TRANSCRIPT FROM "THE GLENN BECK SHOW"CNN Headline News"Honest Questions about the End of Days"April 25, 2008GLENN BECK, HOST (voice-over): Hillary Clinton says she will retaliate with force against Iran if they attack Israel. Then Russian President Vladimir Putin embraces one religion. Jimmy Carter meets with Hamas to forge Middle East peace. JIMMY CARTER, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: If there is success between Abu Mazen and the prime minister of Israel...BECK: Could these current world events be signs that we`re closer to the end of days? Author Joel Rosenberg, hailed as a modern Nostradamus, has a new book out. It`s called "Dead Heat." It takes you inside a presidential race and asks what role, if any, does the U.S. play in the last days? It may be fiction, but tonight it will seem a little more real. Tonight, honest questions about the end of days, with Joel Rosenberg for the full hour. (END VIDEOTAPE)BECK: Well, hello, America. I -- it`s one of these shows that -- I mean, this puts me into Crazytown. It really does. I want to spend a full hour with you talking about stuff that people just don`t talk about. You know? Because the people who talk about it and think, jeez, some of these things look familiar in the news today. Could we be at the end of the day? You know, or end of days? The chaos in the world looks eerily familiar. And somebody who has written about current events in his novels and knows how it relates to Bible prophecy is Joel Rosenberg. He is the founder of The Joshua Fund and author of "Dead Heat," a work of fiction that veers scarily close to fact, I think. In fact, let me just give some of the -- some of the things that you have not really -- you wouldn`t call these predictions. I mean, you`re not Nostradamus.JOEL ROSENBERG, AUTHOR, "DEAD HEAT": No.BECK: Yes, you`re just -- you`re writing about them because they make sense, right? ROSENBERG: Right. BECK: You have written -- about nine months before 9/11, you said -- you wrote a story that had a kamikaze plane attack on a U.S. city. Five months before there was actual war with Iraq, you had a story line that included war with Saddam. Arabian leader vowing to annihilate Israel and Russia and Iran forming an unprecedented military alliance, this one happened the date of publishing the book. Right? ROSENBERG: Right. BECK: And I know what books are like. I mean, I`ve got a book coming out this Christmas. It`s due next week. ROSENBERG: Absolutely.BECK: The death of Yasser Arafat, radical Islamic terrorist, trying to seize the West Bank and Gaza. Thirteen months later, Arafat was dead and that`s exactly what they did. Does it ever spook you that...? ROSENBERG: It does. I don`t know what you`re going to say. But yes. BECK: You know, it must spook you that you -- you feel like, this is the logical thing. If I know prophecy and, this should happen. And you write about it. And then it does. ROSENBERG: Yes. Because when people say, "You`re basing your political thrillers on Bible prophecy." But, Yasser Arafat isn`t mentioned in Bible prophecy.BECK: Right.ROSENBERG: Saddam Hussein isn`t; kamikazes aren`t. No, that`s true. So I start with end-times Bible prophecies and I say, "OK, these are things we know. Now let`s back them up and say what`s a plausible geopolitical scenario that gets us from where we are today..."BECK: Sure.ROSENBERG: "... to where these prophecies are?" And then I just do some guess work. I mean, I`m not trying to predict it. This is the way it`s going to happen. I`m just saying this is a way it could happen. Because I think a good political thriller starts with "what if"? What if these events the Bible says will happen, happens in our lifetime?BECK: I don`t know if you`ve ever heard of a guy named Vilakovsky, but he was a discredited scientist, you know, some of it wrongly so, back in the 30s and 40s. And what he did was he said, "Let`s stop dismissing the Bible. Why don`t we look at the scriptures, sacred scriptures from all over the world. Instead of saying, he couldn`t have parted the Red Sea, why don`t we look for natural causes that may have caused those things? Was there anything else that was happening on the planet at the same time in somebody else`s religious scripture that might tie into these things?" And I think that`s the problem with scriptures. So many people just dismiss it. Oh, well that`s nothing but, you know, spooky stuff or whatever. They dismiss it. Instead of saying, "OK, I read Revelations, I read Ezekiel," they were describing it in the terms that they understood at the time. ROSENBERG: Right. BECK: So what could cause those things today? And unfortunately, today there`s a lot of those things. ROSENBERG: There certainly are. BECK: That are coming our way. And it`s the -- is it the first time really -- people have been talking about this for 2,000 years. The first time, really, that we can say -- a lot of the big ones are now in play? ROSENBERG: Absolutely. You know, we say on Passover, why is this night different from all other nights? And people ask me, "Joel, why is this period of history different from all other periods of history?" I mean, Jesus said, "In the last days there will be wars, rumors of wars, earthquakes, famine." We`ve had that for all of the last 2,000 years. So why is this period different? And the answer is Israel. The only document on the face of the planet that said Israel would be reborn as a country in the last days and Jews would re-gather into the holy land after centuries of exile, was the Bible. And this Bible prophecy, most people in the world didn`t believe it. Actually, many Christians didn`t even believe it. It`s a whole replacement theology that got developed. God was done with the Jews. But May 14, 1948, almost exactly 60 years ago, Israel was reborn. And now we`ve got a situation that makes this period of history different, because Israel is what Bible scholars call the super sign. The fact that it has been reborn sets into motion all of the other prophecies. BECK: Right. You know the reason why I like you, Joel, is you`re normal. You`re a political guy. Your background was much more political. You`re not a Bible-thumping preacher or anything like that, right? What made you turn? What... ROSENBERG: It wasn`t easy. I mean, first of all, failure. I had helped a lot of political candidates lose their elections. Helped Steve Forbes lose twice. You know, I was on former Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu`s, "comeback" campaign team in 2000. BECK: You were good.ROSENBERG: Oh, yes. I worked for Natan Sharansky, the former deputy prime minister of Israel. He got so frustrated with politics he just retired completely. So after that, I said to myself, "All right. I need to do something else with my life." I had two tracks in my life, and I kept them separate. I had my political track. And I had my interest as an evangelical Christian studying Bible prophecy. My father`s family was orthodox Jewish and escaped out of Russia. My mother`s side is Gentile, English. But because of that Jewish background, because of my interest in the scriptures, and because Saddam Hussein in 1990 was invading Kuwait, and Babylon, that country was suddenly in the news again after thousand of years of not being in the news, all of these things were happening in two separate tracts. Once I kind of got -- went through political detox -- I`m out, I`m clean. I`m going to do something else with my life. BECK: Right.ROSENBERG: I said, what do I really love? What I really love or I`m fascinated with is Bible prophecy and how it could come true in my lifetime. Since we`ve seen Israel come true -- come to pass, and since Jews are returning to the holy land. And I thought, you know what? People say write the novel that you know. That`s not really true. I think you should write the novel where you live in your mind. Where I lived in my mind was "what if?" What if in my lifetime or the lifetime of my children this could happen? What would it look like? What would it feel like? Would I and my wife and kids have the courage to go through it? BECK: When you first started writing it, then, was it more of a "what if" -- was it fiction? And now it`s more of -- don`t want to put words in your mouth -- more of a watchman on the wall kind of a Ezekiel 34 kind of thing? ROSENBERG: It has accelerated into the second point, for sure. What happened was this prophecy of Ezekiel 38 and 39, where Russia will form an alliance with Iran and Libya and these other countries in the last days. I`d always been fascinated with that. But I was on a plane from Washington, D.C., to New York City in the fall of 2000 with Natan Sharansky, the former deputy prime minister of Israel. And while we were chatting, I said to him -- we got chatting, and he said -- he started telling me the story of how, when Benjamin Netanyahu was the prime minister and Sharansky was a cabinet minister, Netanyahu sent him to Russia to meet with then KGB chief Vladimir Putin to talk about the threat of Russia selling nuclear technology and weapons to countries like Iran and Iraq. And that Netanyahu as prime minister was worried about a Russian-Iranian alliance, in particular. Well, here is my political track. I`m just helping Sharansky get his message out. But now suddenly my prophetic side kind of clicked in. And I don`t mean I`m a prophet. I mean that -- my interest in prophecy. And I thought, "Wait a minute. Did he just say that the prime minister of Israel is getting worried about a Russian-Iranian military alliance? Because that has never happened in 2,500 years." And when that... BECK: That`s Gog and Magog.ROSENBERG: That`s Gog and Magog. That`s Ezekiel 38 and 39, which I thought for many years, I believe it`s going to be true. But that must be 1,000 years off. I mean, it`s not close to happening back in the 1990s when the Soviet Union was collapsing. And that moment on that plane on the way to New York City, I began to think, "Wait a minute."BECK: OK.ROSENBERG: I might be living in a time where this could accelerate. I want to write a novel that looks at how this could play out. BECK: OK. When we come back, we`re going to do a couple of things. We`re going to take you through the news of the day. We`re going to talk to you all about, you know, food and crisis, and political leaders, and what things might actually be coming our way. And what plays into the end of days. All this week, by the way, Joel has been writing exclusive articles for the end of days, only available in my free daily e-mail newsletter. You can go over to GlennBeck.com and sign up. Get your free copy today at GlennBeck.com. 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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, the question was, if Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel, what would our response be? And I want the Iranians to know that, if I`m the president, we will attack Iran. We would be able to totally obliterate them. That`s a terrible thing to say, but those people who run Iran need to understand that. Because that perhaps will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish and tragic. (END VIDEO CLIP)
BECK: Continuing our conversation on end of -- on the end of days. And, you know, I know a lot of people are like, "Oh, jeez." This is really something you should listen to. Author Joel Rosenberg grounds his stuff in reality that is important and accurate. And that statement, Joel, we talked earlier this week -- that statement by Hillary Clinton is -- it shows, it demonstrates what so many people don`t understand. Ahmadinejad -- correct me if I`m wrong -- and the leadership, not the people but the leadership of Iran would almost welcome us to vaporize all of Iran, because it would fulfill their end-times prophecy that the Great Satan, known as us, just slaughters Muslims wholesale, right?
ROSENBERG: And vice versa. The -- Ahmadinejad is not a Soviet or Chinese leader who is a megalomaniac, maniacal dictator, but who wants to preserve his own skin because he doesn`t believe in an afterlife.
BECK: Right.
ROSENBERG: No. Ahmadinejad is a Shiite, Islamic fascist. He`s a Shiite Islamic fanatic. And what he believes is that you have -- his mission to create the conditions of global carnage and chaos. And into that -- that mass annihilation of Jews and Christians will come the Islamic messiah known as the Mahdi. So when somebody says, "Look, if you nuke Israel, we`ll nuke you back." First of all, he thinks, "Good. That would create the conditions in which the messiah would come."
BECK: Right.
ROSENBERG: I also believe he believes that he was just chosen. You know, if he dies he`s going to spend eternity with 72 virgins, he believes. And he doesn`t think he`s going to die. He thinks he`s going to live. Because he thinks history is with him, that the wind is at his back. And that`s what makes him dangerous. That`s what makes him undeterrable. How do you deter someone who believes it`s his God-given mission to annihilate the United States and Israel and Judeo-Christian civilization as we know it? That`s not like the Soviet era.
BECK: Right. The 12-ers -- and my head hurt -- like a year`s worth of research on all of this stuff to try to understand their theology. He`s a 12-er.
ROSENBERG: Yes, he is.
BECK: Which means that he believes in the 12 -- the coming of the 12th imam. These people were so dangerous -- correct me if I`m wrong -- that the Ayatollah Khomeini said, "Kill all the 12-ers. Get them out. I don`t want them in government. I don`t want them anywhere." And they went underground for a while.
ROSENBERG: It was a cult.
BECK: Yes.
ROSENBERG: It was banned, because -- because Khomeini`s belief was you create paradise on earth.
BECK: Right.
ROSENBERG: Ahmadinejad and the 12-ers believe, no, no, you create chaos on earth and then paradise comes.
BECK: If I may explain this, again, in Christian terms. What that -- what this is, is we`ve all read about the tribulation. If you`re a Christian you`ve read about the tribulation. A 12-er`s perspective is -- well, Jesus comes at the end of the tribulation, and it`s only seven years, so let`s create the tribulation period. Let`s get it going. So seven years later Jesus is here.
ROSENBERG: Right.
BECK: Right?
ROSENBERG: Right. Christians know it`s going to happen, but you certainly don`t want to encourage it. It`s the worst-case scenario.
BECK: Jesus, if you`re watching, you can wait.
ROSENBERG: That`s right. Well, that`s right. And that`s what -- that`s what Senator Clinton misunderstands. She fundamentally misunderstands the nature of this particular regime, because it`s unlike any other regime in Iran`s history. It`s unlike any regime in all of history in any country. We`ve never seen this before.
BECK: OK. I know you have done briefings with the CIA. You`ve been to the Pentagon. You`ve done briefings at the White House. You`ve done briefings on all levels. I mean, I`ve talked to Benjamin Netanyahu about you. And he has told me that he understands what we`re facing. He has told me...
ROSENBERG: He does.
BECK: Yes, he gets it. Bush gets it.
ROSENBERG: I`ve not spoken to the president.
BECK: I have -- I have had sessions with him where I have gathered the impression that he understands the role of religion here and the times that we`re living in. Ronald Reagan was one of those guys. What is the percentage of people that -- that are controlling this situation, that are involved in this situation, that actually consider this to be something they should be concerned about?
ROSENBERG: Very few people in Washington have even heard of the biblical prophecies about Russia forming an alliance with Iran and Libya, Ezekiel 38 and 39 prophecies, much less any of the other Bible prophecies that you and I have been discussing all week. And I make it clear when I get invited to speak at the Pentagon, at the White House or Congress. I`m not there to persuade them of something. I really think it`s important that I, who was a political guy and not there as a lobbyist. Hey you should believe these are end of days and here`s what`s going to happen and here`s what you should do. I really don`t do that. I just want them to be educated and be aware of, as a backdrop. And they`re inviting me. I mean, I have not gone knocking on the door of the Pentagon or members of Congress. But there is a growing interest. Why? Because everyone in Washington is beginning to realize that they don`t really understand what`s happening in the Middle East. Events are -- are accelerating in a way that nobody expected them to go.
BECK: Condi Rice said about a year ago, and it made me break out in cold sweat when I first heard her say it. She said what we`re seeing now are birth pangs in the Middle East. That is specific language. Do you think she meant it? Explain what that language is implied...
ROSENBERG: Jesus was asked on the Mount of Olives by his disciples in Israel, overlooking Jerusalem, "When are you coming back? And what should we be watching for?" And he gave a list. He could have given a very Washington political answer, "No comment. Next question." But he gives a list: wars, rumors of war, all the things we`ve been talking about. And he says the wars and the terrorism, this is all the birth pangs. These are the beginnings of what`s coming. Just as my wife who`s had four children.
BECK: Yes.
ROSENBERG: You can see as you get closer...
BECK: They get closer.
ROSENBERG: ...the contractions, they`re more intense and closer together. That`s what we are seeing. Now, she is an evangelical Christian. I have no idea if Secretary Rice has an interest in Bible prophecy. I don`t know whether she planned to use that language in the context of the Middle East. But boy, it really was evocative of exactly what Jesus said would happen.
BECK: You said a minute ago, you`re not going up to the Hill, and you`re trying to campaign for it or anything like that. You know, I don`t know, if we`re -- nobody knows if we`re living in the end times. I personally, to be real frank with you, I think my kids will be here. I don`t know if I will be. But I think my kids will be here. But nobody knows. They`ve been saying this for thousands of years. I don`t want to be the guy who says -- I`d much rather -- honestly, it would be much easier for me, and I`d be, you know, more popular and everything else, if I got you on and I made fun of you for an hour. Do you want to be the guy who says, "Hey, pay attention. T
