Why did God create us in diverse nations, races, and tribes? Two memorable Qur’anic verses, taken together, suggest an answer.

“…So compete with one another in doing good. Wherever you are, Allah will bring you all together [for judgment]. Surely Allah is Most Capable of everything.” (2:148)*

“O humanity! Indeed, We created you from a male and a female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you may get to know one another. Surely the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous among you. Allah is truly All-Knowing, All-Aware.” (49:13)

In today’s world, certain nations and tribes compete for wealth and power by striving to be the worst and the least righteous—lying, cheating, stealing, raping, torturing, and committing genocide far more than would seem to benefit them strategically. It’s like they think they are trying to win a contest to see who can be most “cartoonishly evil.”

Compared to that kind of competition, World Cup soccer seems benign and wholesome. As I reflect on the latest World Cup news—Morocco beats Netherlands in a thriller, Paraguay upsets Germany—it occurs to me that the notion of “competing in goodness” can be applied to the national identities represented by soccer teams.

Morocco has become a soccer powerhouse in recent years, reaching the final four in the 2022 World Cup and going on to win the Arab and Africa cups and the U-20 World Cup. Last night the Atlas Lions won a thrilling come-from-behind victory over The Netherlands. It was the first time an African team has ever beaten the Dutch.

As in 2022, the Moroccans feature a world-class defense anchored by goalie Yassine Buonuo, who won the game with a final penalty kick save. As the Eastern Hemisphere’s best Global South team in the 2026 World Cup, Morocco has built a huge international fan base, and the crowd in Monterrey, Mexico was overwhelmingly dressed in red and cheering for the Atlas Lions. The Moroccan team’s habit of performing Sujood, the prostration of gratitude, after every match—win, lose, or draw—endears them not only to Muslims, but to everyone who appreciates spirituality and humility. And their history of flying the Palestinian flag, taken up by their fans, has earned them the appreciation of the overwhelming global majority that supports Palestine.

The Global South beat the North last night not only in Monterrey, but in Boston as well, where underdog Paraguay stunned Germany, also on penalties. Europe’s domination of soccer, like its domination of global politics, economics, culture, and military power, seems to be waning. (And just as European economies are kept afloat by immigrants from the Global South, so too their soccer teams succeed in large part thanks to dark-skinned immigrants.)

A minority of white Europeans rabidly hates immigrants, while a larger minority (perhaps even a majority) would like to see immigration reduced. Do these people cheer for their soccer teams, even though they’re full of immigrants? Google tells us:

In many European countries, far-right groups and anti-immigrant activists will passionately support a diverse national team, while simultaneously holding exclusionary political views for the rest of society. However, this paradox is often ignored in the unified moment of cheering for a victory.

Even the Islamophobic anti-Moroccan-immigrant Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who had been tossing out anti-Morocco provocations before the match, tweeted his congratulations to the Atlas Lions in the wake of their victory. Maybe he can convince his government to expel a few of the best ethnic-Moroccan Dutch soccer players and make the Atlas Lions even better.

It seems that most people, not just hardcore chauvinists, cheer for their own nation’s soccer team, whatever the ethnicity of the players. Issa Diop, who enabled last night’s Moroccan win by scoring an equalizing goal in the first minute of stoppage time, has a Senegalese father, but Moroccans could care less. Diop and Buonuo were the two most Moroccan guys in Monterrey last night.

So we all tend to cheer for our own team. But on what basis do we cheer for anyone else’s? Sometimes people support nearby nations’ teams based on geographical proximity and cultural affinity: Koreans support the Japanese, Middle East Arabs and even Algerians support the Moroccans, and so on.

Others cheer for underdogs. Gotta love plucky little Paraguay!

And then there’s politics. Everyone I know was cheering for Iran in this year’s World Cup (and in their war on the Axis of Epstein). When Trump’s immigration goons kept abusing the Iranian team, going so far as to not even let them sleep on US soil, it just increased the world’s sympathy for the Islamic Republic’s footballers. And when dubious refereeingdecisions, and a possibly rigged tie between Algeria and Austria, conspired to eliminate Iran, it just cemented the Iranians’ status as the world’s favorite team.

Another reason to cheer for or against a team is one’s general impression of that country. I cheer for Morocco not only because I love their sujood ritual and Palestine flag, but because I live here and like the place and its people. Moroccans are strikingly friendly and hospitable. The culture has a strong undercurrent of spirituality. The cuisine is incredible. The linguistic and cultural diversity is amazing. There’s a kind of flexibility and openness in the Moroccan personality that I find appealing.

Booing Canada

And as much as I hate to admit it, I’m going to enjoy cheering against Canada when Morocco plays them on the Fourth of July. What do I have against Canada, you ask? Well, for one thing, they have refused me entry about half the times I have tried to go there since 2017. Though I have crossed back and forth into Canada many dozens of times since the 1970s, starting in 2017 at the behest of the ADL and the Bronfman crime family that owns it, and Canada they began harassing me at the border and (sometimes) denying me entry, using the ridiculous pretext that I was supposedly arrested for drug possession in Waukesha, Wisconsin in June 1977—which in fact never happened. They claim that because their record shows the arrest, but no disposition, I might be a fugitive “on the lam” from a minor drug arrest that never happened almost 50 years ago. What’s more, two of the Canadian officials I have discussed this with at the border were incredibly rude, belying their nation’s reputation for politeness.

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Is material progress an illusion? Is the modern world a sham? And is AI exponentially intensifying the ersatz nature of modernity? Paul Cudenec, a notable voice of the freedom movement during the COVID lockdowns, discusses these and other questions, including “illegal” ones involving the Rothschild banking dynasty and Zionism.

Excerpts:

Modernity, AI

Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad Audiovisual. Kevin Barrett here, doing podcasts of one sort or another since 2006, when I got expelled from the academy for wrongthink, I guess it was. So I’ve been doing wrongthink ever since.

And here to do some wrong thinking with me is Paul Cudenec. He’s a notable dissident from the UK, and he’s got a Substack which is highly recommended. He contributes to publications like Winter Oak and Organic Radicals, which I just discovered. It’s all very cool stuff and harks back to my deep history as a kind of left-leaning, anarchist-leaning troglodyte Luddite, thinking that the modern world and progress and all of that stuff is not so great. So I think we’re pretty much on the same page on a lot of things. Welcome, Paul Cudenec. How are you?

Paul Cudenec: Thanks, Kevin. Nice to be able to speak to you.

Kevin Barrett: Where should we start?…These days there are a lot of backwards-looking folks who, like us, are not enamored with the modern world…there is a right wing who want to expel all the immigrants from Europe and the West and go back to Conan the Barbarian land and be heroically militaristic and that sort of thing. And likewise there are others who are not enamored of progress and pseudo-equality and fake liberation movements who are skeptical of the right-wing approach. How do you situate yourself among those of us who are skeptical of material progress as the be-all end-all?

Paul Cudenec: I come to this through anarchism. I was active in the anarchist movement in the UK for years. I live in France now, actually…I’ve never liked the modern world: consumerism, supermarkets, factories…the idea that it is a life-stifling force, that we are forced to live inside this great machine…I’ve got over that now. Actually, I think I’ve got a very particular role in the current time in pointing out what’s wrong with the system we live in, informed by what I know of how we used to live, but with the purpose of forging a future that is better than the present we live in now. It’s inspired in some ways by elements of the past, but only the elements that we like. It’s not possible to recreate the Middle Ages or the Bronze Age. It will be a different society…

Kevin Barrett: So today people are telling us that AI will make us all elite. AI, these robots, will do all the work, and theoretically they could create great beauty, just like great civilizations created great beauty in the past. But you and I, I think, are a bit skeptical of turning the world over to AI and its overlords. Why are those people wrong who say that AI is going to save us?

Paul Cudenec: Well, there are so many reasons, aren’t there? Even the idea that AI can create beautiful things is disproven just by looking at a piece of AI art. I recognize it now. It took a while to realize that particular style was actually AI creating things. I mean, it’s hideous because it’s false. To me, anything that is beautiful—I associate beauty, in the classical tradition, with truth and nature. Those things belong together.

Some creative professionals may be able to use AI to do away with boring, mundane work—filling in forms or whatever—but they will still have their creativity in their job. For most people, AI is placing them in little boxes and telling them what to do. AI is becoming their slave master, basically, their boss.

It’s also the prison guard to their cell, deciding things without any communication, without any causation, without the slightest hint of humanity—which you would expect from a human boss. There would at least be some understanding there.

This is going to be a rigid system, far worse than any of us have experienced before.

And, of course, it’s going to continue to destroy nature, the living world, with these data centers they’re building everywhere, sucking up all the water. How selfish of us to think we should be prioritized for drinking water over the demands of the AI industry. They’re cutting down trees and building power infrastructure to provide the electricity these systems require.

Kevin Barrett: Do you think there’s a built-in reason why AI is not going to make things better? It’s basically an imitation machine. The chatbots imitate human speech, human conversation, human discourse.

Paul Cudenec: Deliberate falsity—not just accidentally. It’s been set up that way.

The good thing, though, is that this imitation may prove to be its downfall. I’ve read that AI goes around the internet finding things to adopt as its opinions and source of knowledge. Increasingly, it’s finding mistaken material generated by AI itself and feeding that back into the system.

So yes, I think you’re right, and I hope they can’t get past that. Maybe they think if they build enough data centers they can…

Zionist Censorship

Kevin Barrett: The basic logic they’re using is pretty incredible. Supporting Palestine is supposedly a call for genocide against the Jewish state. Wait a minute—I thought it was kind of the other way around, wasn’t it? Who went there and tried to get rid of the people who were already living there? I don’t think it was the Palestinians.

Paul Cudenec: No, exactly.

The last time I was in the UK, I spoke at an event staged by an organization called The Real Left. It used to be called Left Lockdown Skeptics during Covid.

I wasn’t the only speaker making the point that it’s the same networks and the same entity behind both agendas. I ended up talking about Judeo-supremacism and the power of the Rothschilds.

A Jewish anti-Zionist speaker who had spoken earlier that day and whose speech I had enjoyed—because she explained how, despite being Jewish, she’d been accused of anti-Semitism for opposing Israeli actions—actually became offended by what I was saying. She accused me of anti-Semitism and walked out.

That was the last time I was in the UK. I think the temperature has been notched up a bit since then on those issues.

It’s not that different in France, really. I think they’ve gone a little further in Britain, but there is a lot of pushback. That’s encouraging. There are many people speaking out on this issue on social media and elsewhere.

Kevin Barrett: So now in the United States, it’s actually a certain branch of the Republican Party that’s pushing these restrictions. They’re banning what is really a pretty mainstream style of thought and analysis.

Back when I was in the academy, being radically pro–Third World liberation and supporting Palestinian liberation groups was considered perfectly normal in many circles.

It was the same thing with South Africa. Everybody saw it as the same thing. Mandela freeing South Africa—everybody agreed on that, except for a small minority.

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The US-Israeli war on Iran is already pretty weird, even before we start factoring in Chinese-alien intel technologies, mind-waves controlling Trump, psychedelic “jellyfish” drone formations terrifying pilots and taking down F-15s, EMF weapons that cause droughts (and yield downpours when you blow them up), Uri Geller issuing red-alert Mullah-telepathy warnings as he attempts to eat kosher hummus with a flaccidly drooping spoon…do we even need such stuff to see this as the oddest war ever?

It is deeply strange that a mid-level regional power like Iran can utterly defeat the world’s most powerful military. It’s bizarre that the supposed religious fanatics who rule Iran speak and act with tact, reason, consistency, and restraint, while the president of the United States blathers incoherently, alternating drooling obscenity-laced threats with equally incoherent outbursts radiating peace, love, and call-option-friendly investment optimism. And perhaps the most bizarre sight of all is the global economy drifting slowly and inexorably towards a cliff, like an unconscious canoeist drifting towards Niagra Falls, while gathered onlookers (the markets) seem oblivious to the catastrophe that is about to unfold.

Already cursed to live in interesting times, we don’t need the curse to get worse (and presumably even more interesting). But Iran war fringe stuff is definitely a thing, and as far as I can tell nobody has tried to bring it all together.

I asked Gemini:

Has anyone written a comprehensive article about “fringe” phenomena from the Iran war? I’m talking about reports like:

*Uri Geller says Iran is using mind waves to control Trump.

*F-15 pilots are terrified of Iranian drones flying in “alien jellyfish” formations.

*Iran accuses the US of weather warfare and claims it ended its drought by blowing up US radars in the Gulf States.

Gemini answered:

“There is no single, all-encompassing article that covers all of these ‘fringe’ and unusual stories.”

Until now.

And I’m the man for the job. Before I learned Arabic and became an Iranian-TV Middle East expert, I moonlighted as Dr. Weirde, author of Dr. Weirde’s Weirde Tours: A Guide to Mysterious San Francisco. What’s more, my academic training included studying reports of fringe phenomena as background for a Ph.D. dissertation comparing miraculous and supernatural claims in medieval Moroccan saints’ legends to contemporary personal experience narratives. So the precise spot where Islamic-world-geopolitics meets high weirdness is my bailiwick.

Where to begin? We might as well start with the jellyfish. Last Wednesday, Press TV’s headline announced: “Downed F-15 pilot’s account of ‘alien’ Iranian jellyfish formation shocks US intel.” According to the report:

The US military and intelligence community were thrown into a state of profound shock and disbelief when an American F-15 pilot, shot down over Iran in April, reported witnessing a sight that defied conventional understanding of Iranian military capabilities.

According to a report by CNN on Tuesday, which cited four sources familiar with the incident, the pilot described seeing multiple Iranian drones hovering in the air, moving in perfect unison, in a formation that eerily resembled a jellyfish.

CNN quoted one of the pilots:

“Multiple drones interconnected and moving as one with smaller drones below the bigger drones like legs,” one of the sources familiar with the pilot’s witness account told CNN. “Real alien sh*t.”

But is it “alien sh*t” or Chinese sh*t? China is famous for its amazing sky displays featuring drones flying in incredibly dense and complex formations.

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While Iranian drone engineers may be cooperating with their Chinese counterparts, we shouldn’t imagine that Iran isn’t capable of breakthrough drone innovations without outside help. Iran is an engineering powerhouse, as the US military is learning the hard way. Google tells us:

Iran produces roughly 230000 to 250000 engineering graduates annually. It routinely ranks in the top 3 to 5 countries globally for total engineering graduates outperforming major economies like Germany and Japan. A standout characteristic of Iran’s engineering landscape is that women comprise up to 70% of its STEM and engineering graduates one of the highest ratios in the world.

Wait a minute…Isn’t Iran a medieval theocracy that keeps women barefoot and pregnant? That’s what Fox News and the Iranian royalists in Beverly Hills keep telling us. I guess those barefoot and pregnant Iranian housewives must be finding the spare time to sit around in their chadors earning online engineering degrees and building extraterrestrial-looking drone swarms that can take down F15s. Radical Islam at its absolute scariest!

So there’s probably nothing extraterrestrial or supernatural about Iran’s “alien jellyfish drones.” As the Ukrainians found out the hard way, Iran has good drone engineers.

And while we’re debunking dubious legends, let’s quickly disabuse ourselves of:

*The Khordad “UFO” Sightings & Metallic Spheres: An AI hallucination…ask your favorite AI about this and it will spin a completely fictitious yarn, inventing a tale that will make the accounts of the craziest human UFO abductee seem relatively plausible.

*The Persian Gulf “Cthulhu” / Caspian Sea Monster Reports: Another AI hallucination, in which Gemini takes a deep whiff of DMT and tells us:

• The Claim: A fringe maritime rumor alleged that sonar technicians aboard coalition warships detected massive, unidentified biological anomalies in the Strait of Hormuz. The more extreme versions of the rumor claimed Iran had “weaponized deep-sea creatures” or unearthed an ancient anomaly to attack naval vessels blocking the strait.
• The Reality: This rumor was a highly distorted game of telephone regarding Iran’s asymmetric naval tactics. To counter American naval primacy, Iran deployed hundreds of semi-submersible, low-profile speedboats and remote-controlled explosive aquatic drones to bottleneck the Strait of Hormuz. To sonar operators and radar systems, these small, erratic, wave-skimming signatures looked highly unusual, which internet forums quickly spun into “sea monster.”

But there is no such rumor. Gemini hallucinated it by taking the insane American psy-op about Iran supposedly weaponizing kamikaze dolphins, adding a pinch of HP Lovecraft and a very real fleet of Iranian speedboats, and turning the mixture into a bad acid trip.

Trump prides himself on the art of the deal. It’s the name of his ghostwritten autobiography.

But Trump’s legendary skills as a dealmaker are mostly…legendary. As in “just legends.” He’s gone bankrupt six times. Trump was never much of a deal-making businessman. His real job description is “frontman for the Kosher Nostra.”

Trump’s hotels and casinos were never meant to turn a profit, which is why they kept going bankrupt. In reality, they were bust-out money laundering operations for Jewish-dominated organized crime, with Trump bearding as the shabbos goy carnival barker.

No wonder Jeffrey Epstein was Trump’s best friend. Epstein was never a real billionaire, just a Mossad-run front for Wexner & Co.’s MEGA money. Likewise Trump is a creature of the same forces. Wexner created Epstein just like Roy Cohn created Trump.

Trump is still fronting for the mob. His corrupt dealings are almost too extensive to track. Ironically, the worst decision he ever made—allowing Netanyahu to drag him into a disastrous war on Iran—has paid off in billions of dollars worth of insider trades for those who know when Trump is going to announce that peace is at hand, as opposed to when he’s going to drop bombs and utter bloodcurdling threats. If you want a winning bet, you can wager on the likelihood that those “in the know” are disproportionately Jewish.

Trump’s lack of skill as an analyst, and his reliance on intimidation and bluster, has crippled his handling of the Iran file. The Orangeman’s hysterical attacks on Obama’s JCPOA were not based on any well-informed analysis of the US-vs.-Iran chess game. Instead, Trump’s anti-JCPOA fervor was a ploy for prying money out of stupid, hysterical Jewish billionaires laboring under the delusion that taking a harder line would always be good for Israel.

Trump probably believed his own schtick. Why not? He was being paid to believe it.

Before Trump started greenlighting and joining Israel’s attacks on Iran, the Islamic Republic’s leadership had always behaved cautiously. It could have seized control over the Strait of Hormuz any time, but chose not to. Why not? The ayatollahs knew that if they did that the American globocop would pull out his nightstick and start whacking them. Since they couldn’t be sure precisely how big that stick was, and in any case did not wish to be whacked, they refrained from exercising their Hormuz option.

But then Trump and his Israeli masters pulled out their nightsticks and started whaling on Iran for no particular reason. It was an illegal, unprovoked attack—the supreme war crime. That forced Iran to take over Hormuz in self-defense. And suddenly it became clear that Trump’s nightstick was rather small and limp, while Iran’s controlling 25% of the world’s oil flows is the equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

It was as if a mean little bully had been successfully intimidating a big strapping giant for years, but finally overplayed his hand by physically attacking the giant, forcing the latter defend himself and discover his own strength.

As I have been saying since Trump attacked Iran on February 28, “this may go down in history as the most strategically stupid military attack of all time.” Now Trump needs to find a way out, but Iran holds all the cards. The only question is how to disguise the US-Israeli surrender, and Iran isn’t interested in making it easy.

At first glance it seems that Trump has blundered into the mother of all Zugzwangs, a chess term for a position in which every possible move makes things worse. If he escalates militarily, the inevitable loss just gets that much more catastrophic. If he adheres to the terms of the Memorandum of Understanding he signed with Iran—i.e. surrenders—he admits the war was a fool’s errand and he is the fool who just wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on the mother of all strategic defeats. And if he keeps delaying and waffling in hopes of staving off the inevitable, the looming admission of defeat will be compounded by a huge economic crunch just gets that much worse with every passing day that the Strait of Hormuz isn’t wide open. All of these options could lead to a crushing electoral defeat in November, impeachment, and the possibility that the-most-corrupt-president-in-history-by-orders-of-magnitude might spend the rest of his life in prison…or at least be bankrupted by prosecutions and lawsuits that would make the hell he went through from 2020 to 2024 look like a walk in the park.

How Trump Could Emerge Triumphant

But Trump does have an ace in the hole, if he’s bold enough to play it. Netanyahu has, inadvertently, offered Trump a way out. Trump could conceivably save his presidency, and his reputation in the history books, by throwing Netanyahu and Israel under the bus. And I mean WAY under the bus! Half-measures won’t work. I’m talking about an all-out total reversal of America’s traditional subservience to Israel in general, and the Greater Israel project in particular.

Trump needs to do whatever is necessary, even if it includes declaring a national emergency, to throw all of America’s remaining military, economic, and diplomatic might behind “saving Israel” by forcing it back into its pre-1967 borders immediately. As in, right now. Whether or not Pakistan really threatened to “erase Israel…(if you touch our delegation) we will wipe you off the map,” that is the kind of threat that Trump needs to deliver to Tel Aviv. What’s more, Trump should add, the US is sending in inspectors and nuclear experts to retrieve the contraband Israel stole from the NUMEC plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, among other locations. From now on, Israel, like Iran, will have to join the NPT.

Once Israel is back inside its 1967 borders, UN troops can guard those borders and, with the support of the region and the world, maintain peace until Israel recovers from its genocidal psychosis. Meanwhile, Palestine can rebuild, also with the support of the region and the world.

This isn’t rocket science. The world, the region, and the Palestinians are fed up with Dog Rape Nation. Only a dramatic, game-changing move could possibly restore enough legitimacy to the Zionist Entity to get it through the next couple of decades. Shoving it behind its 1967 borders and ensuring that it stays there might do the trick. (Apologies and reparations from the genocide perpetrators to the victims would also help.)

Ten days ago, on the occasion of the Islamic New Year, I wrote:

The tenth of Muharram will mark the holiday of Ashura. For Shia Muslims Ashura is a festival of mourning, marking the martyrdom of Hussein at Karbala, while for Sunnis it is a complex amalgamation of mostly-celebratory activities and commemorations. The stark contrast between Shia mourning and Sunni celebration makes Ashura the one calendar date when the two interpretations of Islam seem to radically diverge.

But Ashura’s mourning/celebrating opposition actually overstates the difference. Sunnis, like Shias, mourn the death of Hussein at Karbala, and revile his killer, Yazid. But most Sunnis don’t ritually commemorate that tragedy on Ashura like the Shia do. (Actually, some Sunnis, especially Sufis, have made mourning for Hussein a part of their Ashura observance, but it’s not done much nowadays.)

Here in Morocco, people sometimes throw water on each other as a playful way of celebrating Ashura. They call it رش (splash) and imagine themselves blessing each other with holy Zamzam water from Mecca. The custom may also be linked to the Biblical/Quranic story of Moses parting the Red Sea, commemorated on Ashura—though in that case it was the bad guy, Pharaoh, who got splashed.

Ashura illustrates how Sunni-Shia differences, viewed superficially, can look huge: One celebrates, the other mourns. But beneath the surface, the two traditions are not so far apart, since all Muslims interpret the story of Hussein’s tragic martyrdom in roughly the same way, with the main difference being the degree of intensity of feeling.

Though Sunni and Shia Muslims agree that Hussein’s martyrdom was a terrible tragedy, their sharply divergent ways of observing Ashura tend to reinforce the sectarian divide. Sunnis celebrate Ashura as the day of God’s deliverance of Moses and his people by way of the miraculous parting and un-parting of the Red Sea. Other auspicious events said to have occurred on Ashura include Noah’s ark landing safely, God forgiving Adam and Eve, Yunus (Jonah) escaping the belly of the whale, and Yusuf (Joseph) being rescued from the well.

So how should we nondenominational Muslims observe Ashura? Should we mourn with the Shia or celebrate with the Sunni?

Though not a religious scholar, I came to Islam primarily by way of reason. I find Islam’s approach to God fully compatible with philosophy’s. (For details, see my conversation with Laurent Guyénot.) Since the open gates of ijtihad were what brought me to Islam, I’m going to keep thinking things through. And when I think through the issue of Ashura, it occurs to me that both the Shia and the Sunni get it half-right.

The Shia are right to remember and honor Imam Husayn’s sacrifice, “not merely a historical tragedy, but as the enduring criterion by which truth and falsehood continue to be measured.” Husayn stood up for truth against falsehood, justice against oppression, and right against wrong, heroically refusing to back down from his principles or give up because he was so massively outnumbered. His martyrdom is an inspiration not just for Shia people, and not just for Muslims, but for all humanity.

A Christian colleague of mine and former co-host at False Flag Weekly News, the late Presbyterian pastor John Shuck, was deeply moved by the story of Imam Husayn, and considered his pilgrimage to Karabala a high point of his life. Having just lost another wonderful and brilliant FFWN co-host, Cat McGuire, I am reminded to be grateful for God guiding me to this path that has crossed with such extraordinary people. Every Ashura, and every Arbaeen forty days later, I think of John Shuck at Karbala and am inspired by the example of that brave American Christian who wound up being disowned by his flock for following the example of Jesus and the prophets, peace and blessings on them all.

If the Shia are right to mourn Husayn, does that mean the Sunni are wrong to celebrate Musa’s delivery from slavery, among other triumphs, on Ashura? Allahu alim…but my best understanding is that Husayn’s martydom has a triumphant aspect as well as a mournful one, in that it has inspired millions of people across the generations to stand up for justice with their hands, tongues, and hearts. In the end, Husayn triumphs over his killer Yazid, because his example inspires people of truth and justice to stand against oppression and evil. So God’s plan for the triumph of good over evil, symbolized by the deliverance of Musa, Nuh, Yunus, and Yusuf, also applies to Husayn’s heroic sacrifice at Karbala.

We are witnessing this heroic, triumphant aspect of the Karbala tragedy today, as millions of courageous people, many but not all of them Shia Muslims, are making great strides toward liberating their lands from the genocidal Zionist-imperialist Dajjal. Iran’s David-vs.-Goliath victory over the combined might of Israel and the USA owes its inspiration to Husayn’s heroic sacrifice at Karbala. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s martyrdom, and the martyrdoms of so many others, were inspired by Karbala, and taken together are part of a larger pattern of good triumphing over evil. So celebration, as well as mourning, is indeed warranted!

As I observe Ashura here in Morocco—where people are celebrating their soccer team’s come-from-behind victory last night, as well as the deliverance of Musa, Nuh, Yunus, and Yusuf—I will embrace contradictory feelings, both celebratory and sorrowful, feeling gratitude to God for guiding me to His final revelation…while remembering the sacrifice of Imam Husayn, a tragedy that symbolizes spiritual and temporal triumph over both internal and external evils.