Tucker’s interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee showed his true colors.
Tucker Carlson is a disingenuous fellow. He has always claimed that he does not hate Jews, but now is opposed to Zionism. While maintaining that he is not antisemitic, he accuses the IDF of killing “thousands of children”. He flew into Ben Gurion Airport—” at great expense” from the guy with tens to hundreds of millions of dollars—and blamed Israel for his not moving into the country. He said that it would have been “dangerous” for him to head to Jerusalem or that Bibi Netanyahu would not let him leave the airport. It’s all a grift to make Israel look as bad as possible.
Mike Huckabee did a great service to the US and mankind by showing the deceiver that Carlson has become. Every time he successfully deflected or crushed a Carlson lie, Tucker moved onto another topic or, once again—like LeBron James flopping—declared that he does not know definitions or understand issues. One claim that was wildly outrageous but extremely telling was Carlson’s claim that we need to run DNA tests to see who the “real descendants of Abraham” are. Now, he claimed that he believes that whoever those real descendants are, they deserve the land of Israel. He made a big effort to describe such land as being between the Nile and the Euphrates, even though the Torah does not give such a big chunk of land and the state of Israel has made it clear that it has no interest or mandate to make the secular state of Israel a copy of the Biblical land as described in the Five Books of Moses.
The reason Carlson wants his DNA tests is that the Muslims believe that, as descendants of Abraham—through his son Ismael—they deserve the land. Their tradition does not jibe with the Torah story that God promised the land to Abraham’s descendants through Isaac, his other son. Huckabee was playing five-dimensional chess when he asked Tucker about converts or “gerim” in Hebrew. They and their offspring have full rights in the Jewish people. What happens if their DNA does not match some arbitrary “this is the absolute DNA pattern of a real descendant of Abraham” sample? Will it be like Monty Python’s bridge scene, where people giving the wrong answer are thrown into an abyss below?
Carlson’s entire premise is perverse and somewhat demented. The state of Israel is a secular state that happens to have a lot of Jews living in it. Its Knesset has Arab representatives, and its Supreme Court has a tradition of having one Muslim justice in the 15-member group of judges. The state of Israel took many cues from the Torah, Jewish history and culture, but it is not a theological state, and it is not based on any promises made by God to Abraham, Isaac or Jacob. Yes, those promises do exist in the Torah, and many religious Zionists base the case for Israel as a Jewish homeland on those verses. But in the end, just as the American revolutionaries made war to free themselves from British rule, the Jews in British Mandate Palestine fought to set up a homeland where Jews could be safe from mass slaughter. Anyone who knows a wee bit about Zionism knows that Uganda and other locations were considered as possible landing places for the Jewish people. The Zionists and many non-Zionist Jews bought, owned and developed land “between the river and the sea”. Arabs admit that they came to mandate Palestine because the Jews had made the desert bloom and there was work there. The fledgling Jewish army defeating local Arabs and their supporters from surrounding states was an outcome that had nothing to do with DNA tests or anyone having to prove that he or she was Jewish. It was a war and the Jews won. People like Tucker and his friends in Doha do not accept that outcome.
As Mike Huckabee pointed out, the Jewish people still pray in Hebrew, face Jerusalem when we pray (and in Jerusalem face the location of the ancient Temples), learn the same Torah, keep the same commandments, and do the same things that Jews have done for hundreds and even thousands of years. One can look at the writings of Maimonides to see how we keep Passover or perform a ritual circumcision is identical to the way he arranged Jewish laws on these and numerous other subjects 800 years ago. Where did he get his source material? From the ancient Talmudic texts. Now we are closing in on the year zero, if we go back to the Mishnaic tradition, that is the basis for the Talmudic discussions and disputes. As a dear rabbi friend once said to me, if Rabbi Akiva—who lived from 50 - 135 Common Era—were to enter a study hall and listen to the discussions, he would immediately understand the topics being argued. There are 613 commandments spelled out in the Torah and thousands of specific Jewish laws that have been observed since the times of Moses. Does Tucker believe that Moses existed or that he gave the Jewish people God’s law? He claims that there was a real flesh-and-blood Abraham, so why would he deny Moses, who lived so long after the first Jew? If we do things today that Moses taught way back when, do we need a DNA test to show that we’re not impostors?
Tucker’s goal for the past two years has been to delegitimize Israel. “Israel is the most violent country in the world”—so he claimed. American cities are far more violent, and as Mike Huckabee pointed out, Israel made phone calls, sent messages, put out drone loudspeakers—all for the purpose of warning Gazans to move away from a building about to be destroyed. When Huckabee pointed out that the US had never done these things, Tucker took great offense: how dare he speak so badly about the US! Huckabee stated that he was not speaking badly about the country whose flag he holds in his lapel; rather, he noted that Israel has done more than any country to minimize civilian deaths. Tucker wanted to say that a 14-year-old Hamas terrorist has no agency and cannot be killed, even if he is holding hostages or pointing a rifle at someone. Huckabee asked if Tucker would kill him if he was in the way of saving his hostage children. Just as he would not say that Israel has a right to exist—after several prompts to say the same—he refused to say that he would save his children at any cost. This reminds me of the disastrous answer of Former Massachusetts Gov. Dukakis when asked about a theoretical assault on his wife. A terrorist is a terrorist, and his age is irrelevant. If he is holding a weapon or involved in terror activity, he is a combatant. Tucker doesn’t know about the 14 and 15-year-olds who lied in order to get into the armed forces to fight for the US in World War II? Huckabee was right: war is terrible, but you fight to win.
Tucker came off as disingenuous and hellbent on making Israel look bad. While I would give Amb. Huckabee, a 10 for his efforts to parry Tucker’s obfuscations, for the latter’s followers, none of it matters. It came out of his mouth and therefore it must be true. People who hate Jews or Israel are not interested in the truth. All they want is their guy to claim that Israel is not a legitimate country. The present Christian population is five-times the 1948 size, but for Tucker, Israel remains bad for Christians. For Tucker and his followers, that fact does not matter.
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