Starting with Tucker Carlson’s adulatory interview with Vladimir Putin, people asked a question: “Was Fox News, rather than acting as an ugly censor when it came to Tucker, actually preventing the world from seeing his worst ideas?” That question takes on new power when it comes to Tucker’s latest interview with Munther Isaac, a Christian pastor living in Bethlehem. The gist of the interview is that Hamas is good and Israel (because Christians have been killed as a byproduct of war) is evil. Tucker, by promoting this view, has fallen into a terrible moral fallacy…or revealed himself to be a true antisemite.

As always, context is everything, so let’s talk about the context of Christians in Bethlehem, the home of Munther Isaac, whom Tucker interviews. Bethlehem, the ancient town in which Jesus was born, was part of Judea when the pre-modern Jewish nation lay under Roman control. Indeed, it was a Jewish city going back as far as the 7th or 8th century B.C.

Bethlehem became Christian very early in the Christian era, and long boasted one of the oldest Christian populations in the world. Even during the thousand-year occupations by Umayyads, Abassids, Ayyubids, Mamluks, and Ottomans, those Muslims allowed Christian worship (suitably taxed, of course) in Bethlehem.

Image: X screen grab.

In 1947, when Israel was recognized as a Jewish nation, the surrounding Arab countries instantly attacked it. Many local Arabs (with roots mostly going back no earlier than the 1830s) fled the fighting after being assured that, when the Arabs won, they could return for the spoils. However, the Arabs didn’t win, although Jordan captured what came to be known as the West Bank, including Bethlehem. Many of the fleeing Arabs settled there, overwhelming the Christian population. In 1967, Israel regained control over Gaza and the West Bank.

Bethlehem’s demographics reflect the rise and fall of the Christian population over the years (and I assume Wikipedia is accurate, at least as to the early time periods):

• At the end of the 16th century, Christians were roughly 100% of the population.
• In the mid-19th century, Christians were around 99% of the population, with a few Muslims and no Jews.
• By 1948, Christians were 85% of the population, with Muslims at 13%.
• In 1967, after 19 years of Jordanian control, Christians were down to 46%.

After 1967, the number of Christians increased in Bethlehem (albeit slowly), although their representation as a percentage of the population shrank as the Muslim population grew.

In other words, when it comes to the West Bank, which is under Palestinian Authority control and which informs Isaac’s perspective on what’s happening in Gaza, Israel has not been persecuting Christians. That makes sense because Israel doesn’t persecute Christians in Israel, either. Indeed, Israel is the only nation in the Middle East that accords full civil rights to all citizens, regardless of race, religion, or creed. They can vote, practice their faith, get an education, and serve in government.

Things are different in Gaza, which has been under sole Hamas control since 2005. Unlike the West Bank, which derives revenue from Christian pilgrimages to Bethlehem, Hamas has no interest in keeping Christians alive, something both Tucker and Isaac ignore. Instead, Hamas has gone the full Islamic route of driving Christians almost to extinction. Once one sifts through all the war propaganda flooding the internet, one learns that under Hamas’s aegis, the Christian population had dropped from over 2,000 in 2010 to fewer than 1,000 in 2020, a decline of more than 50% in a decade.

With that background, Tucker Carlson has decided to charge in and announce that Israel is slaughtering Gaza’s Christians. He does so under this inflammatory heading: “How does the government of Israel treat Christians?” In fact, it treats them just fine. It’s the government of Gaza, i.e., Hamas, that has been terrorizing and slaughtering them—and using them as civilian shields, just as it does with the Muslims in Gaza.

To justify this premise, as noted, Tucker interviewed Isaac. He was a strange choice given that there’s a video available of him seemingly praising the October 7 attack on Israel, an attack that saw Hamas militants and hangers-on sadistically slaughter more than 1,200 civilians and kidnap (and rape and slaughter) hundreds more as a good thing:

Here is video of the pastor applauding the October 7 Hamas massacre, declaring in Bethlehem during his sermon the next day that he was "shocked by the strength of the Palestinian man who defied his siege"

1200 innocent men, women, & children were murdered on that day. https://t.co/RiuWO58oMU pic.twitter.com/4vPtUrkZAT

— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.today (@JordanSchachtel) April 9, 2024

Tucker, operating out of ignorance or animus, blithely accepts the word of someone who (a) essentially lives as a hostage in the West Bank, as all Christians do, making him unreliable, (b) reflects the bizarre, self-loathing antisemitism of certain Christian Arabs who prefer Islam’s repression to Israel’s pluralism, and (c) desires the end of the Jewish state. Isaac is the mirror image of that tiny, grotesque sect of anti-Zionist Jews that Iran periodically trots out to justify its threats to nuke Israel and all its inhabitants. These are evil people, and Tucker just made common cause with them.

The problem with Tucker, and I say this as someone who enjoyed him for years on Fox News, is that he really does seem to hate the Jews. We saw as well in his cuddling up to Kanye West and Candace Owens as both became increasingly open about their own antisemitism.

The attacks on Jewry worldwide show that there is no distinction between hating Israel and hating Jews. It all comes out of the same place of deep immorality. Tucker has now joined with those who forgive Muslims for their centuries of genocidal attacks on Christianity so that he can blame Israel for the fact that, despite its best and unprecedented efforts to protect civilians during a war against a genocidal enemy that started this war, some civilians, including Christians, are still caught in the crossfire.