Christian Russia and Christian America
Last week I published a long article comparing our society with that of the USSR, our great Cold War adversary.
I noted the disturbing recent trends that have gradually shifted our country towards certain Soviet practices that we had once so sharply condemned, and I drew some uncomfortable conclusions from this.
At one point, I briefly sketched out a few of the strange recent ironies:
During the long Cold War that dominated much of the twentieth century, the USA and the USSR stood as the great rival superpowers, champions of radically different ideological systems.
Today, America and Russia are still major global rivals, but during the 35 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union their ideological trajectories have moved in unexpected directions.
Although it has a significant Muslim minority, Russia is an unabashed Christian nation, with President Vladimir Putin and other political leaders publicly embracing that traditional Russian religion.
But although a much larger percentage of America’s population has Christian roots, that religion plays no official role whatsoever in our government or our society. Indeed, many recent government policies are absolutely antithetical to those religious traditions. This unusual situation is extremely uncommon outside the West and seems oddly reminiscent of how Russian society had fared during its many decades under the Communist yoke.
So in that matter at least, the USA and the USSR have strangely shifted their ideological positions over time, somehow even passing each other while moving in opposite directions.
- American Pravda: The Jewish Roots of the USSR and the USSA
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 10, 2026 • 10,700 Words
Soviet Communism endured for fewer than seventy-five years, less than the lifetime of many who experienced it. Indeed, one of its foremost foes was the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn who was born just a few weeks after the Bolshevik coup and died in 2008 at the age of 89, long outliving the system he had so strongly opposed. Late in his life, he praised Russian President Vladimir Putin for having restored Christian Russia and saved his country from collapse. Putin was one of the mourners at Solzhenitsyn’s funeral and then directed that The Gulag Archipelago be added to the standard curriculum of all Russian schools.
As someone who came of age during the late Cold War, I had regularly seen “Communist Russia” used in my media outlets and textbooks, almost interchangeably with “the USSR” or “the Soviet Union.” Conservatives often favored that former term because it carried a much sharper ideological edge, helping to explain and justify the great geopolitical struggle we were waging against that rival superpower.
But although Christian Russia became a reality decades ago, replacing the Communist Russia we had long denounced, I’ve almost never seen that contrasting phrase used anywhere in American society or our media outlets. Perhaps it might raise disturbing questions about the underlying sources of our intense hostility toward that large geopolitical rival. So much of the flag-waving FoxNews audience skews elderly that many of those individuals may vaguely assume that Putin’s Russia is still Communist, and disabusing them of that notion might seriously undercut their support for our renewed Cold War.
One reason that the Bolshevik Revolution came as such a huge shock to the Westerners of 1917 was that for well over a century Russia had been the world’s largest Christian nation, and its people who followed the Eastern Orthodox Church were widely regarded as among the most deeply religious.
In that year, the Christian population of the Russian Empire probably numbered over 120 million, substantially greater than the number of Christians in the United States, which ranked second in size. So Christianity had been overthrown in its leading country and Christians throughout Europe and across the world recoiled in horror.
The Bolsheviks who seized power in a coup were militant atheists, who despised Christianity and all other religions. During the bitter civil war that followed, religious Russian Christians and their clergy were often strongly aligned with the White armies on the other side, so it was hardly surprising that the Bolsheviks employed very brutal tactics to suppress them. Estimates vary, but perhaps as many as 300,000 Orthodox priests, monks, and nuns were executed during the first quarter-century of Bolshevik rule.
Prior to the 1917 October Revolution, the Russian Empire had boasted more than 77,000 churches, but nearly all of these were destroyed or permanently closed by the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Regime they established, so by 1939 only a few hundred remained open for active worship. In the immediate aftermath of Germany’s 1941 Barbarossa invasion, Stalin desperately reversed this policy, relaxing the campaign against Christianity as a wartime measure. But Christianity remained stigmatized and partially suppressed down to the 1991 fall of Communism.
Measuring religious faith is obviously difficult in a country governed by a militantly anti-religious regime. But throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the number of Soviets with Christian roots was generally quite close to the figures for the United States, with all other nations in the world very far behind. So although neither I nor most others probably thought in such terms, the long Cold War was actually waged between the world’s two largest Christian countries, the key difference being that one of them was then under anti-Christian rule and the other was not.
Russia, the partial successor state to the dissolved USSR, today includes a smallish and well-integrated Muslim population that amounts to perhaps 10-12% of the total, along with mere slivers of various other non-Christian faiths. But a country in which at least 85% of the total population has a Christian background is obviously Christian, and calling it anything else is mere ideological foolishness. Moreover, Christianity enjoys a somewhat privileged status in that society, something that is only natural given its overwhelmingly dominant numerical position.
But it is quite enlightening to apply this same sort of analysis to our own country.
Over the years I have read many works published in America during the last couple of centuries, and the term “Christian America” has only very rarely been used to characterize our country.
Across our entire national history, our society has been so overwhelmingly, almost uniformly Christian that the use of such a term made little sense. For example, the population of Iran is around 99% Muslim by background while the figure for Pakistan is over 95%, so someone even slightly familiar with the region would only very rarely bother using the term “Muslim Iran” or “Muslim Pakistan.”
Although Americans were divided into many different sects and their degree of religiosity greatly varied, prior to the heavy influx of Eastern European Jews that began in the late nineteenth century, around 99% of our population had always had Christian roots. Even afterward the Christian percentage remained around 95%.
Calling America a Christian nation was so self-evidently true it was hardly necessary except occasionally as a form of moral commendation, and use of the term Christian America was quite uncommon.
But although the numbers and percentages remained the same, in the years leading up to World War II, such a Christian description became increasingly seen as harsh and exclusionary. Although the term “Judeo-Christian” had first appeared during the nineteenth century, it only gradually came into common American usage during the 1930s and then especially during the postwar era that followed. In actual fact, Judaism and Christianity are extremely different religions, and they have often been bitterly hostile throughout their shared 2,000 year history, but accuracy was sacrificed to political inclusivity.
And once this descriptive and ideological transformation took hold, any reference to Christian America was considered more and more problematical, almost suggesting anti-Semitism. During that same period, there were increasing legal and political efforts to expel all expressions of Christianity from the public space, with prayer banned in the public schools, creches removed from town squares, and even such innocuous non-religious elements as Christmas trees and Christmas carols sometimes denounced.
Yet despite all of this, the underlying population numbers in America have never really much changed. Since 1965, our country has received enormous waves of immigrants from all across the world, and our ethnic and racial diversity has greatly increased. But although Americans may or may not be religious, almost 95% of them still have Christian roots, making America nearly as Christian as Pakistan is Muslim.
Furthermore, America currently has by far the world’s largest Christian population, greatly exceeding the total for second-ranking Brazil, and far more than that of any European country, with Russia and Mexico probably vying for third place.
So we have something of a paradox. America is the world’s largest Christian country and 95% of our population has that background. By any reasonable standard, America is a Christian country, and indeed the clear world leader of Christianity. But almost no one in the respectable mainstream would ever publicly express such sentiments, and there are no indications that we see ourselves in that role, or act accordingly.
Meanwhile, our society and our political system have increasingly expunged all outward signs of that religion from our public life. After this decades-long social transformation, I think only the bravest or most foolhardy elected officials or celebrities would ever dare to publicly describe America as “a Christian country” let alone use some version of the phrase “Christian America” in a non-ironic sense.
In puzzling out this strange and contradictory situation, we should remember that by exactly that same standard of population size and religious background, the USSR remained the world’s leading Christian country throughout its entire existence.
The Persecution of Christians by Israeli Jews
Six months ago, just before the outbreak of the Iran war swept aside all other issues, I published a long article exploring some of these religious matters and the strange contradictions that they revealed.
If America today so obviously stood as the world’s leading Christian country, we might naturally expect that it would support struggling or oppressed Christian communities elsewhere. At the very least our own Christian leaders would press for such action.
Although that certainly had been the case a century or so ago, in recent decades matters had been entirely different.
Furthermore, nearly all of our mainstream media, certainly including its conservative FoxNews and Breitbart wing, had long concealed the shameful reality of such foreign oppression of Christians from our own Christian community.
My article described how some of this long-hidden information was finally beginning to get into widespread circulation, perhaps with important political consequences.
But for decades, that same sort of harsh suppression of Christianity has already been steadily increasing in the holy land of the Middle East, the very place in which Jesus was born, proclaimed his doctrine, and accepted his martyrdom. Tucker Carlson is the leading figure in America’s conservative media landscape and in the last couple of years his shows have finally broken the wall of media silence preventing Americans from learning those bitter facts.
In April 2024 he released a long interview with a Christian evangelical pastor in the holy city of Bethlehem who described the severe oppression that he and his flock regularly faced at the hands of Zionist militants. These fiercely anti-Christian groups were bizarrely receiving the full support of America’s own Christian establishment.
This may have been one of the very first times that sizable numbers of Americans discovered that much of their own Christian leadership was supporting attacks against the Christian communities living in the very birthplace of Jesus.
Six months ago, Carlson aired another such interview, this time with Mother Agapia, the sister of George Stephanopoulos and a Christian Orthodox nun from New Jersey who had moved to the holy land in 1996. Their conversation ran for 90 minutes and accumulated more than two million views on YouTube.
She described the very difficult circumstances that she and her fellow Christians faced under Israeli domination and control. They lived in a brutal Zionist Apartheid state that oppressed both Christians and Muslims alike, and sought to drive out the centuries-old Christian communities, some of which stretched back in time to the very days of Jesus.
As the conversation progressed, a somewhat disbelieving Carlson asked her whether it was really true that Jewish settlers sometimes spit on Christian clergy. Sure, she said, they’ve spat on me.
At another point, she casually mentioned the case of an elderly American citizen who had been beaten to death by Jewish settlers, and once again, Carlson couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing, asking her to clarify it. She explained that the retiree was from Florida and had been visiting some of his local relatives when he had been brutally killed by Jewish militants. Naturally no one was ever been arrested or otherwise punished for that crime.
Carlson was equally startled to discover the extremely amicable relations long enjoyed between the Christians and Muslims of the area. For example, Mother Agapia mentioned that she taught at a Christian girls school but that 98% of her students were actually Muslim, a reality very different than what Carlson would have expected.
Another minor tidbit that seemed to surprise Carlson was when she mentioned the total contempt most Israelis expressed towards America and Americans. He considered that very odd given the enormous funding that America supplied to Israel, which could not continue to exist without American money and American political and military support. But she suggested that perhaps that bottomless support without any reciprocity was exactly the reason for such feelings of contempt.
During the last couple of weeks, Carlson strongly returned to this same important theme, with two long interviews that together ran well over three hours and were viewed a couple of million times.
While on a trip to the Middle East, he visited Jordan and interviewed the Christian Archbishop of the region, born in Israel and holding Israeli citizenship. Carlson seemed almost disbelieving when he was told of the severe restrictions and hostility that the local Christian community suffered at the hands of an Israeli government that received billions of dollars each year in American financial support, the vast majority of it coming from taxes paid by American Christians.
For two thousand years the entire region had been home to large and often thriving Christian communities, but over the last generation many of these had been destroyed or expelled because of the aggressive foreign policy initiatives undertaken by the American government, and this sharp decline was certainly true of the Christians of the holy land itself.
For decades our dishonest media had persuaded the American people and especially our Christian conservatives that their fellow Christians of the Middle East faced severe oppression at the hands of Muslim extremists, and in some cases this was correct. But those extremists usually gained power in Iraq, Syria, or elsewhere because of the military actions taken by the American government, overthrowing the previous, Christian-friendly regimes of those countries. This led to the destruction of local Christian communities that had stretched back to the days of Jesus.
In the second part of that long video, Carlson interviewed a prominent Christian banker in Jordan, who explained to his audience that although his country was perhaps 97% Muslim, its small Christian minority was disproportionately wealthy and influential, and had the full support of the ruling Hashemite monarchy, direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammed.
Yet although the very successful Christian whom Carlson interviewed had lived his entire life just a few miles from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the other most sacred sites of his own religion, the Israeli government made it so difficult for nearby Christians to visit those places of worship or undertake a pilgrimage that he had only been there once in his entire life.
Another, even longer interview aired just a few days ago, running nearly two hours and watched on YouTube well over a million times.
Bethlehem had been the birthplace of Jesus, and Carlson spoke with a Christian Palestinian-American minister from that area, whose own family had lived there for the two thousand years since the founding of Christianity. But now the Christians of his village were being steadily pushed out of their lands by Jewish militants, who demanded that they permanently uproot themselves and go elsewhere, claiming that all of this territory had been granted to the Jews by divine right.
Just as in these other cases, Carlson was told that the Christians were regularly denied access to the holiest Christian sites of the region, even though they were the native people who had lived there for a thousand or two thousand years. Meanwhile, the Jewish militants who harassed and mistreated them were often recent arrivals from Brooklyn whose roots were in Eastern Europe, having no real connection whatsoever with the lands that they now claimed as their own.
The actions of these Jewish militants sometimes took a far more violent turn. Carlson’s guest explained that as a youngster, his own mother had been shot and severely wounded in her own home by a settler for no reason at all, and although she survived, if the trajectory of the bullet had been an inch or two different, she would have been killed.
All of these different Christians, whether American, Palestinian-American, or Palestinian, told exactly the same story of constant oppression or worse at the hands of the non-Christian Israeli government that America funded and supported.
Even just a few generations ago, no one in the West could have ever imagined that such a bizarre possibility might occur.
Indeed, as all of us learned from our basic history textbooks, the Popes of the Middle Ages had launched the Crusades almost a thousand years ago because they claimed that the Christians of the holy land were being mistreated by the local Islamic rulers and denied access to their sacred Christian sites. Some of the colonial interventions of the British and French empires of the last two centuries had involved similar justifications.
But today this same sort of harsh religious oppression of the Christians of Bethlehem, Nablus, Nazareth, Jerusalem, and the rest of the holy land was occurring with the complicity or even the active support of the leading Christian elements of the United States, the world’s most powerful nation and one having an overwhelmingly Christian population. Surely it would have been difficult for any science fiction writer or satirist to have invented such a strange story.
- American Pravda: A Christian Beauty Queen Challenges Zionist Power
The Explosive Holy Land Interviews of Tucker Carlson
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 23, 2026 • 8,800 Words
Mike Huckabee, Carrie Prejean Boller, and Christian Zionism
Across most of Carlson’s interviews with the persecuted Christians of Palestine and other parts of the Middle East, he was surprised that the victims reported the complete indifference they had received from American Christian leaders, even including those who had visited the region.
A major ideological reason for that total disregard for their suffering fellow Christians had been the century-long rise of Christian Zionism, an unusual Protestant Evangelical movement that has elevated Jews and the Zionist State of Israel to the absolute pinnacle of its religious framework.
Carlson had only been slightly familiar with that religious dogma but for decades he had been on friendly terms with Mike Huckabee, a prominent Republican political figure and ordained minister who embraced Christian Zionism. They had recently clashed on Twitter, so Carlson traveled to Israel to interview Huckabee, who was currently serving as our American ambassador to that country.
My February article included that discussion and some of its remarkable revelations.
During the height of our Cold War against the Soviet Union, a deeply committed Zionist Jew named Jonathan Pollard who was working for Israeli intelligence became one of the worst traitors in American history. He had successfully stolen an enormous quantity of our most important military secrets, including our war-fighting plans, and passed those along to Israel, which had then bartered them to the USSR in return for various considerations. Even after his arrest and conviction, he had remained totally unrepentant for his crimes.
When many years of fervent lobbying by pro-Israel donors and activists had finally allowed Pollard to regain his freedom and depart for Israel, he had been welcomed as a conquering hero, and he soon began publicly urging all other American Jews to follow his example and similarly betray their own country.
All of this was serious enough, but Carlson wondered why Huckabee had recently had a very friendly meeting at his American embassy with Pollard, who was arguably the worst traitor in all of American history. Other than suggesting that the meeting had not been as long nor as important as many people made it out to be, Huckabee really had no other defense of his official behavior.
Carlson also pointed out that considerable numbers of Jewish pedophiles who had been accused or arrested for crimes committed in America had fled to Israel and the government of that country had refused to extradite any of them. He asked what Huckabee had been doing on those legal cases, but the ambassador argued that they were outside his own bailiwick and instead were the responsibility of the Israeli and American court systems.
But the most interesting and enlightening elements of the interview related to Christian Zionism. Huckabee was an ordained minister, so Carlson hoped that he could clarify its doctrinal tenets.
Although many such religious matters were covered in their long discussion, I think the most important related to the Christian Zionist perspective on Israel’s rightful territory, which Huckabee claimed had been permanently deeded to the Jewish people by divine command in the Old Testament. The American ambassador emphasized that this certainly included the lands of Judea and Samaria, otherwise known as the Palestinian territories of the West Bank. According to Huckabee and other Christian Zionists, there was not the slightest doubt that these were lands that must be exclusively under the control of the Jews of Israel.
But Carlson then raised a very crucial point. According to the biblical passage that Huckabee and so many Israelis always cited, God had granted the Jews all the lands stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. So Israel’s divinely-mandated territory not only included the West Bank and Gaza but also all of Jordan and Lebanon, most of Syria, and very large portions of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Thus, Israel’s true borders encompassed nearly all of the Middle East.
Indeed, maps have been produced of this divinely-authorized Greater Israel and right-wing Israelis sometimes wear small images of that same map on their clothing.
Although Huckabee suggested that Israel had no current plans to seize all those other territories, he never doubted that it had the right to do so, and based upon the very clear meaning of that biblical passage, probably nearly all Christian Zionists would take the same position. Huckabee certainly never gave any indication that his own American government would strongly oppose any such program of massive Israeli territorial conquest. Instead, Huckabee even said “It would be fine if they took it all.”
Combined with Israel’s waves of recent military aggression, launching major attacks against seven other countries in the last year or two, this naturally set off considerable alarm-bells in most Middle Eastern capitals, and a firestorm of angry protest resulted. But despite his seemingly outrageous statement, Huckabee held his job and suffered no serious reprimand, suggesting that his views had considerable support within the Trump Administration.
The Carlson Tweet containing that explosive clip was quickly viewed 11 million times but rather strangely no longer seems to appear in simple Google searches.
Although Huckabee’s remarks initially attracted a great deal of controversy, America attacked Iran about a week later. So his stunning statements received much less sustained attention than they probably warranted.
My February article had actually opened with the interesting story of Carrie Prejean Boller, a devoutly Christian beauty queen. She had won the title of Miss California in 2009 but then sacrificed her shot at the Miss USA title when she stood her ground and refused to declare her personal support for same-sex marriage. That public stance made her a great hero to religious conservatives, and after her recent conversion to Catholicism, Trump had named her to his White House Religious Liberty Commission.
Like so many other Americans over the last couple of years, she had been horrified by the scenes of death and devastation coming out of Gaza, and was intensely hostile to the Zionist ideology that seemed responsible for those terrible atrocities. This led to a clash on the commission:
The most recent public hearing focused upon anti-Semitism and some of the commissioners shifted the entire discussion to Israel and Zionism, prompting her to declare that as a Catholic, she completely rejected Zionism. That totally outraged several of her most vocal fellow commissioners, who followed the current party-line that anti-Zionism was a form of anti-Semitism and they immediately denounced her.
Our media has spent generations conditioning Americans to immediately back down whenever accused of harboring anti-Semitic sentiments, but that former California beauty queen was made of sterner stuff and she refused to be intimidated. Instead, she declared that her own Catholic Church had always rejected Zionism so she asked her critics whether they were accusing all 72 million American Catholics of being anti-Semites. They notably refused to directly answer that very telling question, merely repeating the statement that anti-Zionism was anti-Semitism. She also asked whether they approved of the horrific massacres of innocent women and children that Israel’s Zionists had been committing in Gaza during the last couple of years, and aside from some obvious gnashing of teeth, they also avoided answering that question.
Her bold defiance of the Zionist power that so heavily dominates our political world drew widespread praise all across the ideological spectrum. The month after my article appeared, Carlson interviewed her at length, allowing her to provide the most detailed account of what had happened and presenting many of the religious issues under debate.
She explained that the Christian Zionist movement she strongly opposed had elevated political support for the present-day government of Israel to an absolute religious obligation, often even taking priority over most other principles of Christianity. This obviously represented a bizarre Christian heresy, found only in America and apparently growing out of the Scofield Reference Bible that had been produced and very widely distributed more than a century ago.
For two thousand years, traditional Christianity had always held that the coming of Jesus fulfilled and superseded the biblical promises the Old Testament made to the Jews, but Christian Zionism rejected that belief. So Prejean Boller and others who dared to affirm traditional Christian doctrine were accused of promoting anti-Semitism, a devastating political charge in our society. Although many fellow Christians privately agreed with her position, they were fearful of publicly saying so.
One of the most shocking aspects of the situation was that major elements of the New Testament of the Christian Bible fell afoul of the anti-Semitism statutes that were being widely enacted. Some of the fundamental provisions of the Christian religion were now subject to legal sanction in Florida and many other American states and cities. Although it seemed difficult to comprehend, traditional Christianity almost stood on the verge of being legally banned in the world’s largest and most powerful Christian country.
This growing climate of repression was hardly restricted to Christianity. Over the last couple of years, peaceful college protests against Israel’s ongoing slaughter of innocent women and children in Gaza had been brutally suppressed. Meanwhile, large numbers of individuals in Europe, Canada, and Australia had even been arrested and sent to jail for expressing such views.
Even prominent public figures faced severe sanctions. Charlie Kirk had been one of the leading conservatives in America, but Carlson explained that in the weeks prior to his sudden assassination, Kirk had often been viciously attacked as an anti-Semite, leading him to declare that “you can’t criticize Israel or you’ll be destroyed.”
Donald Trump Mocks Christianity and Attacks the Pope
At the time that last interview was released, most public attention was focused upon the early stages of the war with Iran, but developments in that conflict soon moved religious matters to the forefront of the public debate, with these public controversies reaching a peak during April.
Contrary to Trump’s expectations, the Iranians successfully absorbed the massive American attacks that he had launched, and after they closed the Strait of Hormuz to cargo traffic, he ruefully discovered that his naval forces lacked the power to reopen it.
Faced with such political humiliation, Trump apparently ordered a special forces commando-raid to seize Iran’s enriched uranium, but that effort ended in total disaster. More than a dozen of our aircraft were destroyed, with their wreckage strewn across a temporary airfield near Isfahan.
Trump reacted to this further defeat with volcanic fury, issuing blood-curdling, profanity-laced threats of massive war crimes on his Truth Social platform. This came on Easter Sunday Morning, the holiest day on the Christian calendar.
Some of Trump’s formerly staunchest supporters were outraged by this, declaring that he was “not a Christian.”
Carlson reacted with similar horror, quickly releasing a lengthy podcast on Trump’s outrageous behavior.
Carlson explained that even prior to his unprovoked attack on Iran, Trump had already rejected the basic principles of Christianity and other civilized norms. Instead, he had declared a brutal doctrine of “might makes right,” saying he would seize control of Venezuela’s oil because he wanted it and America was much more powerful.
Now our president had deliberately mocked Christianity on its holiest day, promising to commit war crimes. There were strong hints from Trump and his leading Neocon supporters that nuclear weapons would ultimately have to be used against Iran, potentially killing enormous numbers of civilians.
In the second segment of that podcast, Carlson interviewed Christian researcher and film-maker Nathan Apffel, who had produced a powerful documentary series The Religion Business on the striking corruption and venality of so many of America’s most prominent Christian leaders and their churches.
Contrary to all the teachings of Jesus, these Christian ministers often focused upon the acquisition of wealth above all other things. The Mormon Church had accumulated some $350 billion in assets, becoming one of the largest landowners in America. The tax-exempt nonprofits of some individual Christian clergymen had billion-dollar holdings and were used to pay for private planes and numerous other extravagant luxuries.
Most of these latter figures were ardent Christian Zionists, who rejected traditional Christian teachings and were instead willing to excuse almost any horrible crimes committed by the State of Israel. Carlson suggested that their behavior might even include an evil, almost demonic component.
A few days later, some of Carlson’s analysis was fully vindicated as Trump doubled-down on his outrageous statements. He issued an even harsher threat to permanently annihilate all of Iranian civilization, implying that he would use nuclear weapons to destroy that nation of more than ninety million.
These outrageous threats were fiercely condemned by some of Trump’s staunchest erstwhile supporters, especially those of deeply Christian faith. Prejean Boller denounced Trump as “an evil psychopath” and even called upon all true Christians to resign from his government.
A few days later, Carlson interviewed an award-winning British journalist reporting on the Israeli murder of civilians in Lebanon who himself narrowly escaped death when the IDF tried to assassinate him on camera with a missile strike.
Steve Sweeney also mentioned that a couple of years earlier the IDF had deliberately destroyed the Tomb of St. Peter in Lebanon, an internationally-recognized pilgrimage site that was holy to both Christians and Muslims,
Later that same month, Trump provoked even greater outrage when he posted an image on his Truth Social website depicting himself as a Jesus-like figure comforting some afflicted individual.
Overwhelming numbers of devout Christians had voted for Trump, and many of them were scandalized by that obvious blasphemy. So he quickly took down that post, even as the controversy reverberated across social media and was widely covered by journalists.
Trump defended that post by claiming that the image had actually portrayed him as a medical doctor rather than Jesus, which was the sort of ridiculous excuse only to be expected from a president whose statements were often only loosely associated with the truth.
But I was much more surprised by the reaction of some of Trump’s leading religious supporters. The Rev. Franklin Graham was one of America’s most prominent Evangelical Protestants and a fervent Christian Zionist, and his Tweet staunchly defending Trump was viewed some 4.5 million times.
If Graham had merely excused Trump’s misstep as a forgivable lapse that statement would have passed unnoticed. However, he not only accepted the claim that Trump was merely portraying himself as a medical doctor but even argued that there had not been any noticeable religious overtones in the image.
When I looked at the illustration, I didn’t jump to the same conclusion as some. There were no spiritual references—no halo, there were no crosses, no angels. It was a flag, soldiers, a nurse, fighter planes, eagles, the Statue of Liberty, and I think this is a lot to do about nothing. There is so much ill-intended speculation. I think his enemies are always foaming at the mouth at any possible opportunity to make him look bad.
The top reply to Graham’s Tweet showed that AI image side-by-side with a classic painting of Jesus, and I found it very difficult to believe that the Rev. Graham had never previously encountered the latter.
Graham was a leading Christian Zionist and was obviously willing to declare the most absurd religious falsehoods in order to support Trump and the war being waged against the enemies of Israel.
His clear dishonesty on religious matters merely reinforced the impression provided by Carlson’s previous podcast. The guest had explained that Graham’s nonprofit religious empire had become one of the wealthiest and now exceeded two billion dollars of assets, with the preacher controlling it enjoying an enormously sumptuous lifestyle, much of it hidden deep within the public reports he was required to file.
The controversy surrounding that image soon merged into a different one that had been slightly hinted at in the full text of Graham’s lengthy Tweet.
A few weeks earlier Trump had initiated his war against Iran with a surprise attack whose waves of missile strikes had killed most of that country’s top religious and political leaders, many of their family members, and also some 165 young girls at an elementary school.
Such an unprovoked American-Israeli war of aggression launched in the midst of peace negotiations was hardly congruent with the Christian religion nor the Just War doctrine long advocated by the Catholic Church. Therefore, Pope Leo XIV began giving speeches supporting international peace efforts that many interpreted as an implied criticism of the policies of our own government.
Trump was hardly someone who accepted public criticism with equanimity whether it was implied or explicit, and he reacted by denouncing the Pope in surprisingly harsh political terms, accusing him of being “weak on crime” and “catering to the radical left.” Trump’s post portraying himself as Jesus had followed the next day, clearly suggesting that he hardly regarded the Pope as possessing any superior moral or theological authority.
The eruption of this sudden conflict between president and pope had important implications. Leo was the first American pope, and together with Trump they were perhaps the two most famous and influential Americans in today’s world.
Trump’s very narrow 2024 presidential victory had been entirely due to his overwhelming 56% share of the Catholic vote, far above the 48% he had received from Protestants. Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and more than one-third of Trump’s Cabinet were Catholics, as was the background of all six of the conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Under these circumstances, picking a very public fight with the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics seemed a rather risky step to take, and it was difficult to imagine that any previous American president of the last one hundred years would have done such a thing, let alone a president so heavily dependent upon Catholic support.
Although liberal Catholics had sometimes been willing to sharply criticize the positions taken by their holy father, that had far less been the case with devout members of that religion. Moreover, Pope Leo was widely regarded as considerably more conservative on doctrinal issues than his late predecessor Pope Francis, hence a welcome change to Catholics of a similar ideological bent.
Yet surprisingly enough, when the conflict between pope and president reached the headlines, some of Trump’s most prominent conservative Catholic supporters very strongly declared their support for the latter.
I was most astonished by the reaction of top FoxNews host Sean Hannity, a conservative “cradle Catholic” who had always struck me as someone who fully deferred to the teachings of his church. Now in his sixties, he declared that he was leaving Catholicism over the pope’s implied criticism of our war with Iran. This was surely one of the most bizarrely secular reasons anyone had ever cited for abandoning the religion he had followed from birth for more than sixty years.
Around the same time a story came out that earlier in the year top Pentagon officials had directly threatened the Vatican, declaring that “the United States has the military power to do whatever it wants — and that the Church had better take its side.”
One U.S. official had allegedly even invoked the notorious Avignon Papacy of the fourteenth century, established when the powerful French government of that era had kidnapped the reigning pope and reduced the papacy to complete subservience.
For the conservative Catholics of the Trump Administration to have displayed this sort of attitude was simply astounding and demonstrated their total lack of regard for their own Christian religion.
America Elevates Israelism Over Christianity
All of these developments prompted a new podcast by Carlson. His opening monologue ran a full hour and I found it a deeply insightful analysis of these important religious matters, so much so that many of his ideas became the basis for this article. I would strongly urge everyone to watch it or read the full transcript.
Carlson began by noting that Trump was a famously irreligious man, who had attracted the support of so many Christians not because of his own faith but because they believed that he would implement the conservative policies that they desired.
However, Trump’s latest actions had clearly crossed many lines, and shattered that sense of trust. On Easter Sunday morning his profanity-laced post had promised major war-crimes and mockingly praised Allah, thereby crudely insulting both Christianity and Islam, the two largest world religions. The following Sunday he had attacked and insulted the Catholic pope for his implied criticism of the Iran War, then a day later he had portrayed himself as Jesus.
Although many sincere Christians were deeply offended by all of this, the leading Evangelical preachers and conservative Republicans took it all in stride. They defended Trump and sometimes even joined in his attacks on the Catholic Church, the world’s largest and oldest Christian denomination. Hannity had hardly been alone in favoring Neocon policies over Catholic doctrine, and even abandoning the latter religion because of that conflict.
Almost 95% of the American population had Christian roots and our country was seemingly the largest and most powerful Christian nation in the world. But Carlson argued that concern for Christian sentiments counted for little in the elite ranks of even the supposedly pro-Christian conservative movement and Republican Party. Instead our government policies were often aggressively anti-Christian and over the last generation our actions had led to the destruction of many of the Christian communities of the Middle East, whose history had stretched back to the days of Jesus. We had abetted the murder of Christians.
So Christian America seemed to ignore the interests of Christians as much as had the Communist-ruled Soviet Union despite its overwhelmingly Christian population.
Instead of Christianity, the actual basis of America’s reigning ideology had become something entirely different. Carlson coined the term “Israelism” to represent the quasi-religious doctrine almost uniformly espoused by our ruling political and media elites. Israelism represented a fusion of political Zionism, the expression of deep love and admiration for Judaism and the Jewish people, and the elevation of the Holocaust as the central event of modern world history.
Over the last couple of generations, Israelism had gradually replaced Christianity as the actual civic religion of our society. While many conservatives and liberals both felt comfortable attacking or mocking Jesus and Christianity, any similar attacks against Israelism would have been treated as something akin to blasphemy.
Carlson noted that the political and ideological views of Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Pope Leo were entirely different on most matters. But because all of them rejected a blind commitment to Israelism, they were equally denounced and vilified.
Trump might be totally disrespectful towards almost everyone and everything, mocking Jesus, the pope, and Christianity. But he displayed only the greatest sincere reverence toward the late Rabbi Schneerson, founder of the fundamentalist Jewish Chabad movement, someone who was regarded by many of his own followers as the Jewish Messiah, an outrageous blasphemy according to Christian doctrine.
Although sanctions against those who challenged Israelism had traditionally been informal, they were now increasingly acquiring the power of law. Almost 40 states and many large cities had adopted a formal definition of anti-Semitism that was gradually criminalizing any criticism of Israel. A couple of years ago, the Gaza protests of on American campuses had been very harshly suppressed.
Whereas our former civic religion had been based upon the freedom of speech espoused in our Bill of Rights, we were gradually replacing that with a totally contrary and totalitarian framework. Across Britain, Germany, and other European countries, large numbers of individuals were currently serving jail sentences for protesting the destruction of Gaza. Ukraine already regarded criticizing Israel as a crime carrying an eight year prison sentence. Our own country was clearly moving in that same direction.
A major effort was underway to enact Section 224 of the NDAA, legislation that would set the stage for permanently merging important elements of the American and Israeli military and intelligence services, thereby incorporating Israelism into our entire national security apparatus.
Holding a major Christian ceremony at our national capitol might easily be considered a violation of the separation of Church and State. But Carlson showed an extended clip of an eight-day ceremony held there to commemorate the Holocaust, having the deepest sort of religious overtones and including the direct participation of many serving members of our uniformed military.
On that last topic, I had made some similar points in a 2018 article, noting the sharp contrast between the treatment of Christianity and the Holocaust.
According to Finkelstein, Hollywood produced some 180 Holocaust films just during the years 1989-2004. Even the very partial subset of Holocaust films listed on Wikipedia has grown enormously long, but fortunately the Movie Database has winnowed down the catalog by providing a list of the 50 Most Moving Holocaust Films…
Some 2% of Americans have a Jewish background, while perhaps 95% possess Christian roots, but the Wikipedia list of Christian films seems rather scanty and rudimentary by comparison. Very few of those films were ever widely released, and the selection is stretched to even include The Chronicles of Narnia, which contains no mention of Christianity whatsoever. One of the very few prominent exceptions on the list is Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ, which he was forced to personally self-fund. And despite the enormous financial success of that movie, one of the most highly profitable domestic releases of all time, the project rendered Gibson a hugely vilified pariah in the industry over which he had once reigned as its biggest star, especially after word got around that his own father was a Holocaust Denier.
In many respects, Hollywood and the broader entertainment media today provide the unifying spiritual basis of our deeply secular society, and the overwhelming predominance of Holocaust-themed films over Christian ones has obvious implications. Meanwhile, in our globalized world, the American entertainment-media complex totally dominates Europe and the rest of the West, so that the ideas generated here effectively shape the minds of many hundreds of millions of people living elsewhere, whether or not they fully recognize that fact.
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI sought to heal the long-standing Vatican II rift within the Catholic Church and reconcile with the breakaway Society of St. Pius X faction. But this became a major media controversy when it was discovered that Bishop Richard Williamson, one of the leading members of that latter organization, had long been a Holocaust Denier and also believed that Jews should convert to Christianity. Although the many other differences in Catholic doctrinal faith were fully negotiable, apparently refusing to accept the reality of the Holocaust was not, and Williamson remained estranged from the Catholic Church. Soon afterward he was even prosecuted for heresy by the German government.
Internet critics have suggested that over the last couple of generations, energetic Jewish activists have successfully lobbied Western nations into replacing their traditional religion of Christianity with the new religion of Holocaustianity, and the Williamson Affair certainly seems to support that conclusion.
- American Pravda: Holocaust Denial
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 27, 2018 • 17,600 Words
Attacks on Christianity and the Origins of Christian Zionism
No sooner had the twin controversies regarding Trump’s attack on the pope and his portrayal of himself as Jesus subsided than a different sort of religious controversy erupted.
For decades, Israel had been an expansionist power, seeking to conquer and annex the lands of its Arab neighbors and resettle them with Jews.
Lebanon was the only country in the Middle East having a Christian president and a substantially Christian population. But it was small and militarily weak, so once the Iran War began and the entire region was thrown into turmoil, Israel seized that opportunity to boldly advance its Greater Israel project by invading and conquering Southern Lebanon. All the existing residents were to be driven out and their ancient villages totally destroyed, while Israeli leaders proclaimed their intent to permanently occupy the territory and resettle it with Jews, effectively annexing it.
Israel also initiated a heavy bombing campaign against Lebanon’s cities. Since the country lacked any air defenses, the Lebanese civilian death toll soon far exceeded that in Iran.
Just as they had often done in the case of Gaza, Israeli soldiers gleefully filmed the destruction they were inflicting, distributing the videos as proud testaments to their handiwork. One of those images showed an IDF trooper smashing the face of a fallen statue of Jesus with a sledgehammer
This shocking incident quickly swept all across social media. Normally our overwhelmingly pro-Israel publications would avoid giving attention to such a savage Israeli attack against Christianity, but the striking visual image attracted so many tens of millions of views that the New York Times and other MSM outlets were forced to cover it. It also prompted another Carlson show.
Carlson explained that when the image first surfaced most people naturally assumed that it was an obvious AI fake since it seemed almost incomprehensible that Israeli soldiers would commit such an act of desecration, but it soon proved entirely real. America’s Christian leaders and Christian broadcasters generally downplayed or ignored the incident, even suggesting that anyone who promoted the story was playing into the hands of our national enemies. But Carlson pointed out that if some American soldier had been filmed burning the torah scrolls of a synagogue, his deed would have become the biggest story in the world and a very long-lasting one.
In contrast, this latest Israeli attack on Christianity would probably soon be forgotten, just as so many previous incidents had been flushed down the memory-hole. Israel had regularly bombed local churches in Gaza, Lebanon, and elsewhere, and frequently murdered Christians, but no one had ever been punished. Christians in Israel itself were constantly being attacked and spit upon. Israeli soldiers had mocked and defiled a church in Lebanon, then proudly posted the video of what they had done.
Despite all of this, America’s Christian conservative leaders remained absolutely unwavering in their total support for Israel, a country that seemingly violated almost all of their supposed ideological principles. As Carlson explained, the Israeli government might provide free abortion on demand and hold the largest Gay Pride parade in the history of the region, but the Christian Evangelical leaders who considered such things abominations were adamant that America must provide Israel with the unending flow of financial support that subsidized those actions.
Carlson devoted the second half of the show to an interview with Christian Palestinian activist Alice Kisiya, who recounted the long oppression that her community experienced at the hands of the Israeli government and militant Jewish settlers. The religious schools of the latter taught them to hate and despise all non-Jews, leading Carlson to note the similarity to the extremist Islamic madrassas so frequently featured on FoxNews and similar programs.
Not only did America’s Christian leaders fail to support the Christians of Palestine, but they actually contributed to the ongoing Israeli program of ethnic cleansing. They encouraged the Palestinians to abandon the homes and villages they had occupied for many centuries and give them over to Jews who had just recently arrived from Brooklyn or Ukraine.
Some of the factors behind this strange attitude of so many American Christians came out in another Carlson show that aired a couple of months later, that included a transcript.
Carlson invited back Nathan Apffel, the same Christian documentarian whom he had originally interviewed in April, and this time much of the focus was on the sophisticated Israeli methods used to enlist the support of American pastors for a cause that would seem so contrary to their purported religious faith.
According to Apffel, this success was partly due to the effective media propaganda employed, sometimes relying upon the use of targeted social media technology.
But in other cases, the churches involved were so corrupt and venal that cruder financial methods were probably employed.
Some of Apffel’s examples of religious corruption were certainly extreme. In one example, hundreds of Eastern European orphans had been sodomized by employees, but the church operating the project covered up the scandal because the orphanage involved was such a lucrative means of attracting American donations. In another case, a church began buying the life insurance policies of the impoverished elderly for pennies on the dollar, earning some $700 million by heartlessly taking advantage of those trusting victims.
Through a mixture of these means, support for Israel in many Evangelical circles has become the only existing religious litmus test, with the attitude being that anyone who failed to support Netanyahu was not a true Christian.
All of this obviously depended upon the tenets of Christian Zionism, and a couple of days later Carlson directly explored the origins of that religious movement by interviewing Christian theologian J.D. Hall.
Hall seemed extremely knowledgeable on the topic. The information he presented on the origins of Christian Zionism was by far the most thorough and detailed I had ever come across. I would strongly recommend that anyone interested in the topic watch it or read the transcript.
Hall explained that this religious movement actually rejected all the core beliefs of Christianity as contained in the New Testament and almost universally acknowledged for the last two thousand years. Christian Zionists rejected the notion that belief in Jesus and the Christian gospels was the sole means of salvation, instead claiming that Jews still retained their special covenant with God, being superior in that respect to all other peoples on earth whether Christian or not. So according to this theological framework, Jews enjoyed exclusive ownership rights to the land of Palestine and the rest of the Middle East, thus providing a divine mandate for Zionism.
Among Christians, this doctrine had been totally marginal and insignificant until the early years of the twentieth century. But the Oxford University Press had then produced and distributed the Scofield Study Bible, in which the actual text of the Christian Bible was accompanied by additional notes in the margins, promoting some of these unusual ideas. In those days, relatively few American Christian clergymen had easy access to serious theological commentary, so many of them believed and accepted those added side notes, perhaps sometimes even assuming that these were part of the actual biblical text itself.
That heavily modified version of the Bible had been prepared around the same time as the parallel growth of the Zionist movement in Britain, ultimately culminating in the Balfour Declaration. So although there existed no proof, it was easy to suspect that the two developments were directly connected, perhaps with wealthy Zionists having subsidized the religious project.
Hall then went on to explain many other aspects of the issue, noting that the Israeli government annually devoted more than $700 million to its propaganda efforts, with American Christians being the main target. That figure was more than 100 times greater than what the old Soviet Union had spent on similar propaganda efforts during its heyday, and helped to explain the tremendous amount of misinformation accepted by most Christians.
For example, they would be surprised to learn that for many centuries the local Christian communities of the Middle East had generally been protected and supported by the Muslim rulers of that region, who always regarded them as followers of a kindred faith. By contrast, traditional Judaism utterly reviled Christianity and the Israeli government had been increasingly following that extremely hostile religious approach.
Another interesting point Hall made was that the original Judaism of the Old Testament was entirely dependent upon the existence of the temple in Jerusalem as the necessary site for ritualistic observances and sacrifices. So after the Romans destroyed that temple in 70 AD, the religion could no longer be practiced, and the surviving Jewish rabbis were forced to create what amounted to an entirely new religion, based upon completely different methods of worship. Hall argued that the Jews of the time of Christ would not recognize the Judaism of the last two thousand years as being anything at all like their own religion.
Most disturbingly, there were indications that under the traditional Jewish doctrine, the killing of Gentiles was considered a praiseworthy and even necessary element of religious observances. If so, the exceptionally blood-thirsty behavior of Israeli military forces in Gaza and elsewhere may partly be explained by these troubling ideas.
Traditional Jews and Their Seething Hatred of Christianity
Meanwhile, additional incidents continued to reveal the true feelings of religious Jews in Israel towards Christians and Christianity. A couple of weeks after that sledgehammer attack on the statue of Jesus, footage emerged of a religious Jew violently assaulting a French nun in Jerusalem.
A few days later, Israeli soldiers in Lebanon proudly uploaded another image, showing them crudely disrespecting a statue of the Virgin Mary.
All of these stories emerged only because Israeli soldiers had themselves posted the images of their Christian desecrations, or cameras had happened to capture the attack on the nun. So it seemed quite likely that many more incidents along such lines went completely unreported.
This sort of traditional Jewish attitude toward the mother of Jesus sharply contrasted with the Islamic perspective, which considered Mary as “the perfect woman,” elevated above all others. Numerous public murals honoring Jesus and Mary can easily be found in Muslim countries, certainly including Iran, which last year opened a new subway station dedicated to the Virgin Mary:
Given that our Christian leaders still remained so firmly committed to funding the one country and bombing the other, it was very easy to understand why Israeli leaders had developed such tremendous contempt for America and for Christianity, their ancient religious enemy.
As a result of that total contempt, some of them had become very candid and bold in their public statements, as was reported in a major Wall Street Journal article earlier this month:
JERUSALEM—In Jerusalem’s Old City, a group of Israeli teenagers recently banged on the door of the headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic Church and asked if there were Christians inside it. They wanted to spit at them.
The boys said it was a religious duty, or mitzvah, to humiliate Christians, or, as they called them, idol worshipers. “We are supposed to hate them,” explained one teen, wrapped in an Israeli flag…
The rise in distinctly anti-Christian behavior is relatively new. In 2013, attackers desecrated a Protestant cemetery in Jerusalem. Two years later, Jewish extremists set fire to a monastery in Tabgha, a place where Christians believe Jesus performed the loaves-and-fish miracle.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, was the defense lawyer of the arsonists. He has said spitting on Christians is an ancient Jewish custom and shouldn’t be considered a crime.
Benedictine Abbot Nikodemus Schnabel said the situation has worsened dramatically since he first arrived in Jerusalem in 2000. At the time, spitting was rare. “Now there is no day that people are not spitting at me,” said the German-born monk. The attackers often come for his pectoral cross and sometimes shout at him to remove it.
He said the rise of religious extremists in the government is making it easier for people to get away with acts of anti-Christian hate. “They are making it very clear that there is no right to be here as a Christian.”
All of these emerging incidents seem to have fully confirmed the religious analysis that I had published in one of my earliest American Pravda articles.
In 2018, I had drawn upon the ground-breaking research of Prof. Israel Shahak, an award-winning Israeli academic, to provide an overview of the astonishing tenets of traditional Judaism. Although these had mostly been abandoned over the last couple of centuries by Jews living in the West, there had recently been a resurgence in these religious doctrines, which had now become increasingly influential among Israeli Jews, with important political consequences:
And while religious Judaism has a decidedly negative view towards all non-Jews, Christianity in particular is regarded as a total abomination, which must be wiped from the face of the earth.
Whereas pious Muslims consider Jesus as the holy prophet of God and Muhammed’s immediate predecessor, according to the Jewish Talmud, Jesus is perhaps the vilest being who ever lived, condemned to spend eternity in the bottommost pit of Hell, immersed in a boiling vat of excrement. Religious Jews regard the Muslim Quran as just another book, though a totally mistaken one, but the Christian Bible represents purest evil, and if circumstances permit, burning Bibles is a very praiseworthy act. Pious Jews are also enjoined to always spit three times at any cross or church they encounter, and direct a curse at all Christian cemeteries. Indeed, many deeply religious Jews utter a prayer each and every day for the immediate extermination of all Christians.
Over the years prominent Israeli rabbis have sometimes publicly debated whether Jewish power has now become sufficiently great that all the Christian churches of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other nearby areas can finally be destroyed, and the entire Holy Land completely cleansed of all traces of its Christian contamination. Some have taken this position, but most have urged prudence, arguing that Jews needed to gain some additional strength before they should take such a risky step. These days, many tens of millions of zealous Christians and especially Christian Zionists are enthusiastic advocates for Jews, Judaism, and Israel, and I strongly suspect that at least some of that enthusiasm is based upon ignorance.
- American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion
The Attitude of Judaism Towards Non-Jews
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 16, 2018 • 7,800 Words
The Desperate Gatekeepers of the Elite Media
For generations, our centralized electronic media performed a powerful gatekeeping role on many topics, notably including the Middle Eastern conflict and Israeli behavior. Information that the media failed to report only rarely reached substantial numbers of Americans so for practical purposes it almost did not exist.
However, over the last couple of decades the Internet has increasingly challenged this informational monopoly, and the rise of powerful video platforms has now largely broken it.
Taken together the dozen Tucker Carlson podcasts presented above have provided an enormous amount of important material regarding Israel, the Middle East, and American Christianity, potentially reaching a global audience that was probably unaware of almost any of it.
The serious discussions in those shows totaled around twenty hours, and I doubt whether all our national television channels and cable news networks combined have aired even a fraction of that candid material over the last couple of generations.
Across YouTube, Twitter, and various other platforms, those videos have probably accumulated a total viewership reaching into the many tens of millions.
Many of those who unthinkingly accept Israelism might begin to question their beliefs if they became aware of this information. The leaders of that movement have relied upon keeping the American people ill-informed so they must surely view this development and Carlson himself as extremely threatening to their efforts. At the time that these shows were released, many of them provoked small or large firestorms of extremely hostile reactions all across the Internet.
For years Carlson had been regarded as one of Trump’s most important and influential supporters, so his political break over the war with Iran was particularly noteworthy and significant, with Carlson immediately condemning the attack as absolutely disgusting and evil.”
Given that background and his enormous platform, Carlson has certainly become one of the most effective public critics of the war and of the “Israelism” that was responsible, the movement that dominates our country’s political system and its society.
So it was hardly surprising that fervent Neocon pundits such as Mark Levin quickly redoubled their past attacks on Carlson as a “Jew-hater” for his criticism of Israel. The Evangelical Christian leaders such as Rev. Franklin Graham who are equally committed to their religious doctrine of Israelism were naturally just as hostile.
But what was much more intriguing were the attacks that came from less expected quarters. For example, just a couple of weeks after the American attack on Iran, the top editor of the Economist visited Carlson at his home for an hour long interview.
In her traditional media world, accusations of anti-Semitism were absolutely lethal and normally elicited the most abject apologies and denials. So when she raised that issue, repeatedly pressing Carlson about his sharp criticism of Israel, she probably expected that sort of reaction. But perhaps to her considerable surprise, Carlson stood his ground, noting that she was merely repeating the standard talking-points long-promoted by the Israeli government.
A dozen years earlier, the Economist had itself published a totally innocuous cartoon mildly suggesting that Israel and its partisans possessed some political influence in America, then quickly retracted it with profuse apologies when the ADL and other Jewish groups denounced it as anti-Semitic. Later that same year, the Economist editor announced his departure from the magazine.
An even more extreme and dramatic example of this same sort of elite media campaign came a few weeks later. The former Israel correspondent of the New York Times interviewed Carlson for two hours.
The Times ranks as our leading liberal newspaper, and naive Americans might assume that its journalists have ideological views that are the be polar opposite of such right-wing Christian Zionist Evangelicals such as Mike Huckabee or Franklin Graham, being eager to see those latter individuals discredited. But the interview suggested something very different.
As mentioned, just a couple of months earlier Carlson had traveled to Israel and interviewed Ambassador Mike Huckabee, wondering why he had had such a friendly meeting at our embassy with Jonathan Pollard, one of the greatest traitors in American history. Carlson had then pressed Huckabee about his belief in the God-given right of the Jewish people to the lands of their Arab neighbors. Huckabee eventually declared that he believed Israel had every right to conquer most of the Middle East, an astonishing admission that made headlines across the region.
But instead of praising that remarkable example of important journalism, the Times reporter interviewing Carlson challenged him for his criticism of Christian Zionism. She accused Carlson of seeking to undercut Christian support for the State of Israel and its policies, even seeming to regard his probing questioning of Huckabee as quite illegitimate. As the Times correspondent in Israel, she never would have pressed Huckabee in that way, let alone revealed to the world that he and his fellow Christian Zionists believed in Israel’s divine right of conquest.
Instead, she emphasized that there was “an enormous sensitivity around Israel being the homeland of the Jewish people” and asked Carlson why he was “tagged so often with antisemitism.” Indeed, the word “antisemitism” appeared 14 separate times in the text of the interview.
She even brought up the topic of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and the dangerous belief that Israel had inordinate influence over American politics or had been involved in assassinations. On that latter point, she seemed unaware that her own Times colleague Israeli Ronen Bergman had published a widely praised 750 page book documenting the unprecedented history of Israeli assassinations.
She especially pressed Carlson regarding his October interview with Nick Fuentes, with the name of the latter figure appearing 48 separate times in the text. Nearly a dozen of her questions focused on Fuentes, and she seemed to regard Carlson’s mere willingness to interview him as proving that Carlson held vile, anti-Semitic beliefs deep within his heart. Why else had Carlson interviewed Fuentes?
I wonder how she would have reacted if Carlson had politely pointed out that the month before he interviewed Fuentes, the Times itself had published a long and surprisingly friendly interview with that same right-wing podcaster. So perhaps the Times made Fuentes sound so interesting and important that Carlson had decided to interview him as well.
For those who lack the patience to listen to the full two hour Times interview, many of the highlights along with some rather biting commentary was provided in a 22 minute segment on The Young Turks, one of the leading progressive YouTube channels.
Related Reading:
- American Pravda: The Jewish Roots of the USSR and the USSA
- American Pravda: A Christian Beauty Queen Challenges Zionist Power
- American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion
- American Pravda: The Nature of Anti-Semitism
- Donald Trump and the Downfall of the American Empire?
- Has President Donald Trump Lost His Mind?
