Philadelphia Trumpet executive editor Stephen Flurry interviewed author and journalist Melanie Phillips on the May 26 Trumpet Daily. They discussed President Donald Trump’s negotiations with terrorists, the situation in Israel, the impact of Judeo-Christian values on civilization. This exchange took place prior to hostilities between Israel and Iran and is even more relevant in the current situation.

Stephen Flurry My father, Gerald Flurry, talked about Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran being the worst foreign-policy disaster in America’s history. You have mentioned before that it wasn’t the fact that it was a bad deal, it was the fact there was a deal with Iran at all.

Melanie Phillips Yes, I think this has become quite troubling to myself and to several people who are very concerned about Iran and the threat it poses, not just to Israel but to America and to the free world. Because Donald Trump has been very clear. He has said several times now that Iran is not going to get the bomb and that if Iran doesn’t voluntarily agree to dismantle its entire nuclear program, then America will do it for it, by force. That Donald Trump would prefer not to do that, but ultimately, he will do that. And that was very clear.

And people in Israel were very cheered by this because, as you said, we’ve all lived through the disastrous 2015 Obama-brokered nuclear deal with Iran, which lifted sanctions, enabled vast amounts of money to be funneled in to finance Iran’s power grab in the region, wage its terrorist war against Israel and the world, and proceed to assemble what it needs to assemble, particularly in uranium enrichment, to get a bomb. And my understanding—and I know nothing other than what I’m reading in the public press—is that it is at the point of making a bomb.

It is no longer useful to talk about stopping uranium enrichment. It has enriched it, and it’s at the point now of working out how to fit warheads to missiles. So this is, to put it mildly, a few seconds before midnight.

Now, what Donald Trump said originally was fine, except that he does believe, in my view, that he can do deals that nobody else can do. He seems to believe that all conflicts in the world are potential deals which can be done if he is doing them. His problem, as I recall, with the 2015 Obama deal was that it wasn’t a good deal, that he could have done a better deal. Now, this to me is a terrible mistake, because I don’t doubt Donald Trump’s skills as a dealmaker, but there are some agendas which are simply nonnegotiable.

The people who run the regime are governed by a religious ideology, which holds that if they produce the apocalypse, they will bring to Earth the Shia messiah, the 12th imam. Now, if you have people who believe that it’s a religious duty to wage war on the West and to destroy Israel and the Jews, then there’s no negotiation. There’s no negotiation with that agenda. There’s no negotiation possible that is not seized by them as a surrender and as a kind of inspiration to ratchet up their aggression.

Flurry: Some conservative commentators have made some stunning statements about the Jews. It is shocking to see even some in the maga movement turn against Israel. This probably explains why there is a rift between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu. President Trump went on a trip to the Middle East and didn’t even visit Israel. What’s Israel’s take on the relationship right now between Trump and Netanyahu?

Phillips: Israelis were immensely, to put it mildly, relieved by President Trump’s election, because they felt they dodged a bullet. … It was bad enough under President Biden, but under Kamala Harris, it was perceived that the Democratic Party would be unleashed in its most extreme attitude of hostility to Israel. So everyone was very thrilled and relieved to see President Trump back in the White House.

And now they’re not sure. They believe, I think, that President Trump’s feelings towards Israel remain warm and supportive, and his attitude towards the Jewish people is extremely warm and supportive. I see no reason to doubt that whatsoever. … He probably thinks Netanyahu is just dragging his feet, which is what he’s basically said, you know, Why isn’t this war finished already? And there are many reasons why the war isn’t finished already. Partly, it’s because America is putting pressure on Israel to drag its feet because of the hostage negotiations, partly because the hostages are still there and because Israel is terrified of causing them to be killed. …

In order to understand what the West has done to itself, one has to understand that the West is at war with the Jewish people and Judaism. For this reason—as I say in my book, and as I’ve written for decades—the West’s elites, its intelligentsia, the people who run the culture have basically taken a wrecking ball to Western civilization and the Western nation and its core values on the basis that the West is fundamentally bad because it was born in the original sins of colonialism and imperialism and racism and all that sort of stuff. And so, you have to basically demolish it and replace it [with] something better, which is universalism, brotherhood of man, transnational institutions.

I’ve been writing for years about the onslaught on the traditional family, the onslaught on education as the transmission of a culture, the onslaught on the very idea of the nation, the elevation of universalist values through transnational institutions, and so on. And at the root of that onslaught on the West is the onslaught on its core values.

Its core values are largely implanted in the West by Christianity, the foundational creed of the West. The Greeks had quite a lot of input as well, but nevertheless, Christianity is the foundational creed of the West, and Christianity itself didn’t come from nowhere. Its parent is Judaism, and the values that everybody in the West holds dear or purports to hold dear—whether they are religious people, whether they are people of no faith—they are biblical values. And so the West’s onslaught on itself has been in effect an onslaught on biblical values. I’ve said in the book at great length that few people understand the immense importance of those values of the Hebrew Bible to the West, civilization and greatness.

Watch the full interview at Rumble.com/TrumpetDaily.