At the Glastonbury music festival last weekend a punk band led a delirious crowd with “Death, death to the IDF”. On the deadliest day in post-Holocaust history a battalion of Hamas massacred a peacenik crowd at the Nova music festival. At both events the killer instinct played out. In England, punks and fans voiced the desire to kill Jews, while in Israel terrorists enacted the identical killer instinct.
What is so difficult? Antisemitism translates into ‘Death to Jews’. Yet panicky politicians, academics and pundits have been trying to combat the deadliest hatred by identifying it from a rule book. Small wonder that the concept mimics a farfetched marsupial created by AI at which self-styled peaceniks crying ‘genocide’ and ‘globalise the intifada’ protest that criticising Israel is not antisemitic.
Where does Tucker Carlson, summarily cancelled for being antisemitic, fit in? His routine is not, like Piers Morgan’s, to pillory the Jewish state. The frontrunner isolationist is against America going to war for Israel, or provide the hardware and intelligence to help it win its wars. To the Carlson pack yapping at Trump’s gutsy heels, avoiding all entanglements abroad is of the essence.
A showdown with Senator Ted Cruz, as with a string of his encounters with different dramatis personae, revealed that the Israel question is the one that gets Tucker’s goat.
“He spent a lot of time attacking the American Israel Public Affairs Committee”, Cruz said, lapsing into disparagement.
“On foreign policy, Tucker has gone... crazy. He’s gone off the rails. He is suddenly a hardcore isolationist. It was just unhinged. There are conspiracy sections of the internet that are worried that, like AIPAC is running the world, it’s just not reality. And he didn’t like it when I called him on it.”
Why would he like it? Cruz insinuated that he was antisemitic.
Israel’s Diaspora Minister, a fellow named Chikli, had a go at Carlson from afar. In 2024 he slammed the Tucker Carlson Network as, “the leading platform for fringe Holocaust deniers, conspiracy theorists, and blood libel enthusiasts who oppose the State of Israel.” Talk about not mincing words!
It took a mere photo of Carlson with Trump and Musk at the White House to fire up a detractor or two. Evangelical Christian Cardoza-Moore hit him where it would hurt.
“Tucker Carlson’s antisemitism does not reflect the values of the Trump administration,” she said. And given his “blatant antisemitism” Trump should ban him from the White House.
What Carlson’s utterances made his bigotry “blatant” she failed to disclose. Still, he called to beg her to retract. So she said. The stalker of antisemites is no TACO (acronym for "Trump always chickens out"). Cardoza-Moore thumped her bible galore.
“I had clearly touched a nerve for the former Trump confidante, but I would not back down. I explained to him that he clearly hadn’t made it past the Book of Genesis, which clearly states: “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you.” Had he read his Bible, he would not have made the cardinal mistake of breaking the Ninth Commandment in bearing false witness against God’s Chosen People. With today’s tweet from the President we saw Tucker Carlson’s career crumble before his eyes.”
The same bible extract made Carlson’s interview with Ted Cruz erupt. He mocked the Senator for stumbling over the passage, followed by a ridiculing body punch. “Is the nation God was referring to in Genesis the same as the country run by Benjamin Netanyahu?”
Cruz looked like a deer caught in your headlights. He slipped into an all-too common trap set by savvy Israel-bashers who, truth be told, tend to hold the intellectual high ground against their accusers. Norman Finkelstein is one.
One doubts that even the ADL could make a charge of antisemitism stick. The CEO is himself ambivalent. At one time he attacked Elon Musk, madly Zionist, for being antisemitic for comparing George Soros to a comic book character named Magneto. On a later occasion Greenblatt pronounced Musk innocent of making what many claimed was a ‘Heil Hitler’ salute.
Is Trump’s “Special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism” any better? And what about the DOJ “Task Force to Combat anti-Semitism” which can’t get even the spelling right?
So to the nub of the problem. If indeed Tucker Carlson is a blatant anti-Jew bigot, what exactly makes him one?
Ask Federal bodies or States or Ivy League schools, all geared up to punish antisemitism as a violation of this or that, and condescendingly they’ll key up their copy of IHRA, the definition adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016 and now become law throughout the West.
Look out - at the very start IHRA rambles into a problem: “...Examples which, depending on the context could be antisemitic.” Context? Could be? Recall Ivy League Presidents grilled by a House Committee. Were those not the escape words they trotted out?
Talking of which, what is it that makes a campus protest antisemitic?
Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (yet another pro-terrorist lobby with Peace in its name) looks askance at IHRA trusted by US lawmakers to crack down on campus antisemitism as, a “conflation of criticism of Israel or Zionism with antisemitism, to censor speech that doesn’t align with unconditional support for Israel.” Whew.
There is clearly something in IHRA for everyone not to like. Antisemitism, according to one example, consists of, “using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism, e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus and blood libels) to characterize Israel or Israelis.” It was now the turn of Tucker Carlson to be grossly upset. If that is what antisemitism is, he said, tongue in cheek or not, the New Testament could be banned.
Observe all the red herrings bred by the most elaborate and painstakingly written definition of the oldest hatred. I mean, not even the fellow who fathered IHRA is at peace with the monster to which he gave birth
“I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it” said Alice “Through the Looking Glass.” Kenneth Stern, Director of the Bard Centre for the Study of Hate, is an Alice. A true liberal who wants the most deplorable speech to be protected not punished, he fears that making his creature into law will be used to censor speech
Which it has been. A cornerstone of liberty is the freedom to express whatever comes to mind. Will prosecuting ‘antisemitic’ speech be worth the existential loss of liberty? And will it make Jews more popular or more hated?
Stern has no delusions that his made in committee definition will backfire.
Weaponizing antisemitism makes Jewish students “'less safe,” IHRA’s drafter says.
“Antisemitism is often seen as a “canary in the coal mine, warning of broader societal issues and human rights dangers. Times of emergency however lead to the worst type of legislation. A key example is the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023, a bill that the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed. People think they can use the government to stop hateful speech. But censorship does not stop bigotry. It often makes it worse.”
Whither combating Jew-baiting?
The answer is at hand. The Oct 7 pogrom rendered complex definitions redundant. Israel was denounced before the IDF put a boot in Gaza. If Tucker Carlson the isolationist lives to fight another day as a MAGA bulwark, the one true benchmark will be decisive. It will put paid to the shortcomings of the mother of all definitions. Kenneth Stern should welcome it with open arms. As he pithily remarks, a growing number of younger Jews understand Israel and Judaism in a way that leads them to be anti-Zionist. While he’d debate this political shift, he shockingly would not, as does his definition (and one of its main goals, according to late antisemitism expert, Manfred Gerstenfeld) , label anti-Zionists as antisemites (To quote: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.").
No one has asked how antisemitism was identified before 1879 when it became a word? Did we really have to wait millennia for a German agitator named Wilhelm Marr to come up with what’s now a buzz term scattered like confetti, with hardly more utility.
After the Second Temple was destroyed the dispersed Jews took the brunt of what Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has called, “the deadliest of human phenomena. More than hate destroys the hated, it destroys the hater” he said. Indeed, ‘deadly’ and ‘destroy’, are the operative words.
They leave careful academic definitions of what is essentially a deadly hatred that advertises what it wants to do in the wilderness. Defining a woman is about as useful as defining antisemitism. It is what it is, and the Passover Haggadah, compiled 2,000 years ago, tells us what it is, in sixteen everyday words.
“In every generation there are those who rise up against us and seek to destroy us.”
Accurate prophecy or age old incontrovertible meaning, this unequivocal statement tells us to stop with IHRA and curbing academic freedom and defining what people may or may not say. Clearer than daylight, the West’s pro-Hamas hordes have risen up against Israel and the Jews, and seek their destruction.
It took a non-Jewish French playwright who knew the Passover Haggadah as little as he knew kneidlach to grasp the credo it set forth for all time. In his thin but seminal book, ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’ Jean-Paul Sartre grasped the psychological bedrock of the most destructive hatred on the planet.
“The anti-Semite has murderous instincts but has found a means of sating them. His thunderous diatribes at the ‘Yids’ are really capital executions.. He is a murderer who represses and censures his tendency to murder without being able to hold it back, yet dares to kill only in effigy.” That is not quite the way it worked out, is it?
The killer instinct, Sartre tells us, defines the oldest hatred. Between your Columbia professor and your campus mob on one hand, and Hamas murdering its way through the Gaza envelope on the other hand, there is zero difference: they all possess the killer instinct. The first are closet Jew killers, the second put the Jew-killer instinct into practice. Every antisemite, mask on or off, drools over the prospect of dead Jews.
Don’t let channel news anchors slip the hangman’s noose by mimicking “freedom of speech” as Kenneth Stern let them. When someone wants Jews dead there can be no question: that someone must be antisemitic.
When for example a person demands that Israel declares an immediate and unconditional cease fire, that person expects that Hamas will kill more Jews. When a UN lawyer maintains that Israelis have no right to self-defence, there can be no question: she wants Jews to be murdered with impunity. When a mob chants, ‘Globalise the Intifada’ or ‘From the River to the sea Palestine will be free’, or "Death to the IDF", it’s a battle cry to kill Jews.
Where does all this leave isolationists like Carlson who resent America helping Israel fight its own wars? Or want Trump to defund Israel. Do they desire and drool over Jewish death? What of the spooky Holocaust deniers on his podcast: do they?
Yes, Carlson disputes any link between the Israel of the Bible and Netanyahu’s Israel. But is he on record calling for Israel, not Hamas, to lay down arms? Did he in some manner make excuses for Hamas for slaughtering Israelis on Oct 7?
If not, we are in the most parlous position for dumping the MAGA isolationist on the anti-Semite trash heap.
Carry a pocketbook inscribed with the 16-word definition and you’ll clinch the debate every time.
Steve Apfel is a diversity freak: Economist. Former director and founder of the School of Management Accounting. Veteran authority on anti-Israelism. Activist against antisemitism. Prodigious author. He has penned more out of the box works on antisemitism than most.
He blogs at https://substack.com/@steveapfel1