In this episode of Family Talk, we delve into a timely discussion on the intricate relationship between the United States and Israel. Our esteemed guests, Gary Bauer and Michelle Bachman, share their insights on the political and spiritual significance of supporting Israel in today’s world. With rising anti-Semitism and shifts in global policies, this conversation sheds light on why this alliance is essential and how it aligns with biblical teachings.
Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It’s a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute supported by listeners just like you. I’m Dr. James Dobson and I’m thrilled that you’ve joined us.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast ministry of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I’m Roger Marsh, and during the next half hour, we’re going to be tackling a topic that continues to remain at the forefront of today’s political discussion, and that is the relationship between the United States and Israel. Now, in recent months, we’ve witnessed dramatic shifts in policy and also growing tensions that affect this crucial alliance. Well, on today’s Family Talk broadcast, Gary Bauer, our Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, is sitting in the co-host seat today. And joining him in studio is Michelle Bachman. Minnesota’s first Republican congresswoman and a valued member of the board of directors here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. Michelle brings unique insights from both her political experience and her deep commitment to strengthening U.S.-Israeli relations as well. Together, they’ll be examining recent developments in U.S. policy toward Israel – exploring why this alliance matters both politically and spiritually. And they’ll also discuss what the Bible tells us about nations that stand with Israel. There’s a hint, they are blessed by God. At a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise globally and tensions in the Middle East continue to escalate, today’s conversation could not be more relevant or timely. So we’re glad you’ve joined us for this special edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hello, friends. I’m Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President for Public Policy at the James Dobson Family Institute. Welcome to Family Talk. Dr. Dobson and I have been friends for many, many years, and I’m proud to be his colleague here at JDFI. Check out my podcast, Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom, here at JDFI. I think you’ll like it. We’ve got a real treat, however, today. We’ve got a special guest. There’s so many things going on right now that I know all of us want more information about. And I couldn’t think of anybody better to bring us that information and her unique perspective on these issues than Michelle Bachman. Michelle Bachman is, of course, a board member of JDFI and a close friend and colleague of Dr. Dobson and Shirley. But in addition to all that, she has had a sterling career in public policy, in government, in ministry. And so she’s uniquely qualified in knowing how Washington, D.C. works, but also understanding how Christians need to be good Christian citizens. Michelle was in Congress for, I believe, six terms representing Washington. a district in Minnesota. She ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. She was the first woman to win a state’s primary in a Republican presidential contest. She’s done so many things related to representing faith, family, and freedom in government. Today, she’s the dean of the Robertson School of Government at Regent University. But Michelle, welcome to the show. In addition to all that, one of the areas that you’ve been so involved in over the years is the issue of Israel, the U.S.-Israel relationship. You’ve been an incredible spokesman against the evil of anti-Semitism, which is something that we’ve all been horrified to see spring up here in the United States. Right now, those of us that love Israel, and I’m certainly one of those people, we’re all excited. We’re astonished at what is happening in the Trump-Vance administration and the contrast between what President Trump’s doing right now with the last four years in which the relationship grows. between the nation of Israel and the United States really was under a lot of strain. So let me begin by this. Could you tell us a little bit about what you do in Israel? You have some projects there. But then let’s just talk about how amazing and gratifying it is and what the theological implications are for our country as Israel and the United States re-strengthen this great alliance.
SPEAKER 02 :
We’ll be right back. And so we meet in Jerusalem, usually the end of May, beginning of June, and we’re there to do the work of praying for the peace of Jerusalem. We’ll have lectures, but it’s really a prayer event more than anything. And we have people from all over the world that come in to do that. There’s tremendous blessing that comes from that. From that, we’ve gone all over the world. I think we’ve had 31 different Jerusalem prayer events in country after country. We just had one in Mar-a-Lago. The week of the inauguration, we had our event there, and it was an incredible event because… President Donald Trump was scheduled, he was going to come and speak to us in the ballroom. Many people see the inside of that ballroom. And we had 650 people. He was inside the house and he was finalizing the hostage release deal with the Israeli hostages. So three times you were told to sit down in our chairs, the president’s coming in. And he didn’t come because he was a work camp, but we had cabinet ministers from Israel. We had members of the Israeli Knesset. We had parliamentarians from 40 different countries, as well as just Christians who love Israel and want to pray for Israel. But what we’re really doing is praying to inaugurate the Trump presidency, that the Trump presidency would bless Israel. That’s an extremely important goal that the president has. As a matter of fact, if you look at Scripture, Gary, if you look at the book of Joel, the prophet Joel, and you go to chapter 3, verse 2, Joel says something very unique that Jesus repeats at the end of the book of Matthew. And he says that, I, God… will bring all nations. Nations will be judged. I’ll bring them down to the Valley of Decision, the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and there I will judge them on one criteria only. It’s this. How did the nations treat Israel?
SPEAKER 03 :
Absolutely. That is so key. You know, I’m sure this happens to you. I will run into Christians who will say to me, well, Gary, I am pro-Israel, but I don’t get this thing that you and others say that This has got something to do with our Christian faith. I mean, it’s just another country. Holy moly. You know what I mean? That’s not what the Bible says. No, that is not what the Bible says.
SPEAKER 02 :
Because in the Bible, the number one character is God. The second character is Israel. And that makes sense because the centerpiece of the whole Bible is the covenant of God, because we all know that man sinned. God created us perfect, but we sinned. And so God’s plan of redemption is the covenant. So how did he bring that about? He created a people group, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the 12 tribes and their descendants, and he put that people group on a specific piece of land. It’s written in Genesis 15, 18. That piece of land, you can figure out very easily the geography on a map. That is the covenant land. So you take a covenant people, a covenant land, and then God tells us why. The purpose is to bless all nations on earth. All nations are blessed when that covenant people are living on that covenant land. And when they aren’t, there’s a big difference. And through that people, the Jewish people, a Jewish Messiah was born, Jesus. And Jesus is the Lamb of God. who took away the sins of the whole world. And of course, we know that all of the first disciples were Jews. So it’s a Jewish Jesus, Jewish disciples, and he fulfilled what the Jewish prophets said about the coming Messiah. There’s no other individual that’s ever done that. And who is Jesus? He is God made flesh. walking on the earth. So it’s the most beautiful story that’s ever been told. And Joel 3 says to the nations that there will be a reckoning before God. And the reckoning is based on how did your nation treat Israel? And then God gives the criterion for that. Did your nation seek to divide the land of Genesis 15, 18? And
SPEAKER 03 :
There are times we have done exactly that.
SPEAKER 02 :
And America has done that. Or did you seek to scatter the people off of the land, telling people, you’ve got to go. You’re going to be evicted. And that’s happened since the time that the nations began. That was after Noah’s Ark. Seventy nations were created. Since that time, nations have sought to divide the land or scatter the people from the land. And that’s the criterion upon which God judges. No nation is exempt. America isn’t exempt. So when we look at Donald Trump and when we gather for prayer for our president, Donald Trump, we pray that the one thing that he can’t get wrong, according to the Bible, is he can’t get Israel wrong. He has to come from a posture of blessing Israel, not cursing. And that leads us to the most pivotal week that recently happened in Washington, D.C.,
SPEAKER 03 :
It has been an unbelievable week. Now, folks will be listening to this show a little bit after this week, but all the signs are that this wasn’t a one-week deal, right? This administration has made a major shift in direction. You know, Michelle, we could probably take a couple of hours and just talk about how the nation of Israel and the nation of the United States have been woven together through our entire history. We’re a young nation, of course, compared to Israel. But the founders were restorationists. They believed that the Christian gospel was clear that the Jews would be regathered in their homeland.
SPEAKER 02 :
They did, and the pilgrims, too. The pilgrims came here. They called themselves the children of Israel. They weren’t replacement theology, but they believed what the Bible said about Israel and that the Jewish people would be restored to the land. They came here in that same vein. So that’s the DNA of the United States because the people who founded the United States believed the Bible. They read the Bible. They believed the Bible. They taught it to their children. And that’s what needs to be restored. The reason why you see anti-Semitism, Jew hatred in the United States is because children aren’t being taught what the Bible says. That’s why, again, I’m dean at the Robertson School of Government at Regent. We started a PhD program because my prayer is that we will be able to train 100 PhDs that get Israel, that understand the proper understanding of Israel, and put them in the State Department, the Pentagon, in the military academies so that they can have a proper understanding
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, you know this point that if America doesn’t stand with Israel, there’s a price to be paid. Yes, there is. We watched the Biden administration that spent all of its time – I mean most of it never even made news. No. You knew it and I did. But they were constantly undermining Israel’s government.
SPEAKER 02 :
Not even undermining. mining, they were threatening. Israel was threatened. So it’s important our listeners understand during the four very difficult Biden years, our lives were hard with inflation and everything that we had to deal with. But what he was doing to Israel when they were under attack, remember, seven nations were fighting them in the worst war Israel ever had. This is worse than 1948, 1967, and And not only were their hands handcuffed behind their back, they were told they had to lose the war by both Kamala Harris, the vice president, and by Joe Biden. They were told they had to lose the war because that’s what a ceasefire was. You have to lose the war. So you’re not going to get your dad back. It’s too bad. You have all of your own ruin, but you’re losing everything. And as a matter of fact, Israel was the one that was forced to supply all the humanitarian aid and make sure that that went in. That wasn’t humanitarian aid. That was military supply lines. So Israel was forced to resupply their enemies because that was the pressure coming from the Biden administration. We’ve never seen anything more crazy than what the Biden administration did. We’ve never had a more anti-Israel administration in America than Joe Biden. We haven’t had a more pro-Israel administration in America than Donald Trump.
SPEAKER 03 :
It is a stark contrast. You know, there was a period of time there, Michelle, where President Biden wouldn’t take Netanyahu’s phone calls, wouldn’t initiate a phone call.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, he wouldn’t meet him.
SPEAKER 03 :
President Trump First meeting with a foreign head of state was bringing Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington.
SPEAKER 02 :
And it was in a side room that Biden was willing to meet with him. Obama was even worse. When Netanyahu would come to the White House, Obama wouldn’t give him any food. He left him cooling his heels. Obama went off and ate dinner by himself at the White House. And he left the Israelis and he basically told the Israelis, you have to lose. You take this bad deal or we’re not going to give you weapons. People don’t even realize during the Obama term, Obama said, I’m going to give you a little bit more money. But you’re going to have to be 100% dependent on America for your weapons. So Israel had to shut down their own ammunition factories. So when Joe Biden came into office, Joe Biden said, hey, yeah, we’re going to slow walk any weapons. You buy them from us, but we’re not going to deliver them to you. Israel bought bulldozers. They didn’t get delivered. So everything Israel ordered, Joe Biden, during wartime, wouldn’t give them the weapons, wouldn’t give them the ammunition, and slow walked it. It’s a scandal. Oh, it’s a disgrace. It is an evil. That’s what it was. It was evil. So the United States was on the side of cursing Israel against what the Bible says in Genesis 12, 3. And so nations pay a price for it. The Bible says nations pay a price if they are cursed. Cursing Israel versus blessing.
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, I think President Biden personally himself may have paid a price because if you’re constantly undermining God’s people, we now know, sadly, that for four years, it doesn’t appear that Joe Biden was actually capable of being president. He was almost struck dumb on occasion.
SPEAKER 02 :
And it isn’t even you and I saying it. It’s the Democrats saying it now. They’re all confessing that he had dementia for the time that he was in the White House. He didn’t run the White House. Some ghost presidency behind him ran the White House. And we’re finding that out now with President Trump releasing information on the USAID offices. It is bizarre. So corrupt what happened during those years. We were fleeced to the tune of billions of dollars, even paying, even the U.S. government was paying reporters to undermine Donald Trump, to perhaps impeach him, to hire journalists all over the world to write stories against their political opponents. You can’t even make this up. People need to be going to jail for what happened here under the previous administration.
SPEAKER 03 :
I think you could make a strong case that that has been the most serious widespread… Corruption. …scandal and corruption in history.
SPEAKER 02 :
And it’s because Joe Biden wasn’t running the White House. That’s why. He wasn’t running it.
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, I don’t know if you saw this or not. It didn’t get that much press attention. But I love this about President Trump that he will… explain things in a way that the average person – he talks like an average person, gets him in trouble sometimes. Maybe he’ll use a word that people blanch out or whatever. But he was in the Oval Office just a few days before we’re having this conversation and And one of the reporters – he was signing executive orders. One of the reporters asked him a question about what Israel needs to do for peace and so forth. And the president looked up and he said, you see this desk? And he ran his hands over the desk that’s in the Oval Office. He said, that’s the Middle East. And he said, this little tip of my pen – and he put that in the middle – that’s Israel. And I thought, what a tremendous visual image.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. And it went everywhere. It went all over the world. At that moment, he sent the signal to all the terrorists in the world. I understand who Israel is. I understand that they need protection. And he sent the signal, we’re going to be there to protect them. So what President Trump did in his first term is the world was calm because the bad guys knew they were going to get whacked by Donald Trump if they acted up. As a matter of fact, Mike Pompeo, who’s a friend of mine, the former Secretary of State, told me, he said, no, trust me, the Taliban that was running in Afghanistan, he said they knew if they even stepped out of a 12-inch box, they were going to get whacked. They were going to be done. And the world under Joe Biden knew every bad guy on earth knew they could get away with whatever they wanted to do. And so they did. So now the bad guys are going back to their holes and their caves. And now good and righteous people have a chance to live their lives again. So the world is getting set in order. It’s only been a few weeks now that he’s been president of the United States. But thank God we feel like we’re getting our life back.
SPEAKER 03 :
I think that we might have four years of this kind of progress because it’s not just Israel, obviously. We could – and we will in the future talk about faith, family, freedom, the sanctity of life.
SPEAKER 02 :
You notice we haven’t talked about political party. We’ve talked about individuals and what they’ve done. Right. It has zero to do with political party because Republicans have not always been great when it comes to Israel, too. So we’re not talking political party here. We’re talking about whether or not the leader of the free world is acting biblically or anti-biblically. That’s all we care. Yes. We’re interested in the biblical actions of a leader. And the second Donald Trump does something that is against what the Bible says a leader should do, we’ll be here talking about it because God is no respecter of persons. And so we’re here because we want to be biblical, not because we want to be political.
SPEAKER 03 :
And we’re serious about that because if we only criticize bad U.S. policies when it’s being done under a Democrat president, then we’re really not – Following a biblical message about Israel. So we will call out whoever is in elected office.
SPEAKER 02 :
And you and I did that on a prior broadcast when I talked about Donald Trump and his true state solution that he proposed in his first term and the very terrible consequences that came to the United States as a result of that. Very clear. So that’s why I want to encourage all of our listeners, pray for President Trump. Pray for the administration. Pray that they don’t stray from what the Bible calls them to do. Pray that they don’t push for dividing the land of Israel or scattering the people from Israel. And again… Know your Bible. Read Joel 3, verse 2. Read what Zephaniah 2, 4 through 7 says. Read what Judges 12, 14 says. I think there is a biblical basis for what is happening right now that has been called for, which is removing these terrorists from the land. And people might be saying, Gary, but not everybody’s a terrorist in Gaza. If you look at the 85% of the people in Gaza are 100% on board with what happened October 7th, the slaughter of Jews.
SPEAKER 03 :
Even after all of this.
SPEAKER 02 :
Even after all of it. So I guess in our mind, we generously think people can’t be that bad. But the fact is, the people have been brainwashed. They’ve been brainwashed to hate Jews. And so therefore, when you commit acts that are so vile and barbaric, you’ve lost something. You’ve lost rights. And so I think they’ve lost the right to even occupy that land. Israel was kind to them, and that’s how they were paid. Most people don’t even know Israel gives them all free electricity, free water. Israel supplies everything for them. This is how they’ve been praying. Well,
SPEAKER 03 :
A lot of the workers in Gaza that Israel began to let come into Israel to work jobs in Israel because the pay is better. And so they were going back and forth between Gaza and Israel. And we found out that they were spying.
SPEAKER 02 :
They were spying and they were the murderers. They were the slaughters. So think of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Think here in this country, Minneapolis, St. Paul. So imagine if you had terrorists living in Minneapolis and they came over and they were slaughtering the people of St. Paul. Would we put up with this? And would we allow in America a city of terrorists that their goal was to kill every Jew that lived in the city next door? We wouldn’t do that because we’d be nuts. The Bible says that you don’t reward the evildoer, you punish. punish the evildoer. And we’ve had our mindset backwards in the United States, where we’ve seen in major city after city in America, it’s the criminals that go free and the innocent are punished. And so I think now that we have a new sheriff in the White House, we’re going to see all of our major metropolitan areas. I truly believe that the crime rate will come down. We’ll be safer. And I can’t wait for D.C.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. My goodness, Michelle, every sentence you’re speaking is so good. And I’ve got so much more that I want to talk with you about. Could you possibly come back and finish this conversation so that we can get to these other issues? Let’s do it. That would be great. Fantastic.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, you’ve been listening to a special edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, featuring insights shared by Michelle Bachman and Gary Bauer that remind us that understanding the biblical principles involved around this Middle Eastern situation is not just important for our personal faith. It also shapes how we view current events and our nation’s role in God’s ongoing story worldwide as well. All these powerful conversations about faith, family, and our biblical heritage don’t happen by accident. They take intentional effort and support from friends like you. Now, if today’s program has helped deepen your understanding of Scripture’s relevance for our times, please consider stepping forward with a gift. Every day we hear from listeners who tell us how these broadcasts have opened their eyes to God’s Word and its meaning for our world today. And your support, your donation of any amount, helps us continue bringing biblical truth and wisdom to families all across America. Now, you can make a secure donation online when you go to drjamesdobson.org. That’s drjamesdobson.org. You can also give a gift over the phone when you call 877-732-6825. That’s 877-732-6825. And if you’re looking for more biblical wisdom to strengthen your faith and family, I want to tell you about a wonderful free resource from Family Talk that fits right into your daily routine. We’ve created several inspiring reading plans in the Bible app by YouVersion that you can access right from your smartphone. Now, whether you’re waiting in the carpool line or enjoying your morning coffee, these brief devotionals bring Dr. Dobson’s trusted wisdom on marriage, parenting, and faith right to your fingertips. Ready to get started? Simply open the Bible app and then search for Dr. James Dobson. Once you’re there, you can explore all the free reading plans that are available that can help transform your family one day at a time. Again, go to the Bible app by YouVersion and search for Dr. James Dobson. Believe me, you’ll be glad you did. Well, I’m Roger Marsh. Thanks so much for joining us today. Be sure to tune in again next time when Gary Bauer will continue his conversation with Michelle Bachman about how America stands with Israel again. That’s coming up right here on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
