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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
coincidental serendipity, uses the same word as the Quran, Abraham walid, walid, this begotten, begotten, meaning sexually conceived. When it gets down to verse 16 to Jesus, the form of the word changes to a feminine word, passive construct in Aramaic, meaning there's no man and there's no action. I mean, physical action.
And when Muslims hear this, the scholars, the cab drivers, my close friends, they're just enamored with this. So the point is, the way Jesus was begotten in the Bible and in the Quran is identical.
you said a number of things that are of crucial importance. Okay. Well, I've been thinking for some protracted period of time, especially in the aftermath of the Abraham Accords, that... There are foundational principles that unite Muslims, Jews, and Christians. They're all people of the book, for example, and they're all Abrahamic people.
And those are the idea that all of our cultures are predicated on a book rather than a city, rather than the state, rather than a military power, rather than an empire. That's a radical similarity. People of the book is a radical change
with regard to say the Romans or the Greeks or the pagan empires, the fact that a book is the foundation of the culture, that's an unbelievably revolutionary notion. And then the three, the books that guide all three of the major Abrahamic religions have marked similarities. One of them, as you pointed out with regards to Islam and Christianity is the centrality of Christ.
Okay, so you said that was a big surprise to you and I'm sure it's a surprise to many of the people that are listening. Well, then, where's the rub? Well, that's what you turn to right away. Christ is a central figure. Jesus is a central figure in the Islamic text, as he is in the Christian text. But there's doctrinal differences, which you zeroed in on right away.
But one of the things that you were fleshing out, investigating, was the possibility that the doctrinal differences with regards to the circumstances of Christ's conception and birth were less evident at odds than might be if you were ultimately pessimistic, right? Because the question is, for me, look, the Abraham Accords demonstrated that
People of goodwill could circumvent the State Department and, what would you say, accumulated doctrinal diplomatic wisdom that it was impossible to negotiate peace between the Arab world and the Israelis, absent an agreement on Palestine, which was never going to happen because... the Iranians, it's in the Iranians' best interest to keep the Palestine conflict with the Jews going on forever.
And so that's a non-starter. And the Abraham Accords signatories just walked around that in quite a remarkable way. And I don't think that that's an accomplishment that's been heralded sufficiently. And I know that the people, particularly in the UAE, they've built that tri-faith complex.
And they seem to be working towards a solution that's similar to the one that you're pursuing, which would be the idea that, well, maybe we should start with our commonalities and see what we could do. negotiate so that we could establish something approximating at least a lasting and cooperative peace right as opposed to continual warfare now
I was stunned, first of all, that the Abraham Accords were ever signed, but I was also more stunned that they held in the aftermath of October 7th. I know the Saudis backed off and everything got kind of quiet about Arab-Israeli cooperation, but the... The Accords didn't fracture.
And then more recently, I noticed that the UAE in particular, but also the Saudis, have taken steps to do something that the West is very loath to do, especially the UK, France, and Germany, which is to define radical Islam, right, Islamism, to set it outside the canonical Islamic doctrine and to oppose it.
And the leaders in the UAE have called out Germany and England, or the UK in particular, for being weak in their opposition to Islamism, which the UAE and the Saudis don't regard as part of canonical Islamic tradition. If I got that, is that in accordance with how you... Yes, indeed.
Okay. And the Abrahamic Accords... were not lauded anywhere near what they should have been. I was privileged to be in the gardens at the White House watching the signatories and working with North Sudan where I visited 24 times, a hard tomb and the surroundings, to encourage them to participate, which they did, as did Morocco as well. So the Abraham Accords began to extend.
And Saudi was, as you know, as you pointed out, were right on the edge of joining. And then October 6th occurred. And what a convenient thing to... to happen at that timing. It was horrific. It's nothing less than a atrocious atrocity, but it was also well-timed.
Well, it seemed to me that the purpose of October 7th was to stop the Saudis from signing the Abraham Accords.
Well, that was one of the goals. It was Iran's goal, and there were others, but October 7th. And that's exactly why the timing was as it was.
Right, right. Well, and it meant with some success, although the agreements didn't fragment. Okay, so now you have this epiphany, and so you were talking about going to Israel and speaking with the Palestinians, and you faced opposition from within your own party, especially Israel. On the neocon side? Yes. Or having the temerity to propose such a thing? Okay, let's pick it up from there.
So loving enemies is not appreciated in politics. And this is—I don't want to get off on a tangent, but this is why Donald Trump is disdained by neoconservatives as well, because he talked to Kim Jong-un in his first term. He made friends with Putin. He's a master negotiator, as you've analyzed his psychology, I noticed, on one of your blogs, which is fantastic, by the way.
And I have a great respect for Donald Trump because his heart, I believe, is for peace. And he talks repeatedly. about all these young men dying and all the people dying. He talks about dying and killing repeatedly. So I believe this is why there's an opposition. He is a man of peace.
Showing 81–100 of 279 · page 5 of 14
← Previous
Next →