Are advanced learning courses in public school racist?
Is merit itself a racist concept?
And the view from Jerusalem from best-selling author and someone who calls himself a Jewish follower of Jesus, Joel C. Rosenberg.
Finally, what's in a name?
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
We're seeing the issue of race, allegations of racism, penetrate just about every aspect of American life.
In some ways, this all seems so strange because we are now, well, we're 70 years away from the beginnings of the civil rights movement, from the Brown versus Board of Education decision.
We're 60 years away from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and still Still, we're talking about this.
In fact, we're talking about it more than ever.
Now, Dr.
Fauci was recently speaking at a graduation ceremony at Emory University, and he echoed what is now becoming kind of a familiar line.
He talked about the undeniable effects of racism in healthcare.
Listen. That some people of color find themselves in from birth, Regarding the availability of an adequate diet, access to health care, and the undeniable effects of racism in our society.
Let us promise ourselves that our corporate memory of this tragic reality, that an infectious disease disparately hospitalizes and kills people of color, does not fade after we return to some form of normality.
So here we get the woke perspective on healthcare.
The idea that, and as far as I can see, when I hear these kinds of allegations, I'm always looking for where is the evidence?
What are you actually saying, Dr.
Fauci? Now notice Fauci, by the way, is echoing what other people have said.
Here we see the CDC director says racism is, quote...
A serious public health threat.
And I think to myself, is he saying that hospitals are more reluctant to admit black patients because they're black?
That's what racism means.
Racism is a kind of theory of inferiority, and discrimination is the kind of practice that flows from the theory.
But it looks like these people are talking a different kind of language.
Let's listen to this.
This is the AMA president, Susan Bailey, who appears to be singing out of the same hymn book.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disproportionately plague Black and brown communities, it's clear that collective action from all stakeholders is needed to dismantle systemic racism and confront, embed, and advance equity across our health care system.
So I want to translate.
What she seems to be saying is that more blacks and Latinos get COVID than whites.
So that's what she means by disproportionate impact.
That when you look at their ratios in the population, there are more of them getting it and maybe more of them dying from it than whites.
Right? Now, if I were to consider the question of is there racism in healthcare, I would start by asking, first of all, how does this disease kind of play out?
Are you more likely to get it, for example, if you're poor?
Are you more likely to get it if you're fat?
Are you more likely to get it if you have certain types of pre-existing conditions?
Are you more likely to get it if you live, for example, in concentrated living conditions where you're more exposed to people around you?
For example, are urban people more likely to get it than rural people who are perhaps more dispersed?
Are you more likely to be severely affected by it if you are older?
And all of these are germane questions, and we know answers to most of those questions.
And yet, when we hear these doctrines of racism pronounced, I ask myself, did you correct for socioeconomic status?
Is it the case that this is not a discrepancy affecting blacks?
But a discrepancy affecting poor people.
Because poor people, arguably, have less easy access or have less means to take advantage of healthcare that's available than people who are better off.
So is this a socio-economic problem?
I don't see Fauci.
Fauci presented absolutely no data that's teased out these different sorts of variables.
What about rates of obesity?
Now Fauci mentioned that, but he mentioned that sort of as if this was like a side point, but it's not a side point.
Why? Because while Americans in general are obese, the fact of the matter is nearly 40%, nearly 40% of African Americans are obese.
They are the most obese population of any ethnic group.
Latinos seconded.
They're in the high 30s.
And whites are in the high 20s.
So the obesity stretches across the society, but it doesn't stretch across differentially.
Now, you could say, well, of course, it could be the residual effects of racism that make people obese.
And you can go ahead and make that case.
But again, what strikes me as...
So notable is that no one makes these cases.
There is simply no attempt to prove your point and say, look, once we correct for all these different variables that do affect And do affect who gets COVID? And do affect the likelihood of someone getting a vaccine?
I saw one preposterous article that said, we're trying to figure out why communities of color aren't getting the vaccine.
Could it be that they're less likely to own an automobile?
And I'm thinking, seriously?
Is lack of automobile ownership a problem?
I mean, people who live in cities, a lot of them don't need automobiles.
Is it that difficult to get to a place where you can get a free vaccine?
So the bottom line of it is, it seems to me that this allegation of racism, which has not one shred of proof attached to it, if the doctors aren't racist and the hospitals aren't racist and the medical personnel aren't racist, The simple fact that there's a discrepancy in the number of blacks and whites that get COVID doesn't prove that the system itself, the healthcare system, is racist.
So I think what you have here is a kind of generic appeal to history.
There was all this bad stuff going on in 1830 and 1920, and then...
Quickly, a quick move to the disproportionate impact today.
Ergo, there has to be racism.
This strikes me as fallacious reasoning, bogus reasoning, but the kind of, quote, reasoning that is sadly all too common today.
The California Department of Education is coming, I would say, dangerously close to declaring that merit itself, excellence itself, is a racist concept.
I now want to talk about a California DOE Department of Education report that has all these recommendations that are very startling.
It would be very startling if someone were to come from outside America and see that this is going on in America, in one of America's largest states.
The first thing they want to do, they're proposing, is eliminating calculus in high school.
And the reason for that is that they say that, well, we're not really sure that high school students need calculus.
Really? I can just imagine you trying to say this to some, you know, kid from China or India.
If you said that in an Indian or Chinese school to teachers or students, they would think you were from Mars.
We're living in a time where technology demands knowledge of math.
There's a kind of worldwide competition to get ahead in this field.
And here you've got people in the Department of Education saying calculus is kind of unnecessary.
So why would they say that?
Now... As you read into the report, you find more telling revelations.
They don't like the idea of having advanced courses, not just in math, but in any subject at all.
Why? Here is the bottom line.
In California, 2004 to 2014, and according to the report, 32% of Asian American students were in gifted programs, compared with 8% of white students, 4% of black students, and 3% of Latin students.
So this is the bottom line.
The bottom line is that they're afraid that these kinds of gifted programs, tracking programs, excellence programs, demanding programs, tough math programs are disproportionately another kind of classic term here.
They're afraid that some groups are doing better than others.
That's what it comes down to it.
Now, they're declaring that this differential performance, the fact that some groups are doing better than others, shows that these programs are, quote, inequitable.
Of course, what the results show is that some groups...
Are academically better prepared, study harder, work harder, do more math problems, maybe have families that emphasize math problems more, are more eager to succeed.
It shows all those obvious things which are manifest in the work.
There was actually a study years ago by the Stanford sociologist named Dornbusch.
In which he said, you know, there's really no mystery why Asian Americans are overrepresented in these gifted programs.
They study a lot harder.
So here you have a behavioral explanation for why groups do better.
But for the California school system, This is a problem.
And so what they want to do, instead of saying, hey, listen, why don't we try to raise the performance of black students and Latino students?
Why don't we try to interest them more in math?
Why don't we try to improve their test scores?
Have them become more competitive with the other groups?
No, it's none of this. Let's get rid of the program.
It's kind of like, let's get rid of the thermometer.
That way it won't show you have a fever.
I think what's happening here, and the reason all of this is now kind of reduced to race...
Is that for people who are doing badly in our society, race is their only merit.
They've got nothing else to offer, and so they go, hey, I'm black!
So, the race becomes a badge of kind of self-worth.
Race becomes the basis of self-esteem.
It's actually, in a way, so pathetic, and it's a close mirror of what used to happen with white racism in the past.
It's often pointed out that poor whites in the South were great defenders of slavery, even though they didn't benefit from it.
So why would poor whites, who had no slaves, defend the slave system?
The answer was that they liked, you may call it the aristocracy of color.
That there was a sort of system in which even if you were a poor white, you were sort of on top of even the most educated black guy.
Even the most educated free black was below you in social standing, so your race...
It became a badge of how important you are.
Race became your merit.
And what I'm saying is the same thing is happening now, not with whites, but with minorities.
And what you have is you've got these race activists playing to this and basically saying, listen, what matters about you is not how much you study.
It doesn't matter how much effort you put in.
It doesn't matter what your learning skills are.
It doesn't matter what you can demonstrate on a test.
Really, your self-esteem should be rooted in what you see when you look in the mirror, your skin color.
So, to me, this is a formula for pulling not just the black students and the Latino students down, but all of American students down.
And I'm reminded here of a poem that was written many years ago by a black writer, Aimee Cesar.
He's a champion of a movement that at that time was called negritude.
It was kind of a celebration of blackness.
This was a guy from the islands.
And I want to read a verse from this poem because it seems to me to reflect the sensibility that's at work today.
Here's what he says.
Hurrah for those who never invented anything.
For those who never explored anything.
For those who never mastered anything.
In other words, what he's basically saying is, yeah, it's true that minorities haven't really explored the world or invented modern medical solutions or gotten us to the moon or sent the Voyager out into orbit.
What he's basically saying is, we've achieved nothing.
But that's okay, because we're still great.
Why? Because we're black.
And I'm sure he'd say if he were to meet me, because you're brown.
But no, my brownness is not a basis of my self-esteem.
Nor should it be. It was Frederick Douglass who said, let the sun be proud of his achievement.
Our race is something that is incidental.
It's not important to who we are.
It is the painted face, as someone else said, in a little different context.
The bottom line of it is, our self-esteem should be based on what we can do, who we become, what we make of ourselves.
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I was thinking about this concept of merit as somehow a racist concept.
And then I happened to take a look at the famous biblical parable of the talents.
This is Matthew 25, the famous story about the talents.
And I thought to myself, what would the critical legal studies perspective be on this biblical parable?
This parable is a kind of nightmare from the critical legal theory point of view.
And let's see why.
I have in front of me the King James Version and it says that the kingdom of heaven is as unto a man traveling into a far country who called his servants and delivered to them these goods.
at the very beginning, There is the insinuation that the kingdom of heaven resembles a kind of meritocracy of a kind that we will see.
So the master has these servants and he gives one of them five talents.
Talent here referring to kind of an ancient coin.
Or it could refer to a talent as in a capability, a form of excellence.
One guy gets five. The second guy gets two.
A third guy gets one.
Now... As the story proceeds, the guy with five engages in commerce, investment, trading.
He turns the five into ten.
The second guy does the same.
He turns the two into four.
But the third guy buries his talent in the ground.
He does nothing with it.
And when the master comes back, the first and second guys say, hey, master, you gave us talents.
We have doubled them. And here's the proceeds.
And the master is overjoyed.
And he says, I'm now quoting, enter thou into the joy of the Lord.
So the master rewards effort.
He's just as happy with the second guy who took two and made it four as he is with the first guy who took five and made it ten.
Why? Because in both cases, they applied themselves with equal effort, industry, and maybe creativity to multiply what God, what the master had given them.
But the master is very angry with the third guy.
And he basically says...
Thou wicked and slothful servant.
In fact, he's ready to cast him into outer darkness.
And then he says this, which I find very interesting.
This is kind of a progressive nightmare.
I don't think either AOC or Bernie Sanders would be too happy with this one.
Take therefore the talent from him, from the guy with one talent who did nothing with it, and give it unto him which hath...
Ten talents. So take the one talent and give it to the guy who has the most.
You may almost call it redistribution upward.
Now, of course, think of how alien the spirit of all of this is from the critical legal studies perspective, which of course would go something like this.
You know, I see a system of systematic oppression going on here because obviously not everybody was given the same.
So right to start out with, you have what they call inequity.
One guy got five, one guy got two, one guy got only one.
So the starting premise of critical race theory is that in any just distribution, everybody should have the same.
But see, that doesn't even work.
Why? Because everybody doesn't do the same with what they got.
Even if you gave everybody the same, let's say the master in this parable gave everybody two talents.
One guy made it four.
One guy made it three.
The other guy buried the two in the ground.
So even though you started out equal, you don't end up equal.
And of course, what happens with these critical race guys is they only look at the end point.
And then they reason backward that if the ending, if the end point is not equal, the system must be rigged.
So even, in fact, a neutral system that would assign the same number of talents to each of the three is insufficient because it may not produce A quote, equitable result.
And so, what would be the sort of Nicole Hannah-Jones, Ibram Kendi critical legal theory solution?
Well, I think it would have to go something like this.
The guy with the 10 talents needs to confess his privilege.
He needs to acknowledge that he's an oppressor.
He needs to acknowledge that the guy with one talent is poor because he has ten.
He needs to now figure out how to correct this systemic oppression.
He might need to have some sort of a revolution against the master to overthrow the master and then establish some kind of socialism inside the biblical parable to try to produce a better result.
The bottom line of it is, You can see that this whole system that the race people are pushing is antithetical to encouraging the best in people.
It's antithetical to bringing out human capacity, human industry, human effort.
It's ultimately a consolation and a recipe for people being sluggish, being slothful.
In other words, defeat, victimology, is now the greatest achievement.
The greatest achievement is not something you did.
It's how many times you were hit on the head with a truncheon.
One hit... Pretty impressive.
Ten hits, even more impressive.
So you have here, I think, a perverse psychology that elevates oppression, and in many cases, fictional oppression.
The guy with one talent wasn't oppressed.
He was just downright lazy.
He was just downright uncreative.
He was slothful, to use the word from the Bible.
And so we see in the miniature of this parable, The conservative philosophy, which is we're all dealt a deck of cards in life.
The guy who succeeds is the one who uses his talents well.
And then we see against it the progressive or liberal philosophy, which is by and large, if you don't do well, it's not because of you.
Just go ahead and blame the system.
You know, I don't know if anyone has yet used the phrase Bidenomics, but for me, it signifies fiscal irresponsibility.
Question comes to mind, who's going to pay for all?
It's clearly the Biden people think they're playing with monopoly money.
Now, for years, actually decades, I never invested in gold, just the stock market.
But now I'm really worried about the regime we have in Washington.
No sense of fiscal responsibility at all.
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A consistent theme in this podcast is the question, the issue of whether merit is a racist concept.
And I want to discuss in this segment a really interesting book, which I have right here.
It's called The Rise of the Meritocracy.
It's by a British sociologist named Michael Young.
And this is a...
A fable, a kind of a fictional story, but one that you'll see in a moment has great relevance to what we've been talking about.
So according to Michael Young, in this fictional story, Old England used to be a society which was not based on merit.
He says, This is not a far invention.
A society where most advancement occurs because of who you know.
A nepotistical society where you get ahead because you're a member of the aristocratic class or you're a lord or your grandfather went to Oxford and it's because your family has all these connections.
So it's a society like that.
Where intelligence is distributed throughout the society.
There are smart people in every social class and economic class.
And you have lots of smart people in the lower class.
Why? Because after all, that's not how you get ahead in the society.
It's not based upon being smart.
It's based upon kind of who you are, where you were born, and who you know.
So that was the, let's call it the old world.
And, says Michael Young, in that world, actually if you were at the bottom of the heap, you didn't like it.
But on the other hand, it did make you feel inferior.
Let's say for example you're a serf working in a great house.
You don't think, well, I'm an inferior person and that lord is a superior person.
Well, that guy lucked out.
He got the better end of the straw.
I got the short end of the stick.
That's why I'm a serf. It's my bad luck.
But it doesn't mean that I'm less capable than that guy or less smart than that guy or less witty than that guy.
It just means that he knew the right people.
He was born into the right family and so on.
But now, says Michael Leung, let's conduct a social experiment, a kind of thought experiment.
What if we were somehow in Great Britain, he says, writing in Great Britain, what if we were to establish a complete meritocracy?
What if we were to equalize social conditions in such a way that everybody has a level playing field?
Everybody gets to run, you may say, a fair race.
Everybody gets to start at the same point and the rules of competition are neutrally enforced.
What, he says, what, asked Michael Young, would happen?
He says, well, since there are some differences that are due to nature itself, differences in height, in strength, in beauty, in speed, perhaps even in moral development or character, he says, obviously what you would get is not the elimination of a class structure, but the creation of a new class structure.
But the difference, of course, is that the old class structure was based on nepotism, favoritism, and privilege, and the new class structure is based solely on merit.
All vestiges of the old world have been removed.
Everybody is competing in a fair race.
And now what happens?
Now, says Michael Young, we have a society that is more stratified than ever.
Now, if you're looking for smart people, you won't find them in the lower class.
Why? Because due to their smarts, they have moved up into the middle and now the upper class.
Because after all, we now have a meritocracy.
So now what you have is a stratified society, smartest people at the top, mediocre people in the middle, and really stupid people at the bottom.
And he's not talking about this in terms of race.
He's just saying, this is the way it would be if you could achieve the liberal goal.
This is the kind of punchline of the book.
We all want a society of equal opportunity.
We want a society where, ultimately, favoritism and privilege doesn't determine who gets ahead.
We would like to have a society based on merit alone.
But, says Michael Young, that society creates a system in which now, if you are at the top, You can genuinely feel, not that I lucked out, not that my uncle knew somebody who knew somebody.
You go, I'm on top because I'm better.
And so you have a sort of basis of arrogance at the top.
And what do you have at the bottom?
Well, says Michael Young, what you have at the bottom is humiliation.
The people at the bottom have no excuse.
I'm going to quote... Quote Young, he says basically that the upper classes are no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism.
Today, the eminent know that the success is a just reward for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their own undeniable achievement.
They deserve to belong to a superior class.
And, this is sort of the crusher, the people at the bottom...
Because they are not as fast.
They are not as smart.
They are not as good.
And, says Michael Young, and this is how the story concludes, what happens is that there is just as much discontent in the merit-based system, which is then overthrown by a kind of revolution at the end.
Why? Because it is too hard on the self-esteem of the people at the bottom.
Now, What does this have to say to the race debate today?
I think what it has to say is that merit today is producing some of the same inequality that racism once did.
Of course, racism produced inequality arbitrarily.
I'm better because I'm white.
White supremacy. You deserve to be at the bottom.
You're inferior. But if you have a system, let's just say, for example, in which we administer neutral math tests to everybody of the same age and in the same grade, you notice immediately that there are racial and ethnic differences.
Some groups are on top, other groups in the middle, other groups at the bottom.
Now, the new inequality is not produced by racism.
The people at the top are not discriminating against the people at the bottom.
They're outperforming them.
They're doing better than them.
But you notice that there's inequality again, but this time inequality based upon performance.
And I think this is really why we are seeing an upsurge of race talk and At a time when racism is actually almost nowhere to be found.
We're seeing an upsurge of race talk to reinforce the self-esteem of the people who are not doing as well.
It's basically as if to say, listen, you're not doing as well not because your family structure is messed up.
If you're not doing well because you're living in a terrible neighborhood where you've got terrible public schools and you can blame the public schools or blame the democratic establishment that administers the system, the whole idea is that you should take consolation.
You should get power.
You should get a sense of identity.
From the color of your skin, what could be more ridiculous than that?
It's kind of like telling people to get their self-esteem from their bushy eyebrows or from the fact that they've got flappy ears or from the fact that they're a certain height.
The Hutus are better because they're tall.
The Tutsis are worse because they're short.
This kind of stupidity, which we've seen all over the world, has now become epidemic on the basis of skin color in the United States.
It's part of a kind of American disease.
Not a new disease, but a disease that today we see in a new form.
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Go to trustednewspaper.com Amidst the tension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the way that that's reverberating now around the world, I'm really happy to have a really interesting guy join me on the podcast, Joel Rosenberg.
Now, Joel is an internationally best-selling author.
He's written, well, 15 novels, as far as I can see, four non-fiction books.
You have a new one, Joel, the Beirut Protocol, out this year.
And Joel Rosenberg is also, I think, Joel, you call yourself a Jew who is a follower of Jesus.
And maybe that's the right place to start.
I'm just curious about your background and how you and or your family of Jewish descent became followers of Jesus.
How did that happen? Yeah, well, happy to talk about that, Dinesh.
That's my favorite topic, and certainly good news in a region where we're dealing with a lot of bad, right?
We've had more than 4,000 rockets fired at us from the Gaza Strip, from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, just in the last 12 days.
More than 4,000. Half our country is living in bomb shelters right now.
So it's been a hellish week and a half, and lots of bad news.
But let's talk about good news.
Okay, so yes, So my father's side of the family is Jewish.
My mom's side is not.
My mom's side is actually English Methodist WASP, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
Her family left England hundreds of years ago.
She could be.
She's not literally part of, but she could be part of the Dollars of the American Revolution.
That's how far back...
Her English side goes.
My father's side was Orthodox Jewish.
His parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were born and raised in Russia.
They escaped in the early years of the 20th century when Czar Nicholas II was fomenting all kinds of pogroms, anti-Semitic attacks against Orthodox Jews, beatings, 60,000 murders, rapes, pillaging, burning of their homes, and so forth.
As Orthodox Jews, I sometimes make light of it a little bit just because of how horrible it was, but I say if you were an Orthodox Jew in Russia in 1906, you had two options.
You could fiddle on the roof, or you could try to get out.
And so my family escaped.
And now they escaped and they eventually got to the United States.
And like any good Jewish family, they set up shop in Brooklyn.
That's how it's done. And so that's where my father and his older brother were born and raised.
They're not from Russia.
They're born and raised first generation Americans.
But in time, my father fell away from the Orthodox Jewish family.
in Brooklyn and that's a longer story than we probably have time to get into.
But to say he was really wandering, it was the 60s, he didn't know what he believed.
He would have described himself perhaps as an agnostic Orthodox Jew, which maybe was more common in the 60s than perhaps now.
But the point is he eventually married an agnostic Methodist, my mother, the woman who would become my mother, and they met and married in 65.
and I was born in 67.
But during this time, they were trying to figure out not just how to raise me, but what do they believe?
And so they read the Quran, but they didn't decide to become Muslims.
They read the Bhagavad Gita, which But it didn't take.
They tried to read the New Testament.
It didn't make sense to them. But eventually, in 1973, they visited a church.
Now, Dinesh, again, real quickly...
What we know about that church was that the pastor at that time wasn't an actual born-again follower of Jesus Christ.
He would have described himself as a Christian, but he didn't really know how to have a personal relationship with God through Christ.
And it can happen in the Christian world, unfortunately, where it's a religion, but not necessarily an actual transaction, a relationship with God.
But all that to say, he wasn't there that weekend.
And he turned over the service to some young couples from the denomination that were just sort of traveling through early 70s.
They were playing some gospel music on their guitars, and they were just sharing their own personal stories.
And they explained the gospel.
And my mother's heart started racing.
She just was like, that's it.
That's the truth.
That's what we've been looking for.
And there was an opportunity to ask questions after the service and to pray with them.
and she had a thousand questions.
They answered them all.
She prayed to receive Christ, turned to my father going, isn't this exciting?
Couldn't find him.
When she finally found him, he was in the lobby of the church, drinking a cup of coffee.
And she's like, where were you?
This is it.
And he's like, honey, this is not it.
It may be it for you, but I'm Jewish.
I don't know what I believe, but the one thing I remember the rabbi told us, it ain't Jesus.
But this set into motion for them a journey.
And six months later, after going through the gospel according to Luke, in a small group Bible study that my mom begged him to go to, my father became a follower of Jesus, the Messiah.
And honestly, Dinesh, he thought he was the first Jew since the Apostle Paul.
That believed this.
And in 1973, there really weren't that many Jewish people on the planet who believed that Jesus is, in fact, our Messiah.
And I was six years old when that happened.
That was a spiritual revolution.
It took a few years until it took for me and really not until late in high school that I really wrestled it through for myself.
But one thing it did convince me, not only was it true, and I wasn't just now believing it because my parents believed it and had been transformed.
I could see the transformation.
But it also, it became clear to me, this being Jewish and being to follow Jesus, this is not normal.
It's normal in the New Testament, but it is normal in society.
And so, why has the Lord shown me so much mercy?
What responsibilities do I have to my people?
To my King, my Lord and Savior, because I'm one of the relatively few at that time of Jews who believed in Jesus.
And so, yeah, I wasn't really raised in a messianic culture.
That's almost a subset of American Christianity, of global Christianity.
I wouldn't have, I mean, theologically it's the same.
I would describe myself as an evangelical.
Yeah. Very interesting.
I mean, when I think of myself, for example, I would be part of the, you would say, the Gentile community that through my ancestors and then later through my own choice embraced Christianity, but I don't have that direct lineage to Judaism.
It seems to me that your Christianity is anchored just as much in the Old Testament as it is in the New, right?
Well, absolutely. I mean, one of the things we had to wrestle through was, is Jesus, in fact, the fulfillment of all these hundreds of prophecies that were laid out by the ancient Jewish prophets?
Now, obviously, the Pharisees in Jesus' day did not think that.
And obviously, the vast majority of rabbis in our day don't think that.
In fact, they're hostile in some of them.
Some are happy that Christians love Israel and love Jews and are on the Cutting edge of fighting anti-Semitism and defending Israel and so forth, but they are not comfortable with a Jewish person who believes in Jesus.
A ministry that I helped start with my wife a number of years ago, we helped fund a project a few years ago, a massive benchmark survey with LifeWay Research, the research arm of the Southern Baptists.
And the project was to look at how do evangelicals see Jews, Israel, prophecy, Palestinians, so forth.
But part of that survey studied what percentage of the American evangelical community has Jewish roots, Jewish parents or grandparents.
And what we discovered was stunning.
I mean, it was groundbreaking that there are 871,000 evangelicals in the United States that have Jewish parents or grandparents.
This is fascinating. Four times more than any number that anybody in the Jewish ministry world was thinking was the truth.
And this is exciting.
What it's telling us is that That in the last 20 years or so, 25 years, but mostly really in the last 10 to 15 years, we are seeing a tremendous awakening going on in the American Jewish community.
We're seeing it less here in Israel, though the numbers are growing, and worldwide.
Worldwide, we're at about a million followers of Jesus from the Jewish community.
And given that the world Jewish community is around 15 to 16 million, that's a stunning number and a stunning percentage.
We've never seen that in the history of Christendom.
Well, Joel, this is fascinating.
This is really fascinating. I actually had not planned to quite go down this road, but I think it's very eye-opening.
I want to take a pause, because when we come back, I want to dive into what is going on right now in Jerusalem, where you are now, and also talk perhaps a little bit about your novels, which have been, I don't know if prophetic is the right term, but they're a delineation of these larger conflicts around us.
So when we come back, more with Joel Rosenberg.
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We're back with Joel Rosenberg, bestselling author, the new book, The Beirut Protocol.
Joel, in a recent interview, you said that God loves the people of Gaza.
Gaza is actually mentioned in the Bible.
But then you also said that the sufferings of the people of Gaza are the responsibility of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Say a word about the biblical connection to Gaza and then talk about who is the real cause of the sufferings of the Palestinian people.
Well, I'll try to make that brief.
Yes, the good news is God absolutely loves the people of Gaza and the Palestinian people more broadly.
And I think it's too seldom that evangelicals say this.
We know that God loves our neighbors, but even if we see them as enemies, Jesus commands us to love our enemies.
So however we see them, we have to see them as made in the image of God.
And again, I'm someone who loves Israel.
I couldn't be more happy to be an Israeli citizen and to have my boys serve in the army here and so forth.
But we absolutely must love Palestinians.
And the tragedy that's going on there, yes, the Bible mentions Gaza 22 times.
Most Christians don't even realize that it's a factor in the Bible.
But it also was the base camp in biblical times of the Philistine armies that kept marauding and terrorizing the Jewish people, the nation of Israel.
So this is a problem.
It's been a source of a problem for millennia.
At the moment, the reason that there's so much trouble there is because of two terrorist organizations.
Hamas, which is the radical Islamist version of the terrorist organization in Egypt known as the Muslim Brotherhood.
That's a global organization, but it started in Egypt.
And Egypt was once in charge of Gaza, so it's not surprising.
But the other group is Islamic Jihad.
They're both funded by Iran.
They're both armed by Iran and directed, mostly, by Iran.
So this is the reason.
It's not the Palestinian people of Gaza that Israel has any issues with.
It's the terror regimes that are holding the people hostage and have fired now more than 4,000 rockets.
In fact, as you and I are talking, my app on my phone is going crazy because more rockets are inbound.
Yeah.
No.
Now...
In America, it appears that the Democratic Party, which was at one point, I think it's fair to say, fairly strongly pro-Israel.
You say in one of your articles that Biden may be the last remnant of that.
He seems to be the only pro-Israel guy left in the Democratic Party.
But there certainly seems to be a groundswell led by people like Rashida Tlaib, who not only See Israel as the source of the problem, but make analogies between, let's say, Israel and the Palestinians as compared to, say, the situation facing whites and blacks in the United States.
So an effort to sort of draw an oppression parallel between what's going on over there and what's going on over here.
How do you view these developments from Israel happening in the United States With, you know, I would say probably Israel's longtime and strongest historic ally.
Yeah. Well, Dinesh, it's interesting.
You're citing some articles from All Israel News, the website that we launched last September, to try to provide balanced, accurate coverage, exclusive coverage, but also links to key good stories from other media publications here in the region.
Yeah. And this war is exactly the reason we've had to do this because there's so much bias and there's so much hostility to Israel.
Imagine a country being attacked with 4,000 missiles and then the rest of the world, including and especially the media, saying that we're at fault.
So what you've got now, I did this big article on All Israel News about the left wing, the far left, which is increasingly taking over the American Democratic Party.
And I would just note, specifically what I said was that President Biden is the most pro-Israel in his party.
He's not the only. And then I would still say...
The majority is still pro-Israel, but he's the best that the party has.
And he's fighting off a movement that includes Senator Bernie Sanders, who is not only politically powerful in the Democratic Party, even though he technically isn't independent, but it's also because he's Jewish.
And so he carries this weight.
Well, he's Jewish, and he thinks that the Israelis are acting like Nazis, that we are You know, apartheid, that we are demonizing and destroying the lives of Palestinians and our government here is racist and horrible.
So this carries a lot of weight.
But Elizabeth Warren has picked up that.
She used to be pro-Israel. Not anymore.
And then Rashida Tlaib, AOC, Ilhan Omar, the crowd, the squad is growing.
The bottom line is Biden is under enormous pressure to force Israel to stop defending ourselves.
That's what a ceasefire technically is, if it's premature.
You and I both want a ceasefire.
None of us want to see a war, but a premature ceasefire, if it's forced on Israel, is actually a victory for Hamas and Islamic Shihad.
I would just say that the far left in the Democratic Party in America right now are becoming human shields politically protecting Hamas and the radical Islamist terror movement rather than helping stand with Israel.
Here's a quotation from your writings from Ron Dermer, Israel's former ambassador.
He goes, The Israeli people want to make sure the ceasefire will be a long-term pause in hostility.
So I think what he seems to be saying is that what Israel wants to do is inflict enough pain on these terrorists so that you get a genuine cessation of hostilities and this doesn't just become a strategic victory which allows Hamas to remobilize and then do it again.
That's exactly right, Dinesh, but you've 100% accurately analyzed it.
And it's not just pain.
We want to physically degrade, if not fully destroy, the actual infrastructure, the terror tunnels that run for dozens and dozens of miles under Gaza that move around the armies, as well as the weapons and the missiles and the rockets that they have, as well as the launchers and the intelligence sites and communications facilities.
We're doing that. And look, at some point, and I hope it's soon, it may be by the time, you know, by this weekend, I hope, that Israel will feel genuinely we can stop if we have peace, you know, quiet for quiet.
One other thing, I moved here with my family in 2014.
We became citizens.
We happened to arrive during the last big rocket war with Gaza, okay?
Now, that war lasted seven weeks.
4,500 rockets were fired at Israel in seven weeks.
4,100 rockets have been fired at us in 12 days.
So the intensity of this war is much bigger than last time.
But one other point is important for your viewers and listeners.
In the last war that we fought with Hamas, more than 2,500 Palestinians in Gaza were killed.
A bunch of them were terrorists, but some of them were innocent civilians.
It's very difficult to fight in an urban environment when they're firing their rockets from schools, hospitals, mosques, factories.
But in this war, with roughly the same number of rockets fired at us, fewer than 250 Palestinians have been killed, and half of those at least Are definitely terrorists.
So we're talking about a 90% drop in the civilian casualty rate in a war roughly as intense.
And I think that really speaks to Israel.
If we wanted to kill Palestinians, we have the firepower to kill tens, hundreds of thousands.
But this is 90% less than last time.
And I think it's a testimony.
Every in life is valuable.
And Palestinian lives do matter, but so do Jewish lives.
And Hamas is the one destroying them, not Israel.
And it's a very dangerous game and a lot of slander against us.
Joel, this is all very insightful and quite frankly, all stuff that I didn't know, stuff that I don't see in the U.S. media.
So I really want to thank you for coming on and talking about it and revealing it.
I do want to recommend your new book, The Beirut Protocol.
I'm just going to read a line about it.
The U.S. is brokering an historic Saudi-Israel peace deal.
But a major war erupts between Israel and Iran.
So, Joel, you're right on these developments.
You're writing about them in fiction.
You're analyzing them in nonfiction.
You're doing an important work.
Thanks very much for coming on the broadcast.
Dinesh, it's been great to be with you, and I appreciate the vote of confidence for what we're doing at All Israel News.
I hope it becomes something that people find useful and valuable, including signing up for our email alerts to get it directly to their desktop or phones.
Thank you very much. Absolutely.
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I think in the, toward the end of a fairly serious podcast about some troubling issues of race and merit, I'd like to turn to a little more whimsical note and title this segment, What's in a Name?
The other day someone asked me kind of a question that took me by surprise.
It was, he said, why are so many blacks named Anthony?
I thought to myself, what?
What? What kind of a question is that?
And the guy asking me said he knew three African Americans named Anthony.
And he thought that was odd that he wanted to know kind of why that name would have taken root in the African American community.
And the truth of it is I don't know the answer to that.
But that kind of got me thinking.
About the history of names, including the history of my own name.
Let me start with my own name, Dinesh, and if you just look at my names, my middle name, by the way, is Joseph, then D'Souza, you can kind of trace a lot about my ancestry right there.
D'Souza is a Portuguese name, referring to the fact that my ancestors were converted to Christianity by Portuguese missionaries.
Joseph reflects the biblical name, and that's my middle name.
And Dinesh is the name my parents gave me because India got independence in 1947.
I was born in 1961.
And so even though my parents have English names, it was customary in India post-independence to give Indian children, and particularly Christian children, Hindu names, kind of Indian, classic Indian names.
And my name, Dinesh, actually means God of the Sun.
Now, I noticed that in America, there are names that have, well, there are names today that are so different from the names of the past.
I mean, in the past, you'd have, you know, women, girls who were named things like Daphne, or Phyllis, or Maud, or Rose, or Petunia.
And those names are kind of vanished.
And the same kind of for men.
I mean, you rarely see a guy today named Rupert.
Or Edgar.
Or Eldridge.
Or Jedediah.
So it seems like there's a certain kind of fashion for names.
When we look historically at the early pilgrims who came to America and struck by, well, these are two names in the same family, Cotton Mather.
Imagine a guy named Cotton.
And his son, who was also, by the way, a famous preacher, his name was Increase Mather.
His name was Increase.
Increase? Can you bring in the vegetables?
What a name. What a weird name.
I guess in the aftermath of World War II, there just haven't been a lot of German kids named Adolf.
And in Italy, I think Benito too has kind of gone totally out of style.
So here you have the abolition of a name because it's connected with a loathsome character.
Obviously, we never find people today named Lucifer.
And I don't think I've ever met someone named Judas.
It's kind of funny, since we're in the biblical context, that the Latino name, Jesus, which is really Jesus.
A Dartmouth friend of mine, he was a priest, was once in a parish with a lot of Latinos in it, and there was a kind of a white guy who was reading the notices, and he goes, you know, Pablo is going to be doing the first reading, and Jesus is in charge of the collection.
Jesus is in charge of the collection.
Jesus. In slavery, slaves only had one name, no surname.
I guess this was part of the indignity of slavery.
You just have a single name, and you're called by that.
Booker T. Washington says that when he was born a slave, but one of the first marks of his freedom was to take on a last name.
He took on, by the way, the name Washington.
Notice, by the way, a lot of blacks are named after presidents, and particularly presidents who are seen as having liberated blacks.
So you'll have blacks named Lincoln, Washington, and so on.
And with Booker T. Washington, he took Washington, but then he said in order to be sort of sort of have a full name, he thought was really important to have a middle initial.
He was struck by the fact that a lot of people had middle initials, so he took T, Booker T.
Washington.
Southern names are really funny.
I mean, only in the South do you find people who are like sheriffs and sometimes even senators who have names like Billy Bob.
Billy Bob the senator from Arkansas.
So I'm always struck by names and the way that names convey culture and names convey history.
So what's in a name?
Not everything. But if you pay close attention to names, What's in them is indeed something.
As I look at this, the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as I see the impact that radical Islam has in America, I'm always struck about how prophetic the movie Trump Card is turning out to be.
This movie lays out the full track, the United States of Socialism, the move by the Biden administration, and of course what's happening on the foreign policy front.
Now, here's a little clip from the movie to give you an idea of what it sounds like.
Listen... What is the fundamentalist and jihadi agenda for America?
The future of America has to be Muslim.
What you're saying is that there is serious Middle Eastern and specifically radical Islamic intervention into U.S. politics.
Exactly. And I think it's more dangerous than the so-called Russian collusion.
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Now it's time for our mailbox, so let's go to today's question.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
My name is Sam and I just completed my first year of college.
My mom reveres your show and says you bravely fill great educational, historical, philosophical, and theological voids worldwide, but especially in America today.
She says you should call your show the Dinesh D'Souza University.
I now have been watching your show with her.
We greatly appreciate what you do.
We are fascinated by your wealth of education, debating skills, and worldly perspectives and are interested to know your training, studies, and upbringing that molded you.
into the product that you are.
You've mentioned that you had strict parents, went to a Jesuit school, and we found that you graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College.
What courses did you take?
What were your concentrations?
Thanks to you, we have expanded our knowledge base.
In doing so, we hope to become apostles of a true awakening not only for ourselves but for the hypnotized woke who are asleep in ignorance and don't know it.
Thank you. Well, Sam, well, thank you for those nice things that you said, and I'm delighted that you are enjoying and learning from the podcast.
I'll just say a couple of things.
I think that in terms of my own learning, when I was in India, Indian learning is very much driven to rote learning and memorization.
Now, I don't mean to understate those things.
They're very important. If you're going to be a good lawyer today, it's really important you have a good memory, that you can recall things and recall things at the spur of the moment.
I think my early academic drive was not even so much for the true purpose of education.
It was a little bit competitive.
So I'd go to my dad.
I had a very good friend in school named Dave Das, and he'd always come first in class, and I'd be like fifth or sixth.
And I told my dad, I think Dave Duss is just a little smarter than me because, you know, and my dad goes, no, he's not smarter than you.
He just works harder than you.
And I said, what do you mean, Dad?
I said, you know, I come home from school, I put in like, I do two hours a day of homework.
And my dad goes, yeah, but he probably does five hours a day.
And I go, Dad, you're joking.
And my dad was like, no, go ask him.
So a few days later, I had a moment and I said, Dave Duss, I said, you know, outside of school, how many hours a day do you study?
And he goes, well, five or six.
And I was like, oh my god.
And this totally put me in a new zone and I realized if I'm going to be competitive, I have to do five or six hours of work.
And so I kind of became a little bit of a nerd, a little bit of a study maniac.
Why? Because I was competitively driven.
My liberal education didn't begin until I came to America.
I went to Dartmouth. And oddly enough, some of it was in the classroom, this idea.
I was an English major.
I took a lot of courses in history and philosophy and so on.
But interestingly, a lot of my education also came from a group of conservative students that I kind of met almost accidentally.
And I heard them talking about all these issues, profound issues about the differences between capitalism and socialism, the difference between, let's say, the United States and the Soviet Union.
They talk about also the college.
What is the meaning of a liberal community?
Who should be allowed, who should be admitted to this community?
They talk about these kinds of issues and I realized, wow, these guys have answers for things I didn't even know were questions.
They've read people like Solzhenitsyn and Hayek and people like this that I've barely even heard of.
And so outside of college work, I began to sort of read all this new stuff that drew me into the intellectual world of conservatism.
And then later, when I was at Princeton, I discovered the Greeks.
I picked up almost randomly from the Princeton Library a work by Plutarch.
And I was just so drawn into it.
I mean, I understand him completely.
And through Plutarch, I was drawn into this wider world of the ancients.
It was Nietzsche, I think, who said that the Greeks made suffering beautiful, a sentiment that you'd understand.
You can only understand when you're familiar with the Greeks and the Greek body, not just of Greek tragedy, but Greek comedy.
The whole Greek world, there's a sensibility there coming out of the 5th century B.C., And quite honestly, it is more refined, it is more humane, it is more decent, it is more elevated, it's more sublime than pretty much anything that you'd see around you today.
The bottom line of it, I think, is the key to learning for me, and I think for anyone, is to retain a little bit of that childlike sense of wonder and curiosity.
The same kind of wide-eyed innocence with which a kid asks a question, We're adults.
We don't ask the same questions, but we should have that same sense of, how did things get to be the way they are?
How does this road lead to that road?
If I go down this, where is this going to take me?
So keeping that curiosity alive, I think, is an important part of being a lifelong learner.