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March 20, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
19:03
The Jewish Nation & the Destiny of the West
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Speaking of conversation, I want to rejoin my guest, Josh Hammer, author of Israel and Civilization, The Fate of the Jewish Nation, and The Destiny of the West.
And Josh, I'm sorry, I threw that question to you a little late here, but we're talking about the Ten Commandments, and I believe that the Ten Commandments are etched on all of our hearts, whether you're a Jew, whether you're a Christian, whether you're an atheist, agnostic.
I mean, it's common sense to me.
Everybody knows that stealing is wrong.
Everyone knows that murder is wrong.
Everyone knows that Lying is wrong.
Everyone knows that adultery is wrong.
The problem is a lot of people don't equate it to the God of the Bible.
That's exactly right.
Now, Carl, I think back to everyone from John Locke writing in England in the 1600s to Thomas Jefferson's famous words in the Declaration of 1776 that all men are created equal.
They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.
And what Jefferson famously wrote is that we hold these truths to be self-evident.
And I guess my response to that is it's self-evident within a certain overarching context, within a certain moral millennia-old worldview, thousands and thousands of years, that prioritizes the genuine moral dignity of humankind.
And that gets us back to what I was saying.
Before the break, in Genesis 127, this notion that God made man in his image, male and female, he created them, which I argue in the book Israel and Civilization, is the single foundational ethical and moral imperative underlying all of Western civilization.
Carl, Genesis 127 is probably our best way to beat back against DEI.
It's probably our best way to beat back against all those who seek to divide us based on arbitrary characteristics, whether it is race or ethnicity or...
Or anything like that there.
So whether or not you are personally a believer or not, I think it is incumbent upon you, and not you, Carl, but you Americans and just generally speaking people, I think it's incumbent upon all of us to recognize where all these values come from.
You can support a strong sense of religion in America, a strong church and so forth.
You can support all of this without necessarily being a believer yourself.
Let me ask you this, Josh.
We spoke about this on the podcast last night, so please check that out, the Carl Jackson Show, wherever you go to get your podcast.
But there is a strain that is, even within the conservative right, that has surprised me a little bit, that seems to be popping up.
And sometimes you'll hear them equate Russia and Ukraine.
I can't believe it.
I think it's one of the dumbest things ever.
But as conservatives, it's always baffling to me when conservatives don't understand how valuable Judeo-Christian values are and how they're the glue that holds America and the West together, or at least should be.
That is the glue that holds America and the West together.
Again, Carl, it's something that the founders understood just extremely well.
I mean, Alexander Hamilton has this amazing quote where he essentially argues that one of the reasons that we know God exists is because the Jewish people have survived over all these thousands and thousands of years.
If you go back and look at all the other nations that existed when the Jews were formed, when the patriarch Abraham was there, none of the other nations back then continue to exist to this day.
And this was kind of the Hebrew Bible-centric philo-Semitism that really was maybe not ubiquitous, but it was certainly at least predominant.
It was pervasive at the time of the American founding.
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin wanted the great seal of the United States, the national seal, to be Moses parting the Red Sea.
You can actually go back even further than that.
You can go back all the way to the pilgrims crossing the Atlantic Ocean on the Mayflower.
If you go back and look there, William Bradford, who was the captain of the ship and he became the second governor of Plymouth Colony, he was a student of a well-known English Hebraist, so a Christian Englishman there in the late 1500s, early 1600s, who specialized in scholarship of the Hebrew Bible,
man by the name of Sir Wilbur Hedford, who was one of the early leaders of the Pilgrims in Plymouth Colony, he actually spoke about a thousand words of Hebrew.
And apparently the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, I learned this while researching for the book, they actually
the possibility of just severing ties with the English language and establishing Hebrew as the new language in the colony.
Obviously, that didn't actually happen, but it was discussed.
And it was discussed a little bit at the time of the American founding as well.
Josh!
A split second.
You blanked out when you gave the last name of the gentleman that had discussed using Hebrew as the language as opposed to breaking from the English language.
What was the second name you used after Bradford?
So the English Christian scholar of the Hebrew Bible was a man by the name of Sir William Ainsworth.
Sorry, Sir Henry Ainsworth.
All of this is particularly important for today's day and age, and that's why I decided to write this book.
That's why I believe the book coming out in the timing that it did today is extraordinarily timely because there is an increasingly loud cacophony of provocateurs who are trying to drive a wedge even within certain pockets of the nominal so-called rights.
We're trying to drive a wedge between Jews and Christians here who are basically trying to say that That Christians can just forsake the Jews.
They can forsake the Hebrew Bible.
They can forsake all this.
This is not the political philosophy.
This is not the religious philosophy.
It's just not what America was founded on.
This notion that you can just forsake the Jews, you can forsake the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, is completely anathema to everything that this country and that this entire civilization stands for.
And even on an entire practical level, Carl.
Just practically speaking, Jews and Christians face the exact same threats today.
We face threats from wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism.
Those are the three hegemonic forces that I identify.
They always start with the Saturday people, they start with the Jews, and then they always go on to the Sunday people, the Christians.
Anti-Semite threat history has been remarkably consistent and oftentimes quite outspoken on this.
So Karl Marx, in his 1840s infamously anti-Semitic essay on the Jewish question, He was a self-hating Jew who hated Judaism.
But his ultimate goal, as he says quite clearly, is to overthrow all of Western capitalism and Western Christendom, Christian civilization there.
So you always start with the Jews.
It never, never ends with the Jews.
And as an American patriot who cares so deeply about my country, Carl, I see all the rising antisemitism all across the political spectrum.
And I care not merely for self-interest reasons as a Jewish American myself, but I care deeply just as an American patriot because anti-Semitism is here, there, and everywhere symptomatic of a much broader societal and civilizational run.
Yeah, you know, I agree with you.
I agree with you completely.
And Josh, we spoke about this briefly.
We got three minutes left on this block.
I want to get your take on this before I move on to other subjects.
And now I just forgot my thought.
Oh, the division.
We talk about the division that we see amongst the Democrat Party right now.
Chuck G. Schumer that's out there.
I mean, the left are after him.
Those that are in the House, it seems like they want to get rid of him.
I don't know if that will survive or not.
But I've got to be honest with you.
I think that Republicans and conservatives, I really do believe that God has extended us a hand of grace and mercy.
And I know this is going to sound a little bit crazy, but I consider everything that Trump endured to become president of the United States again, and it brought a lot of factions of the right together.
But if there's a chasm that exists or an understanding, a misunderstanding about the importance of the Judeo-Christian heritage and value system...
I foresee somewhere down the line, if more conservatives don't understand the value of the Judeo-Christian system, then eventually those of us on the right are going to split as well.
Your take?
Well, we've already seen some splintering on the right.
And to be clear, internecine debates on the right are about as old as the right has been a thing.
I mean, going back to the post-World War II origins of the contemporary American conservative movement.
To an extent, debates on the right are healthy, but they're not healthy when you have a rising pocket that is just dripping with anti-Semitism.
That is not healthy.
That is not healthy at all.
It is not healthy for the Jewish people.
It's not healthy for Christians.
It's not healthy for the body politic.
It's just not healthy for the future of the country.
Now, Carl, there are a lot of...
Wonderful Christian Zionists in this country, people like the soon-to-be ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who look at Genesis chapter 12, where it says, God shall bless those who bless the children of Israel and curse those who curse them.
There are a lot of our wonderful Christian Zionist friends who look at that and take it seriously as a biblical prophecy.
But I don't even think you actually have to go there.
I literally think that you can just look at global history.
I cannot identify a single instance.
I literally cannot think of a single instance in world history of the Jewish people being discriminated, oppressed against, and then that has actually led to a good result for a country and society.
Because the fact that the Jews are being oppressed and discriminated against...
They're the scapegoats.
They're in the coal mine.
Something broader is happening in that country.
Something more profound is going off the rails, is going wrong in that nation, in that civilization at that time.
So even if you have never met a Jewish person in your life there, again, if you care about the future of America, I do think that, one, our heritage, our biblical heritage, which goes back to the children of Israel and the Hebrew Bible.
That's core.
That's very important.
Josh.
Hold.
Hold your thought.
Hold your thought.
We'll be back on the other side.
Israel and Civilization.
The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.
Josh Hammer will be back.
And I'm joined by my guest, Josh Hammer.
He's got a new book out.
Go out and get it.
Israel and Civilization.
The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.
And Josh, I apologize.
I'll try to give you better heads up when we're headed closer to the breaks.
But I'm sitting here listening and then all of a sudden I look at the clock.
So my apologies.
We have eight minutes in this block, and there's several things that I'd like to touch on with you as quickly as we possibly can here.
You spoke of the Jewish community basically serves as a canary in the coal mine when there's some type of persecution that we see happening.
And I want to speak to that.
Let's talk about these campus protests.
I don't know if you heard me earlier.
One of the latest things, obviously, we have Mahmoud.
Khalil, not a U.S. citizen.
I know you're an attorney, too, so I'd love for you to speak to that issue when it comes to the green card and all that good stuff.
But as well, I'm not sure if you've heard about this Brown University professor, and I don't know what I've done with this report, but basically, she was deported.
Trump deported her, sends her back to Lebanon, or Beirut, well, Lebanon, Beirut, where she belongs.
Have you heard of...
This particular case, this was literally just done.
Yeah, I was looking into that yesterday.
I think the deportation of the doctor of Brown University, the Hassan Nasrallah Ayatollah Khamenei loving kidney doctor.
You know, how lovely, Carl, to go into a potential kidney transplant or something like that.
And you have a doctor who is a sycophant of Khamenei, the Ayatollah in Tehran, someone who literally attended the funeral.
Look, immigration law is pretty straightforward, actually, when it comes to this particular question.
There actually is a massive, massive distinction between citizen and non-citizen.
And I know that that is shocking news to globalists who don't believe in the nation-state, who don't believe in such thing as borders, who take this John Lennon-imagined view of the world.
By the way, that whole view of the world is one of the three things I talk about actually in the book Israel and Civilization.
But taking us back to the case of the deportation of these jihadi sycophants here, if you are not a citizen, if you are an alien, legal or illegal, you can be deported at any time for any reason, period.
As Justice Robert Jackson, and he was a brilliant justice, actually.
This is the man who was the leading dissenter in the Korematsu case.
Korematsu was the FDR World War II-era Japanese internment case, one of the more infamous cases in U.S. history.
Justice Robert Jackson dissented in that case on due process clause grounds, and then he subsequently became the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial.
So this man's credentials are not doubted.
He famously said, writing on due process in a 1953 case called Shaughnessy, That due process does not entail any alien with the right to come here to the United States, nor does it entail any right for an alien once you are here to remain here against the national will.
So there's no due process right to stay here, whether you're on a student visa, an O visa, whatever visa, a green card, it makes no difference.
The point is if you are not a citizen, you are only here at the behest and the discretion and, frankly, the beneficence of we the people.
And we can basically yank the quid on that quid pro quo.
There's more news that Trump has, and I haven't heard much of this, but Trump is considering rather a travel ban from dozens of countries, basically hot zones, that he was talking about during his first administration.
Have you heard of this?
I have.
It looks like there's going to be a lot of countries that add to this one.
I saw between 40 and 45, at least 11 on the top tier.
That top tier country is basically full ban, no exception.
So it's an expansion of the so-called travel ban.
And I say so-called because that's really just the label that the disingenuous left-wing media used the first time.
But it's an expansion of the travel ban that Trump put into place the first time around.
There's also a key legal citation here.
I mean, the first travel ban, Carl, as you likely recall, reached the Supreme Court.
It was a case called Trump versus Hawaii that came down in the year 2018, if memory serves there.
It was a really important 5-4 decision where the court upheld the travel ban.
They upheld it because the President of the United States has the ability to do this.
So buried deep in the weeds of the 1950s-era statute called the Immigration and Nationality Act, which remains one of the most important immigration laws to this day, there's a provision known as 1182F.
And 1182F basically amounts to a full delegation from Congress to the executive branch to the president.
To ban any classes of aliens from entering at any time for any reason he wants to do so.
It's a very, very expansive delegation of power from Congress to the presidency.
So the court has already ruled that this sort of thing is legal.
And I happen to think it's a very good policy to boot.
I mean, this is exactly the kind of thing, Carl, that Donald Trump was elected to do.
I mean, this is literally MAGA, America First in Action.
So I say two thumbs up.
I applaud it.
Yeah, I do as well.
And I'm so glad that you're up to speed on this stuff.
Obviously, being an attorney as well, it's very helpful.
Let me ask you this.
And I believe that all of these stories, frankly, Josh, again, I'm speaking to Josh Hammer.
Go out and get his book, Israel and Civilization, The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.
We only have a couple minutes left, but let's see if we can intertwine these stories.
At least I believe they're connected.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
But you look at these campus protests that are happening.
I believe that we've been infiltrated, Josh.
This may sound like hyperbole.
I don't believe it is.
But I believe we've been infiltrated.
Obviously, you've got this lady that was just sent back to Lebanon.
She was teaching or she has taught four universities over the last several years.
And then you get the gangsters, the gangbangers that were sent back.
You've got these rogue federal district judges.
I'm like, what are we doing to ourselves?
We are committing suicide by letting these people in.
It's just insane to me.
We got about a minute and a half.
So they totally are connected.
And we are committing civilizational suicide.
Look, the nation state is a real thing, Carl.
I mean, the American founder spoke of this.
John Jay famously writes about this in the Federalist No.
2, the second of the Federalist Papers.
You have to have something in common.
By the way...
This is one of the things that I talk about in the book, Israel and Civilization, because to me, biblical Israel is actually the world's first example of what today we would call a nation state.
When King David unites the tribes in Jerusalem there, this formation of the tribes and the families into a concrete entity there.
That is the predicate of what today we call the nation-state.
Actually, in antiquity, it was contrasted to the Roman Empire.
So if you care about the nation-state, if you care about a global order predicated not on empire but on independent nations, which I do, I'm a nationalist.
President Trump certainly does.
He's a nationalist.
Then you really ought to care about the modern state of Israel as well, because it is based on the ancient first nation state that was ever birthed in this world there.
So I care about the nation state.
I care about making sure that we're not bringing in folks who are seeking to burn down and destroy our nation state there.
So I say two thumbs up to the deportation of folks like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm in total agreement with you again.
I'm speaking to Josh Hammer, Israel and Civilization, The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West is his new book.
Go out and get it.
Also, on my podcast last night, I asked Josh a question about NATO and their values now versus ours.
So you're going to want to check out that podcast, The Carl Jackson Show, wherever you go to get your podcast.
Josh Hammer, thank you so much, man, for joining us.
Really appreciate you.
I can't wait, Carl.
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