D’Souza’s New Film a Spiritual Winner

By Roger L Simon

I am writing this at a moment of extreme tension. According to the Jerusalem Post, the hostages, those still living, will finally be released via the Red Cross at 9AM Monday, which means they should already be released by the time you are reading this.

If they are not, there’s probably trouble. (They are all free at 11.30 am BST -Ed) 

I’m hoping for the best. One reason is that I’ve started to trust the Bible as historically authoritative rather than merely metaphorical, and the Holy Book is pointing in a positive direction at this moment. In Kabbalistic parlance, that’s the yetzer hatov, the instinct for good.

I was powerfully reminded of that when Sheryl and I watched Dinesh D’Souza’s new documentary last night—The Dragon’s Prophecy—based on the book by Jonathan Cahn. Cahn is a Messianic Jew with a great love for things biblical and Israel, and his work clearly made an impact on Dinesh.

He is also the dominant interview subject throughout the film, among a host of others, some quite well-known.

The result is the pundit/filmmaker’s best movie that I couldn’t recommend more highly.

What makes it so compelling is that, unlike his other work —provocative as that often was and controversial as it almost always was —he takes on a topic here far more profound than his usual conservative political obsessions—good and evil.

The theme of his movie —and, I presume, Cahn’s book, which I have not read (he has a sequel, which I will) —is the remarkable historical and spiritual accuracy of both the Old and New Testaments and their extraordinary relevance to our times.

This is true, according to the film, for both Christians and Jews.

Much of the film is an archaeological tour of modern Israel, which is to say ancient Judea and Samaria. Dinesh pays a visit to Shiloh, where the Arc of the Covenant once stood until it was taken by the Philistines (today’s Palestinians) circa 1075BC. This battle between the Jews and Philistines/Palestinians is then more than just slightly old, more than three thousand years, and predates Islam by sixteen hundred years at minimum. Is that now being solved—finally? We live in incredible times if it is.

That conflict even predates the battle over the Temple Mount and the erection of the Third Jewish Temple that appears in my new novel, to be available in 2026, as it does in Dinesh’s film, so I had more than one reason to be fascinated by the movie.

Besides the overtly religious sites—every location has a spiritual side there—he visited many of the places Sheryl and I did on our recent trip to Israel when I was doing research for the book. These included a by now obligatory visit to the Nova Festival grounds and, in our case, the Sheba Medical Center, known for its advanced work in rehabilitation, which figures in my novel.

But the most interesting to me in Dinesh’s film was one we were not able to visit: the newly opened Pilgrimage Road in Jerusalem, which I will have to return to Israel to see. This 2,000-year-old stepped stone path, recently excavated, connects the Pool of Siloam in the City of David to the southern steps of the Temple Mount. Jesus clearly walked it as did the Jewish sages on their way to the temple.

So what’s this “Dragon’s Prophecy?” Well, it’s the Prince of Darkness. And the implied conflict in the film, though it is structured as a series of interviews, is that old one between the forces of God and the Devil.

You might think that quaint and overdone, but isn’t that precisely what we have been living through the last few years? We can pretend it’s a conflict between left and right wing, between socialism and capitalism, between closed borders and open borders, but really it’s good versus evil, all the way down.

D’Souza sees that. A Catholic from Mumbai, he recognized the continuity in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the importance of not breaking it, of enhancing it —both parts —for our times. He doesn’t fall in the slightest for the divisive, satanic impulse we see around us that has turned former friends into monsters o sorts. (Yes, that’s in the fim too.).

Go stream the movie available on SalemNOW.

As for my novel, I decided, like Dinesh, to go a little deeper this time, push myself beyond the old Moses Wine mysteries. You can judge whether I succeeded in 2026.

I hope the news we are reading this morning is great.

 

First published in American Refugees