Tag Archives: Politics

President Donald Hussein Obama

Posted on June 15, 2026 | Comments Off on President Donald Hussein Obama

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

It is prudent to be skeptical of anything Donald Trump says, whether it pertains to his “landslide” electoral victories or his sundry “peace” deals across the globe. This skepticism is triply warranted regarding the highly touted peace deal with Iran whose details are still largely unknown, speculative, fanciful, and exceedingly fluid. Undoubtedly, as the week progresses towards a signing ceremony, it will become increasingly clear that there is almost no meeting of the minds, except on one issue. Trump will boast that due to his remarkable negotiating skills, he has successfully pressured Iran into reopening the Straits of Hormuz, which of course were open to navigation before the current hostilities began on February 28.

In other words, Trump’s conduct of the war induced Iran to close the Straits, plunging the world’s markets into turmoil and driving up the price of oil precipitously. His management of the war including, it must be said without any glee, the underperformance of the US military that failed to reopen the Straits, has succeeded only in restoring the status quo ante with one major exception: Iran now realizes that it controls the Straits and can open, close, and regulate them with impunity, and full immunity from any consequences. 

Oh, yes, one more thing. Although details are still hazy, it is safe to say that Iran certainly expects that in exchange for its agreement to reopen the Straits (whose closure was a blatant violation of international law) it will receive multibillions of dollars of financial relief that will revive its battered economy and facilitate its support of terror across the region. 

Trump’s capitulation, no matter how he spins it, is truly Obama worthy, and Iran’s mockery of Trump and its characterization of the American “defeat” will irritate him no end, if not derail the agreement entirely. Personal pique is one of the most compelling factors driving American diplomacy in the Trump era. The irony, it should be underscored, is that Trump at his worst and dumbest is better than Biden at his best and Obama at his brightest. His visceral support for Israel is still present but we need not join in his delusions. 

Peace is not coming. Iran is not yet defeated, but it is greatly weakened, its vulnerabilities exploited and still exposed. The current war was necessary and worthwhile, even if Trump for his own reasons is aborting it, eschewing victory and reverting to the West’s embrace since World War II of stalemate instead of success, of kicking the can down the road in place of resolve and resolution, of appeasing evil because it has abandoned any understanding of objective morality, of good and evil. Europe’s amorality, coupled with its failed pursuit of material prosperity, placed it on a trajectory towards its own extinction. Obama’s statecraft was not much different, and now Trump’s partakes of the same. 

If the whole point of life is to make money and as much as possible, then war with Iran or any other evil entity is bad for business. Indeed, even acknowledging the power of ideology is counterproductive and so it is best to deny that any nation, including Iran, has any exterminationist motivation, and so that doesn’t exist even if it does. In Trump world, unwelcome facts are simply ignored, and harping on them is considered rude. 

The materialist will never comprehend the power of religious ideology and certainly not the depth of religion-based hatred. The fact of its existence is dismissed as “fake news.” And Trump has been both the victim of fake news and one of its leading disseminators. 

American and Israeli interests were bound to diverge at a certain point, and that point has arrived. Iran’s threat to Israel and the United States is existential but the US has the luxury of ignoring Iran for a longer period than Israel can. The fact that the Iranian regime has spent the better part of forty seven years humiliating the United States is of little moment. Iran has been governed during the last (almost) half century by essentially one regime with a depraved but consistent ideology, while the US has had eight presidents of different ideologies, backgrounds, objectives, and approaches. It is no wonder that Trump wishes to cut bait and run. Iran is weakened, for sure, but while it threatens Israel today, its threat to the US will be some other president’s problem. Obama’s policy was literally kicking the Iran problem down the road. For all his bluster and protestations, that is Trump’s policy today, maybe not tomorrow, but probably again the day after. 

Any sentient observer realizes that Trump, wearing his Obama mask, has succumbed to Iran’s hoary tactics of endless negotiation, conceding and then retracting, agreeing to a final deal and then insisting on one last concession from its interlocutors that undoes much of what was agreed to, and then not abiding by any agreement it does sign. If Trump really believes that Iran will ever willingly divest itself of its nuclear program or materials, then he is now, officially, the most dangerous man in the free world, not its leader. Iran, much like Trump did repeatedly in his years as a real estate developer, will sign something, and then weasel, haggle, threaten, litigate, and not pay up. He might even know this, not that it matters. As the American novelist Upton Sinclair once wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.” In Trump’s case, it is not his salary but his world view, his ambition, and his hubris that requires him to look away from Iran’s aggressions and its war against America.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if Trump allows himself to be deceived because the war is unpopular in the United States, or because he fears a Republican defeat in the midterms, or because he hoped to wage history’s first casualty free war, or because the American military has failed to achieve its war objectives despite the hype and spin. What does matter is that the US under Donald Hussein Obama allowed Iran to gain the upper hand in the Straits of Hormuz, could not reopen it despite the seeming disparity between the American military might and Iran’s decimated forces, and could even defend its own bases in the Gulf Arab states and the Gulf Arab states themselves. That does not bode well for them, or, for that matter, for Taiwan, or other US allies.  

As for us in Israel, we should be grateful for past, present, and future assistance from the United States, and certainly for their actions in the last two years that facilitated many of our successes, and particularly the debilitation of all our enemies and the projection of Israeli power on every front and into enemy territory. Sometimes, as with the biblical (and perhaps current) Amalek, the task of our generation is to weaken them when they can’t yet be defeated (as in Shemot 17:13). But we should not delude ourselves into thinking that our interests with the US are identical. We certainly should not constrain our actions against enemies who wish to destroy our State and murder Jews because of an agreement made between the US and Iran to which we were not a party and in which our interests were not primary or even secondary considerations. That would be insane. 

No nation waives its right of self-defense and no self-respecting nation allows its right of self-defense to be theoretical and not actual. This might require publicly calling out Mr. Trump and asking him “which American border towns would he allow to be rocketed, and how many US citizens would he allow to be murdered without any response because of geopolitical considerations?” 

That question neatly frames our dilemma, our options, and the untenability of demanding our restraint. We need not like Trump wearing an Obama mask and we need not acquiesce to its broader ramifications. Trump does not like war, and in truth, no sane person seeks war. But as George Santayana wrote, “only the dead have seen the end of war.” That is neither our fate nor that of the world, until the coming of Moshiach. Until then, we fight evil, even alone, even when the blusterers are tempted to slink away when the going gets tough, even when they are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and boastfully tweeting about it. 

As little is real in Trump world, the immediate future and even the signing of a deal is uncertain. But in his kowtowing to evil, his abandonment of regime change and hope for the Iranian people, and his fantasy of forcing Israel to accept an agreement with Iran that inevitably leads it to a nuclear bomb, Donald John Trump is more like Barack Hussein Obama than he cares to admit.

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Patchwork

Posted on May 18, 2026 | Comments Off on Patchwork

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

It is hard to dispute that the punishment of thirty days’ imprisonment meted out to a Nachal soldier for wearing a “Moshiach” patch is outrageous, even Draconian, so much so that it is likely to be reduced if not eliminated altogether.

Thirty days? Bear in mind that the Chief of Staff has many accomplishments on his ledger for which we owe him a debt of gratitude but also as then Deputy Chief of Staff shares primary responsibility for the catastrophic Hamas invasion and carnage of October 7. For that he received not thirty days incarceration but a promotion.

The tatzpaniyot (female scouts) repeatedly warned their superiors of dangerous Hamas activity and many paid with their lives because their superiors ignored their warnings. Yet, these superiors have never, to our knowledge, been identified, vilified, prosecuted, or incarcerated. But thirty days in jail for wearing a patch?!

Indeed, the IDF changed its regulations just over a year ago banning such personal patches depicting “Moshiach” or the “Bet HaMikdash,” which on some level is sensible. An army must be uniform, individual expressions must be limited. Such was the reasoning of the US Supreme Court when it ruled, in Goldman v. Caspar Weinberger (1986), that US Air Force Captain Simcha Goldman was not allowed to wear his kippah while on duty. His personal religious garb, innocuous as it was, was held by a slim 5-4 majority to be an affront to the need to “foster instinctive obedience, unity, commitment, and esprit de corps.” Yet, Congress in 1988 passed a law permitting members of the US Armed Forces to “wear an item of religious apparel” while on duty. Somehow, the US military survived, with kippah-wearing Jews and turban-donning Sikhs.

Would a future IDF Chief of Staff prohibit soldiers from wearing kippot? One should be aghast at the thought but who knows? A kippah also distinguishes one soldier from another – as the US Supreme Court implied – and in a profound way. (Conversely, would a future Chief of Staff order every soldier to wear a kippah? Ah, but that would never be sanctioned by Israel’s rogue Supreme Court.) A kippah signifies reverence for Heaven and deference to a higher power, attitudes not always welcome in the military.

For sure, a Moshiach or Mikdash patch is not a kippah; yet, I can hear a dyed-in-the-wool secular Chief of Staff opine that a kippah is barely mentioned in the Talmud  or Shulchan Aruch, should not be defined as essential Jewish wear, and certainly not when it can diminish a soldier’s “instinctive obedience” or the cherished “esprit de corps.”

As numerous reservists and other Israelis have opined, these patches are instrumental in motivating our troops to make the necessary (and even ultimate) sacrifice and therein lies the difference in approaches and why this Nachal soldier’s summary prosecution and sentence is so disgraceful. For what are we fighting? For what purpose are we losing the finest of our youth and seeing many others maimed for life?

One approach is that we are fighting for our land and our State and that too is true enough – but not the whole truth. Poles, Germans, and Spaniards also fight for their land. Russia and Ukraine are fighting over land. We too struggle for our land, our independence, our physical survival – but our endless wars are not simply over territory. Those who believe that – and many do – are generally secular and are seduced by such fantasies as Oslo or the two-state delusion, the illusion that ultimately, we are in the middle of a real estate dispute that can be resolved if we just compromise enough. It is hard to fathom but even after October 7, really, even after a century of conflict, there are people who still believe that.

There is a second approach apparently lost on the Chief of Staff. Many of our brave soldiers – even those who don’t wear patches – instinctively realize that there is much more to our enemies’ hatred of Israel than our possession of a certain parcel of land. It is hatred of the Jewish people, such is now again sweeping the world, which itself is really hatred of the G-d of Israel. As our sages expressed it (Sifrei, Beha’alotcha, 84), “he who hates Israel it is as if he hates the One who brought the world into existence.” Moreover, “whoever touches Israel it is as if he is touching the apple of His eye” (Gittin 57a, based on Zecharia 2:12). The Torah conflated the census of our military with the desire to have the divine presence dwell among us (Rashi Bamidbar 1:1). Our army serves a greater purpose than merely defense of land. It is the instrument through which the Jewish idea is able to proliferate. The land of Israel is holy and a divine gift – but the wars of Israel have a far more profound basis than simply territory. We fight for something far deeper.

Our enemies realize this, even if our Chief of Staff does not. Our enemies focus their evil on conquest of Yerushalayim. Hamas called its invasion the “Flood of Al Aksa.” Pictures of the Dome of the Rock adorned numerous Gaza homes thankfully destroyed. Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the land of Israel but especially in Yerushalayim enrages them and gives them no rest. Their evil is limitless, self-destructive, and suicidal – but at least they are clear about that they are fighting for.

We are less clear and so pay a steep price in life and limb, and the endless pursuit of panaceas and chimeras. Some fight for the homeland, some fight for democracy, and some fight for individual rights. But many also fight to protect Jewish life, preserve the holy land of Israel despite the whimsy of politicians and diplomats, bring the divine presence to earth, establish a model Torah state, bring Moshiach closer, hasten the redemption, and rebuild the Bet HaMikdash. We need not all share the same motivation to fight successfully but we will rue the day when the latter motivations are disdained and those who believe in them are prosecuted. Truth be told, they are the most motivated of all our soldiers. Disproportionately, they have borne the heaviest burden of war in terms of casualties and repeated reserve duty. We disparage them and their inspiration at our peril.

For sure, there are certain patches that should be banned – those that repudiate our national purpose, weaken morale, or dispirit our troops. But King David stated (Tehillim 122:2) that “Our feet were standing in your gates, O Jerusalem,” to which Rashi comments, “our feet were standing in battle everywhere because of the gates of Jerusalem, where they were engaged in Torah.”

Jerusalem – both spiritual and physical – is the focal point of this and every war. Moshiach will appear in Jerusalem and the Bet Hamikdash will be rebuilt in Jerusalem (or vice versa, as conflicting Rabbinic sources suggest). The order is less important than the realization of the centrality of Yerushalayim to our lives, our soul, and our esprit de corps.

We should be encouraging our soldiers to fight for what they believe in, not disheartening them. In this latest contretemps, let cooler heads prevail – heads that are also saner, holier, and more imbued with the eternal spirit of Israel, the key to victory.

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Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight

Posted on March 25, 2026 | 3 comments

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

Absent from any discussion on the future of Iran is democratization, and with good reason. Iran, from ancient times until today, has no history of democracy or even democratic aspirations. Some Iranians may yearn for freedoms as Westerners understand them but democracy as “rule of the people” is utterly foreign to them. It is also because democracy is increasingly difficult to sustain, as we are today experiencing in Israel.

The struggling Washington Post publishes on its masthead the self-serving but hopeful phrase “democracy dies in darkness.” Maybe, but in Israel where we always strive to do better, democracy is dying in broad daylight. Israel’s claim to be the “only democracy in the Middle East” has become increasingly farcical. Sure, Israel has elections, like Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan have, but true power is not wielded by the elected officials but by an unelected power structure that barely tolerates the government, humors the legislature, runs roughshod over people’s individual rights, and is beyond accountability. Oh, and all the while accusing the government of being a “threat to democracy.” Talk about people who need to buy a mirror and take a gander at themselves.

Let us count the ways that the instruments of the deep state – the Supreme Court, the police and prosecution, and elements of the media – undermine democracy, especially because they cannot win elections. Sadly, this is only a partial list.

The police and prosecution eavesdropped on thousands of Israel citizens not accused of any wrongdoing, and without any court approval. They gathered and still retain personal information on many of them in the hope of finding something incriminating that the authorities could use to blackmail them into framing PM Netanyahu for something, anything. Nothing will come of this.

Attempts by the government to investigate these crimes have been thwarted by the Supreme Court, which is attempting to cover up its involvement and that of the “fired-but-still-reigning” Attorney General, Gali Baharav-Miara. She, in a remarkable exercise of judicial malfeasance, has been granted 23 adjournments in order to delay appointment of a committee to investigate the mass eavesdropping, thus delaying the case to the point of meaninglessness. In this and other areas, the AG and the Court are hoping to run out the clock past the next elections where they pray (if they pray at all) that a friendly left-wing government will sweep away all these charges. The Supreme Court has protected her from rightful termination for misconduct in office, even though no statute gives it the authority to do that.

The legal establishment has waged lawfare against the prime minister for well over a decade, with evidence fabricated, witnesses threatened, prosecutors suborning perjury, and the witch hunt dragging on for years. It has perfected the system of neutering disfavored politicians, appointees, or bureaucrats by holding over their heads bogus investigations facilitated by tendentious and false leaks to the media.

Meanwhile, the AG’s son was credibly accused (it is caught on camera, after all) of shamelessly stealing another soldier’s bullet proof vest, even refusing to return it after no charges were filed against him because of collusion between the AG and the Military Prosecutor’s office. Who knew that her self-proclaimed immunity extends to her son as well?

The former Military Prosecutor was credibly accused of fabricating evidence and leaking it to the media, a video that besmirched our soldiers’ names across the world. She was forced to resign after accidentally being outed by an employee undergoing a routine polygraph, but this only happened after the Military Prosecutor informed the Court that the results of her investigation did not expose the leaker. This was quite understandable, as she was the leaker, and was granted the right to investigate herself, which the Court willfully permitted until she was otherwise exposed. Her case is now pending, but (as above) it is pending its way towards quiet disappearance in the mischievous murkiness of the deep state.

The AG and the Supreme Court have asserted powers unknown to comparable officials in any functioning democracy. They fabricate their own laws and simultaneously void or thwart laws passed by the Knesset, Israel’s elected legislature, which has been successfully marginalized as a substantive branch of government. They operate under the risible legal theory spawned by Aharon Barak that “everything is justiciable,” something also unprecedented in legal annals. The AG and Court have arrogated themselves the right to pass judgment on every legislation, every policy, every initiative, and every appointment, even when they run afoul of no law but simply reflect the priorities of the government elected by the people.

Thus, the Court functions without any limits on standing, allowing every malcontent to sue the government even when he has suffered no personal injury but simply because he doesn’t like the government’s policies – for which they, not he, were elected to promote. Judges routinely ignore conflicts of interest, sitting on cases involving relatives and occasionally even cases in which they have monetary interests. Apparently, there is no equivalent in Hebrew for the English concept of “judicial restraint.”

For example, the law is explicit that the State Comptroller can investigate anything and everything. Nothing is beyond his purview. Yet, the High Court illegally ordered the State Comptroller to halt his investigation of the failures of October 7, because, apparently, they did not like where his investigation was heading. (He allegedly was finding fault with their preferred heroes and little fault with their designated villains.) But no existing statute justifies this Court decision.

Similarly, Ronen Bar, the failed head of the Shin Bet who ruled out any possibility of a Hamas attack on October 7, also refused to be fired. And when even the Court could not prevent his dismissal, his successor, David Zini, appointed by the only body authorized by law to appoint the head of the Shin Bet – the government – had numerous obstacles placed in his way, had his assumption to office delayed for months on the most specious grounds, has been politically, journalistically, and legally harassed since assuming office, and the denizens of the Deep State are actively seeking to depose him even now.

Indeed, every government appointment is scrutinized not for legal disqualification but for crass political purposes: will this person advance or impede the interests of the deep state? If the latter, the appointment will be delayed indefinitely, to the point of meaninglessness.

The same pertains to government decisions. Consider, for example, the government’s ordered closure of Galei Tzahal, the Army radio station, announced months ago to occur next week. Not too long ago, a conservative Galatz director balanced the left-wing hosts with an equal number of right-wing hosts. Had he fired the left-wing hosts, the court would have overturned his decision as a “threat to free speech.” When he was replaced, a new director dismissed all the right-wing hosts, who were deemed a “threat to democracy.” But Israel is the only country in the world whose army runs a radio station, much less a partisan, anti-government, and too frequently anti-army radio station. No law prevents the defense minister from shuttering the station; it is a branch of the military like any other branch. But the Supreme Court, acting in its role as High Court of the Deep State and defender of the radical left, has now estopped it, hoping to drag out the proceedings past the next elections and rendering the decision moot. Safe prediction: Galei Tzahal will not be closed anytime soon.

Just as the Court insists that the government subsidize the left wing Galei Tzahal, it is even more undemocratic, if not unconscionable, that the public pays for Reshet Bet, a leftist radio station. Israel TV’s flagship Channel 12 is also government subsidized, and its leftist news division is relentlessly anti-government. Any attempt to reform it by balancing its commentators between right and left, or by letting it privatize and compete in the free market with other networks, is aborted as a “threat to free speech” and a “threat to democracy.” Even the non-astute citizen can grasp that any endeavor that weakens the leftist, secularist segment of society and strengthens the rightist, traditional segment of society, is immediately depicted as a “threat to free speech and democracy.”

To be sure, even a left-wing media has its place. But that place need not be eternally subsidized by the taxpayer, especially those who find its offerings and commentary repugnant. The government should get out of the media business, period. It should be obvious that these left-wing, government-subsidized outlets could not survive if they were forced to compete in the marketplace; that is why the Deep State protects them like an etrog. Forcing taxpayers to subsidize only leftist media is a travesty.

Similarly, two years ago, the Government cut off all ties with the radical left newspaper Haaretz and even ordered the cessation of its subsidized distribution to various government ministries. This is understandable, considering that its publisher has called Arab terrorists “freedom fighters” and one of its columnists recently termed the State of Israel “the greatest danger to world peace of any country.” (If all Tucker Carlson did every day was read the lies from Haaretz, he would not have to concoct his own lies.) Haaretz is one of the most anti-Israel, anti-Jewish publications in the world. Naturally, the Court ordered the Government to resume its subsidies.

This has nothing to do with free speech. Not a few public officials call for the closure of privately funded, right-wing Channel 14. Those who think that cannot happen should recall the closure of Arutz-7, the first popular right-wing organ. Those who think that the expulsion of Jews from Judea and Samaria by a leftwing government is impossible should recall Gush Katif. Those who think that the left does not still pine for a Palestinian state should recall the delusions of Oslo that are all alive and well in the febrile minds of the unrepentant dreamers of a secular, progressive, state of all its citizens, non-Jewish Israel. It is delusional to think that the Hamas invasion or the wars with Iran and Hezbollah has disabused the radical left of its fantasies are starry-eyed as it is to think that the legal establishment that investigates itself and mysteriously never finds any wrongdoing will ultimately be brought to justice.

Elections have been rendered meaningless as real power is held by the courts and unelected bureaucrats who cannot be fired or replaced without permission of the elites. The only virtue of elections is that it enables a right-wing government to be a partial brake on the excesses of the Court, the exact opposite of how a democracy is supposed to function. A left-wing government buttressed by a left-wing Court would be catastrophic, an unchecked behemoth that will undoubtedly oppress right wing and religious Jews who will lack any recourse.

It goes on and on. The AG wants to cancel Itamar Ben Gvir – an act devoid of merit, legal precedent, or statutory authority. Surely, the Election Commission will find some way to ban him in the future. The Court is compelling the IDF to integrate women in combat into mixed units, which will inevitably result in yeshiva students refusing to serve in the tank or artillery corps, a suicidal triumph of rigid, radical feminist ideology over Halacha, efficiency, and battlefield success. The Court demanded years ago that Gazans be allowed to approach the border unhindered and unchallenged, itself one of the proximate causes of the colossal failure of October 7, and one which will also be covered up. And not content with its domestic and military interventions, the Court has ordered that mixed prayers be allowed at a sub-divided Kotel, a mockery of Jewish law and all that is holy. If they feel so strongly about it, maybe the Court should order the same at Al-Aksa.

And do not be surprised if the Deep State cooks up a way to disqualify PM Netanyahu from running in the next election, on some pretext, with the goal of so dispiriting the right wing that people see no purpose in voting, the only way the left can win in Israel. By the time it happens, it will be too late to respond, and the elites know whatever turmoil erupts will die down as soon as a left-wing government is in place.

The problem is that currently there is little hope of changing the system regardless of who is elected in the fall. The elites have carved out for themselves an infrastructure of power that is impregnable through ordinary democratic processes, short of a revolution. The judges cannot be impeached, essentially appoint their replacements, they shield corrupt bureaucrats who serve their purposes and harass honest ones who do not. There are no checks or balances on them. And in a fashion quite evocative of North Korea, the most undemocratic party in Israel – the one that aspires to deprive most of the citizenry of basic rights – calls itself the Democrats. It has no faith in the demos – the people who actually vote – but only in the crats, the ruling class.

Eventually, there will be a constitutional crisis, in which the government and the people who elected it – the majority of the country – simply refuse to enforce the Court’s arbitrary dictates or the AG’s capricious predilections. In a real sense, that crisis is already upon us, obscured only by the necessities of an existential war.

We should not be concerned with democracy in Iran, a pipedream even for optimists. We should be more concerned about the fate of democracy in Israel, dying a daily slow death before our eyes, in broad daylight. And we should pray for the day when “Zion shall be redeemed with justice, and her repentant ones with righteousness” (Yeshayahu 1: 27), may that day come soon.

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Tucker Unhinged

Posted on February 24, 2026 | 1 comment

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

Ambassador Mike Huckabee must have the patience of a saint; it is the only way to explain his serenity during his interview with Tucker Carlson. Huckabee was imperturbable, unflappable. Carlson, by contrast, has the demeanor of a deranged person, with a demonic laugh that erupts at inappropriate times for the oddest reasons. He speaks in spurts and flits from topic to topic without any coherence.

Carlson also has the inflated ego of the narcissist, bent out of shape because PM Netanyahu rejected his entreaties for an interview. Who is Carlson after all but a fired TV host who now has his own podcast like a million other people? Today he has many listeners because hatred sells but that well will eventually run dry. Other haters will compete for his audience, at least until they get real jobs that take up their time.

He is also quite scatterbrained. Huckabee is the US Ambassador to Israel; what connection does he have to Jeffrey Epstein or the Epstein files? None. So why badger Huckabee about them? As Ben Shapiro points out, Carlson is a devotee of the “Just Asking Questions” copout, by which Carlson normalizes nuts and haters of all stripes by interviewing them, asking questions but no follow-ups or challenges, thus allowing them to spew their hatred unconstrained by facts or decency.

Carlson has been forced to apologize for several wild statements, including his declared hatred for Christian Zionists but also for accusing President Herzog for befriending Jeffrey Epstein and visiting the infamous island. Herzog strenuously objected, claiming he never met Epstein even once (it is good to know that there are some Jews who had no dealings with Epstein), and Carlson apologized for his accusation that was entirely baseless and slanderous. So why make it?

It is fair to ask: how friendly was Tucker Carlson with Jeffrey Epstein? How much money did Epstein lend him? How many times did Carlson visit the island and are the reports of their close association true? I have no evidence at all – but I am Just Asking Questions. What a perverse game. It is a devious way of spreading lies without being accountable.

I believe Carlson when he says he is not an anti-Semite. Why would anyone have anything against Semites? What did the Semites ever do to offend anyone? But I do believe he hates Jews and Israel and his use of certain code words and phrases – almost one a minute – betrayed his animus.

Israel is a “police state.” Christians are persecuted. He is “paying” for Israel’s crimes through his tax dollars.  Israel committed genocide on his dime and murders children. He is obsessed with Israel’s right to exist, as he is for no other country. The Israeli government “shields child molesters.” Netanyahu’s parents did not speak Hebrew (!). Netanyahu has no claim to the land of Israel because he is not religious. Carlson has no idea what “from the river to the sea” means. The United States went to war in Iraq because of Israel and for Israel, and Netanyahu was the one who talked George Bush into regime change in Iraq. (Alas, for Carlson, Netanyahu was not the Prime Minister of Israel then, nor during the entire Bush Presidency, and wasn’t even in government when Muslim Arabs – not Israelis – attacked America on September 11, 2001.) There are more Christians in Israel than there are in Qatar (unlike Carlson’s assertion to the contrary) and unlike in Carlson’s patron Qatar, Israeli Christians are full citizens while Christians in Qatar are mostly not.

He did raise three questions for which he could have received better answers, not that his mind is open to answers. He is fanatically obsessed with the Law of Return, something that to him smacks of racism and rabid nationalism. To be fair, he contrasts that with America’s open borders until recently, but why blame Israel because the demographics of the United States and Europe are swiftly changing?

Carlson asked: what is a Jew? And what right do the Jewish people have to the land of Israel? Is Jewishness an ethnicity or a religious affiliation?

To the latter question, Huckabee properly answered “both,” not that Carlson could understand or would accept that. But it needs elaboration, as this is something that perplexes Gentiles. The Jewish people are a religio-nation. We have a dual identity, given to us by G-d. The Torah states (Shemot 6:7): “I will take you to be My people and I will be for you G-d.” We are both an ethnic group and a religion, and in both capacities we were granted a relatively small territory on earth in which we were mandated to build a holy state.

A Jew born of a Jewish mother, or converted according to halacha, is a Jew, a member of both the religion and the nation. We are heirs to the land of Israel through the Bible (as Huckabee pointed out repeatedly) and via international law and organizations (as Huckabee also pointed out repeatedly, to no avail.) In another whopper of an error, Carlson insisted that the Balfour Declaration was not enshrined in international law, apparently unaware that it was adopted by the League of Nations that awarded the mandate over the land of Israel to Britain on that basis.

But Carlson was also extremely mystified by Huckabee’s assertion of our biblical claims to the land of Israel, which, accordingly, should give Israel rights to all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates (we can call that “from the river to the river.”) Huckabee deflected – Israel is not claiming Jordan, Iraq, Syria, etc. – but there is a better answer. The Bible proposes several maps for the land of Israel. G-d delineated one for Avraham – from the river to the river (note that the “River of Egypt” does not necessarily mean the Nile). But at the end of Bamidbar (Chapter 34), the Torah spells out the borders of conquest that adhere more closely to Israel’s current borders, save for a sliver of land in southern Lebanon and east of the Jordan River. The conquest of Yehoshua resulted in still a third map that is different from the other two, and King David’s borders were even larger.

The truth is that the borders of Israel according to the Torah are somewhat fluid, much like the borders of the United States when independence was declared almost two centuries ago. The original thirteen colonies occupied territory mainly along the Atlantic coast but the US extended its borders to the Pacific Ocean and beyond in accordance with the “manifest destiny” it proclaimed. Of course, the only territorial “destiny” that is truly “manifest” is the divine one that bestowed the land of Israel on the people of Israel. And the Euphrates border? Consider that a Messianic vision – except, perhaps, if our neighbors to the east attack us and are defeated.

Carlson was also bewildered by the grant of land to the descendants of Avraham. How can they be defined? He even called for a DNA test, which Huckabee parried by saying that such would exclude righteous converts. He could have added that the Torah prescribes that only descendants of Avraham through Yitzchak share our covenantal mission and rights to the land of Israel (Breisheet 21:12, Nedarim 31a), by implication excluding descendants of Yishmael and Esav.

Asked to prove that Netanyahu is a Jew who shares in the covenant, Huckabee appropriately cited the Mesorah, and movingly portrayed the Jewish connection to the land of Israel through unending residence here, even after the destruction of the Temple; that we face Jerusalem in prayer wherever we are in the world (consider: Muslims praying in Israel literally turn their backs on Jerusalem and face Mecca); our adherence to the Torah and the Hebrew language; and our embrace of the covenant. Carlson was unmoved, if he was even listening.

Thus the Right of Return – vilified by Carlson – assures that the Jewish nation-state can survive.  That vexes Carlson, who is untroubled by even more restrictive citizenship criteria in Japan, the Emirates, or his patron Qatar, all US allies, where the average immigrant can never become a citizen no matter how long they live there and even if they are born there. And Carlson fully embraces the classic lie – popularized but not invented by the Nazis – that we Jews are not the descendants of the real Jews of antiquity but imposters. Apparently, according to Carlson, Israel does not have the right to exist as a Jewish state because Jews simply do not exist.

Carlson was particularly angered by Huckabee’s meeting Jonathan Pollard, even terming him the “most dangerous spy in American history.” Really? Worse than Benedict Arnold? He uttered this bit of ignorance with an abundance of confidence, willfully unaware that Pollard was accused of spying for the Soviet Union by Aldrich Ames, to deflect attention from the person who was actually spying for the Soviet Union, whose name happened to be Aldrich Ames, who died last month after serving 32 years in prison.

Carlson also seemed blissfully unaware of the true nature of American aid to Israel. As the ambassador correctly pointed out, all of this money is spent in America and subsidizes the US arms industry. Furthermore, the US return on this investment is more than tenfold annually, in terms of intelligence Israel provides and the promotion of US interests in the region and beyond. He could have added that the US has spent far more money maintaining bases in Germany and Japan eighty years after World War II, as well as provided Ukraine just in the last few years, than it has ever granted Israel. He clearly believes that any foreign aid is wasted money that should be spent in the US. That is a plausible but unconvincing argument, akin to claiming that his advertisers waste money because I will never patronize their products, so why are they paying him. But others will, and so advertisers assume there will be a return on their investment. The same principle applies to foreign aid to Israel, if not other countries.

Perhaps the most egregious and outrageous of Carlson’s ramblings is his moral equivalence  between Hamas and Israel. True, he admittedly hates Hamas, but without admitting it, he hates Israel as well. Hamas slaughters people and Israel slaughters people. Huckabee tried to explain the difference between the assailant and the assaulted, the victimizer and the victim, but unsuccessfully, no fault of the ambassador’s. Carlson pronounced himself, as a Christian, opposed to all wars and violence. Really? Even the Revolutionary War? The Civil War? World War II? Does he not subscribe to the “just war” doctrine of the Christians, or is he an absolutist, a pacifist, who is intolerant of any violence at all?

In any event, Carlson’s abhorrence of violence, “as a Christian,” sounds tone-deaf to Jews considering our history as victims of anti-Jewish Christian violence, forced conversions, blood libels, and the like. The good news is that Jews and Christians have mostly reconciled in the last few decades; the bad news is that Carlson seems intent on reviving the classic Christian religious-based hatred of Jews.

In truth, I haven’t paid much attention to him in years but was urged to watch this interview. Carlson’s manner was maddening. He was tactless, argumentative, frenetic, manic, ignorant, quick to distort Huckabee’s words and repeatedly so, and unable to answer any of Huckabee’s questions.  He presents as a tad disturbed.

I did learn two things. Mike Huckabee has exquisite patience and must have been a fine pastor. And Qatar Carlson, I mean Tucker Carlson, should be barred from future visits to Israel as a peddler of Nazi and radical Muslim ideology, an enemy of Jews and Israel, and – it will shortly become clear – the United States as well.

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