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May 2, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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ON THE OTHER FOOT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep570
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Coming up, the shoe is now on the other foot for the left as the Biden regime brings felony charges against black socialists for their opposition to the Ukraine war.
I'll examine whether Tucker Carlson's opposition to Ukraine is the real reason for his ouster at Fox.
And I'll consider the question of whether Singapore is a good tyranny.
Israeli scholar Yoram Hazoni joins me.
We're going to talk about what we can learn from the Hebrew prophets.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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 think of political persecution, political targeting, the suppression of rights and of free speech as something that happens to us, to conservatives, to Republicans, to the right.
But there's a very interesting case I want to discuss which shows that once you begin to give regimes this kind of power, they're Violations of liberties become undiscriminating over time.
In other words, they start with a set of targets, and then they decide to persecute just about anyone.
They persecute anyone that they see as a threat to themselves, even if the threat is coming kind of from their own political perspective.
And George Orwell talks about this, in which the communists begin by trying to go after people that they see as anti-communist or bourgeois, but pretty soon they're persecuting socialists and other deviant brands of communism so that the political weapons are wielded in a kind of promiscuous way.
Now, I saw this because of a post by the Justice Department.
They said that U.S. citizens and Russian intelligence officers are charged with conspiring to use U.S. citizens as illegal agents of the Russian government.
And I'm like, wow, this seems a kind of strange echo of Russiagate and We're good to go.
Who are charged with being, quote, agents of Russia.
So this piqued my curiosity.
I was like, what have these people actually done?
Well, it turns out that they've done essentially nothing.
The leader of this group is a black guy named Omali Yeshitela.
This guy has conducted rallies denouncing the Ukraine war, denouncing U.S. involvement in Ukraine, calling for a peace treaty that would bring an end to the war.
As I listen to the guy talk, it's a little...
Over the top, it's a little bit incendiary, but it's essentially socialist rhetoric.
And socialist rhetoric, let's remember, has this kind of anti-war dimension.
It sees war as a kind of mechanism that capitalist societies use to divert attention away from the plight of the working class.
So there's There's nothing really all that unfamiliar.
And anyone who knows the rhetoric of the 60s, this is the rhetoric of the 60s all over again.
These same guys, these four black socialists, are also accused of posting memes and blogs and other political content protesting against the war in Ukraine.
A war that, by the way, they see through a lens of racial injustice.
Now, the first thing to be noted is that the United States itself does a lot of this all over the world.
In other words, if the Russians are accused of somehow encouraging or supporting marginal groups on the right and or the left to push, let's end the war in Ukraine, let's oppose the Biden administration, if the Using vehicles like the National Endowment for Democracy,
the United States posts false information, disinformation, certainly shares information that's sympathetic to the U.S.'s own official position, and tries to get local groups in those countries to circulate this.
So if this is a crime, we're doing it.
And we're doing it on an international scale, and on a far bigger scale than one Russian guy.
I forget his name. It's in here...
Oh yeah, Alexander.
Then one Alexander Viktorovich, who is in cahoots with four black radicals.
So that's the first point.
The U.S. government does this all the time.
And yet the articles that are talking about these arrests never mention this.
Jim, this shows how active Russia is in our democracy.
The reporter goes, indeed.
And then goes on to read from the indictment.
So it's as if the indictment has already been proven.
Case closed. This Russian guy is accused, so he must have done it.
The African socialists are accused of collaborating with him, so they must have done it.
Now, what does collaboration here actually mean?
These guys don't work for Russia.
Even though the indictment seems to say that they were, quote, Russian agents or that they were somehow been, that they were activated by the Russians, the simple truth is nothing more.
The word that's used in the indictment is that this guy, Alexander Viktorovich Ionov, quote...
Well, how did he direct them?
These guys never saw themselves as agents of Russia.
They took positions that they already believed.
It may be that the Russians were like, let's have a rally, we'll help to pay for it.
And my point about all this is, big deal.
It doesn't really matter.
Let's say, for example, that a Russian organization is trying to encourage me to say certain things on this podcast.
In fact, there's no such organization.
I say what I actually think.
But my point is, if there were, so what?
I can still say whatever I want.
I still have a First Amendment right that is in no way cancelled out.
Well, Dinesh, it's Russian propaganda.
So what? It doesn't really...
Oh, Dinesh, it's disinformation.
So what? Our rights are not cancelled by the fact that That they are, quote, directed or stimulated or encouraged or cheered.
I see so many times in the press, oh, Tucker Carlson's statement on Ukraine has been reproduced, has been quoted in Russian media.
So what?
Tucker Carlson is saying what he exactly thinks.
He's defending the interests of the United States as he sees them.
If the Russians happen to agree with the point he makes again, that in no way undermines its validity and no way proves that it's untrue.
But I think the broader point I want to make here is that the left needs to be a little bit careful in cheering the FBI, cheering the CIA, cheering these organs, these police state organs of government.
These police state organs of government don't care about right or left.
At the end, they care about themselves.
They care about their own power.
In the end, tyranny is an undiscriminating monster that will devour us all.
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So if you're ready to take the step What is the real motive for the ouster of Tucker Carlson at Fox News?
There have been a number of theories circulating, and none of them really to me is all that convincing.
In fact, it's more convincing had Tucker just got up and walked out, because I would then say that the plausible explanation for that is that Tucker is being squelched, he's being silenced, he doesn't want to take it anymore.
But why would Fox get rid of, well...
It's most valuable, you may say, media property, namely Tucker.
Now, a new explanation seems to have surfaced that I see in social media.
There's an interesting article in Semaphore.
It's called semaphore.com, S-E-M-A-F-O-R.com.
And the article is this.
Fox News chairman Rupert Murdoch had a one-on-one call with Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.
And a little bit earlier...
This is on March 15th.
Zelensky had a similar conversation with Lachlan Murdoch, son of Rupert Murdoch, and basically the de facto boss of Fox News.
The Fox News president, Suzanne Scott, reports in effect to Lachlan Murdoch.
And so, even though nobody knows what they talked about...
Here is a real possibility.
Zelensky says to the Murdochs, Hey, listen, it's really important for our survival and our success that there be a united front in favor of Ukraine and against the United States.
And you can see where I'm going with this because right away it turns out that who is the obstacle to this united front if not one Tucker Carlson?
Point number one.
None of the other hosts...
On Fox are as hostile to the Ukraine war as Tucker.
He's been the most outspoken.
He's talked about the fact that the Ukraine is not really a democracy.
They're sort of a dictatorship.
They suppress dissent.
So we are...
Tucker is not exactly high on Zelensky.
Number two, the two parties, by and large, the establishment figures in the Republican and Democratic Party are united on Ukraine.
This may seem a little more surprising, but hey, for the Republicans, it's a legacy of the Cold War.
Russia is the bad guy.
Ukraine is fighting for its freedom.
And so if you take a guy like Mitch McConnell, his views on the Ukraine are pretty much the same as Biden's.
If you take Lindsey Graham, her view on Ukraine, his view on Ukraine is pretty much the same as AOC.
AOC is a champion of the Ukraine war.
And so here is, there are a few people, a handful of people really, who are outside this consensus and are speaking eloquently against it.
Now Tucker's not the only one.
There is the writer Glenn Greenwald.
Tulsi Gabbard has been denouncing the Ukraine war.
Rand Paul has been doing it.
There's the academic John Mearsheimer and also the military historian Edward Luttwak.
But here we come to the clincher, which is that I read in The Week, theweek.com, Ukraine accuses Tulsi Gabbard and Rand Paul of promoting Russian propaganda.
So Ukraine itself coming out, this is coming from the official Ukraine media article, Media outlet controlled by the government, by the way.
They have named Rand Paul, Tilsey Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, John Mearsheimer, and Lutwak as being sort of Russian pawns, pawns of Russian propaganda.
Now, Tucker is not mentioned in this list.
But what are they objecting to?
Well, Meersheimer, and I've talked about this on the podcast, basically said that, look, the problem here is that it is NATO and the United States that have egged Ukraine to poke the Russian bear until the Russian bear turned around and basically swatted Ukraine.
Like, enough. Russia is the big boy in the neighborhood.
Ukraine is this tiny little country that was sort of daring Russia to do its worst.
And finally, the Russians said, well, okay.
And Lutwak, this is the military historian Lutwak, who was, by the way, an eloquent anti-communist going back to Reagan days.
He's pretty old now.
But he said, listen, it's time for a peace deal.
And moreover, this is really Lutwak's big heresy.
He said, look, why don't we allow there's a dispute over territory?
And these are mainly the territories in the Donbass.
Let's have a referendum.
This kind of thinking, which by the way, would be pretty persuasive, makes a lot of sense to a lot of people, not just in America, but around the world, this is now treated as somehow Russian propaganda.
And it could be that Zelensky made a plea...
To Murdoch and the Murdochs, Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch, hey, listen, this Tucker is a real thorn in our side.
When Republicans vote for Ukraine and Ukraine spending, Tucker goes after them.
This is going to weaken their resolve.
So if we can take this guy out of the picture, it's really going to be helpful to us.
Again, I'm not saying this is the reason.
I'm saying it's a possible reason.
certainly makes more sense than some of the other reasons that I've heard.
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Ongoing right now is the rape case that has been launched by the writer Gene Carroll.
E. Jean Carroll against Trump.
Now, E. Jean Carroll says that Trump raped her, although she doesn't really know when.
She says it's sometime around 1995 or 1996.
Think about it. This is 27, I guess, years ago.
At the time, she didn't report the crime to anyone.
She didn't tell anyone about it.
The statute of limitations came and went.
Even 20 years later, when Trump ran for president and other women said that Trump had accused Trump of some sort of sexual misconduct, E. Jean Carroll remained silent.
She says that in 2017, after Harvey Weinstein, after the Me Too movement, she decided it was time to speak out against Trump.
But guess what? She didn't speak out against Trump even then.
It wasn't until 2019 that she accused Trump, and that happened to be the year that she published a book.
And the book was featured in New York Magazine.
In fact, she appeared on the cover of New York Magazine wearing the same dress that she claimed she was wearing when Trump supposedly attacked her.
And where did Trump supposedly attack her?
In the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman.
Talk about something that is on the face of it a little hard to believe.
In any event, as part of a book promotion, E. Jean Carroll would conduct these so-called walking tours of New York, which would typically begin at Bergdorf Goodman, supposedly the site of the infamous attack.
And then, even despite all that, the book was...
You could say that she was making these accusations to promote the book, but the book came and went.
The idea of suing Trump over this was actually given to Eugene Carroll by none other than George Conway.
George Conway is Kellyanne Conway's husband.
This, by the way, is a guy who applied for a top job in the Trump administration.
He didn't get it.
There was evidently some falling out, some bad blood between him and Trump.
And he became a massive anti-Trumper to such a degree, such a never-Trumper, that he was invited to a cocktail party at the home of a left-wing writer, Molly Jongfast.
And this event was evidently in honor of another leftist, Kathy Griffin, the so-called comedian.
I say so-called because it's, well, I guess I have laughed a few times at her jokes about being on the fourth rate list and so on.
But it's basically one joke.
I mean, her whole career is one joke.
And now her whole career is a joke.
But anyway, they were having this cocktail party at this salon in New York.
And E. Jean Carroll was there.
And Conway goes, you got to sue Trump.
And she's like, how am I going to sue Trump?
The statute of limitations has passed.
And Conway goes, well, sue him for defamation.
So here's a lawyer saying you can't sue him for rape.
That's already passed. But if you sue him for defamation because Trump made some Trumpian comments to the effect that she's not my type and so on.
So, you can use the defamation case to sort of retry the rape case.
And moreover, says Conway, I know somebody who will take this case.
He referred E. Jean Carroll to a lawyer.
This is another left-winger, a woman named Roberta Kaplan, who has represented a bunch of the Me Too cases.
So, this is the left kind of ganging up here and deciding, you know what, this is a way to create a circus.
They know that the media will jump on it as the media, in fact, is And then finally, the last piece of the puzzle, a tech billionaire, Reid Hoffman, one of the founders of LinkedIn, I believe, he steps in and begins to bankroll the E. Jean Carroll case.
In fact, this is something that she had been apparently either lying about or disguising, implying that she was funding her own case.
But now it's emerged, and it's emerged in a deposition that Reid Hoffman is the one paying, at least paying part of the costs.
E. Jean Carroll, by the way, went on Anderson Cooper's show in 2019 and was asked about whether or not she suffered as a result of this so-called attack from Trump.
And I'm now quoting her.
I didn't suffer, Anderson.
I did not suffer. I did not lose my job.
I wasn't beaten. And at another point, in a rather creepy way, she begins to talk about how even the concept of rape is kind of intriguing.
It's kind of exciting. I mean, Anderson Cooper, you can see, is visibly uncomfortable with her using that kind of rhetoric.
So this is a very strange individual.
And... I don't really see this case.
I don't know where it's going to go.
I've seen some indications that the judge is very biased against Trump.
That's not exactly a big surprise.
So this is the backstory of how this case came to be, a case that seems to have far more to do with anti-Trump politics than it has to do with any of the issues that are being raised, so-called on the merits.
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I want to talk for a few minutes about Singapore.
Singapore, a very tiny country in Asia.
And Debbie was doing her bike the other day.
And when she does her bike, she can go on a scenic ride by calling up scenes of wherever she wants.
I'm biking in Ireland.
I'm biking in Norway.
Well, she decided to go with Singapore.
And so she's biking on the streets of Singapore, of course, right in our house.
And she goes, wait!
She goes, oh my gosh!
She goes, this is like the cleanest place in the world.
This is like the most spectacular, scenic, and just spotless.
And you don't see, there's absolutely...
And I think it struck her because these days we see images of, well, we were just in New York doing some filming, but of course San Francisco, Los Angeles, American city seems so dilapidated, so run down, so dirty.
You're always stepping over things to make sure that you don't get it on your shoes.
It's like a pink. And yeah, Debbie's pointing out that in New York, she directed me specifically to navigate around some human excrement, or at least a smear of it.
So this is, I mean, what a contrast.
And Debbie's like, how do they do it?
Like, what's their secret?
And here's their secret.
This is from the Washington Times.
From last month. Singapore executes marijuana trafficker amid international outcry.
Now, I'm using this symbolically.
But evidently, this is the first guy executed this year.
But there was a big international brouhaha about this.
The Amnesty International weighs in.
The UN High Commissioner weighs in.
The British billionaire Richard Branson weighs in.
And listen to this kind of nonsense.
This is Branson talking.
Tanga Raju's execution will not make Singapore any safer.
It will do nothing to stop the flow of illicit drugs.
Blah, blah. As if he knows.
What does he know? Here's the reply from the Singapore Minister of Home Affairs.
Quote, Singapore's policies on drugs and the debt penalty are derived from our own experience, which works for us.
I don't know if you remember, but several years ago, a U.S. citizen was defacing Singapore with graffiti.
And the Singaporeans arrested the guy, and his penalty was to get a public caning.
And again, Amnesty International, everyone's having tantrums.
The U.S. State Department, this is...
This is cruel and unusual punishment.
And the Singaporeans are, well, it happens to be our punishment.
It's the way we do things around here.
Don't you guys respect other cultures and the way we do things?
And the caning went forward.
And then there was an outpouring of enthusiasm from Americans who were basically like, Canem even more!
We'd like to do some of that in our own country!
The point being this, that what the Singaporeans have done, and it goes back to a guy named Lee Kuan Yew, a Chinese guy who lived in Singapore, was educated in Britain, I believe, and he decided to take the best of the West back to Singapore.
And he decided that the best of the West is to combine two things.
On the one hand, freedom and economic prosperity.
And on the other hand, social order.
So in other words, social decency.
And so in Singapore, you can't spit on the sidewalk.
You can't chew gum in public transit.
You get fined. And then I guess if you do graffiti, you kind of have to bend over and get publicly caned.
And drugs is where they draw the line because drug trafficking is not only frowned upon, but it can basically put you in front of a firing squad or however they execute people in Singapore.
By the way, Singapore has hanged 11 prisoners in 2022, all of them on severe drug charges.
And the point is that this is a little harsh.
I mean, I guess you'd call it a certain type of, you know, I don't think it's fair to call Singapore an authoritarian society across the board.
People there are free to live their lives.
But if you do break the law, they come down pretty hard on you.
And many people in Singapore think that is a very good thing.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast a new guest and someone whose work I've followed off and on over a number of years.
His name is Dr. Yoram Hazony.
He is the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation.
He also serves as the president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem.
He's joining us from Israel.
By the way, you can follow him at Twitter, at Y-H-A-Z-O-N-Y. Or his website, which is yoram.org.
Yoram, welcome to the podcast.
I've been reading a book that you wrote a few years ago now, but it really drew me in.
Very fascinating.
It's right here. It's called The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture.
And what struck me when I first saw it was Well, first of all, the word philosophy.
When we read the Bible, the Hebrew, or the Christian scriptures, at least I don't think of them as inherently philosophical.
In fact, a lot of what they say seems to me sort of declaratory.
They seem to make declarations.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
There's no effort to prove it.
There's merely a kind of assertion.
So maybe I'll start by asking you about that.
Do you I guess you do argue that there is a philosophy contained in Hebrew Scripture.
And how did you come to that sort of realization?
Well, thanks for having me on the show, Dinesh.
It's really great to see you.
The issue of how to read the Bible is, you know, it's something people have been talking about for thousands of years and arguing about it, and people have different perspectives.
But I think it's especially important today, after a couple of centuries in which the Bible has kind of been dismissed as a book of superstition.
And I think we can't help Noticing that, you know, we're undergoing this big cultural revolution.
And it basically took, I don't know, two generations or so from the time that Bible was removed from the schools in the United States until, you know, you get to the point that people can't really tell the difference between a man and a woman.
And so, I think it's especially important for us to return to the Bible and to try to understand what is it that it's saying to us.
The question that you're asking is about the difference between reason and revelation, because in the Western tradition, there's this It's an extremely deep divide that some thinkers have dug between revelation and reason.
They say revelation or reason, that's like science.
That's like, you know, trying to figure out the facts and figure out what's true.
Whereas revelation is just this You know, blind faith, and it doesn't matter whether it's stupid or makes any sense, you just have to believe it.
Now, that's a caricature, and it's a very damaging caricature because it makes Judaism and Christianity look like what they're asking people to believe is foolishness.
And so, the reason for a book on the philosophy of Hebrew Scripture is to try to get back to the time of the prophets and scholars who wrote the books of the Bible and to try to understand what they were getting at.
And my argument is that if you're looking for political thought, political theory, or for ethics, or even for metaphysics, that these things are argued for by the prophets and scholars who wrote the Bible.
Now, when you talk about revelation and you talk about reason, I think you make the interesting point that even the Greek philosophers, Socrates, for example, Plato, do at various interesting points in their thought make an appeal to divine inspiration, a muse, Socrates talks about this kind of
inspiration that comes over him that seemingly comes outside the orbit of human reason itself.
And then you go on to say that that element is present in the Bible as well, but there's a lot of earthly wisdom.
And I think your stress in this book is on earthly wisdom that is contained in the Bible When we think of a prophet, we think of someone foretelling the future, but clearly the Hebrew prophets did a lot more than attempt to foretell the future.
Talk about what a prophet means in the Hebrew tradition.
Well, look, it's interesting that you mentioned Socrates.
Socrates is famous for going around the city asking different players in Athens for the truth, to explain the truth as they understand and arguing with them.
And a prophet like Jeremiah has...
You know, almost the exact same kind of rhythm to him, except that the prophet Jeremiah's book was probably a couple of centuries earlier.
Jeremiah is seeing the collapse of the city.
And when we say, and I would be careful about saying, he's not talking about the distant future.
He's talking about his present.
It's like somebody going around the city today and saying, look, doesn't it look to you like Look at the people who call themselves prophets.
Look at the people who call themselves priests.
And he's saying they are bringing about the destruction of this city and this country.
So that kind of prophecy is, you're right that there is some foretelling the future, but most of it is not foretelling the future.
Most of it is analyzing what is it the people are doing wrong.
For example, Jeremiah will say, look, In the Torah, it says that you have to free all your slaves in the seventh year, but you haven't done it.
And so there's this underclass of people who are being abused and hating the government, and they're crippling our society.
We need to do something about it.
So there's much, much more that can be said.
But I think the basic point is that prophets are much closer to philosophers than people usually like to say.
And I think that that can be helpful for people.
They're not identical, but they are very similar in many ways.
Let's take a pause when we come back more with Dr.
Yoram Hazoni and the book, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture.
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Go to relieffactor.com or call 800-4-RELEEFFACTOR. I'm back with Dr.
Yoram Hazoni, Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, President of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, and the website...
Yoram, Y-O-R-A-M-H-A-Z-O-N-Y.org, the book, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture.
You make a point, Yoram, in the book that in some ways our view, and I think this is true of me, my view, of the Hebrew Scriptures is very much influenced by By seeing it through the lens of the Christian scriptures or the New Testament.
And a classic example of that would be when I read the Abraham and Isaac story.
They're going up the mountain.
Isaac says to his father, you know, where is the lamb?
And the father says, basically, God will provide.
And then for Christians, this is a sort of...
A precursor or a symbol of Jesus who is the Lamb of God coming to take away the sins of the world.
And so, Christians tend to read the Abraham and Isaac story for itself, but they also read it through, if you will, the Jesus spectacles.
Now, let's put those spectacles aside.
You're analyzing this as a Jew.
You're rejecting the idea that we should do this kind of backward reading.
So, I want you to interpret the Sure.
Well, look, it's a story about idolatry.
Right, meaning that Abraham is called by God at a time and place in which people worship idols all around and people are sacrificing their children to the various gods.
And by the way, this continues for another thousand years, 1500 years.
Up until the Christians eliminate child sacrifice from the Roman Empire.
So, all around Abraham, it's considered to be normal to sacrifice your child to a god.
And this story of the, in Hebrew we call it Akedat Yitzchak, which means the binding of Isaac, not the sacrifice of Isaac.
What is it, why is he being bound?
God is asking him to do the same thing that, you know, everybody around him does.
And the question, there's two, there's an aspect of a test, it says that God tested Abraham.
What's the test about?
And you were correctly quoting when he says, when Abraham, when Isaac says, where's the Where's the sheep for the sacrifice?
And Abraham says to him, God will see to the sacrifice.
God will see to the sheep for the sacrifice, my son.
And the question is, is he lying to him because he's planning on actually sacrificing him?
Or is it an expression of faith that God does not, that the true God, creator of heaven and earth, does not want child sacrifice?
Yeah. And so, as Jews learn the story, and I think Christians can also learn it this way, that Abraham is expressing faith that God will not make him go through with this terrible, terrible thing of sacrificing his son.
And in the end, of course, that's what happens, is that God intervenes and says, no, you're not going to do that.
that for Jews, that's the turning point in human history, because from then on, the sacrifice of human beings becomes forbidden for all time.
And not only that, but as you point out, the Abrahamic answer to Isaac, which is that God will provide, in fact, a ram does appear on the scene, and Abraham takes the ram and sacrifices the ram instead, so I guess what you're getting at is that God never intended for Abraham to go through with this.
Because, I mean, this is one of the, in some of the literature of the so-called new atheists, they invoke this story to say, what a vengeful, sick God to put Abraham through this trauma, in other words, to Call him to sacrifice his own son.
What could be more barbaric?
And even though God held back at the very end, why put him through this at all?
And what you're saying is that it was ultimately a declaration that God wanted to bring an end to this horrific practice that had been going on and continued for centuries later.
For sure. Yes, exactly right.
So offer a comment, if you will, Yoram, about the idea of the Jews as the chosen people.
We see this theologically, of course, in the very early, I mean, right there in the Exodus, I think, is when it first emerges in the Bible.
But we also see it politically in the fortunes of the state of Israel, almost a sense that there is, and some American presidents have had the same, a providential idea of Israel as we sometimes have heard of America.
What to you is the meaning of the concept of a chosen people?
Well, probably, there's a number of different sources in Scripture.
Probably the most direct is right before the giving of the law at Sinai, when God tells Moses tells the elders of Israel, gathers them, and he says,
look, God has proposed a deal, a covenant, an alliance, and his proposal is that we are going to be a nation of priests and a holy people.
And the idea of being a nation of priests, this is something that I think Christians as well as Jews can appreciate, the idea that in a world that is filled from end to end with evil, there's room for the Jewish people to say to God, look, we are going to try to be teachers.
We're going to receive the law and we're going to try to teach this to the world.
And to a very significant degree, if you consider Christianity a success in teaching the commandments to the nations, I think in a great many ways it's been an astonishing success.
Half the world knows something about Hebrew Scripture at this point.
And so, I think that that is the central meaning.
The central meaning is that The Jews willingly take upon themselves this extremely difficult task of being priests to the nations or as Isaiah says, a light unto the nations.
It's a very remarkable thing you're saying, which is that other countries are bigger and stronger than Israel, and other countries try to create warriors, or they try to create this, or they try to create this.
and that the special mission, if you will, of the Jewish people is to be the ethical instructors, or at least the ethical voice for the world to hear.
It's this kind of, I think, trenchant observations that we find in this book.
It's called the philosophy of Hebrew scripture.
I've been talking to the author, Yoram Hozoni.
Yoram, thanks very much for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you. I'm talking about the historical crimes of atheism and atheist regimes, and it's quite obvious, really indisputable, that Mao and Lenin and Stalin were atheists and that their regimes were officially based on an atheist doctrine.
But what about Hitler?
Now, here is Sam Harris.
The hatred of Jews in Germany was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity.
So what he's trying to do is blame anti-Semitism, Hitler's anti-Semitism, on the legacy of medieval Christianity.
He says,"...the Holocaust marked the culmination of 200 years of Christians fulminating against the Jews." And therefore he says knowingly or not the Nazis were agents of religion.
Interesting that knowingly or not that somehow the Nazis were expressing a Christian legacy even if they were not explicitly identified with it.
We see on atheist websites that Hitler was a Christian because he was born Catholic.
He never publicly renounced his Catholicism.
And we find the following line in Mein Kampf.
By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
How do we assess this evidence?
Yeah, Hitler was born Catholic, I admit.
Just as Stalin was born into the Russian Orthodox Church, Mao was raised as a Buddhist.
But these facts don't really prove anything because many people reject the religious upbringing that they were raised with just as these three men did.
From an early age, this is historian Alan Bullock writing, Hitler, quote, had no time at all for Catholic teaching, regarded it as a religion fit only for slaves, and detested its ethics.
So, how do we make sense of the line?
There are very few. I cited the isolated one from Mein Kampf.
It's about the only one that you could cite that Hitler is kind of appealing to Christians of doing the Lord's work.
Well, as it turns out, during his ascent to power, Hitler needed the support of the German people.
Let's remember the Nazi party had become the largest party in Germany when Hitler was named Chancellor.
So to get political support, Hitler needed the Catholics in Bavaria and the Lutherans in much of the rest of the country.
And so he would sometimes use rhetoric that was gently kind of laced with Christian allusions.
But this is not really proof that Hitler was a Christian.
It confuses political opportunism with personal conviction.
In fact, Hitler even says in Mein Kampf that we've got to look at what he's saying as propaganda, for example.
For Hitler, propaganda is not a bad word, but propaganda is aimed at persuasion.
It doesn't really bear any direct relationship to truth.
It is aimed at swaying the masses.
And good propaganda is just propaganda that does that.
The Nazis came up with a strange concept of an Aryan Christ.
This is a Christ who uses the sword, who uses violence to cleanse the earth of, not of sin, but of the Jews.
Hitler once used the phrase positive Christianity.
So he was sort of reinventing Christianity, but in a manner that made...
His Christianity unrecognizable to any true Christians.
It was a radical departure from any Christian understanding, Catholic or Protestant, was condemned by the Pope at the time.
And the important point is that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not religious.
It was racial.
Let's remember many of the Jews in Germany were, there were some that were religious, some that were Orthodox, but there were many who were completely secular.
Their Judaism was, in a sense, cultural, and that's true.
We see that in this country today.
We see it around the world.
So, for Hitler, that didn't really matter.
You couldn't go to the Nazis and say, hey, listen, I'm not an Orthodox Jew.
I don't really pray.
I don't really keep the sacraments.
I don't follow the dietary restrictions.
None of that. I live the same as you or anybody else.
And Hitler would go, who cares?
Ethnically, you are a Jew, and that's the end of the matter.
So this is the point that for the Nazis, Jewishness, Judaism was an ethnic and not a religious designation.
Going back to medieval Christianity and subsequently for the Christians, Judaism was a religious designation and everything depended upon where your convictions were.
So under Ferdinand and Isabella in medieval Spain, the Jews were expelled from the country.
But they were expelled from the country for practicing what Ferdinand and Isabella considered a heretical religion.
And they were like, listen, you're welcome to convert to Christianity and if you do convert and if you genuinely adopt the Christian faith, you're welcome to stay.
In fact, you're no different than us.
You are now part of the Christian brotherhood.
So you can see that the Christians in medieval times are objecting to the beliefs and practices of Judaism.
It was not kind of an ethnic hostility to Jews just as Jews.
It wasn't based upon the idea that the Jews were biologically inferior or anything like that.
Ferdinand believed the Jews belonged to a kind of inferior, morally corrupt racial stock.
His anti-Semitism was secular.
When I pick this up tomorrow, I'll talk about a remarkable book called Hitler's Table Talk.
It was recordings made by a senior Nazi of Hitler's actual conversations.
And this was done over a long period of time during the war.
In fact, in the latter part of the war.
And you see in it Hitler's vehement and undisguised hatred toward God, but also specifically toward Christianity.
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