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Michael Youssef [born 1948], Founding Pastor of the Church of the Apostles in Atlanta, holds a master's degree in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Emory University.
In May, more than a month before President Trump’s June 14th announcement of an initial deal with Iran, Youssef appeared on Salem Radio Network’s That Kevin Show to discuss Iran, Israel, end-times urgency, and his new book, An Unholy Alliance: How Progressivism Brought About an Islamist Invasion.
He was candid. “Particularly with the Iranians, I don’t believe a word they say. They can swear on a stack of Qurans, and I still would not believe a thing they say. They are ideologues. They want chaos. They want war; that’s why they have proxies in Lebanon, in Gaza, and in Yemen.”
The Islamic term is taqiyya, entailing a doctrine of concealment historically associated with Shiite Islam, arising when Shiites lived as a threatened minority under Sunni rule. It permitted concealment of one’s beliefs under persecution or coercion. Iran is overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim, where deceiving an adversary is not a vice but a virtue.
Reinforcing Youssef’s judgment, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that Iran attempted to smuggle Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-linked terrorists into the U.S. by concealing them within Iran’s World Cup soccer delegation.
The IRGC is not Iran’s regular army but a separate military, ideological, and political power center created after the 1979 Islamic Revolution to defend the clerical regime.
Montana U.S. Senator Tim Sheehy [born 1985], the Naval Academy graduate and former Navy SEAL, double-downed as he was interviewed by Brian Kilmeade on FOX & Friends:
“Iran is a murderous regime that doesn’t want the deal. They don’t want $6 gasoline. They don’t want the Straits to be open. They want you, your family, and all of us to be killed. They want to wipe our civilization off the map.
“What we’re seeing now is the Rope-a-Dope: buy time, lead us along until President Trump and his team are out of office, and re-up their campaign. We’re dealing with a regime that will not negotiate in good faith.”
Which brings us to Ambassador Mike Huckabee, who addressed the JNS International Policy Summit* in Jerusalem on June 21, reaffirming America’s “unbreakable bond” with Israel and declaring that Iran “will never have a nuclear weapon.”
We wrote to the 70,000 American Renewal Project pastors on April 28: “If the United States weakens the regime, stirs hope among the oppressed, and then steps back before the tyrants are broken, it will amount to the ultimate betrayal of a people crying out for freedom. To awaken hope and then abandon the captive before liberation is secured would be a historic blow to the cause of freedom.”1
On January 13 this year, President Trump had announced on Truth Social: “KEEP PROTESTING - TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! … HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”
At JNS, Huckabee opened with characteristic wit - before taking the stage, he had checked Trump’s social media account “to make sure this was not my last speech in Israel,” noting that the President “typically fires people in the middle of the night via social media.”
Then he said what needs saying:
“One of the reasons our nations are tied together is because Christianity was formed upon the Jewish and Judeo-Christian foundation. Western Civilization was formed upon that foundation, and without that, there would not be an America. It is as simple as that.”
When critics excoriated him, Huckabee answered plainly:
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