In this episode of Family Talk, we feature a riveting discussion with acclaimed filmmaker and author Dinesh D’Souza. The conversation is drawn from Gary Bauer’s podcast and delves into D’Souza’s latest documentary, The Dragon’s Prophecy. This film interprets unfolding Middle East conflicts through a lens of biblical prophecy, weaving history, current events, and biblical truth in a compelling narrative. Interviews with leaders such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ambassador Mike Huckabee shed light on these themes, challenging and informing viewers about the pressing conflicts of our time.
00:09:20 Rising Tensions and Christian-Jewish Relations
00:14:25 Handling Difficult Content in Documentary
SPEAKER 02 :
Hello, everyone. You’re listening to Family Talk, a radio broadcasting ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute. I’m Dr. James Dobson, and thank you for joining us for this program.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, welcome to Family Talk. I’m Roger Marsh, and today we’re bringing you a powerful conversation that recently aired on Gary Bauer’s podcast called Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom. The response was so overwhelming that we knew we had to share it with you here on Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk. Our guest is acclaimed filmmaker and bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza, whose latest documentary called The Dragon’s Prophecy is captivating audiences all across America. Now it’s based on Rabbi Jonathan Cahn’s number one international bestseller featuring that same title. And this film tackles the most pressing questions of our time. What’s really happening in the Middle East? How do the ancient conflicts described in Scripture connect to the events unfolding before our eyes? And what does biblical prophecy reveal about where we are in history? Through dramatic footage, interviews with leaders like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ambassador Mike Huckabee, and stunning archaeological discoveries, Dinesh D’Souza weaves together history, current events, and biblical truth in a way that will challenge and inform you. So here now is our own Gary Bauer with filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza today. on today’s edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hello, everybody. This is Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President for Public Policy here at the James Dobson Family Institute. Really glad you could join us today. We have a special guest and his name, I’m sure you recognize it, is Dinesh D’Souza. Dinesh and I go back a long time. In fact, before we started today, we were reminiscing about our years in the Reagan White House toward the end of the second term. And it was a pleasure to work with Dinesh and be part of that administration. But I want to have him on today not to reminisce about the Reagan years, but to talk about just the extraordinary events that are taking place right in front of our eyes. And that Christians, and I think all men and women of goodwill are trying to figure it out and try to figure out what the headlines mean. For those of you that are familiar with the Bible, read the Bible, care about the Bible, I think sometimes When we see headlines, they seem like they’re coming right out of the prophetic literature of God’s Word. And, of course, there’s big debates about that in the body of Christ. But we’re going to talk about all of that. But the reason we’re going to talk about it with Dinesh is that he has produced this wonderful documentary, The Dragon’s Prophecy, based on the book by the same name by Rabbi Kahn. And Dinesh, I confess right up front, I haven’t seen the documentary, but I’ve talked to a lot of people that have, and I’ve seen some of the reviews. It really sounds like something that every believer should want to go to right now. Because we’re seeing, again, these events unfold. So, first of all, welcome to the show. You’ve got a long history of not only writing great books. I think you wrote your first book the same year you became a citizen, as I recall. And that book about illiberal education, my friend, you were ahead of the curve. You were talking about what was going on on our university campuses online. long before it became a major issue for conservatives and now under the Trump administration, a major issue that he’s dealing with. But you’ve also been known for an incredible series of documentaries. And correct me if I’m wrong, because you keep producing stuff. So maybe the figures or the statistics need to be updated. But I think if you look at the top 10 documentaries ever produced – about public policy, you’re responsible for, I believe, three or four of those. Is that right?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, that’s right, Gary. For most of my early career, I was an author, a speaker, largely on the college campus. And then about 2012, I started making documentary films. Now, my earlier films have all focused in one way or another on the meaning of America. This new film called The Dragon’s Prophecy is a departure for me because it covers Israel, Hamas, the war, It covers radical Islam, but it also covers biblical archaeology and a hint of biblical prophecy. So in the end, this is a film that integrates the spiritual with the biblical in the way that I have not explicitly done before. And when I made this film, I thought it was going to be interesting, but I had no idea that it would be flung right in the middle of these massive walls you could say biblical events we’re living through. So there’s sizzling political controversy. I mean, as you know, Israel and the Jews are now a topic of controversy, even on the right, even right of center. But also there is this larger question of whether what we’re living through, are we seeing a vista of like perpetual peace stretching as far as the eye can see? Or are there biblical warnings that say, listen, this thing is not going to be ultimately resolved until the very end. It’s not to say you can’t have meaningful progress, not to say you can’t have periods of peace, but this is going to be a festering sore until, well, what the Bible calls the last days.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, that’s a good summary, Dinesh. You know, I know you applaud the efforts that President Trump has made and is continuing to make. And of course, we all pray for the peace of Jerusalem and the peace of the Middle East. But If you immerse yourself in the Bible, even Donald Trump’s wonderful efforts at the end of the day don’t seem to be what ends up settling the question. And what ends up settling the question is bigger than any one president, and we could spend a lot of time talking about that. But, Dinesh, did you start— Doing the documentary before the events of October 7th, 2023, or were they spurred by that incredibly evil day that I can’t believe is already being swept under the covers, right? People want to forget that day as quickly as they can, but that day tells us a lot about the enemies that Israel’s facing.
SPEAKER 03 :
My wife and I went to Israel for the first time at the end of 2022, and I was exposed there to these new findings in biblical archaeology. Now, I’ve been involved in writing about Christian apologetics. I’ve debated many of the leading atheists around the world, but I was not familiar with the findings coming out of the ground in Israel, but also in surrounding areas in the last couple of decades. Now, for centuries, you have figures in the Bible, both in the Old Testament and the New, people like Pontius Pilate, or the high priest named Caiaphas, who presides over the trial of Jesus, or going further back, the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, or going even further back, King David. Now, these figures were in the Bible, but they were only in the Bible. But now, coming out of the ground are these artifacts, And I mean stone inscriptions, I mean coins, I mean clay seals, various material objects. And suddenly these figures from the Bible are jumping into the pages of history via the pathway of archaeology. So I was exposed to this and I’m like, wow, I don’t understand why this isn’t being like shouted from the rooftops of every synagogue and every church. I just became kind of enthralled. Then fast forward almost a year, October 7th. And then, for the past two years, my wife has been collecting, she’s been on a Telegram channel, getting all these videos, most of them, as you know, filmed by Hamas, of October 7th. And I’m like, I don’t think anyone has seen this stuff. This is like mind-blowing footage. But the Israel government had made a decision not to release the footage, only to show it to some select journalists. I think their motives were good. They wanted to respect the families. but it told me that there’s a whole experiential aspect of October 7th that the public has not seen. So I got the idea of doing a film that opens in the first 15 minutes by just putting you on the scene of October 7th. And then along comes Jonathan Cahn, introducing the element of biblical prophecy. And I hadn’t thought about that element before in this connection. And I realized, guess what? I’ve got the ancient past. That’s the archaeology. I’ve got the present. It’s October 7th. It’s the war. It’s now the peace plan. And Khan is giving me sort of the signposts of the future. So if I can pull all of those together into a tapestry, it’s going to make a really interesting film.
SPEAKER 02 :
Probably our listeners have figured this out, but the dragon that’s referred to is presumably Satan, and Revelation tells us that the dragon attacks the woman, and presumably the woman is Israel. Is that how you understand that?
SPEAKER 03 :
Right. I have Khan expound this part of the film, and it’s Revelation 12. The dragon goes to war against a woman representing Israel. The dragon represents Satan. The woman is pregnant, representing the Messiah. And so what the Bible is kind of pointing to here and forecasting in other passages is that we’re going to see in the end of time a… a dramatic increase in the temperature of attacks on the Jews and Israel on the one side, that’s the woman, and a dramatic increase of the persecution, blasphemy, and harassment of Christians, that’s the child. And so the point here isn’t just that the Bible predicts it. The point is we can look around the world and see if it is true that that you are seeing rising anti-Israel sentiment, by the way, not just in the orbit of radical Islam, even on the campuses in the West, even in the media, even in a lot of places far away from Israel. And then second, are we seeing rising attacks on Christians? Sure enough, we’re seeing rising persecution of Christians, the chopping off of Christian heads in Nigeria, but also increasing derision toward Christianity coming from within the secular West. So the attacks are coming, and they’re also coming from the same people. So the film kind of takes note of the fact that biblical prophecy is empirically validated by just kind of keeping your eyes open and looking around the world, and what the Bible says is going to happen is happening right now.
SPEAKER 02 :
You know, Dinesh, a lot of people look at the headlines and we see the rise of neo-Marxism again in many places in the West, including right here in the United States. And we know that Marxism almost always is godless. It’s responsible for the most incredible death toll of the 20th century. And then on the other hand, you’ve got radical Islam. And we see radical Islam and the Marxist left cooperating together in one Western country after another. And I run into people going, whoa, how do you explain that? That doesn’t make any sense. Well, it does make sense when you realize that they both hate Judeo-Christian civilization. And they both want to bring it down. And they will cooperate in doing that. If they ever succeed, the world will sink into another dark age. So God forbid that they would ever succeed. But that’s the only linkage I can see between the radical left and radical Islam, that they both hate us.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, that’s true. And you’re right that the connection between those two, the alliance, is a little mysterious because the two groups, let’s call them the red group, that’s the neo-Marxists, and the green group representing radical Islam, they have completely different end goals. Yeah. Right. If it were up to the red group, you’d have this kind of left wing socialism mixed with identity politics. You’d have LGBTQ. You’d have what my wife calls the Moulin Rouge Society. Very promiscuous. Anything goes. Radical Islam doesn’t want that world. It wants a different world. So these two groups cannot inhabit each other’s world. But they are joined by common hatreds, hatred toward the Jews and Israel on the one side and toward Christianity and the core principles of America and the West on the other. So, you know, you would think it would be rather obvious that Jews and Christians should draw closer together. that Israel and the United States have a necessary alliance to repel both radical Islam and the cultural left. And in a way, Gary, this makes it all the more enigmatic and mysterious that we have influential figures on the right who attack Israel, who attack the Jews, who seem to be trying to drive a wedge between America and Israel. So it’s forced me, somewhat against my instincts, because these are people I know, to be much more public in my resistance to all this, because it seems to me to be bad for MAGA, it’s bad for Trump, it’s bad for America. It’s also, I think, bad for Christianity, because we’re getting a version of Christianity here that’s basically saying, that the New Testament doesn’t need the Old, that we can somehow kick out the ladder from under us. And we can, you know, if you look at the Old Testament as the biography of God the Father, the Gospels as the biography of God the Son, and then the Acts of the Apostles as the biography of the Holy Spirit, it’s almost like these guys are saying, well, we can reduce the Trinity from three people to two. Let’s get rid of the Old Testament and just keep the New.
SPEAKER 02 :
You know, there’s a well-known pastor down in the Atlanta area that infamously said a year or two ago that he didn’t really see any need for the Old Testament. It was actually a stumbling block. And if we got rid of it, it would be a lot easier because it’s a vengeful God in the Old Testament, you know, and it would be a lot easier to show the love of God if we just kept the New Testament, but as you’re suggesting, that the Old Testament, I mean, Christ is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. That’s one of the ways we know he is the Messiah. So how in the world any pastor of a large church or any church could think that the Old Testament is beside the point or can be disposed of? Man, he needs to go back to theology school. Maybe that’s a bad idea, too. I don’t know.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, you know, as you know, in the book of Acts, there is a meeting between Paul and the apostles, and they’re discussing this exact question. To what degree do the Gentiles who want to follow Jesus need to, quote, become Jews? And the conclusion is really simple, that the Gentiles don’t have to be circumcised, and they don’t have to follow some of the Jewish dietary rituals and some of the other Jewish rituals, but… Guess what? They have to follow everything else. So in other words, we don’t get rid of Genesis creation. We don’t get rid of the Exodus. We don’t get rid of the Ten Commandments. We don’t get rid of the Psalms or the teachings of the prophets. All of that is retained and incorporated into the Christian Bible. So I think this notion that somehow we can do without the Old Testament, not to mention the You know, even putting aside for a moment the theological aspect of it, as you know, as well as I do, that Western culture is built on Athens and Jerusalem. And Athens here refers to classical reason, Socrates, the idea of free speech, also Pericles and the idea of democracy. But guess what? Jerusalem brings us the moral aspect. the idea of an external moral code that is independent of us, that makes claims on us. So I don’t think our civilization could stand on just one of those two pillars. It really needs both. And that is the cultural and moral case for maintaining a solidarity, not just with Israel, the political entity, but also with Jerusalem, the moral entity.
SPEAKER 02 :
Dinesh, I want to get back to the main reason we’re having this conversation, which is this documentary. And it’s getting fantastic reviews, by the way. So you mentioned that you began with the footage of October 7th. I’ve seen some of it. It is a hard thing to see. How do you handle that? What kind of a rating does the documentary have? Is it suitable for children to see or would you caution against that?
SPEAKER 03 :
I would say it’s not suitable for small children to see, but it is suitable for students who are, for example, in high school. It’s no problem. The most grotesque footage is excluded. I do enough in a very tasteful way to put you on the scene. So yes, you’re going to see gunfire. You are going to see dead bodies sprawled everywhere. You are going to see blood. And as I say, there’s a kind of a cautionary warning up there that that’s coming. But here’s why it’s important, Gary, because first of all, we live in a visual age. Second of all, it is one thing to know about things. It’s another thing to actually experience them. If I were to tell you, Gary, I grew up in India, you wouldn’t have a very clear picture of what that was like. You’d know about it. But if I then show you, Gary, here’s a video. This is me at the age of 10. This is my family. This is the home I grew up in. see what we’re eating for breakfast. That puts you on the scene. And so I thought it very important for people to have that experiential sense. And what makes it especially, I think, eerie in this film is that normally in a film where you’re going to see something horrific, you always see it from the point of view of the victim, right? Take a typical horror film. There’s a family. They’re eating peacefully. Everything is blissful. Suddenly somebody breaks a window and you see the bad guys coming at you. Here… you are seeing it from the point of view of the bad guys. Why? Because, of course, Hamas took the footage. So it’s almost like you’re on a motorcycle, you’ve got a GoPro on your head, you are riding with Hamas from Gaza over the fence into the kibbutzes of Israel to cause mayhem. And so you have that strange feeling of being with the bad guys going into and launching these October 7 attacks. So cinematically really powerful. One of the reviewers actually said, this is the most powerful opening scene of a film ever. since Saving Private Ryan. And I feel very good about that because I want people to cinematically experience these things. Now, once you’ve experienced them, I pull back and I take the most wide-angled biblical lens to make sense of it all so that the movie is very timely in a sense, but it also engages themes of good and evil, God and the dragon that are very timeless.
SPEAKER 02 :
You know, it’s interesting that most of the footage comes from Hamas itself, and it raises a question. Why in the world would they want to capture on film, video, what they were doing to women and children and civilians? And to me, that alone is very – it says who they are. No Israeli soldier or military unit, no American military unit, if they were going to conduct themselves in that way, violate the rules of war, et cetera, the last thing they would want to do is film it. But these people filmed it because they were proud of it. I’m sure you heard what I thought was just – almost the definition of evil, which was one of the Hamas fighters calling his parents. And he’s saying to his mother or father, I’ve killed Jews with my own hands. I’m using the Jewish woman’s phone right now to call you. And the parents, instead of being horrified, are saying, praise Allah, my son, praise Allah. I think the mother says, I wish I was there with you. These are the people that Israel is constantly being told by the diplomatic community and by professors and diplomats, etc. You must have a state side by side living in peace. This is absurd to suggest you can live in peace with this.
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, yes, that phone call is in the film. In fact, right after the October 7 massacre, I’m walking through the Nova kind of graveyard or it’s become a memorial now with all the pictures of all the people who were killed at that site. And that’s when we play the phone call. So that, because I think that the phone call gives you a window into the nature of evil itself. It also becomes an exploration of the way in which part of the devil’s handbook here is is to force good people to be in a very awkward position vis-a-vis evil, right? In other words, think about a guy who does a home invasion on you, massacres your family, runs away. You grab a gun and chase after him, but he then goes into a truck and he comes out with his wife and seven children. And he puts them right in front of him and he goes, I dare you to shoot. I dare you to become a murderer. This is exactly the position that Israel has been in for two years, namely the position of Hamas putting these human shields and putting the good guys, Israel, in a position where it’s like, what do you do now? Do I retreat and let the bad guy win? Do I shoot and take the risk of harming a civilian? This is in fact the devil’s strategy to force the good guy to jump into the mud pit with the bad guy and become to some degree like him.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, Israel and the United States, we put our military in front of our civilians to protect them. Hamas puts their civilians in front of their fighters to not only protect the fighters, but to provide this moral dilemma that then can be used by the propagandists to turn people against Israel.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, this has certainly been an eye-opening look at the spiritual dimensions behind the conflict in the Middle East, dimensions that most news coverage simply completely misses. You’re listening to a very special edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk and a compelling discussion featuring our own Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the James Dobson Family Institute, and his guest, filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza. They’ve been discussing the ancient prophecies unfolding in today’s headlines today. and a new documentary that Dinesh D’Souza has recently released entitled The Dragon’s Prophecy. If you recognize that title, it’s based on the international best-selling book by Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, who was with us last year here on Family Talk to discuss that book. Now, if you missed any portion of today’s broadcast, or if you want to share it with a friend, go to drjamesdobson.org forward slash family talk. As we navigate these turbulent times, understanding how faith intersects with culture becomes increasingly more important. And that’s why I want to share with you about a powerful free resource from the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, We’ve created a five-day email series called Transgenderism, Truth and Grace. This series provides well-researched biblical analysis to help you engage this complex issue with both conviction and compassion. As you’ve seen in the headlines recently, the number of college students identifying as transgender has dropped dramatically just over the past couple of years. And if you’re looking for practical insights for discussing these matters with friends, family, and neighbors while remaining true to Scripture, you’ll want to sign up for this helpful series. Again, Transgenderism, Truth and Grace is the title, and you’ll find information on how to start receiving it free when you go to drjamesdobson.org. Through daily broadcasts like the one you just heard, we are equipping families to better understand the times and stand firm in faith. The Dr. James Dobson Family Institute exists to strengthen marriages, support parents, defend life, and promote the Judeo-Christian values upon which our nation was founded. but the work of defending biblical truth in our culture requires faithful partnership from listeners just like you. Right now, you can participate in the Dr. James Dobson Memorial Matching Grant, which matches donations dollar for dollar up to $6 million now through December 31st. To make a secure donation, go to drjamesdobson.org, or if you’d prefer to make your contribution over the phone, call a member of our constituent care team right now at 877-732-6825. Well, I’m Roger Marsh, and on behalf of all of us here at the JDFI, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for part two of Gary Bauer’s fascinating conversation with Dinesh D’Souza, talking about the brand new documentary on Israel called The Dragon’s Prophecy. It’s coming up right here on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you can still trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
