Why Does the Middle East Matters?

Why does Glenn care so much about the Middle East? Quite honestly, a lot of it has to do with the scriptures. Faith and family are the foundation of who Glenn is and why he does what he does. But it’s not just Glenn – The Bible has been around for thousands of years and heavily influenced America and the Founders. Glenn explained why the Middle East and Israel are so important during a candid and powerful monologue to open tonight’s Glenn Beck Program.

As  you’ll see in the next couple of weeks, I’m going to have some pretty frank conversations with you because my life is changing and needs to change some more. And I don’t think we’re all that different from one another.

What makes me different than most hosts on television is I’ll take you through the things that I’m going through because I don’t think we’re different. And I think they’re important. And tonight is a good example of the change in approach that I want to take on the program. I’m going to tell you why I care about things, not from a political standpoint, but why I care. And if you have a different reason, fine. But we have to be able to explain to people why things matter.

Before 9/11, I was a slug. I didn’t care about the Middle East. I didn’t know. I figured if it all went into a sinkhole…they want to blow themselves up all the time, whatever, I’m cool with that. I’m over here, they’re over there, whatever they want to do. But after 9/11, I admitted that doesn’t work, and there’s a lot that I don’t understand.

But I remember a listener called in and said what is happening to us? And I said I don’t know, but I vow to find out. And I will tell you, ever since that day, I’ve not stopped learning. I made a promise just as you did on that day, never again, and I’d figure it out. I’ve never stopped trying to understand the world around me, why the things are the way they are. That’s what led me to the idea of Progressivism and how bad it really was. And most importantly, not just why things are, but why I should care.

There are so many things that happen today, and you can’t care about all of them. So what is it that you have a gun to your head, what is it that matters to you? To me, what matters is my family and my God. That’s it. I like history because it teaches me what’s coming next, but the only thing that matters is my soul and my family.

So when it comes to the Middle East, I have something else I can look at, and you may disagree with it, but it’s important – if you disagree with the Bible that’s fine, whatever, but you have to understand the role it played in history, and why this matters. We are connected to Israel. We are wound in so deeply to Israel, and most people don’t even know it. The Bible and our own history shows us how, and I’m going to show you just a couple of things tonight.

And this is a history that I’m teaching to my own family because too many people no longer care about our history, no longer care about the history of, you know, God. They don’t care, and they’re trying to change our history to fit an agenda, and that’s what happened yesterday with Oprah Winfrey and now tonight with the Middle East.

Let me give you a little bit of history here, and excuse me, because I’m not the guy to go to on this, but in a real quick nutshell, biblical times, this is Israel. And Israel was split into two kingdoms, the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom. The southern kingdom was Judah. That had Jerusalem, root Jew, right? The ten tribes were up here in the north. That’s the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Judah remained, and they were cut off from Jerusalem. They started worshiping false idols. They became spiritually bankrupt, and God says in Jeremiah, he’s like, you know, you’re becoming the whore of the earth. What are you doing? And you’re passing it around to all of the other nations of the earth. Stop it. And he tells Judah you tell them to stop it, and you two get along. And they don’t, and they’re warned – you’re going to be taken by the Assyrians, and you’re going to be taken into captivity. Well, that’s exactly what happened.

Judah remained, but the tribes in the north, they were taken, and they went throughout the Assyrian Empire. The Kingdom of Judah was not scattered. This is where the term Jew comes from, Judah. Assyria at the time was the most feared nation on earth. Their name was synonymous with atrocity. They skinned prisoners alive. They cut off body parts. They pulled out tongues and eyes. They put piles of skulls on display so everyone knew, don’t screw with us.

Here’s what I find very fascinating on who they were. When they were finally defeated, they had all of these, this tribe of Israel as captives. But when they were finally defeated, the Assyrians and the Israelites, they fled, and they went north. And they fled out of captivity through the Caucasus Mountains. The Caucasus Mountains are where you hear the word Caucasian, the Caucasus Mountains.

What’s interesting is the Assyrians who were very good, meticulous record keepers, and who were just brutal, they settled in Italy and in the Germany area and the Russian area where Fascism comes from. But the Israelites, the lost ten tribes, they went north, and they started to scatter the other direction, and they went to the coastlines, generally in the area where our pilgrims came from.

Judah kept the Torah alive. Those who were taken captive by the Assyrians, Caucasians over the mountains, and they started to populate the western part of Europe. All of Western civilization is based on the laws of Israel. And our entire history is directly tied to this moment. Our pilgrims thought that they were completing the journey out of captivity from Moses.

The Statue of Liberty reflects this. On her base, she’s got a broken chain. She’s carrying the tablets. She has the rays of light. That’s God’s light. She’s a symbol really of Moses, and she is depicting his descent from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, what keeps us solid, the Ten Commandments, the law of God.

Okay, that’s just one, but I contend these symbols are everywhere. And you can believe ’em or not. It doesn’t really matter to me. I’m talking about me, why I care. Let me show you this. If you’re anywhere around the president, Air Force One, or you’re sitting here in the office, you’ll see this flag. And we see this flag sitting behind the president a lot, but nobody really ever looks at this flag, and what this flag really means.

What’s on this flag? And I’m just going to show you a couple things. There’s more, and we’re going to get into it later. We know about the olive branch for peace and the arrows for war. There’s much more to tell about this. There’s 13 olives and 13 leaves, the 50 stars around the shield, from many one, but what’s this? And what does this have to do – why would I be telling you this when we’re talking about Israel?

Well, when Joseph from the Bible, when Joseph is with his brothers, he tells his brothers that he had a dream, and he said I had a dream where the sun, the moon, and the stars all bow down to me. You mean like the sun, the moon, and the stars? That’s what this is, the sun, the moon, and the stars. Nobody talks like that. Nobody says the sun, the moon, and the stars unless it’s biblical, so is the concept of unity biblical – out of many, one, one God.

There’s strong symbolism with the number 13 being represented everywhere, 13 arrows, 13 stripes, 13 stars, 13 olives, 13, 13, 13. Yeah, I know, well that’s the 13 colonies. That’s what everyone will tell you, and that is one answer, but there is another one that many people believe. Thirteen, what else is 13? Twelve disciples surrounding Jesus, but more importantly, I think, the 12 tribes of Israel.

Well, there’s only 12 tribes, Glenn. What do you do with 13? Hmm, except the tribe of Joseph split into Manasseh and Ephraim, and those were in northern Israel. That’s the northern Kingdom of Israel. That’s the 13 tribes. Okay, hogwash. That’s all garbage. Okay, you say that’s not what any of these symbols mean on this flag. Okay, that’s reasonable, okay.

Let me take you to not the Presidential Seal; let me take you to the Great Seal of the United States. It’s the same eagle, right? Except where you have the sun, the moon, and the stars, what replaces it? Well, it’s this thing here. I don’t even know what that thing is. You don’t know what that is? I know, that’s pretty hard. It’s 13 stars again but strangely 13 stars in the shape of the Star of David. Wow, why is that in the shape of Star of David?

Well a couple of reasons – one, Haym Solomon. He was the guy who helped us. We are bound; we owe the people of Israel – Haym Solomon, that’s why it’s in that triangle. Now, what’s this surrounding it? I don’t know. Well, when Moses led his people out of Egypt, what did they follow during the day? Oh, cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. That’s what this means.

By the way, you can find the image on the back of your one dollar bill, and if you really think that’s a stretch, if you really think okay, Glenn, that’s crazy, well, you’re right. That one was done in, I don’t even know when. In the late 1800s is when they finalized this, and then I think it was, I don’t know, Wilson or one of them that finally said okay, we’re really going to use this one all the time.

So let’s go back to the original seal, the one that Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and John Adams recommended. It wasn’t this. It was instead that one. Tell me that one, Moses leading the Israelites across the Red Sea by a pillar of fire. Hello? Look at the clouds around the fire in the center in exactly the same position as the eagle. Listen to me, the slogan that they wanted to have was opposition to tyranny is obedience to God, opposition to tyranny, to pharaohs, is obedience to God.

They felt Moses was the figurehead of America. So why am I telling you all of this? Man, I have been called an anti-Semite by everybody under the sun for the last six years. As soon as I started caring, the Muslim extremists started calling and writing, and we had to have security because Glenn Beck has gotta stop saying these things and stop saying that Muslim extremists are violent, or I will cut off his head myself. That was my favorite quote the FBI gave me from one extremist.

No, you’re not violent – you’ll cut my head off to prove that you’re not violent? Nobody wants to be a pariah. I didn’t care a few years ago, but after 9/11, I promised I would find out what was going on. So what is it? We are a nation that is based on Judeo-Christian values and the Bible, period. You might not buy into the olives and the branches and everything else. It’s fact. It’s fact. But there’s no way to deny that the majority of our laws come directly from the Scriptures, right directly from Deuteronomy.

And the Bible comes from Judah, not the northern tribe, the southern, Judah. They were supposed to preserve it, and they did. The people of Jerusalem, we owe our existence in many ways. We owe our laws to them. Do you really think that we – I am a religious guy. Others who are not will think this is hogwash, but I don’t care anymore. I haven’t for some time. I’m stating who I am.

We owe the people of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we owe our support and our allegiance, not blind allegiance, and I’m not talking about putting troops down on the ground. We have to be on not only their side but God’s side. When Thomas Paine wrote about his disbelief in God, Franklin felt compelled to write him, giving him a scathing critique. It was like father and son.

Here’s part of it. He said, he wrote to his adopted son, if you will, Thomas Paine, “I would advise you, therefore, not to attempt unchaining the tiger, but to burn this piece before it is seen by any other person; whereby you will save yourself a great deal of mortification by the enemies it may raise against you, and perhaps a good deal of regret and repentance. If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be without it?”

Samuel Adams wrote the same thing. He wrote, “When I heard you had turned her mind to a defence of infidelity, I felt myself much astonished, and more grieved, that you had attempted a measure so injurious to the feelings, and so repugnant to the true interest of so great a part of the citizens of the United States.”

Here’s what he’s saying, how dare you? You have actually grown up, and you have benefited from a society that has Judeo-Christian values. You don’t have to go to church. You don’t have to like church. You don’t even have to like God. But to condemn God and try to say to the rest of society that’s nonsense, how dare you? The only reason why we exist is because of God.

I feel like I have to shake the shoulders of some of my friends and look ’em in the eye and say without the Torah, without the people of Judah, you have no law. Ours doesn’t exist. Our country doesn’t exist. Nothing exists. You get rid of the Torah, you get rid of the Bible, nothing works anymore. Then what are our laws based on? Opinion, man’s opinion. Oh, well that’s good.

This is why I care about Israel and what we’re going to do tonight. If Israel goes, if the Bible goes, you need an entirely new way to govern, because ours is nonsense then. And that’s exactly what all the powerful on the earth would like. I want you to take a second and look at what they want to replace our government and our system with. They’ll tell you right now well, we’ll just kind of wing it. Oh really?

When they really get down to it, they’re all saying that the State Capitalism, as they call it, Communist China, State Capitalism, the model of China, that’s what the future is going to be. May I remind you, may I beg you, that system has people throwing themselves off of buildings. That system is evil. And we have gone dead inside, and we don’t even know it anymore. I don’t want to live that way.

The other model that is currently out there and being talked about is sharia law. Oh, well that’s crazy. Is it? Not for a billion people on earth based on the Qur’an. I don’t want that either. The other model will be something that nobody really has articulated yet. Don’t be silly. We’re not going to do either of those. Well, give it to me, because I’ve never sold a house, even a crappy house, with absolutely no idea where my family is going to live. Have you? Because I haven’t. Until you can show me the address of where we’re headed, I’m not moving. What are we doing?

Sorry, one thing I don’t want to do is get my blood pumping. I want you to sit down with your kids, and I want you to teach them. I want you to teach them American history like we told you last night. Thank you, Oprah Winfrey, sincerely. Thank you for reminding us about Emmett Till so we could remind America who he really was. And then I want you to teach your kids biblical history, because it is our history, and it matters as I will show you tonight.

Part 1:

Part 2: