Dr. Harold Rhode on the future of Turkey and NATO

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio, this is Frank Gaffney, your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. It is a great pleasure to have with us once again, now from Israel, a man whose intelligence on matters of great import to the future course of the war for the free world I have long valued and been proud to share with this audience periodically. He is Dr. Harold Rhode. For many years, he was one of the senior and most respected authorities on the Middle East and by that I mean the larger region of the Middle East, including Turkey, for the Department of Defence. These days, he is a senior fellow with a highly regarded institution in the United States, the Gatestone Institute. A distinguished senior fellow at that. And very much a valued contributor to our programming as well. Harold Rhode, it’s great to catch up with you. Thank you very much for your time.

HAROLD RHODE:

Wonderful being with you, Frank. And thanks for all the beautiful introduction there.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Well, it is both heartfelt and deserved. I’m asking you, today, probably mostly, if not entirely, to address yourself to what has happened in the past week in Turkey. But before we get into the recent events, I’d like to ask you for a little bit of background on who this chap is, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the now president of Turkey. Where did he come from? What are his views and aspirations, as best they can be defined? And then we’ll get into what he’s up to at the moment.

HAROLD RHODE:

Well, first of all, he comes from a poor neighbourhood in Istanbul. He’s a very charismatic man. And from his views has been an Islamic fundamentalist. He has always been a strong brother – a strong member and supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood. And that is a pan – Muslim pan-Islamic national group, the goals of which are very simple. That all of the world must come under Islamic rule, eventually convert to Islam, be ruled by a caliph, and under shariah, the Muslim holy law. That’s Erdogan’s long term goal. He grew up, he was a member of a party, which in the 1990s, a fundamentalist party headed by a man by the name of Erbakan. And Erbakan tried to, shall we say, he became prime minister, and he tried to Islamify, return Turkey to its politically Islamic roots, like the Ottoman Empire, which was the center of the entire Sunni world. Which is, today it’s eighty-six percent of the 1.456 billion Muslims – we really don’t know how many there are in the world. We – the man, as far as I’m concerned, was always dangerous. When he was a member and let’s say a protégé of this Erbakan, Erbakan tried to Islamify Turkey or re-Islamify Turkey politically very quickly. The military then had what was called an encoup [PH] an electronic coup. And the people who were in his party, like for example Erdogan, he realised that if you want to do this – cause they had the same goals, Islamify Turkey and all, you have to do it slowly. Because if you do it too quickly, you will alienate the military, which at the time was strong. And more importantly, the United States. Now, the United States is always unfortunately looking for moderates. That’s a nice, Western term. In the Middle – there are no moderates. The only question is, is what message you use to get your goals done. So Erdogan at first was mayor – became mayor of Istanbul. And then prime minister. And I would say that the American government, this thing that moderate Islam, whatever that is, we have to make peace with, we have to deal with it. So our then-ambassador in the 90s met with Erbakan [UNCLEAR] and we thought we’re just being, you know, you know, that it’s the right thing to do because we’re meeting all forces, [UNCLEAR] that threat, but in the Middle East, meeting with someone gives him – you are, in essence, saying that he’s kosher and that you support him.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Legitimacy and –

HAROLD RHODE:

That’s what we did. Legitimacy, thank you. That’s the best word.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yes. Essentially endorsing him. Harold Rhode, let me ask you about this. There is a famous quote attributed to Erdogan about his attitude towards democracy as a means of advancing this goal. Talk about that if you would.

HAROLD RHODE:

Since we dubbed him a moderate and we dealt with him and all that, we refused to see him for what he was. And he did tell us who he was. The US didn’t want to hear. For example, one of the things that he said is that democracy is like a railroad train. You get on it and you take it as far as you need to go and then you get off. And you proceed. In other words, you mission is the Islamification of the world. If democracy is the way that’s going to help you on that path, then you use it. When democracy is no longer useful, you abandon it. And that is what has happened in the last –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Harold, you talked about two impediments to Turkey’s Islamicisation, if I can use that expression, the military of Turkey, that had traditionally been its – the guarantor of sort of Ataturk’s secular Muslim state, and the United States. And to the extent that you can, just quickly, describe how he used, Erdogan, he used democracy to essentially neutralise both of those obstacles to his ambition.

HAROLD RHODE:

Well, America likes to see anybody who speaks the holy language, which is English, and who is a member or claims to be a moderate and claims to say all the things that we want, that he really is just like us. Now Erdogan doesn’t speak English. But he and the people around him knew exactly how to bamboozle America, America’s diplomats especially, even its intelligence people. They refused to see Erdogan for what he really was.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And this, by the way, precedes president Obama’s tenure in which the president has described Erdogan as one of his best foreign friends, as I recall. So this is a bipartisan failure, not simply one of the Democrats at the moment. And this was very much – this was very much manifested, Harold Rhode, as I recall, and you were intimately involved in all of this, I think, at the time that the United States was preparing to invade Iraq to contend with Saddam Hussein after desert – the 9-11 attacks. Give us a flavour of what happened in that moment, Harold, between Turkey and the United States.

HAROLD RHODE:

America, from 9-11 on, and let’s say that most importantly the war in 2003 for the liberation of Iraq, we assumed that Turkey would be on our side. And what happened was Erdogan controlled the ruling party in parliament at the time. And when it came up for a vote, the idea of letting America use or be part of a coalition to invade Iraq also from the north, it lost by three votes. Now, I want to tell you the way political parties work in the Middle East. They are subservient to the head of the party. Unfortunately, the cunning of Mr. Erdogan was that when it lost, he blamed the military. And the truth is that some of our senior people, especially, Frank, in the building where you and I worked, blamed.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Harold Rhode, we will pause for just a minute and when we come back I want to talk with you about what has happened under Erdogan in the past week. And his response to this so-called coup by the military, what you make of the coup, and what you think is coming next. That and much more with Dr. Harold Rhode of the Gatestone Institute, formerly with the Department of Defence. Right after this.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re back. We’re visiting with Dr. Harold Rhode of the Gatestone Institute. Truly one of the country’s preeminent authorities on Turkey and indeed much of the Middle East. A man who served with great distinction in the Defence Department as a specialist in these matters, including the Turkish desk officer as I recall for a time. And Harold, we were talking about sort of the run up to the events of a week ago which resulted in something called a coup. I’m interested in your take on what happened. Was it, in fact, a military coup as it’s been described or perhaps something else?

HAROLD RHODE:

Frank, I like the way you put that. I’m not sure it was a coup. I can explain that, but let me, what happened – I you’re going to have a coup, number one, you go after the leader. Number two, you go after the media. And the thing was totally bungled. And I have wondered from the beginning the way it was done, was it, in fact, did Erdogan initiate this, just like Hitler did, so he could use it as an opportunity to take power, to take, make absolute power. In fact, Erdogan himself said he wanted that power, the same type of power that Hitler did.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. He’s basically made reference to Hitler’s kind of power and, of course, the Reichstag fire –

HAROLD RHODE:

Yes, it is.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

— I think is what you’re talking about, Harold Rhode, which led to a consolidation of power by Adolf Hitler. And so, to the extent – and Harold, we’re going to have to pause here in a moment, but to the extent that Erdogan might have engineered this for that purpose, was he, in fact, able to do so with the help of the military? Or was this really just a manufactured group operating under sort of military colour?

HAROLD RHODE:

Well, let me tell you, Natan Sharansky, who was a Soviet dissident and had been in jail for many years as a Soviet dissident, and then he was later an Israeli government minister, he says that in situations like this, the Soviets would always have these pretend coups or pretend counter-government demonstrations. The goal was to smoke out the enemies. To find who would then appear and then the Soviets would know who afterwards to arrest, who to go after.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re visiting with Harold Rhode of the Gatestone Institute. And Harold, you were talking about the Soviet practice. This is, I guess, something well known to authoritarians of various stripes. You also mentioned Hitler’s use of a similar kind of technique. So give us a flavour of what actually happened as best we can reconstruct it in Istanbul and other parts of Turkey.

HAROLD RHODE:

Well, the absolute thing of what happened is unclear. But what is clear is the result. All of a sudden, in the education ministry, Erdogan – which basically is educating people for the future, he either arrested or fired fifteen thousand, two hundred people from the education ministry. He has demanded that all university rectors have been relieved of their positions. He has demanded all Turks who are teaching abroad, all academic professors return home. And what he is doing, clearly he has lists of people prepared already. That’s what makes me suspect whether in fact it was a coup. And his goal is simply, he’s arresting huge numbers of people. People don’t know what to do. And because America says he was democratically elected, we must remember Hitler was democratically elected. Hitler – in a free and fair election. I’m not sure whether Erdogan’s election was free and fair, but what was there, what was sure is there was an election. And so when the American government says that the military and everybody else must respect – must respect the will of the people and the election results, I’m like – I just, I can’t believe that we could be so stupid.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. Harold, let me ask you about one of the players in this drama, of course, Fethullah Gulen, a man who is currently residing in the United States, from which he runs quite an empire. To the extent that he figures prominently in Erdogan’s machinations, why would that be?

HAROLD RHODE:

Well, they used to work together. But they have – they’re both fundamentalist Muslims, but in different ways. The reason that Gulen fled to the United States and I think it was somewhere around 1999, is that the military had recorded him at a private gathering saying, we will use democracy, we will tell the West everything it wants to hear, we will patiently wait and eventually we will take over. He fled, he was given asylum, I think that’s the right word, in the United States. And he resides something like fifty or sixty miles north of Philadelphia. Now the point is that he has a lot of followers in Turkey. He’s got a lot of followers throughout the entire Turkey world, which involves anywhere from Xinjiang Province in China, in northwest China, to the Adriatic Sea, wherever Turks are. Education, empire, financial empire, these are a lot of supporters. In the Middle East, when people take power, whatever means they use to, they need to eliminate eventually all those who could possibly stand up to them. And so Gulen is a potential problem, cause he does have a lot of support within Turkey, at least, and in other places as well.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And in particular, Harold Rhode, as I understand it, among the kind of people that you’ve indicated these purges are affecting, that – the educational community, teachers, professors, administrators, police, jurists, and others. And these are all being rounded up and fired as I understand. Is that correct?

HAROLD RHODE:

Yes, you’re absolutely right. And he’s now demanding that the United States extradite Gulen to Turkey where they’ll probably assassinate, eliminate, whatever, torture – I’m not sure what they do. Well, then the Americans, to the American government’s credit, are saying what’s the evidence? Give us the evidence that he was behind this terrorist – what they call this terrorist plot to take over Turkey, to overthrow Erdogan. And if we see the evidence is true, then we will go to our legal procedures to do so. Erdogan – the point is, that Erdogan says, he’s guilty. Well, our response is, what’s the evidence? In the Middle East, you don’t need evidence. When the powerful leader says it, that’s the answer. And here we have again the clash of cultures between Turkey, in fact the whole Muslim world, and the United States. And maybe he is –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Harold Rhode, let me ask you about a detail about Gulen, because, of course, he not only has an educational empire and other businesses in Turkey and parts of the Turkic world, but here in the United States. And one of the arguments that’s being made not to extradite him and to otherwise enable him to continue to operate something like a hundred and sixty, I believe it is, chartered schools across the United States is that he is a moderate Muslim, a Sufi Muslim. And yet, what you’ve said about the identity of views of Gulen’s agenda and Erdogan’s, they’ve had a falling out over power, of course, but talk, if you would, very quickly about – well, actually, we’re going to have to go to a break. When we come back, I want you to help explicate what it means if this fellow is in fact a Sufi, if anything, in terms of the challenge that he might represent to the non-Islamist world, the Muslim as well as non-Muslim community of nations who don’t want to live under shariah as I believe he thinks we all ought to. Harold Rhode is our guest from the Gatestone Institute. We’re talking Turkey and we’ll do more of it right after this.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Harold Rhode is our guest. We’re very pleased to have him joining us from Israel, where he is in residence at the moment and monitoring closely what’s happening not too far away in Turkey, a country in which he is an acknowledged expert in our country. And Harold, I want to just get at this question of whether Fethullah Gulen is in fact a moderate Muslim as we’re being told by some of his advocates and some of his followers.

HAROLD RHODE:

Well, the word moderate we love to hear in the West. I’m not sure what it means in the Middle Eastern context. So it’s really, frankly, meaningless. He is a Turkish Muslim nationalist. He believes that the Turkish form or the Turkish – the entire Turkish world form of Islam is the correct one. And he doesn’t particularly like the Arabs. Erdogan has the combination of everybody together sort of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. Fethullah and him don’t disagree on the eventual outcome, which is the whole world should live under Islam, under a caliph and under shariah. They don’t agree on the way to get there. Another group is ISIS. They have the same goals. Again, but their method of reaching those goals are different. And a lot of the other groups, we’re obsessed with finding this, is this a moderate, is this an extremist? They all have the same goals. But they believe – where the fight is among them is to the methods that they use. The Saudis, the same thing. The Saudis are Wahhabis. Another – really, they’re a radical form of Islam. It would be very nice for us to sit there while they all fight each other and let them work it out together.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

It also seems that, Harold, you are, again, one of the people who understands all this better than just about anybody in our country, they’re perfectly prepared to make common cause when it suits them against the infidel, notably us. And whatever their tactical differences may be, it is the overarching strategic objective and shariah that binds them, is it not?

HAROLD RHODE:

It’s true. And they hate each other and in the Middle East there is never any such thing as bygones be bygones. And so the battle between the Shiites and Sunnis, which started when their prophet Muhammad dies. And it’s boiled down to who should then rightfully be the head of Islam thereafter. That means the caliph. The Sunnis say it should be Muhammad’s family. And the Shiites say it should be the aristocracy of Mecca, which was the center of Islam. Now to us, that happened long ago, we have this phrase in English, that’s history. But in the Middle East, most history, that’s history. Nothing is every solved, there’s never any peace. And so you wait until you are strong enough and then you kill, you eliminate your enemy. That’s the way it’s done. I’m not saying it’s good or bad. I’m simply describing the reality. No –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Seems pretty bad to me, especially since we’re the enemy of choice.

HAROLD RHODE:

You can use that. But Frank, that’s true, but remember that in the age of the Soviet Union, there were times that the CIA and the KGB worked on joint missions together when they both thought it was in their common interest to do so. But Islam, there are very different instances. That’s the story of the Shiites and the Sunnis. They hate each other with a passion and they each consider themselves, the other should be dead. But, you know, Osama bin Laden, his family, they’re Sunnis, they were extremely Sunnis. And they were held in Iran because it was hard for the Americans to get to them for a period of time. The family acknowledged that and Iran eventually acknowledged that, you know, they both hated each other, but they hated America as well.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Let me come back to Turkey, Harold, cause there’s several things I really want to make sure we cover before we run out of time. Just to finish up this thought on Gulen, so the likelihood is, whether Erdogan actually inspired and executed this coup or whether he is simply capitalising on a very hapless operation that seems to be very, very unlike the Turkish military, even after all these years of infiltration and subversion by Erdogan, these folks are now being rounded up as are others who aren’t, evidently, associated with Gulen but who are simply seen as opponents of Erdogan’s regime, to the end that there is now underway, it would appear, a very, very serious consolidation of power and quite possibly a huge stride forward towards a really Islamist republic. Is that your judgment as well?

HAROLD RHODE:

Okay, let me just put it this way. The great Bernard Lewis is probably the greatest Middle Eastern historian alive, now over a hundred. He said back in the 90s, that he could imagine a situation where Turkey and Iran switch places. That Iran leaves behind its Islamic republic and joins again the community of nations. And that Turkey becomes – becomes an Islamic force, who again, tries to lead the whole Muslim world in the battle of Islamifying the entire world. That’s the direction that Erdogan wants to take it. But Erdogan has also threatened the president of the United States. He said if we do not give him back Gulen, give – send him back to Turkey, that that will have a terrible impact on US-Turkish relations. Let me just tell you that the Turkish power – that it’s sort of like, you’re either all powerful or kissing someone’s feet. And this, you know, all of a sudden, Erdogan, by winning – or taking over the way he has now thinks that he is not only the chief dog on the block or whatever the right phrase is, but he is going to dictate to the United States and NATO what the rules of the game are. It is extremely important from a policy point of view that we make it clear to Erdogan that if there’s anybody in the end makes the rules and we’re not working together, in the end we got to pull rank, because we are – America is the greatest and most powerful nation on the face of the earth. And who the hell, if you’ll excuse me, is this pipsqueak Erdogan to tell America, to try to push America around?

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Well, this remains to be seen, but it would certainly fit the pattern of policy under president Obama that he would submit to –

HAROLD RHODE:

Unfortunately, yes, unfortunately I agree with you.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

— to this kind of aggressive and belligerent behaviour by even a fellow that supposedly subordinate and an ally to boot. Harold, one place where this may well come to a head, as I understand it, is with respect to the American use of a Turkish air base at Incirlik. We’ve had reported that there are nuclear weapons stored at that facility. I don’t know that that’s been confirmed because the US government doesn’t do that. And as former government employees, neither you nor I will probably say anything about that, but it just does raise to a heightened level of concern what they might do. They’ve already cut off power, as I understand it, to Incirlik, and obviously shut down the air operations against the so-called Syrian, you know, based Islamic State, but what do you think is likely to eventuate there?

HAROLD RHODE:

We have a treaty, a status of forces agreement with Turkey on how we are able to use Incirlik, the base, there. If they’re violating the treaty, then we should violate the treaty. They’re declaring the treaty null and void. If they dare do what – I don’t know about the electric thing, but if they’re doing that, our response should be to make sure we must, if there are nuclear weapons there or whatever, we must insure the safety of our people. I want to tell you as an aside that when the president of Iraqi-Kurdistan, Barzani, a few years ago came to the United States, Barzani’s people told me that they – they offered president Obama two American bases, wherever they wanted, to replace Incirlik if something went wrong with the relations with Turkey. And unfortunately our president said no. It is the only serious base we have in that area. But I guess it’s necessary. We cannot let these people, this pirate, this dictator, this Islamic fundamentalist radical, dictate to us the way things are going to be. We have a treaty with him. We love signing documents. In the Middle East, signed documents are useless. They’re nothing more than a step to get where they want to go.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

All right, Harold, we’re going to take that to the next step in just a moment. We’ll be right back with more in our final segment with Harold Rhode of the Gatestone Institute, one of the country’s preeminent authorities on Turkey. Right after this.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re back for a final segment of a very special, important and extended conversation with Dr. Harold Rhode, a man I’ve known for many years in terms of both our overlapping service in that he continued to perform in the Pentagon’s senior ranks, is one of really the duty experts for our government on matters involving the Middle East in general and Turkey and Iran in particular. And Harold, you were just describing this practice of treaties being very differently regarded in the West, by the United States most especially and by our counterparts in the Middle East. I’m interested, in particular, in, of course, the future of the US-Turkish relationship and the broader Turkish participation in NATO as well. What are your thoughts as to where this is likely to lead if Erdogan has his way?

HAROLD RHODE:

Well, I’m not a prophet, but I have some thoughts of what might be here. First of all, since paper agreements mean nothing in the Middle East, they’re nothing more than steps along the way to get to where they want, Erdogan’s goal is to use us, to use America, to use NATO, to use whatever, to get as far as he wants. And like the train of democracy we talked about earlier, to get off. I know what his long term goals are. I know that he’s had the patience to get as far as he has and as such, lulled us into lying to ourselves on what his real goals were. That not only, he really wasn’t going to be – he wasn’t a fundamentalist, he wasn’t this, he was a moderate. There are no moderates when it comes to fundamentalist Islam. It’s absurd. I don’t know how he wants to get there, but he wants to rule the world. I know that sounds megalomaniac, but it is how he thinks. How do I know that? I’ve only met him once. I can’t say that personally. It’s that, if you listen to his speeches and you listen to the way he talks, and you understand the context, the Islamic fundamentalist context, in which he talks and how he functions, then it all makes perfect sense. I don’t know what the future holds, but I know what he wants. And if were the United – if I were Russia, most of whose Muslims, of the former Soviet Union’s Muslims are some form of Turkish Muslim, if I were China, which is – one sixth of it is the province of Xinjiang, the native population of which are Uyghurs, which is another Turkic group, if I were them, if I were Israel, which has to deal all the time with the Islamic fundamentalists, if I were Europe, which is being taken over by Muslims, which Erdogan has a huge hand in Europe, under Muslim control, and then the idea of what they’re doing in the United States as well, slowly but surely Erdogan and the Wahhabis funded by a lot of the people in the Persian Gulf, the Arabs of the Persian Gulf and the Saudi government and a lot of senior Saudi businessmen, wealthy, they are funding this idea of eventually getting – bringing the entire world under Islamic rule and that’s the long term goal. How it’s going to happen and when it’s going to happen – we must recognise this, if we recognise this is a reality, then we must come up with a strategy to deal with it. Which means the Islamic fundamentalists must be defeated not on our terms but in – they understand this – frankly, that [UNCLEAR] has to be eradicated. That’s the right word. Eradicated. We must call them, the enemy, as for who they are, label them for who they are and then act accordingly.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Harold, this is a – it does sound fantastic that they could think this. And yet, as you say, even in the past few years, the progress that they have made, notably in Europe, is unmistakable. And let’s just talk about that for a moment, because, of course, the Erdogan regime has brought that crisis about in Europe. There were a lot of Turks there to begin with, particularly in Germany, but what Erdogan has engineered in terms of bringing many, many more in through Turkey and otherwise creating conditions through which others would come in from Libya and so on has changed the demographics of Europe for sure. There’s a talk now, of course, as a result of the deal that he struck with Angela Merkel, that Turks will be given visa-free travel in Europe. Give us a sense of what the implications of that might be, especially if, as has been reported, there is something like three hundred thousand Syrians that he is going to naturalise as Turks and thereby make eligible for such travel as well.

HAROLD RHODE:

Well, Erdogan has engineered a win-win situation for him. Again, Europe, against Angela Merkel, probably the most powerful leader in Europe. And this is how he’s done it. First of all, he allowed for all these refugees to go through Turkey from Afghanistan, Iraq, from Syria, from wherever. These are Muslims. And I know that our news has shown women and children and all that, but about seventy to eighty percent of them are not with women and children and they’re not married. What they are is young men, somewhere between the ages of fifteen, sixteen to about thirty-five. In other words, the high testosterone group. And these people are flooding into Europe. ISIS itself says that they have people among the refugees. That’s wrong. So that would bring the day of reckoning of Islam taking over Europe closer than Erdogan was pushing that. Now, he’s come up with an agreement with Angela Merkel, with Germany, which says we will keep the refugees in camps. But in return for money, for six billion Euros. And visa-free travel that you just mentioned, Frank, throughout Europe. There are seventy-five to eighty million Turks. Whatever the way it is, this is a win-win situation of getting more Muslims into Europe and, again, Muslims have patience, that’s how they work. Slowly but surely, they mind their own business until there’s a critical mass and then they make demands. From shariah courts in the area, halal food – imagine in Germany not eating pork. That’s absurd. It’s a major staple in the German diet. So there’s schools in Germany now who no longer serve pork in deference to the Muslims. They don’t have any deference to anybody else. My point is that it’s a win-win situation that Erdogan has engineered. You must admire the man’s cunning.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yes. And there’s no question, Harold Rhode, in your mind that this is part of his longer term agenda and, indeed, as you say, the same agenda of jihadists throughout the world under whatever stripe, the violent kind or the Muslim Brotherhood’s civilisation kind, to in fact achieve the end state that they believe in god’s will. Namely, that shariah rule the world under a caliphate of some kind. So, Harold Rhode, just in closing, we’ve got less than a minute, but the developments in Turkey of the past week seem to signal a great leap forward, if I can use that expression, in terms of this Islamist agenda. Quickly, what would your recommendation be to the kind of people you served in the past in the Pentagon or the president of the United States to do about this?

HAROLD RHODE:

Use the, at first, military – since we’re in a situation, we’re really, really setting out a plan. We must eradicate their bases. We must shame them, we must humiliate them. So people realise that this – if you want to do these things against us, you will pay.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. And as I understand it, this is the one basis under shariah under which they are allowed to give up the jihad is if they recognise that there is no hope to it. Harold Rhode, thank you very much as always for your time and your insights as well as your vision for what we need to be doing. I look forward to talking with you further in the near future. In the meantime, our very best to you and the people of Israel. Enjoy your stay there and be safe. The rest of you will be, I hope, staying tuned as we talk with Gordon Chang about some very important developments that are also of interest to us in another part of the world, the South China Sea. That and more, straight ahead.