Mark Siljander
speaker
279 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Mark Siljander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, no kidding.
He said, well, since you asked, and of course, the team I'm with, I didn't hear him say it, but I could feel everything. Oh, thank God he asked the question. And I had this plan. And see, God gave you very specific talents, and you're applying them and using them to influence people, when I respect very highly God. And he gives each of us certain talents and backgrounds for reasons.
And we have to discover what that reason or reasons might be. And right then and there, it occurred to me that this is why God had me in that useless politics. I've served in town council, state legislature, three terms. I'm not trying to... That was, at least, what a waste of time. Because you can't really get anything done. That's why. So I could get in the door.
Why would he talk to me otherwise? And ask a question such as that, knowing of the background. So people calling you for your expertise. And as a consequence, you can help and bless people and work with them. And I gave him the plan. I said, let's do a hybrid force of African unions, so it'll mostly be Africans and UN. Let's make most of them Muslim, and I'll talk to the Secretary General.
Ban Ki-moon, do you know him? I said, yes, he's a Buddhist, and he's a very good man, and we've become friends, because his number one goal is to stop the genocide in Darfur. And this is, just to remind viewers, this is in the mid-2000s, 2004, 5, 6. And he said, I'll do it if you write it. I said, I wasn't a bastard. I didn't write anything, including speeches.
He said, no, but I think you could do it. So we go to Dubai a few days later after touring with his plane tour. the displacement camps in Darfur with hundreds of thousands of people living in a blue ocean of UN tarps underneath these blue tarps. And the kids, hundreds would see a white face and they'd come and talk about food. And it was so heart-wrenching. I mean...
You have to say, well, this is what God made me to do. Why am I here in the middle of nowhere in Darfur in this horrible crisis? Then I go to a tent of hundreds of women who have been brutally raped and they're being tended to and they wanted, they said, can you give them a word of encouragement? It was one of the hardest talks I've ever given.
What do you say to a person that had experienced such horrific atrocities? So right then, my heart was committed to do whatever it took and wherever God would lead me. And once that was accomplished, written the resolution, the new resolution that saves his face, still accomplishes the goal. There's much more detail, but it's unnecessary to get into it.
It passed the Security Council, even with some of our edits, they had to be corrected. because we were typing in a business center in a hotel in Dubai with his staff. And it literally went through and deployment of peacekeepers were accomplished in Ban Ki-moon. And I went there to have a prayer session. And keep in mind, he's Buddhist background.
Wonderful man, by the way, my opinion, in terms of a human being and compassion. So there's my wife there. who was with me, and we go in to meet Bashir, the president and his foreign minister, with Ban Ki-moon and his chief of staff. My wife was teasing him because now I was friends with him, had met him maybe 12 times, and we prayed together.
He laughed and often offered me a Sudanese wife because he thought I was a good Muslim because I knew the Quran so well. And she said, please don't offer my husband any more ice. It was, as we say in North Carolina, a hoot and a half. It was amazing. And he laughed, and it really broke the ice. Because, you know, Ban Ki-moon is the great stature of the U.N. Secretary General.
And then we started all laughing. My wife left, and we went in the room. We're having tea and crumpets. And the The president says, Omar al-Bashir, now remember, it's Bashir, his foreign minister, the ambassador's chief of staff, I mean, as chief of staff of Ban Ki-moon, Ban Ki-moon, just the five of them, he says, Mark, you pray. He's always asking me to pray, I don't know why. So we hold hands.
Can you imagine this Buddhist, Muslim, Christian holding, praying, holding hands? I got up and said, it's time for me to leave. So we left. And the next day they signed the peace accord. And they were... There's peace.
All right, sir. Well, that's a very good place to bring this part of the conversation to an end. I think for all of you watching and listening that... You can join us on the Daily Wire side.
I think what we'll do there is you talked about six conflicts that you've been engaged in, and I think we should probably delve into that and also discuss more about the resistance that the kinds of movements towards peace that you've been participating in have encountered and why those exist, why those have existed and still exist.
We got into that a little bit at the beginning of this conversation, but I think we could... That's fertile ground for continued discussion. So all of you watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side. Thank you to the film crew here in Duluth, right? We're in Duluth, right? Yes, I had a talk here last night with Father Mike Schmitz, which went very well.
That'll be released on YouTube in relatively short order on faith. And so that's probably worth paying attention to if you're inclined. Thank you very much, sir. That was absolutely riveting. Thank you, Jordan. Well, and I'm so interested too in following up with you with regard to the work you're doing on establishing this like domain of foundational agreement.
I mean, at minimum, what that would mean is that, well, instead of fighting about all of this, you know, we would understand with the people that we have to share the planet with that we agree on all of this. And, you know, maybe we can, this is something Carl Rogers did point out, you know, if you listen long enough,
you find out that many of your problems vanish in the communication and those that remain are susceptible to intelligent and careful negotiation. And so, God, I hope that's true. It sure better be. And your experience has been that it is. And that's real experience and with real consequences. And so that's very much worth knowing. Very nice talking to you, sir. Thank you, Jordan. You bet, you bet.
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