One need only look at the Middle East to see what decades of antisemitism does to nations.
-Lebanon, once dubbed the "Paris of the Middle East" was destroyed by civil war and taken over by genocidal militias and terrorist organizations dedicated to the genocide of Jews no matter what it costs the people of Lebanon. One of the largest man-made explosions in history devastated Beirut because of the corruption Hezbollah’s antisemitic influence infused into Lebanese politics and life.
-Gaza, which had the potential to be the Singapore of the Middle East, elected Hamas and spent decades building terror tunnels and rockets and preparing for October 7 rather than attempting to build a future.
-Iran, once an ally and one of the few nations in the region where women had freedom, wasted its strength and wealth on terrorist proxies and mass murder abroad because of its visceral need to murder Jews and other infidels while murdering women at home who did not wear their hijabs properly.
Tucker Carlson’s need to defend and sing the praises of anyone and everyone who hates Jews has made him an ally and defender of every one of America’s enemies and rivals. He has gone from defending and praising Vladimir Putin to defending Hitler, praising Qatar, defending the Ayatollahs, and extolling Sharia law. Now he is calling for the US to pre-emptively surrender to China both by abandoning Taiwan and by agreeing to step aside and allow China to become the dominant world power.
In a recent interview with the Economist, Carlson claimed that the most powerful military the world has ever seen “cannot defend Taiwan" because it has “reached the limits of its power."
To cement his pre-emptive surrender argument, Carlson hosted Chinese regime propagandist Jiang Xueqin on his podcast, where Xueqin openly called for a “new world order" where China would benefit at America’s expense without any pushback from Carlson. In fact, Carlson called this craven surrender the “wisest possible advice," to which the only obstacle is the pesky State of Israel.
Carlson’s supposed “wisdom" is nothing more than the madness Saruman used to attempt to convince Gandalf to join forces with Sauron in The Fellowship of the Ring, made all the worse by the fact that Sauron’s armies actually were stronger than all the free peoples of Middle Earth, unlike the current America-dominated order.
In his madness, Carlson has also expressed a desire to live in the slave state of Qatar, where he has purchased a home, and called nations struggling to exit the Middle Ages, “more advanced" than Western civilization, thanks to the wonders of Sharia law.
If Carlson would have his way, America would sit back and watch as China conquered the land where the cast majority of the world’s advanced semiconductors are produced, plunging the global economy into chaos, and letting the Constitution be replaced by system of law where Christians and Jews would be reduced to 2nd-class citizens at best.
This is the cowardice of antisemitism. Rather than confront real threats, antisemites attack the Jews. Rather than defend their civilization, they partner with those who seek to destroy them so long as the Jews can be destroyed first.
Recent violence against Jews has shown exactly where this cowardice leads.
-A terrorist attempted to blow up a synagogue in Michigan which contained a preschool.
-Antisemites set fire to ambulances operated by Hatzolah in north London. In both cases,
Western antisemites rushed to dismiss, deny, and justify these acts of violence. Both have been called “false flags" by people who think the lives of Jewish children do not matter. After the synagogue attack, media outlets fell over themselves trying to make the terrorist sympathetic because his Hezbollah terrorist family members had been killed, as if that justified the attempted mass murder of Jewish toddlers thousands of miles away.
After the ambulance burnings, social media was flooded with concern not that there are those who would stoop to destroying ambulances that serve the entire community, but that Jews would dare to have an ambulance service even if it served anyone, Jew or non-Jew. People who consider the existence of ambulances a greater problem than the destruction of ambulances do not live in a civilized world. They live in the dark ages.
Among those who have traded civilization for the dark ages is the mainstream British newspaper The Guardian, which, prior to the ambulance burnings, saw nothing wrong with publishing a piece justifying and lionizing the vandalism of a bakery that was founded by an Israeli decades ago. When Jews are not tolerated, hate and violence is tolerated in their stead, and the basic function of civilization to protect its citizens is lost.
It is this civilization-destroying cowardice that US President Donald Trump opposed when he banished Tucker Carlson from the MAGA movement and when he refused to entertain the conspiratorial antisemitic ramblings of Joe Kent. There is nothing great about being too afraid to act or to do anything in the face of rivals and enemies except to grovel and surrender. There is nothing brave or patriotic about scapegoating Jews for problems you are too cowardly to face head-on.
If there is one thing Trump hates, it is a coward. That is why he has been so disgusted with Europe’s refusal to act to defend its own interests in the Strait of Hormuz and with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. It is why he spoke up in defense of Mark Levin when Megyn Kelley proved too cowardly to say a word about the lunacy of Candace Owens and started attacking respected Jewish figures on the right instead because they were safer targets.
Antisemitism drives people to join forces with their mortal enemies and turns them against their own countries. It destroys truth and turns cowardice into a virtue. It turns violence against the innocent into justice and justice into conspiracy. It turns genocide into ‘resistance’ and survival into genocide. If left unchecked and allowed to metastasize like a cancer, it destroys civilizations.
Gary Willig is a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.