No self-respecting media outlet in Israel should be interviewing a brazen Jew hater like Tucker Carlson, which means that he will probably follow up his interview with Channel 13 with several others. Carlson has been dubbed by President Trump as a “Low IQ person" and “not very bright" and nothing he said in his most recent interview challenges those characterizations.
The interviewer Udi Segal occasionally tried to push back but also refrained from refuting some of the more outrageous statements and implications.
What should Segal have countered? And how can we repudiate Carlson’s rhetoric and immorality?
Take first the low-hanging fruit. Carlson excoriated the beeper operation that wounded several thousand Hezbollah terrorists and the elimination of leaders such as in Lebanon, Gaza or Iran as “political assassinations" that are wrong and immoral. But by what stretch of his fevered imagination is killing terrorists immoral? Must they be killed only in the act of terror - or after the act?
These are organizations funded by a terror state whose avowed goal is to destroy Israel and that goal has been hardly theoretical. Iran and its proxies have spent the better part of forty years trying to murder as many Israelis and Jews as possible and have long threatened - even boasted about - Israel’s impending destruction.
It comes out that according to Carlson’s twisted logic, a nation cannot defend itself by assassinating the leadership of its foes nor by killing terrorists.
The worst of Carlson’s distortions is his repeated references to the murder of innocents, especially children. “Killing innocents is never acceptable." “Killing children is never allowable… it is evil." Although he has other times labeled such actions genocide, this time he sufficed to call them “atrocities." As such, he concluded, Israel is as much a terror regime as is Iran or any of the terror entities it purports to fight against.
“You can't kill people who haven't done anything wrong." That is true in normal times, but the morality of war is different. Certainly, one cannot target civilians intentionally, but how would Carlson combat terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah who hide among civilians, including children, store their weapons in violation of international law in civilian homes, hospitals, schools, and houses of worship? If killing children is “never allowed," do terrorists then gain total immunity when they use children or other civilians as human shields?
That would seem to be Carlson’s only conclusion, which qualifies him to be a good Quaker and a pacifist, but not much of a Christian. Even Christianity understands the concept of a “just war" and only a nation with a death wish bent on national suicide would adhere to such a morally bankrupt standard. That is one reason why no country does. Carlson’s approach gives evildoers an insurmountable advantage. Would he want to live in a country that followed his rules? I doubt it.
It comes out that war according to Carlson cannot be waged against terrorists who hide among civilians nor against their leadership that dispatches them to murder real innocents. If you can’t fight the leaders and you can’t fight the terrorists, whom can you fight? Apparently, wars can only be fought against terrorists who volunteer to be killed. In the alternative, in Carlson world, Israel should remain morally pristine and allow itself to be destroyed. That will show ‘em! But no thank you.
Labelling something evil presumes evil intent. The very notion of collateral damage reflects the idea that wars always cause unwanted suffering to innocent people. (I set aside for a moment the cogent point that most of these civilians are not innocent at all but part of the terror operation and planning, nor is a child suicide bomber or decoy entirely innocent.) The death of innocents in war is tragic - but tragic is not the same as evil. He is, to be kind, simplistic in his reasoning.
Carlson sounds like someone who denounces as “evil" the act of cutting into the flesh of another human being and cannot distinguish between the surgeon and the stabber. If he doesn’t realize that, then Trump’s assessment of his intelligence is accurate.
In Carlson’s world, terror will always win. It could be that as long as the only victims are Jews, that is a price he is willing to pay to remain morally pure. But there is no such thing as a casualty-free, non-lethal war, and if he thinks he has the moral high ground by claiming such purity, then he is the terrorist’s best friend.
In Carlson’s world - as in many other haters of Israel - Israel has the absolute right of self-defense, as long as we never use it or as long as no one has to die if we do use it. He called Israel the world’s most violent country - a patent falsehood - but revealing no appreciation of the constant terror we experience and the relentlessness of our enemies.
He lamented Israel’s “loss of morality." He shouldn’t; the truth is, we never lost it, while he never had it. His moral compass is askew. Perhaps he is also missing the idea that we need not subscribe to his moral notions that are based on “universal principles." But G-d’s word goes forth from Jerusalem; our moral scruples and conduct should be based on the Torah. If anything, we wage war in a way that dilutes the Torah’s imperative that protecting Jewish life is our priority and our possession of the entire land of Israel is a fundamental Torah objective.
“Israel is not a democracy because millions of Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza do not vote," and according to Carlson, nor is America because Trump embarked on an unpopular war. If only the interviewer spoke a better English and countered with the obvious:
1.The Arab residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza are not citizens of Israel and no more entitled to vote in Israeli elections than are illegal aliens in the USA, against whom Carlson has railed for years. Those Arabs are citizens of the PA and entitled to vote there, but do not blame Israel if elections there never take place.
2. And the USA is a republic, technically, not a democracy. The citizens vote for their representatives. Those representatives do not take polls before making decisions but are elected to make decisions. If Carlson does not know this, and he should, then see Trump: Above.
Finally, Carlson asserted repeatedly and quite aggressively that the USA has no “obligation" to give Israel either arms or money. Of course, no one ever claimed that the US has such an “obligation" so this was an easy straw man to browbeat. Here, too, Carlson - whose poor grades prevented him from graduating with his college class - betrays an ignorance about statecraft:
No nation has an obligation towards any other nation but only to its own citizens and those who legally seek succor in its borders. Nevertheless, nations do have interests, and in pursuit of those interests they establish alliances, have foreign relations, and trade with other countries, including the sale of weapons. (The US does have an unfortunate record of, from time to time, arming countries that became their adversaries or were otherwise hostile.)
Arguably, Israel has been the USA’s most reliable ally in the world, if you consider support for US global objectives, common enemies, provision of vital intelligence, and symmetrical voting patterns in the United Nations. If the US sells weapons to Israel, it does so in furtherance of American interests (which, by the way, certainly do not include the bolstering of Islamic terrorists). The proof is that when certain presidents - misguided as they were - decided it was in the US interest to halt weapons sales, they did. (Read: Biden.)
If the US subsidizes part of those weapons sales, it is to shore up America’s arms industry and ensure that Israel does not seek weapons elsewhere or manufacture its own, which would undercut the US defense establishment. It doesn’t bother him that the US trades with a host of unsavory actors across the world, including China which is now buying American oil while tormenting its own people. Apparently, no Jews, no news.
But a future president may determine that a pacifist USA is an ideal and that arms sales should be halted, just as the current president may cave in to pressure from the likes of Carlson and others and sign a deal with Iran heavy on rhetoric, light on substance, and with little chance of implementation of anything that remotely protects our interests.
We would do well to remember that the interests of Israel and the USA are often aligned but are never identical. Will our prime minister have the strength to rain on the Trump parade and refuse to agree to a cease fire in Lebanon that leaves Hezbollah armed and dangerous? Ditto with Hamas in Gaza? Will he succumb to pressure to withdraw from these territories or do the right thing and settle them with Jews, once and for all? And the "no obligation" mantra should mean that Israel retains complete freedom of action against any regional enemy, despite American wishes for a cease fire.
Yes, let us remember that nations have interests, not obligations, and remember further Lord Palmerston’s dictum that nations have no permanent allies, only permanent interests. That applies to us as well. Our interests are not merely survival but building a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
If anything, Carlson’s diatribes should alert Israelis to Palmerston’s truism and its consequences.
Indeed, he is not that bright and not that moral. I wish that Tucker Carlson hated true evil as much as he hates Jews and Israel. But we will survive him too, and this era’s history will easily be written without reference to his angry words, his caustic opinions, his shallow reasoning, and his vile hatreds.
Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, Esq., former pulpit rabbi and attorney, serves as the Senior Research Associate for the Jerusalem Center for Applied Policy (JCAP.ngo), the Israel Region Vice-President of the Coalition for Jewish Values, and is the author of six books including “The Jewish Ethic of Personal Responsibility" (Gefen Publishing).