Smearing & Threatening Tucker Carlson Will Generate Anti-Semitism Instead of Quelling It

Josh Hammer, Mark Levin, and Lindsey Graham are completely misreading the room, and they will certainly make matters worse for Gentile-Jewish relations in the U.S.

Josh Hammer, Mark Levin, Lindsey Graham, and others who are now fulminating against Tucker Carlson for having a conversation with Nick Fuentes are badly misreading the American room.

Trying to censor a conversation about what millions of Americans perceive to be the undue power and influence of the State of Israel, AIPAC, and billionaire donors will generate anti-Semitism instead of quelling it.

There is nothing anti-Semitic about criticizing the State of Israel or billionaire donors who obviously wield outsize influence over U.S. foreign policy. Carlson has clearly stated his position—namely, he is against the U.S. getting involved in additional Middle East conflicts, such as war with Iran, because such a war is not in America’s national interest.

Carlson has correctly identified the chief instigators of U.S. involvement in Middle East wars to be Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his cronies in the United States.

The evidence that this has been happening since 2001 is overwhelming. Commenting in the New York Times in 2003 (How to Talk About Israel) Ian Buruma (longtime editor of the New York Review of Books) conceded:

It is true that some people in the Pentagon, as well as influential organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century, have close relations with the Likud Party, and especially with Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is much more in tune with American neoconservatism than Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is. Douglas Feith and Richard Perle advised Netanyahu, who was prime minister in 1996, to make ‘’a clean break’‘ from the Oslo accords with the Palestinians. They also argued that Israeli security would be served best by regime change in surrounding countries. Despite the current mess in Iraq, this is still a commonplace in Washington. In Paul Wolfowitz’s words, ‘’The road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad.’‘

Portending Carlson’s primary criticism of Christian Zionists, Buruma continued:

It has indeed become an article of faith (literally in some cases) in Washington that American and Israeli interests are identical, but this was not always so, and ‘’Jewish interests’‘ are not the main reason for it now.

Indeed, Israel enjoys a zealous following among some gentiles, particularly Christian fundamentalists. (In electoral terms, Christian fundamentalists are more important to the Republican Party than Jews -- there are many more of them, the Christian Coalition is highly efficient and most Jews still vote for the Democrats anyway.) Even though Israel is often described as the only democracy in the Middle East, the Christian right’s remarkable devotion to Israel is not necessarily driven by democratic principles. The ‘’Christian Zionists’‘ are convinced by a literal reading of the Bible that Christ will reappear only once the Jews have repossessed the Holy Land. Their other conviction, that Jews will either die in an apocalypse or be converted to Christianity, is not so reassuring. Still, the Rev. Jerry Falwell declared on ‘’60 Minutes’‘ that evangelical Christians would make sure no American president would ever do anything to harm Israel. At a conference of the Christian Coalition held in Washington last year, there were more Stars of David than crucifixes.

While many may disagree with Carlson’s view of this matter, they commit dangerous folly by asserting that his view is an expression of anti-Semitism. Christian Zionists aside, tens of millions of young Americans—including many Jewish Americans—share Carlson’s exasperation with America’s endless wars, and they bitterly resent Hammer’s call to “neutralize” Carlson.

Hammer is old enough to understand that resentment is by far the most dangerous emotion, and it is often inflamed in people when they are told to shut up instead of being allowed to speak their minds.

Josh Hammer

The current situation reminds me of George Kennan’s 1997 Op-Ed in the New York Times (“A Fateful Error”) about the U.S. government’s decision to expand NATO up to Russia’s borders. As Kennan put it:

But something of the highest importance is at stake here. And perhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.

Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

In other words, threatening Russia by expanding NATO to its borders will generate precisely the Russian distrust, enmity and militarism that the policy was purportedly conceived to quell.

It is imperative for Hammer, Levin, Graham et al. to stop being aggressive, emotionally dysregulated weenies, and to start recognizing the supreme American value of free speech.

Instead of veiled threats and self-righteous bloviating about anti-Semitism, these guys should work on their conversation and persuasion skills. Instead of whining about the 27-year-old Nick Fuentes, they should invite him to a debate.

If they had any wisdom, they would recognize that much of Fuentes’s appeal to young men lies not in their affection for him, but in their antipathy to them. Lindsey Graham, with his unseemly expressions of titillation when he talks about “killing people,” is especially loathed among the younger set.