing. That was Hezbollah on orders of Iran that did that.

Barry Nussbaum: And yet all the blood and treasure that was invested and left in the sands of Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein and destabilize the Middle East is still there where we killed a whole lot of people and destroyed a whole lot of lives that had nothing to do with 9/11.

Clare Lopez: Well, I mean, there is some connection, and it’s that number one, of course, Saddam Hussein had invaded his neighbors on multiple occasions. He was a destabilizing force in the Middle East. He absolutely had weapons of mass destruction programs, a latent nuclear program, but a very active biological and chemical warfare program. He absolutely did, and he had been harboring on Iraqi soil one Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, of course, fled Afghanistan and the battles of Tora Bora after the defeat of al-Qaida and the Taliban there. How do you get from Afghanistan to Iraq? Across Iran, which helped him. The IRGC helped him. The Quds Force helped him. Then he went to northern Iraq, where an escape route had been planned for him, and a place had been planned for him ahead of time. They planned this way ahead in northern Iraq, the Kurdistan region, and Saddam Hussein allowed that to happen. So he had al-Qaida on his soil as well with his certain knowledge, if not acquiescence. So for all of those reasons, Saddam Hussein absolutely needed to be taken out, but what the Bush administration missed is that that was the Sunni balance of power against the Shiites in the Middle East. And by taking out the Sunni balance, the Sunni counterweight to the Shiites, but in doing nothing about the Shiites, maybe that was supposed to be a one-two. I don’t know for sure. It never wound up a one-two, but by taking out the Sunnis and Iraq, by the way, of course, we know it is 60 percent Shiite, so it was majority Shiite and then insisting on Democratic rule that’s why we’re not a democracy. We’re a republic. It enabled Iran. It shifted the balance of power to Iran in ways that are with us to this day.

Barry Nussbaum: Oh, absolutely. Let’s come home for a minute in our discussion. Dr. Bill, you’ve written quite a bit about the infiltration of the federal government by representatives and basically salespeople for Islam. And that’s colored the description here of who the bad guys are from the perspective of the mainstream media the bad people are the jihadis, and the rest are all good people. The radicals are the few and far between that have perverted Islam somehow. Our good friend Phil Haney was working on blowing the whistle on this infiltration when he was assassinated. What are your thoughts about those that are surrounding even today, the government with a message that would probably scare many regular Americans to death?

Bill Warner: Well, let’s talk about the infiltration because I was a personal victim of it. I used to write white papers for the FBI on issues dealing with Islamic doctrine. Well, I was told later by the man who is in charge of FBI training that my papers were the last ones purged by the Muslim Brotherhood under the direction of the Muslim Brotherhood. So I was distinctly impacted. He said you were the last one and we just said, look, these are statistical measures. They said it is offensive to Islam. It must go. So we see this in many ways. Let me give you a way that we see this. General Stanley McChrystal, the endless war in Afghanistan, wrote a paper that was supposed to be a strategic outline on how to win the war. Well, I got the redacted copy, and it was interesting in his paper, which is how to defeat Islam and Afghanistan, the word Islam, Muslim, and jihad did not appear anywhere in this document. Excuse me. So if you can’t even say the words of your enemy in his own native language, how are you going to win?

Barry Nussbaum: Yeah, that’s been a common theme, actually. Especially since Trump started running five years ago or so, he was the first one who said, I want to tell you who the enemy is, and he’s been lambasted in the mainstream media ever since. So, the Saudi regime, as you both have said, especially Clare, seems to have been involved in 9/11. Not just being the birthplace of most of the hijackers, but since 9/11 has been moving towards the West. Obviously, Iran has not. Nor has their proxy army, Hezbollah. We’ve just seen dramatic normalization with the United Arab Emirates becoming very friendly with Israel. The stories out of both the Middle East, especially Israel and the United States are saying Bahrain, Oman, Morocco may follow along rather quickly. A Muslim country today in southern Europe just announced they’re moving their embassy to Jerusalem. I’m talking about Serbia. Maybe Saudi Arabia will come along. What they’ve done so far is they’ve opened their airspace to Israel for the first time. So the holy two, the big two holy sites in Saudi Arabia, where they are the basis of at least Sunni Islam, are becoming friendlier with the West, but they’re still Islamic, so is the UAE, and while you don’t flog people and execute people as many as you used to in Saudi Arabia, they’re still devoutly, religiously Islamic. Is the radicalization that comes out of those places going to diminish, or is it just PR in the press and behind the scenes, they’re still making more highjackers?

Bill Warner: I think that what they’re seeing here is just real politics. That’s all it is. I have a concept called the gravity of Mohammed. That is, Islamic nations may move away from the Sharia, but Mohammed is always there, the Sharia is always there, and they will slowly be drawn back into the orbit. I give you the example of Turkey where Kemal Ataturk purged, Turkey supposedly of Islam but now that Erdogan is back and he views himself as the Eucla. So we have here a situation in which you can have real politics drag you out of your strict Sharia orbit, but there will come a time. Remember, we measure time by a watch. Muslims measure time by a calendar. So we’re quick, and we’ve got to have our results now. No, no, no. Time is long. The assurance that Sharia will continue to grow is always there. So I view things like this as all being very temporary. What do you think, Clare?

Clare Lopez: Well, I do think that what is happening in the Middle East is literally tectonic plates moving that we never thought we would see. But I have to agree with Bill that the reasons are not because the regimes there have decided to abandon Islam in any way, shape, or form. I will say that with the rise to power of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, MBS, he’s often called in Saudi Arabia under, by the way, under the mentorship of Mohammed bin Zayed, who is the crown prince, an effective ruler of the United Arab Emirates. With the rise to power of those two Crown Princes things began to shift. Now, of course, they’re shifting for a reason, and it’s not because they woke up one day and read Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. It’s because events in the Middle East propelled them, compelled them to what they’re doing right now. Number one is the rise of Iran and its nuclear weapons program, which they are very much afraid of, and the loose alignment of Iran with Qatar, which is directly across the Persian Gulf, is very close to Iran loosely third with Turkey. So it is a fear of that axis of jihad, as they sometimes call it, but it is also the realization that Israel is not the enemy of these countries, GCC countries for the most part. Gulf Cooperation Council countries, if we add Morocco from way out in the West, another but primarily GCC countries, they know that Israel is not their enemy, and they want to benefit from Israeli technology and things like agriculture and medicine, and water management, things like drip irrigation and desalinization of the seas. So they have decided, at least for right now, that it is more in their benefit to aligning with Israel than against it. Now, here’s where I think the brilliance, really, of President Donald Trump, comes in. Remember the first foreign trip he took after coming into office in 2017? May 2017, he goes to Riyadh, and there he addresses what I think of as the assembled mob bosses of the Sunni world. The Shiites didn’t come, but the Sunnis were there at the orders of King Salman, who told them, you come. And President Trump spoke to them, and he spoke to them in my own mind, I mean, this is the way I think about it as the capo di tutti capi, right? These are the mob bosses of the Sunni world. Trump goes in there who’s who has faced up to the mob in our own country, building hotels and casinos in places like New Jersey, New York, and he knows how to talk to mob bosses, and that’s what he did. That is the beginning that laid the groundwork for this new alliance because the second part was in early 2020 this year when the President’s team finally rolled out its peace plan for the Middle East. Remember this? So long ago now, we hardly remember but that peace plan that offered the Palestinians a generous program, a generous offer, but I think they knew it would be rejected because the Palestinians reject everything. It doesn’t matter. They reject it. That was a one-two punch laying the groundwork in Riyadh with the Sunni leadership of the Islamic world and then the beginning of sidelining the Palestinians who are left out now sidelined and the development of this alignment against Iran. That is what the President has put together. I think it’s significant, and I think that even if it is, as Bill says, just a blip in time on a horizon of millennia, you take what you can get, and you build on it, and you try to create facts on the ground that are difficult, if not very difficult to ever walk back. That’s what they’re doing right now.

Barry Nussbaum: Well, let me jump in because as I listen to both of you, I want to point out the glaring differential, and that’s the following: Bill talks about it from a strict Islamic reading of the texts they don’t think about time over the next weeks or what happened today or the Election Day, they’re dealing with a long term calendar, and under the strict doctrine of Islamic law, you don’t make friends with your enemies, the Jews being the most prominent of those enemies. You might have a hudna, a temporary cessation of violence. It’s not a peace treaty. It’s just you’re not making war right now. From Bill’s interpretation as what I’m listening to the feel-good make nice between the UAE and maybe Bahrain and maybe Sudan and others with Israel is because, well, there might be some benefit to them. Still, war will be inevitable, and the conquering and liberation of Jerusalem would be inevitable, and on the other side, I’m hearing Clare say, well, there’s a lot of stuff being passed around. They want the science they want cooperation with water and inventions and technology and certainly Israeli intelligence vis-a-vis Iran. So how do we balance those two? If I was Israeli and I was concerned about the long term prospects for peace within the Middle East, what would I think? Jared Kushner said in the last several days that he expects every moderate Arab state, maybe 20 of them, in the not too distant future to recognize and have relations with Israel. Is it B.S., or are they just going to put aside their required religious necessity to conquer Israel, the home of the Jews? Bill, how do you read it?

Bill Warner: Well, I read it exactly as it is. That is, there are short-term gains which they’re looking for, but I’m taking the long view. I’m saying like one hundred years from now. So my timescale here is very different. I’d like to make one comment on the point Clare made. When Trump talked to the Muslim leaders in Saudi Arabia. There’s only one thing that calls for respect from a Muslim according to the doctrine of Islam, and that is strength. That’s the reason that we see so many people who pussyfoot around and smile and nervously try to submit to Islam and be nice and pleasant. They don’t get any respect at all. Strength is the only thing they respect, but anyway, I think that right now, they’re willing to do what they need to do to get the job done today. But remember, the doctrine of Islam is permanent. It’ll always be there, and sometime later, maybe in a century, it’ll come back to it. I’m very pessimistic because I’ve studied Islam now for 1400 years, it’s history. And it goes forward and forward may slow down, may stop for a while, but it always keeps on expanding. So I can say I have the greatest respect in the world for Mohammed, the world’s greatest warrior, and part of that war, and part of that war is simply patience.

Clare Lopez: Bill, I think there’s another aspect of this that we might think about in this period that seems to be a relaxation of violent or kinetic jihad against the Jews, against Israel. It’s because Israel is strong, and they know that right now, they cannot defeat it militarily. That is why Egypt made a peace treaty. That’s why Jordan made a peace treaty. Both of those are way more limited than what’s going on with the UAE, which is the normalization of relations, a much broader concept that includes all of those exchanges we talked about, ambassador, and embassy, and everything else. But here’s a thought, they may not be able to pursue violent kinetic jihad right now, but no, they can’t give up its doctrine. So what are they doing instead? I think what they’re doing instead is pursuing the path of interfaith dialog. I think that is the aspect of jihad. And we can see that the Emirati’s are leaders in this. Its the way they’re going to pursue the objectives and the commandments of Islam in this particular period. People may know that in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE right now, they are constructing a compound. It’s kind of circular, and it has a mosque and a church and a synagogue on the compound. You’ll also notice that the UAE is the leader worldwide. So this is probably a decision taken at the level of the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the 57 member head of state organization of all Muslim governments in the world,56 countries plus the Palestinian Authority. At that level, they probably took this decision that they will pursue interfaith dialog because Christian congregations, leadership, and Jewish congregations and leadership are so inexplicability to me inexplicably vulnerable to this. That they are maybe thinking they can make more inroads that way for right now while gaining all those benefits, all those goodies that the normalization of the relationship with Israel will bring to them for the moment.

Bill Warner:  I think your analysis is true and correct.

Barry Nussbaum: Well, I hope you’re both wrong, but you’re probably right. So I’m sad about that from the perspective of someone who is a big supporter of Israel, but at the same time, I can’t imagine major portions of that religion are getting thrown into the dumpster for the economic benefit because they’re not talking about this lifetime they’re talking about eternity and as you say, Bill, it’s a long term project. I want to thank both of you for coming on today in light of the fact that America will remembering our dead and how the world changed 19 years ago. Bill, tell people how they can find out about you and what you do, would you, please?

Bill Warner: I have a Web site called PoliticalIslam.com. You can see my videos, newsletters, books, the whole nine yards, and by the way, I don’t really sell books. I sell educational systems. They are designs for you to educate yourself so that you, too, can know what Mohammed said and did and understand the mind of Allah.

Barry Nussbaum: Excellent. How about you, Clare, where can people find you?

Clare Lopez: Well, I don’t yet have a website, but you can find much of my writing, my videos, and other presentations online at a couple of different websites. One is at TheUnitedWest.com and its partner, ShariaCrimestoppers.com. I’m also posted up at the Citizen’s Commission on National Security. Many of my presentations are cross-posted with Brandon House at WorldViewWeekend.com, and I am online on social media at Clare M Lopez, on Twitter, on Paler, and on Facebook by the same, my name, and eventually, I hope to have a website.

Barry Nussbaum: And both of you are on AmericanTruthProject.org, and we’re very happy to have you. For those viewers out there that have not yet subscribe to our text message alert system, I would encourage you to take out your cell phone and type the word TRUTH, and send it to 88202. You’ll be automatically subscribed to our free service that gets you brilliant insight like Dr. Bill and Clare joining us today on this show and all of our future stuff. We never charge for content. If you’re a little more old fashioned, you can go to AmericanTruthProject.org and sign up to be on our mailing list there, and you’ll get the same stuff for free in your email. For ATP Report, thanks for joining us today. I’m Barry Nussbaum.