Antisemitism is the ultimate lurking hate. It waits, not always patiently, for any and all opportunities to emerge. It might go into remission; nevertheless, it will be primed to take advantage of any social, economic, and political moment that permits its invasion of the discourse of the day, seeking to influence the agenda and the outcome. Humans need to hate as much as they need to love, and Jews are the ultimate target of animosity. That is so because of the breadth of the purported justifications for that hate, which are theological, financial, racist, and social elements that play a role in the insertion of Jew-hatred into politics.
A great battle has developed in the ranks of the conservative movement, and it is focused on the Jews. For years, nay, for decades, Israel has been exploited as a substitute target going back to the pre-state years as well as the early days of the State of Israel. The US State Department, primarily, served as the well of dislike that provided anti-Zionist policies even in Woodrow Wilson’s day.
In those years, however, the dislike of Jews per se, rather than policies and positions, was quietly spoken in hushed tones. Rafael Medoff has illustrated this with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the diary entries of President Harry S. Truman. Of course, there were Henry Ford and Father Coughlin, and their very public antisemitic propaganda efforts. Today, however, something else has emerged, something that is seeking to interlock a nebulous, run-of-the-mill dislike of Jews with a distinctly religiously-defined hatred within the body politic.
Jonathan Chait observed, in a September piece in The Atlantic, that while “a movement dedicated to restoring traditional culture … is not inherently doomed to devolve into anti-Semitism,” he sees the post-liberal American right has been inadvertently “destroy[ing] the guardrails that restrained antisemitism.” He pointed to Yoram Hazony’s words at a National Conservatism conference, sponsored by the Edmund Burke Foundation.
Hazony had complained he was “pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people that there’s been online” in recent years. He accepted there would be legitimate disagreements over American foreign policy toward Israel, but his concern was something darker. “The left has long gone into a rabbit hole of hating Jews,” he said. “I didn’t think it would happen on the right. I was mistaken.”
Carlson Emerges
And while that hate on the right had mostly been racist, blood-based, nationalist, and of a fear of being “replaced,” in a link to the immigration issue, a theological foundation has come forward. Tucker Carlson’s appearance at the funeral for Charlie Kirk was an outstanding example.
“God is here, and you can feel it,” Carlson opened. “Charlie was bringing the Gospel to the country,” he continued. And then, he went dark and dank, retelling his “favorite story ever.” It is the story of Jesus showing up in Jerusalem and “talking about the people in power.” And “they just go bonkers. They hate it. And they become obsessed with making him stop. ‘We’ve got to shut this guy up.’”
Carlson then becomes literary and declares, “And I can just sort of picture the scene in a lamplit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus … And there’s always one guy with a bright idea, and I can just hear him say, ‘I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we just kill him? That’ll shut him up.’”
To whom was Carlson referring in the minds of the millions who heard his words on that broadcast, live and then archived? Who were those “guys eating hummus”? Were they Romans? Were they Jews? And taking into account the assertion that Israelis did not create hummus, were they Arabs?
Truthfully, though, the more important question is why did Carlson weave into his remarks an unmistakable religious confrontation? One possible factor is that the first news from Turning Point USA, the organization Kirk founded, was his last book. It is an expansion of his adoption of the Jewish Biblical injunction to rest on the Sabbath day. As Charlie said, “Every Friday night, I keep a Jewish Sabbath. I turn off my phone, Friday night to Saturday night.”
I trust he is not being visited by demons over that.
If Carlson, a declared Episcopalian, could have been upset about that development, a converted (since April 2024) Catholic, Candace Owens, can be well understood to meld into her political commentary a strong and assertive religious element. “Israel’s Star of David symbol is a hexagram of a cultic nation.” “Israel assassinated John F. Kennedy” and is a “demonic nation.” She disparaged influencer Debra Lea as “a satanic Zionist”, thereby echoing the words in Revelations 3:9 “Where Jews, who are liars, are of the synagogue of Satan?”
Religion or Politics
Are Carlson and Candace Owens–with their numerous followers–and others promoting a rhetorical messaging that employs a specific Christian identity to foment anti-Israel feelings rather than a simple political orientation? Are they seeking, subliminally, to reframe an antisemitic narrative to advance policies of nativism and isolationism? Why dress up their secular agenda in Christian anti-Jewish traditions? Why dredge up religious biases?
Are Jews and Zionism facing an infection of xenophobic nationalism that possibly can be debated and argued, or is it a theological hatred that cannot be properly checked?
In April 2024, in a program ostensibly advocating for Palestinian Christians, Tucker Carlson repositioned that theme into an attack on Israel and America’s political support, as well as Christian support for Israel. His guest was Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, a Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem and a well-known pro-Palestine propagandist some refer to as “the high priest of antisemitic Christianity.” Carlson would repeat the maneuver with Agapia Stephanopolus, a Greek Orthodox nun, on Aug. 11, 2025. She spewed forth lie after lie about the reality in Israel and Judea and Samaria.
Are these figures invited for their wisdom or for their appearance as religious authority figures?
Anti-Israel and anti-Zionist propaganda has been taking an ugly form as if a specific tenet of “Christian” faith is being violated and has already spilled into anti-Jewish agitprop. This has been markedly developing ever since Hanan Ashrawi declared in 2001 that “Jesus was a Palestinian” (although I recall her at the 1991 Madrid Conference using that phrase in my presence at a press conference). Then came the “Christ at the Checkpoint” conferences that began two decades ago, as well as the publishing of the 2009 Kairos Document. Pitting Israel and Zionism as enemies of Christians in the Holy Land has been nurtured. Dexter Van Zile then of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) saw the problems in 2013.
History
What should not be neglected is that already in British Mandate times, the theme of a “peaceful coexistence of Muslims and Christians in Palestine” was a central plank in the opposition to Zionism. It is a fact that the first Muslim-Christian Association was founded in Jaffa in May 1918. J. M. N. Jeffries, writing in Great Britain’s Daily Mail on Feb. 8, 1923, played the Christian angle to malign Zionism: “It is revolting that a Christian country such as Britain is should turn the Holy Land into the domain for free-thinking Judeao-Slavs … our statesmen, fresh from sermons in the chapels of Wales, hand over the country of the Redeemer to infidels.” In 1948, there was the Christian Union of Palestine statement denouncing the United Nations’ partition plan while promoting violent resistance.
Another factor is the evolving Christian-Palestinian theology. An academic review article this year, in Hebrew, in the Van Leer Institute’s “Theory and Criticism,” provides an excellent, if sympathetic and very uncritical, overview of the ideas of Jamal Khader, Geries Khoury, Raheb Mitri, Rafiq Khoury, and others. They have been turning Second Temple history around, creating a new form of replacement thinking and a reidentification of the personage of Jesus.
And it is working for them. For many of the uneducated who have been targeted, Jesus is no longer Jewish but Palestinian. For example, the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem posted a tweet on October 25 noting the “Solemnity of the Virgin Mary, Queen of Palestine and the Holy Land.” If anything, she could be referred to as a “Queen of Judea,” a geopolitical term that appears 47 times in the New Testament. In Matthew 2:1 Judea is noted as the birthplace of her son.
A “Palestinian liberation theology” has been fashioned and been coupled with decolonization and couched in terms of ideological linguistics, such as indigeneity. This approach accepts and pushes all the historical myths and political untruths of raw Arab propaganda, as well as the classic disputational rejection of Judaism that Nahmanides experienced in 1263 in Barcelona, while cloaking it all in a false faith framework of exclusionism.
Jews and Judaism are erased from the picture, including the Jewishness of Jesus, while classic twisted antisemitic tropes and formulations are offered in substitution–such as Christ and the church are the “true Israel” and true “covenant people of God.” The Bible, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust are either misrepresented or missing to a large extent in this theology. A new identity of a Palestinian Christian has emerged.
Targeting Evangelicals
All this is targeting the significant and crucial influence, justly so, of the Evangelical movement, which is pro-Israel and based on the roots of the Restoration movement that emerged in the 1580s. The American connection was strengthened by the meeting of Hebron’s emissary, Rabbi Raphael Chaim Yitzchak Karigal, who in 1773 visited Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, who became a supporter of Jewish restoration and knew nothing of a “Green Line” or an occupation, but rather, as in Acts 1:8, Judea and Samaria.
It is on this centuries-old background that US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee scoffed at an attack from Tucker Carlson, who accused him of being “seized by this brain virus” of Christian Zionism. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), former National Security Adviser John Bolton, GOP strategist Karl Rove, and former President George W. Bush were presented by Carlson as examples of people he dislikes “more than anybody” for their staunch support of Israel. Ambassador Huckabee was pithy, tweeting, “Somehow, I will survive the animosity.” Cruz felt it necessary, when addressing Jewish Republicans, to admit, however, that antisemitism is “an existential crisis in our party.”
There is a problem. A Wall Street Journal article suggested “the right has a racism problem … the racism is concentrated in a faction of MAGA’s online leadership. They call themselves ‘America First.’ If they succeed in making racism respectable again, they will be the ruin of America.”
Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA), Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes are mentioned. They are trying to “hijack [Charlie] Kirk’s Turning Point USA movement to advance racist conspiracy theories into the mainstream.”
The questions recently directed at Vice President J.D. Vance, Glenn Beck, and others at TPUSA events attest to this campaign. The Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts debacle, in which he declared the organization’s support for Carlson [but opposition to Jew-hatred] is more evidence of the struggle being waged with dog-whistling terms like the “globalist class” and a “venomous coalition” serving “someone else’s agenda” becoming acceptable texts.
The Islamists
There is another factor at play. The state of Christians and Christianity in the Islamic Middle East is worrisome, to say the least. Yet very little do we hear about this from the new antisemitic, anti-Zionists of America First. Is the alliance with jihadi Islam the new coalition, as author and film-maker Dinesh D’Souza said recently to syndicated radio host Mark Levin? Is Carlson’s agenda path dangerous in that it is driving a wedge between the most natural of political partners to maintain Western values, Jews and Israel?
As Israeli historian Benny Morris observed, in line with the essence of the Convergence Theory, individuals with shared traits and grievances, even if from opposite poles, come together in a crowd, bringing their pre-existing tendencies and motivations. Have Muslim and Christian antisemitism converged with an anti-Jewish prejudice to fuel the Free Palestine protests across the West?
Is a normalization of Jew-hatred acceptable on the right to please a new ally in the sand dunes?
The right-of-center conservative nationalist camp of America faces a choice. Will a revived centuries-old Christian-based hatred of Jews corrupt and taint the country’s politics? Will the appeal to God guide their thinking and actions, as when Tucker Carlson declared that his critics, including author and commentator Ben Shapiro, support Israel “because of the thrill they feel killing their enemies, the God-like power they imagine they have when they extinguish human life. That’s the whole game for them”?
There are those, both Jews and Christians, faithful to Zion, many multitudes of them, who are working to stem this evil tide. But more attention and more effort must be invested. Even as staunch an ally of Israel as the late Charlie Kirk was unsteady about rejecting alliances with the anti-Israel activists in his milieu.
It is a crucial front in the battle for Jerusalem as much as it is an internal reckoning within the traditionalist political camp in American, and European, politics.
It cannot be ignored and must be a battle waged.
Yisrael Medad is a Research Fellow at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem after retiring as its Director of Information and Educational Resources. He previously served as Parliamentary Aide to Members of Knesset and was director of Israel’s Media Watch. An earlier, shorter version of this article appeared on the Jewish News Syndicate website.
