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Oct. 3, 2025 - Viva & Barnes
53:14
Live With Dinesh D'Souza-The Dragons Prophecy
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Good afternoon, everybody.
This is um something of a special, uh, not during my ordinary time slot and until five minutes ago, wasn't sure if we were going to do it live to quote uh Bill Bill alrighty.
We'll do it live, uh live with Dinesh D'Souza.
As I'm driving down here, I'm listening to uh and sort of watching uh the new documentary that Dinesh D'Souza is putting out next week.
Uh it is amazing.
We're gonna get into all of it.
For those of you who don't know who Dinesh D'Souza is, uh did 2000 mules, another amazing documentary, did the Obama documentary, but I will not mangle uh Dinesh's uh synopsis.
Dinesh, uh great to see you again.
Tell the world who you are if they're meeting you for the first time.
Yeah, it's a real pleasure.
I'm um uh well, I was born in Bombay, India.
I uh came to the United States at the age of 17.
Most of my career I've been uh writer.
Uh I've worked at various think tanks like the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and then about uh 12 years ago I started making political documentaries.
Uh sometimes described as the Michael Moore of the right.
Uh I my first one was on Obama, Hillary's America, a uh 2000 mules you mentioned.
Uh the latest one is a departure for me because it's um um my other films have in one way or another all been about the meaning of America.
Uh this film, on the other hand, is it's about Israel and Hamas, it's about radical Islam, but it's also biblical archaeology, biblical prophecy.
So it integrates the political and the spiritual and the biblical and even I would say the apocalyptic in a kind of unique tapestry.
Bombay, your parents are Christian.
What's the religious demographic or breakdown of Bombay?
So well, India in general, 85% uh Hindu, about 12% m Muslim, and only three percent Christian.
But my family comes from a part of India called Goa, which used to be a Portuguese colony uh until 1961, and my family was converted to Christianity, boy, somewhere between three and four hundred years ago.
That is so cool.
So you can trace back family origins to when uh converted from no, most likely from Hinduism to Christianity.
And it was customary in those days when you converted to take a Christian name.
So no surprise, my last name is Portuguese, even though I don't have any Portuguese ancestry.
Um my first name Dinesh actually in Hindustani means god of the sun.
It's a h in Hindu name, but uh De Souza is a Portuguese name.
That's a fantasti phenomenal.
Uh 2000 Mules, and not to get into rehashing some of the stuff in the past, I I found it to be amazing.
There was a mild controversy which made the news in that, and I want to clarify it because I think people misunderstand what the issue was in order to discredit the entire movie and the entire methodology, but there was an issue of some video surveillance actually not matching over with some of the geo tracking, and they were somebody sued and you had to issue a correction, which people then used to basically wrongly discredit all the findings of the entire document.
Exactly.
They made it seem like um repu repudiating the film or Salem Media is repudiating the film.
Uh look, we offered two independent lines of evidence.
The first is cell phone geo tracking, uh reliably done, uh indisputable, really, used in all kinds of law enforcement contexts, as you know.
And the other is video surveillance.
And the video surveillance, I would say is very valuable because of what it shows on the face of it, right?
A guy pulls up in a car, it's the middle of the night, he's looking left and right, he's got a backpack full of ballots.
So uh true the vote, our research organization for this film had led me to believe, in fact, they say in the film that these two independent lines of evidence had been correlated to each other.
In reality, that had not happened.
So had I known that, I would simply have said it in the film.
I would have said, look, I've got cell phone evidence, and it's very powerful on its own.
And then I've got a lot of suspicious video, which is coming straight from the states themselves.
You look at it and see what it what you think about it, and it requires further investigation.
Like, what is the reason for this guy standing, or not this guy, many guys standing in ballot boxes and depositing one ballot after another.
So uh unfortunately that is a glitch, that is a flaw.
And I figured, listen, I need to be upfront about it, knowing that it would be kind of misrepresented by critics.
But uh, you know, I've come clean about as soon as I learned about it, I disclosed what the problem was.
The problem could have easily been fixed, and the reason I'm kind of annoyed is had I known it irrelevant to the findings.
It was irrelevant.
That's right.
It's like um uh there was a documentary called Died Suddenly, and they had a montage of people dying suddenly.
And I said, Well, one of those clips, I happen to know as a matter of fact, predated COVID.
I think it doesn't undermine from the point being made, but it will allow the detractors to then write off the entire thing instead of and it was it was one incident where the video did not overlap with the correlative geo-tracking as as represented, but uh the geo tracking was still legit, and the video surveillance of the other incidents was not explained in terms of being legit ballot harvesting depositing.
There was a network that organized a uh ballot depositing scheme in the 2020.
That's indisputable.
Uh and I think the reason that they've come so hard against the movie with straight out lawfare is because they recognize the power of it and the power of even Democrats who saw it were completely blown away and were like, I don't know exactly what's going on here, but this is not on the up and up.
I mean, you can't watch that film without coming to that conclusion.
We can't live through 2020 and think it was on the up and up.
It wasn't.
The only question is how bad and what ends.
Exactly.
And you know, interestingly, the new film, The Dragon's Prophecy, and if I can say the website is the dragonsprophecyfilm.com.
If you want to watch it in theaters, it's um it's in theaters two days.
Easy to remember, Monday and Wednesday, so not October 7th, but October 6th and October 8th, and then October 9th, the next day, streaming and available for uh pay-per-view on Rumble.
So I'm excited for people to see it.
It's also available on Salem now because Salem's our medium partner for making this film.
But I begin the film with some pretty raw and riveting footage of October 7th.
And it's part of the filmmaking technique, which is I just like in Mules, I didn't want to tell you about election fraud.
I wanted to show it to you.
You can see it.
Um, you're on the scene of the election.
Similarly, here, I'm amazed at how few people have seen real October 7 footage.
Uh, I don't show the most uh disturbing or grotesque of it, but I show enough that you feel like you are riding with Hamas.
See, Hamas took the footage, so it's from their point of view.
You know, what's amazing is Hamas took the footage, live streamed it, broadcasted, and then you still have people who deny that it happened or deny that it happened to the extent that it did, or deny the responsibility, say like, you know, X amount of people were killed by Israeli friendly fire, therefore we don't believe anything.
It's it's the way of throwing out everything by taking one example of something that was was not necessarily a thousand percent as represented, the whole decapitated babies argument on the internet where they said that that may or may not have happened, therefore none of it happened.
As if it changes a damn thing as to what happened.
What I found so striking is we are in a in a kibbutz right on the Gaza border, 700 yards away, and I'm talking to this woman, Lee Shai Miran.
Her husband is currently a hostage.
And in fact, I just saw a report that Hamas claims that they, quote, can't find him, which cannot be good news.
But in any event, she's describing, she says, these five monsters came through my window.
Uh, they were in my house, we were hiding in our safe room, uh, they shot the neighbor's kid.
And I realized as I was talking to her that I actually have the footage of that event.
Um, I have the Hamas guys in her house.
So this is a case where we're doing an interview, and under normal movie circumstances, you would have to recreate that incident to make it to show what happened.
But no, I don't have to recreate it.
I actually have it.
And so part of what gives this movie its kind of a resting power up front is it's showing you real life events as if you were right there two years ago.
Um we're gonna get into the uh the documentary itself, it's fascinating because it's sort of um uh an interpretation of events through the lens of the Bible.
Um, but again, one thing up front, because I know people are gonna watch this and they're going to say this is the uh biblical version of the propaganda arm of a government that is trying to convince America why they need to support Israel in the fight against Hamas Iran.
And I and I you you have to know that it's gonna happen.
You don't even have you don't have to agree with it to know it's gonna happen.
They're gonna say, uh, you know, you try to go with the political argument, and now you're gonna go with the religious argument to say it's biblically necessary.
Um what accusations have you faced up to date in terms of being funded by the.
Well, I I almost have to chuckle here because yes, these days, for the first time really in my life, I will post things and people go, Did you got your $7,000 check to Nesh?
Like, how much is Israel paying you?
Now, first of all, the reason I think that that I'm these attacks are going to continue is because I am actually truly an outsider to all this.
You know, I've made uh eight films already, uh not a single one has been about Israel.
So no one can say I'm obsessed with Israel.
I've never talked about Israel before.
Um, number two, uh, I became very enchanted with biblical archaeology uh for reasons having to do with Christian apologetics.
They have nothing to do with Israel per se.
What it is is I I'm like, wow, isn't it amazing that after 2,000 years, figures in the Bible that were previously only in the Bible, meaning there was no non-biblical authentication of them, are turn out to be real people, real events.
And I'm talking not just about about Pontius Pilate, who lived 2,000 years ago and presided over the trial of Jesus.
I'm talking about Isaiah and Jeremiah who lived six to eight hundred years before that.
King David, who lived 3,000 years ago.
Going back to Abraham 4,000 years ago, you would think that these nomads like Abraham would have left no traces.
As it turns out, there is archaeological evidence, and it's coming out like in the last 25 years.
So it's almost like as the world has become more secular.
Um, it's like God is like whispering back, but now in the language of science itself, undeniable, right?
So I'm like, I'm entranced by this.
So my wife and I begin donating to it.
So we've we've given 100,000 a year to biblical archaeology in Jerusalem for three years.
And so now I have all these people go, You're in Israel's payroll.
I go, actually, let me correct you.
Israel is on my payroll, you know, because I believe in this stuff on biblical grounds, and that's how I became intrigued.
Now, then along comes October 7th, and I'm scratching my head and I'm I'm trying to put these two very different things together, right?
October 7th is thoroughly political.
It's uh there's a war going on.
Um, and I go, you know what?
They are actually connected.
Why?
Because in the end, this is a fight about whose land is it.
And the biblical archaeology, which I became intrigued about for religious reasons, um, has a political dimension to it because guess what?
You cannot be a colonizer if you are the original inhabitant of that land, right?
I mean, you can't accuse the Irish of colonizing Ireland or the Indians of colonizing India.
These are the original inhabitants.
So that's how those two things came together.
And then I met this other guy, Jonathan Khan.
He wrote the book, a massive bestseller, by the way, called The Dragon's Prophecy.
And he makes the startling claim that the battle between Israel and Hamas and the Palestinians is a recreation of ancient battles between the Israelites and their classic enemies.
So the Amalekites, the Moabites, but most notably the Philistines.
And he doesn't just say that, look, the name Philistine, the name Palestine, it's the same name, it's the same word.
He elaborates by showing that the tactics of October 7th and the tactics recorded in the Bible, you can look at them and they are eerily the same.
Well, I I I very much appreciate that element of the theme of it.
Um, where you talk about back in the olden days, they would capture prisoners and parade them around.
Part of me says, on the one hand, that's just what people do in battle.
I mean, that's just with the nature of war humiliating and degrading your your enemy.
And for those out there, by the way, who are saying you are on Israel's payroll, one thing that I did find I'm not kissing your butt at all.
What I found particularly good about the documentaries, it was surprisingly even-handed in that even the people who support Israel say at what point is it too much, even as a retaliatory or uh uh you know tactically necessary um goal.
How many is too many?
Some people will say, you know, you you asked for this type of response by what you did, and so you can't complain about it now.
And others are going to say Hamas is the master of placing civilians in harm's way so they could use their bloodshed as further evidence as to how evil the the reprisals.
The document was surprisingly even-handed on that front.
Yes.
It it frames it a little bit, I would put it in moral terms like this.
It is one of the most diabolical tactics of evil to put good people in a position where they are almost forced to do evil, and thus evil kind of wins either way.
So that is the conundrum of evil, that the evil person will stoop to a level to which a good person is like the only way to fight this guy now is I have to jump into the mud pit with him.
I don't want to be in the mud, but there's no other place I can go in the situation.
So this is uh this is why the dragon in the title really refers to the devil.
And it's uh it's kind of like uh it's a battle between good and evil.
So part of what evil does is it tries to drag good into the mud pit.
I mean, i the analogy, just the simplest, most um exaggerated analogy analogy is somebody charging ahead with a baby as a shield.
Like just to do, and if you have to shoot the baby, then say, look what you did, you just shot the baby.
Exactly.
Um the flip side is going to be, or at least my bottom line question is that is the nature of the enemy.
How do you fight that enemy then?
And how do you fight that enemy in a way because there's the war on the battlefield and then there's the war of public opinion, which, like it or not, Israel is clearly losing right now, at least with the a certain generation who doesn't understand the nature of the warfare or even the dynamic, how do you fight that fight and try to win that fight in today's day and age?
I mean, I and I guess we'll be able to do that.
Yeah, well, I think I think the um couple things.
I mean, one of them is I think one lesson you learned from this in the modern age is that if you're going to do a counter-attack, you have to do it immediately.
So if Israel had launched even carpet bombing of Gaza on October 8th, I don't think people could have said a word.
Um, but by by holding back, you allow the original outrage to subside.
In fact, Israel, I think did a mistake, uh, the government by not really releasing the October 7th footage.
They did it out of consideration of the hostages and their families.
They uh created a mini documentary for selected journalists to see, but the vast majority of people know about October 7th, but they have not experienced it.
You know, I mean, I know about Papua New Guinea, but I've never been there.
I have no feeling of what it's like to be there.
Um, this is where film can be very powerful.
And that's why that's why I chose to begin this film with that.
But the second point I would make is that, and and this is where I think the anti-Semitic element comes in.
And I'm very reluctant to just throw that charge out.
But what I will say is this if if anti-Semitism can be clinically defined as holding the Jews to a completely different standard than you apply to anyone else, then I think it's fair to say that we are seeing rampant anti-Semitism on the left and the right.
Why?
Because nobody says that after the Japanese attacked at Pearl Harbor and killed a few thousand people, and actually not that many civilians, that somehow America was in its retaliation forced to compute a number of casualties that would somehow match the number of the original attack.
No, America just declares war on Japan, and even people who don't agree with the dropping of the two Atomic bombs generally say, well, we should have done the land invasion instead.
Well, that would have killed untold numbers of casualties.
Similarly, of course, after 9-11, the United States goes into a massive bombing mode.
Huge bombs are being dropped on Afghanistan.
Nobody's even counting the casualties.
And yet on October 7th, suddenly a different standard kicks into place.
And I don't just mean a different standard being applied by Ilan Omar.
I mean that exact same standard being applied by Talka Carlson.
So we are now seeing to me a singling out of the Jews, which is, I think, uh a pretty good uh operational definition of anti-Semitism.
It's it is interesting.
Um, have you seen the movie Pulp Fiction?
I saw it long time ago.
Way back in there's a scene where they're talking about the guy who got pushed out of a window because he massaged Marcellus Wallace's wife's feet.
And then, you know, saying, well, wasn't the response exaggerated?
And he says, Maybe it was, but you had to have expected a response.
Um and again, like you say, the had they done carpet bombing, and I'm not advocating for this at all.
Um I had put out my you know proposed strategy the day after, and one of which would have been, you know, the first thing is answering as to how the catastrophic intelligence failure happened in the first place.
Right.
You're not gonna authorize the people who were at the helm of that catastrophic failure to then dictate the response, because then you're gonna have two catastrophic failures.
But um, you know, there is gonna be a response.
And it if it had been unapologetic from the get-go, um, maybe things would have been different than, like you say, letting the initial shock wear off, and then people are like, this you're still doing this two years later, we've forgotten about the original October 7.
Um, but the holding of Israel to a different standard, people did complain.
I I wasn't alive at the time, but people did complain about the righteousness or the wrongness of bombing uh Hiroshima.
I don't know if they refer to it as an act of terrorism at the time.
No, no, but right.
And and what I was suggesting was that that objection was in fact uh about the bombing of civil of was simply because Hiroshima and and Nagasaki were obviously purely civilian targets.
They were not bombed for military reasons.
They were bombed for the same reason that Hamburg and and Dresden were bombed.
Churchill thought that the German people were sticking with Hitler.
He thought we actually have to break the will of the civilians.
You know, I watched this documentary about uh which had some very had real uh some new footage of World War II, and they were talking to an American bombing commander, and the American guy goes, I was given my instructions, this is like 1944, and he said, uh, this was my target.
I was supposed to go and bomb this target.
And I asked them, I go, Who's in there?
And they they said, 20,000 women and children are sheltered there.
So he goes, I'm not doing it.
And they told him, you better do it.
It's your order, you have to do it.
And he goes, and so I did it.
But he goes, but it's haunted me ever since, right?
So what I'm getting at is this stuff happens in war.
By the way, Israel is not doing this.
Israel is not targeting civilians.
Israel is not trying to quote break the will of the Palestinian people.
Israel is targeting Hamas.
Um, and so there is an absolute moral chasm.
My wife posed a question to me the other day that took me by surprise.
She goes, Why do you think Israel doesn't take hostages?
Right?
It's kind of a shocking question.
And I was like, is it because Israel just isn't like that?
It doesn't do that.
She goes, No.
Israel doesn't take hostages because Hamas wouldn't care.
In other words, when the other side goes, it's it's a little bit like Danny DeVito in that movie, right?
They kidnap his wife, he's like, keep her.
I don't want to.
Was it ruthless people?
I I wasn't.
Yeah, it was the kidnappers thought they had a prize.
You know, they got his wife, he's a successful business guy, and he's like, oh, well, actually, this is the best news I've, you know.
So uh yes, you're dealing with, and I think for Americans, the idea of comprehending that psychology is almost impossible.
I I saw a woman the other day, and she was saying this.
She's like, I've given the blood of my two children, and she goes, I only have two more.
And you think she's gonna say, and so I don't support this war.
I've already lost two kids.
The last thing I would want is to, but no, she's like, I cannot wait for them to be martyrs.
And so what American mom can get their head around something like this?
You know, I I think that part, on the one hand, nobody can.
Uh and the people who can't sometimes say, I just don't believe it's happening.
I believe that's propaganda.
Just to steal man one response, the people would say Israel does take hostages, they're in prison because they shouldn't be there.
So any prisoner that Israel has is by definition a hostage.
And then the flip side is people would also say that Israel is targeting hospitals and civilian infrastructure, uh, but pretending they're not.
I mean, that that's where you can never even agree on a set of facts because they're gonna say some people are gonna say they're not doing it, others are gonna say they are doing it, but pretending they're not, and then some are gonna say they are doing it and basically boasting that they are.
Well, some of this admittedly is the fog of war, right?
And and and and it is true that in I mean, if you look at the great literature and war, particularly Tolstoy, he's so good on this.
You know, he describes, you know, he's uh he describes a guy who's out in the battlefield, and he says, you know, prior to the battle and after the battle, there are all these strategy manuals, and even after the battle is won, pundits, armchair pundits will give seven reasons why one side prevailed.
He goes, to the soldier on the battlefield, none of this is relevant.
It's all smoke.
You can hardly see eight feet.
There's no general's orders that even matter.
You know, you're just moving desperately, and and all the analysis is going to come afterward, and they will be like, it was the strategic genius of Robert E. Lee.
Um that is an ex post factor rationalization for an outcome that actually has very little to do with the facts on the ground.
So I think we should be aware of all that.
Now, what I try to do in the film, uh, you know, in in drawing the biblical parallel, is the biblical parallel reaches a fairly uh striking uh limits.
The four colors of the apocalypse in the book of Revelation.
That I found right.
If the Palestinian flag had been any other four colors, I bet you could find a something of other colors in the Bible to come to that conclusion.
But for the possibly, right, but the four colors.
Right.
So the four colors of the apocalypse are there's there's red, uh, there's white, there's black, and there's green.
And each of them stand for famine, death, destruction.
And then you just look at the Palestinian flag, and it's red for the red horse, it's white for the white horse, black for the back horse, green, by the way, symbolizing symbolizing death.
Let's go further.
The the name Hamas, which is an Arabic word where it refers to uh resolution, uh strength.
But in Hebrew, uh, and in fact, in the Hebrew Bible, if you look at the Hebrew version of the Bible, you get the following lines Lord, rid me of the men of Hamas.
Hamas means violence, destruction, death.
Um Hamas dwells in the dark places of the earth.
I mean, this is fascinating, right?
Right now, Hamas is being offered a deal, right?
And we are not sure, you or I, what Hamas is gonna do.
What my film predicts is that is that Hamas is not going to give up on its name.
It's not gonna give up on the death and destruction.
They might make a tactical move like, uh, guess what?
We're you know, we're gonna lay down arms right here.
But Hamas has been structured as an instrument of destruction.
In fact, it's in their charter.
And so the leopard doesn't change its stripes, it spots, and and Hamas is not going to move away from Hamas.
Um, so the film um it it's grounded in the political, right?
That Tucker Carlson poses a question to Ted Cruz.
I take that same question and I ask Nedanyahu.
Um, I asked Netanyahu to comment on Jesus.
I mean, which, you know, think about it.
There's the the Jewish head of a Jewish state is commenting on the most famous Jew of all time.
Fascinating by itself.
Uh but the apocalyptic and the biblical side of it, I think is intriguing, even for people who are not particularly religious.
It is the the historical element, uh I'm call me biased or whatever.
Uh, the historical element as to who is there first, putting it in quotes, has never been at issue.
The only question is, is there uh actus novice?
Like in the interim that the Jews have been in exile for the thousands of years, other people have taken it over, and now your initial claim is over.
The the Palestinian claim to the land fails on its own logic, because if you go back to the original inhabitants, it wasn't the Palestinians in any event.
The documentary spells that out quite well.
Uh, and then there's the reality that Israel is just there now, and like Canada is there now, whether or not it stole it from the natives, history is unfair.
They're there now, they're not Going anywhere.
My question about the documentary is it will be viewed as being not declaring war on radical Islam, but uh concluding that there is a war with radical Islam and it is being fought by the Jews and the Christians against this Hamas faction of Islam.
Okay, but it needs to that needs a qu an important qualification.
The I agree, there is a there is a war.
It's a it's a physical and a spiritual war, but radical Islam has an ally, and the ally is the cultural left in the West.
So it is the some people call it the red green alliance.
It's a very unusual alliance, right?
Because if you can look at the cultural left as symbolized by, let's just call it LGBTQ, uh, and you look at radical Islam as symbolized by let's just say the jihadis uh in Gaza or in Iran, these two groups do not exist comfortably with each other, right?
You can't take the LGBTQ and put them in Iran.
They have to jump out of windows or be thrown off the roof.
The queers for Palestine will understand what happens to queers in Palestine if ever.
There you go.
And similarly, you can't take the jihadis in Iran.
Imagine taking the Iranian parliament and walking them down the Folsom street fair in San Francisco, they would be extremely uncomfortable.
So, and yet these two groups are politically joined at the hip.
They they show up in the same rallies at Columbia University and they have the same enemies.
And the enemies are who?
The Jews and the Christians.
Uh Israel and the evangelical Christians.
And sure enough, the two biggest sort of um uh attacks today, the attack on the Jews and the attack on Christians in places like Nigeria, where they are being rounded up, they're being beheaded.
And so, yes, I would say that if the if the cultural left and the radical Muslims are mobilized on that side, it is time for the Jews and the Christians to counter-mobilize.
Uh, not only not only politically, but also and militarily when where necessary, but also spiritually.
Okay, it is it is fascinating.
We've been talking about that.
I call it an unholy alliance because it quite literally is, you know, like the radical left and radical Islam up in Canada, they protest together right up until they start teaching 2 SLGB, TQA plus stuff in Muslim schools, and then you have actually the right and the religious Islam uh aligning ideologically to counter the degeneracy.
If if they win, there will be a, you know, just like just like after uh Octavian um and Mark Anthony defeated Brutus and Cassius, then they went to war with each other, right?
There will be another war between the cultural left and radical Islam uh to settle which of them is primary.
Each of them right now thinks that they are primary.
They are the senior partner of that strange bedfellows relationship.
Um, and each brings certain strengths to the table, but uh, but there's something very very bad.
Uh if they win, uh it's bad news either way, because we're either going to get a world dominated by the cultural left or we're all going to be living under global sharia.
Now, um, people are going to accuse, I said it before, just it's gonna happen.
They're gonna say this is now the religious propaganda selling point for why we have to support Israel.
There are people out there, and it's it's a big, I mean, I don't know how big it is, a substantial portion of Trump's magnetic.
Especially a lot of younger, younger guys.
It's the Middle East.
Uh how has Israel been an ally to America any more than Ukraine's been an ally to America?
Okay, so I'll answer that.
I I think that that deserves an answer.
And here's my answer.
Uh, Israel is for two reasons, um, a incredibly effective fighter against radical Islam.
America's record in fighting radical Islam is downright abysmal.
Number one, Jimmy Carter pulled out the Persian rug from the Shah, and we got Khomeini.
We actually enable radical Islam get a hold of a major state.
Number two, after uh 9-11, we go over there to Afghanistan, we pulverize the Taliban, chase them out of town, they're back.
So they win long term.
Number three, we botched Iraq.
So our guys are nincompoops in fighting radical Islam.
We just don't know how to do it.
If you take a simple operation like the Israeli Pager operation, you think that RCIA could pull that off.
I don't.
Um, RCIA is is has never done, I mean, they haven't gotten anything right since World War II.
Um, now, the why is Israel so good?
I think there are two reasons.
One is Israel is over there, so they have a more close-up look at the situation.
America has a far more spectator, distant spectator uh viewpoint.
Number two, uh Israel is, and you feel this when you're there.
It is such a small country, so hemmed in.
It's like I look a football field away, and there's Gaza, you know?
So the so the Israelis are living on the edge.
It's kind of like if you're living in a very dangerous neighborhood, you are trained to look over your shoulder.
You develop survival skills that an ordinary other person would not have.
So I would argue we are terrible at doing something.
That something is not caused by Israel.
I mean, when you think of jihadis in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, in Egypt, they don't wake up worrying about Palestine.
They have a global jihad in mind.
They want to infiltrate Australia, Canada, Europe, America.
They want to build mosques in Houston and Dallas.
They want to take over school boards.
They want a hundred Ilhan Omars.
This is their global project, regardless of whether Israel exists or not.
So we are, we we are in this fight whether we like it or not.
Why would we spurn an ally that is doing our work on the front line that we don't even know how to do?
I mean, I guess uh I can imagine what the response is going to be to that.
Some people are going to say Israel's not fighting uh terror with us, but rather maybe they're even, on the one hand, not in, and I know I'm not saying I believe this at all.
I just know that this is the argument they're gonna make, instigating it.
That, you know, the Iraq failures, you know, to some extent, BB, um, he didn't have a hand in it, but he had a voice in it.
And that, you know, some would say that the failure is maybe part of the the plan to exacerbate the situation situation to get to this one war that uh some people feel that Netanyahu wants to wage ultimately against Iran, Iraq was sort of a halfway step towards there.
And so I I I mean I lived through all this, so I know this is false.
Uh, and and I know this false because I was actually at that time a supporter of the Iraq war.
I was somewhat of a reluctant supporter because I didn't see the nexus to 9-11, but I went along with the Bush uh portrayal of the weapons of mass destruction.
At that time, Israel was not on board.
Why?
Because Israel's strategy was really simple.
Israel's strategy was we need people like Ataturk in Turkey, the Shah of Iran in Iran, um Saddam Hussein and because these are secular dictators that are going to keep radical Islam in check.
So Israel was like, why are you doing it this way?
The neocons who had their own agenda in America, essentially overruled Israel and said, no, this is how we're doing it.
Uh, we're gonna go, you know, break some eggs over there.
And so this narrative that we're getting now that somehow Israel cooked up our invasion of Iraq.
I mean, I'm sorry, but that's just nonsense.
At least see, this is where you get to a disagreement on the underlying fact where that's where this is where we're gonna part ways in terms of uh a disagreement on the core fact.
Because I know people are just gonna say that's not true.
You know, BB's always been trying to get to war with Iran.
Uh, he was putting out the WP.
But let's remember, you know, you had that massive Iran-Iraq war that went on for a decade.
Yeah, it went for a decade with massive casualties on both sides.
Why do why what sense does it make to the degree that Iran is the the sort of master operator of jihad, right?
To the degree that Iran has the power, they have the nuclear threat, they have the wealth, the oil welt, and to the degree that they have powerful proxies like Hezbollah now and later Hamas.
And if your goal is to weaken Iran, why would you want the United States to go and smash the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq?
What is the logic of that?
I think the easy answer would be the resources Trump, the strategy, possibly.
But we didn't even take their resources.
I mean, it would be great if we had gone over there and said, listen, I mean, a good old colonial expedition to take the Iraqi oil would be are you can argue the merits of that.
It cost us a giant fortune to do that war.
We didn't even reimburse ourselves with oil revenues that do exist.
And what we did ultimately is create a structure where Iran, because of the Shia connection with Iraq, was able to get the very Iraqis that we supported to defect to the Iranian side.
So uh that just turned out to be a complete disaster.
I think the Trump phenomenon partly came, you know, came out of that.
So this is the politics on the ground, but there is a lot of, and we're seeing some of this from the right as well.
And I don't think you could have gotten away with this a generation ago.
You know, we have we've become a little bit of an idea uh sort of a society of stupid people.
So you can now put out uh we have we have intellectuals of the ideocracy, right?
And and and their names are like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Mark.
What is that?
Idiocracy, not ideos.
Okay, idiocracy.
Yeah, that's right.
It was an idea.
No, no, no.
It's the idiocracy, sorry.
That's right.
I don't want to sound like an idiot.
I'm an idiot, right?
So, and we have an intellectual class that is actually well suited to that because what they do is they take uh issues and they reframe them in obviously false ways, uh, but young people don't know better.
So let's say take an example.
You'll have Tucker say something, oh, he doesn't say it is guest says, as it, because Tucker's uh uses the what I call the ventriloquist journalism mode, right?
He uh he has a view, but he he stay he raises a question which is very leading and his guest obliges.
So the guests will come in and say something like, you know, the United States should really have allied with Hitler against Stalin, right?
Shocking thing to say, really, uh, because Hitler was on the global march.
Stalin was minding his own business.
He was doing a lot of bad stuff inside his country, but he was not a global threat.
Hitler was.
So what could be the rationale for allying with Hitler against Stalin?
None.
Uh, and and there's no attempt to defend this at all.
Uh now, after World War II, Patton and others took the view listen, now that we have neutralized, now that we have shut down the Nazis, maybe we should march on to Moscow.
That's a whole different thing.
Uh that's not saying we should have allied with Hitler, but it's saying having defeated Hitler, we should now consider keeping it going.
But of course, in reality, the mood in America was we won, come bring the boys home.
So that was never practical.
But what happens is when this guy goes, we need to ally with Hitler, Tucker will, well, you know, there were some people at the time who sort of took that position, and he's completely misrepresenting what the debate was at the time.
Nobody took the position that Hitler is our best friend and we need to, we need to back Hitler against Stalin.
So this um landscape is twisted uh a, you know, 75 years later, when there's no adult in the room to step in and go, you are completely misrepresenting what happened uh during and in the aftermath of World War II.
This factoid now becomes a kind, at least in the minds of young people, a fact.
Well, it is interesting.
Yeah, Tucker has had his issues.
I I defend him because I think he's you know, uh he's not always as bad as the media says, but by way of it's interesting, ventriloquist journalism when he had on George Stephanopoulos's sister, who is ostensibly blaming the decrease in the Christian population in the Middle East in Israel on Israel, and not identifying where the decrease of the Christian population is occurring in Muslim-controlled areas and where it's growing in Israel itself to somehow make Israel look like it's the enemy of the Christians.
Uh I think he gets rightly called out on that, but that's what public debate is for.
Yeah.
My criticism is is just that is really that he doesn't actually engage in any kind of debate.
He has guests on, often some fairly shady or obscure characters, and he allows them to make allegations, which he then in a kind of, you know, he rubs his chin, he scratches his head.
It's very interesting.
Um he validates them through his uh through a kind of pose that's very open-minded.
Like I'm considering an idea.
I'm not committed to it.
Um, and there's a little bit of rhetorical back and forth.
It's like, well, that's interesting.
I'm not, I'm not saying, but I, but you know, he is saying, but he's, you know, so the he there's a kind of a, and it's kind of charming in its own way.
Now, look, I mean, all of us are fans of Tucker, the old Tucker.
I'm a huge fan of the old Candace.
I spoke at her Blexit events.
I did a I did a speaking tour with Tucker last year in Australia, the two of us, uh, with a couple of Australian speakers in eight cities.
We went to all the major cities together, and perfectly cordial.
Uh this topic, of course, never came up.
So it's not like I am I'm rather awkwardly and unwillingly drawn into all this.
But I do think that it's very damaging to the MAGA movement.
It is not only splitting the MAGA movement ideologically, it is tearing it apart generationally.
And that's one of the worst things you can do, right?
You what you're doing is you're bringing the young people over to this kind of Israel is to blame stance.
The older generation does not think that.
So you're cutting off the older generation, the Reagan generation, and even the early Trump generation with Gen Z. The argument is, and to steel man your position for those who say, what good is Israel doing?
It's sort of like either a satellite, it's our boots on the ground in the Middle East to make sure that radical Islam doesn't take over, a nuclear-armed Iran takes over and nukes the West.
Others are going to say, let Israel fight its battle.
And in fact, had they been able to fight without the political reins that America wanted to impose on them, they might have resolved this sooner.
And others are going to say, let them fight, and we'll just protect ourselves against uh nuclear armed Iran, because at the end of the day, it's either going to happen or it's not, or it's happened already or it's not, and Israel is not worth that much of a diversion of all of our resources.
Uh the billions in aid that go to Israel, go to Ukraine, go to funding these foreign wars.
Let them fight and let America focus on America first, as opposed to what many believe to be America second to an Israel first.
Right.
So look, I mean, first of all, America first has never meant America only.
America first means that we take a real politic, uh Machiavellian view of the world, where ultimately a state is going to act to protect its own interests.
Uh that's true of America.
That's true of uh that's true uh of Israel.
I am not saying that we have any permanent alliances, nor am I saying that anybody is getting a blank check.
We had an interest in the Middle East when I first came to America in 1978, between 1978 and about 2000, our interest in the Middle East had to do with Middle Eastern oil.
Uh we were very dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
Remember OPEC, remember the oil crisis.
So we had a kind of financial stake over there, which was our main rationale for getting involved.
Uh global jihadiism was not the main threat.
In fact, it was the era of the Cold War.
Interestingly, after the Cold War, uh the oil interest abated.
America found a lot of natural gas.
We are less dependent economically, but now we're facing this global ideological enemy that you can might call Islamism or global jihad.
And that puts a new spin on it.
And it our interests are changed.
The trajectory is not the same.
I also want to emphasize, and Trump knows this very well, this is not even a straight-out fight against Muslims.
We're not fighting Muslims in Indonesia, that we're not fighting Muslims in India.
The Abraham Accords, you've got uh you've got Muslim countries coming on board in a peaceful framework.
I think Saudi Arabia is thinking of joining.
So if you look at Saudi, you look at Egypt, you look at UAE, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, the Gulf Kingdoms.
This is by no means a quote religious war in that sense.
Uh, we're talking about a species of Islam that can be identified, that in fact identifies itself, uh, and that is inherently violent.
Uh, and that threat, I mean, it's gonna find you if you you can't look away and pretend it doesn't exist.
It's coming home to us in America.
I say it it might already be.
It is here.
I mean, at home in America, certainly at uh we're seeing it in Canada.
I guess the question is this, and this is the ultimate question.
Uh the documentary frames it as you know, a biblical war, which whether or not you think it's a biblical war, it's certainly something of a spiritual war, and it's certainly something of a war of radical Islam and a godless left against the god of Christianity and Judaism.
I mean, how does it uh what is the resolution?
Because you go into the indoctrination in Palestine or in the Gaza and the West, the generational indoctrination, what's the solution to that?
Right.
So it is important to realize that uh I am not doing a religious counter-Jihad.
In other words, the radical Muslims are like, Allah made me do this, right?
Uh, here's what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that if it is True that the enemy is in a sense going back to the way it was in the early times of the Bible.
So, for example, if we are seeing a savagery on the part of radical Islam that resembles the savagery of the Philistines.
Let's look at it just in secular terms here.
Then what that means is that Jews and Christians need to respond appropriately, right?
Now, what does what does that mean?
Well, the Israelis know what it means.
It means that Israelis today have got to be tough.
They've got to realize it's difficult to hold on to that land.
They need to put on the armor the same way that the ancient Israelites did, right?
But the big difference between Islam and Christianity is this.
Christianity has.
And so you've got jihadis on fire and weak need Christians.
So part of what I'm doing in this film is I'm trying to tell the Christians, listen, we once had that same evangelical fire.
It's in the book of Acts.
Christians who were serious about their faith and serious about their society.
And I'm saying we need a Christianity that is invigorated.
Why?
Because Western civilization is built on two pillars: Athens and Jerusalem.
You cannot take either of these pillars down or the whole building collapses, right?
Athens is not the problem right now.
The problem is Jerusalem.
And so I'm trying to, in this film, uh, demonstrate the need for strengthening the Jerusalem pillar, uh, both in a religious but also in a cultural sense, because the American founders drew from that soil of both Athens and Jerusalem.
And really, Athens and Jerusalem need to keep an eye on each other, because Athens supplies classical reason, Athens supplies democracy, but Jerusalem supplies the Hebrew prophets.
And it supplies the idea of the Ten Commandments, an external moral code.
So in some ways, uh, and the philosopher Leo, I'm arguing something the philosopher Leo Strauss argued very eloquently that Athens and Jerusalem are the two uh dueling, but nevertheless mutually fortifying elements that have created the peculiar dynamism of our civilization.
That's how we became as strong, prosperous, and powerful as we are.
I know you have to go sooner than later.
Um a couple of final questions, we'll see how how deep they go.
When you were down there documenting this, and you know, I had seen the footage of October 7 because I was following Telegram accounts where they were unfiltered, uh, and it wasn't a question of you know, uh it not happening, it was proudly being shared on the on on the internet by the perpetrators.
Um, in the documentary, one of the one of the victims talking about how she was holed up in that uh bunker type building at the concert for five plus hours.
Did any of the victims, I mean, uh express any dis any questioning as to how Israel was caught so off guard?
Like, did you have that discussion off record because it wasn't on it wasn't in the documentary?
No, no.
The remarkable thing here is that those people in those kibbutzes and the people at Nova, these are the liberal Jews.
These are not the Netanyahu Jews.
These are the people who actually would extend an olive branch.
Uh, if you look at Nova, those were Bohemians.
They were there at like a bohemian festival.
And the kibbutzes down uh not necessarily in in Judea and Samaria, but down at Gaza, those are all socialist communes, you know.
And so those guys are they are the last people to be on board with Netanyahu.
But I think the very striking thing is that the Israeli left, even though you know, if you ask me what what blinded Israel, uh what blinded Israel was its internal infighting that was going on at a fever pitch, fight about the Supreme Court, the law fair against Netanyahu, and they took their eye off the ball and Hamas took advantage.
So to me, that's the most plausible explanation.
All the other explanations, like Netanyahu ordered the troops to stand down, you know, let's put it this way.
If the Israeli left had the slightest whiff that he did that, they would excavate the truth of it and destroy him completely.
Um, but no, that's not the correct explanation.
I I think one of the problems we have in our time, and maybe we close with this is the is this that because so many conspiracy theories have turned out to be true, and because young people have such an earned distrust of the CDC and the FBI, we've been lied to so much by the left.
This is why people have become in a way suckers for the stupidest explanations.
You know, uh here's a picture of uh the campus at um in Utah.
I see a outline of a pipe.
What if a Mossad agent Klein brother pipe and shot Charlie Kirk?
I mean Do you have any reason to believe that's the case?
Have you uh do you have any evidence that there was in fact somebody in the pipe?
Do you know if the pipe even leads to a place where you know so what I when I watch this, I'm like, I'm like, does anybody is anybody stupid enough to like go along with this?
And it turns out lots of people do.
In fairness to Alex Jones, like eat drink Sandy Hook.
You know, he even said, you know, I was going through a form of psychosis.
I had seen all the things that the government had actually done.
I started to hallucinate it where they weren't actually doing it.
And I say to some extent, uh the it would say we're we're to blame ourselves because you when they use the same arguments in blind support of Ukraine, you then understand why people are gonna use the same opposition in respect of Israel.
Well, the other thing is I noticed this happening on the left.
It happened in the mode of scholarship called deconstruction, right?
They get the idea, uh a correct idea, by the way, that sometimes texts have multiple layers of meaning, and it is and clever people can tease out those layers of meaning, and this becomes a kind of academic art.
But after a while, it's carried so far that you take an absolutely straightforward sentence like I just got back from this restaurant from from you know from uh from dinner for dinner, uh and the deconstructionist ends up playing with it so much that as it turns out you never went to the restaurant at all.
Uh and so uh so what's happened is they've cultivated a habit of suspicion that now makes it that them unable to distinguish appearance from reality.
I think that's really what's happened to our culture generally.
But you know, look, I don't blame these young people who are angry and who feel lost and who's where's my American dream?
I can't buy a house like my parents.
I mean, I get it.
I blame the Pied Pipers who I think are misleading them and misleading them in a very cynical way.
So if we can close with this, um I would just say check out the film.
Um it's uh I'd like you to go to the theater if you can, because I make it very cinematic for that purpose.
It is it's exquisitely well done.
It's it's like full-length documentary, nine, what was it, 90s?
It's 90 minutes, the perfect length.
Uh, but listen, lots of people like to watch at home.
It will be streaming on Rumble, basically starting uh early morning, Thursday morning.
Uh, that's October 9th.
And um, and so if you can't watch it, uh if you can't watch it in the theater, to to get theater tickets, by the way, you can't go to the theater.
You have to go to the website, buy them on the website.
Website again is the dragonsprophecyfilm.com.
So the dragons floral philosophy prophecy film.com.
That will do this prophecyfilm.com and your personal social media.
It's just at Dinesh D'Souza Um and follow me on X. All right, and I was just checking to make sure I didn't miss any questions.
I didn't miss any questions, Dinesh.
Thank you very much.
This was great stuff.
Thank you.
Uh everyone watching, you know where to find him.
You know the document documentary comes out next week and uh Sunday night show with me and Barnes, we're gonna talk about this and a bunch of other stuff.
Thank you all for being here.
Dinesh, thank you very much.
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