Like his curious counterpart, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson wants you to relax. When asked in an interview published Saturday about a TPUSA poll showing that AmFest ranked “radical Islam” as the greatest threat to America, Carlson responded in a way that is becoming habitual for him: he blamed the Jews. At the same time, he downplayed the idea that there was much of any threat coming from Islam, radical or otherwise, at all.
The claim that there is such a threat, Carlson claimed, “comes from the Israeli government and its many defenders and informal employees in the United States, of course.” Carlson didn’t explain whether he thought that the Israeli government had actually masterminded the jihad attacks that have taken place in the United States in recent years, faking the entire thing, or was just exaggerating the threat those attacks represented for its own purposes. Unfortunately, he wasn’t asked.
Instead, Carlson went on to downplay the jihad threat by relating it to his personal experience:
I mean, I don’t know how they responded to the poll. I don’t know who answered it, but I believe in measuring reality a little more empirically. And I don’t know anyone in the United States in the last 24 years who’s been killed by radical Islam. I do know a lot of people who have killed themselves. I know people who’ve died of drug ODs, more than a few. I know people who can’t get jobs. None of the boys in my daughter’s class can get jobs, none of those white boys can get jobs. They’re being destroyed by Adderall and video games and porn.
Giving the devil his due, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Carlson’s point here has been widely misrepresented. He did not claim that there have been no Americans killed in jihad attacks over the last 24 years. He just said that he didn’t know anyone personally who was killed in a jihad attack, and was trying to give the impression that this meant that such attacks are vanishingly rare, and that there are a great many problems that are more pressing.
What Carlson doesn’t acknowledge, and likely does not know, is that the threat from “radical Islam” that he downplays is much bigger than he thinks, for it is not actually “radical” at all, but quite mainstream. All the major sects of Islam and schools of Islamic jurisprudence teach that Muslims must wage war against non-Muslims and subjugate them under the hegemony of Islamic law. This is not a “hijacking” of Islam or the twisted view of a tiny sect; whether or not any individual Muslim acts upon it, it is a central teaching of the dominant strains of Islam.
Also, the jihad threat is difficult to detect and to guard against because jihadis move in and among peaceful Muslims, and contrary to popular belief, there is all too often no readily discernible way to distinguish them. Tucker may survey one Muslim community or another in the U.S., and walk away satisfied that it is full of “moderates,” but according to a saying attributed to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, “War is deceit.” (Bukhari 4.52.268)
Tucker, however, is clearly in no mood to consider such matters. He thinks that his all-purpose whipping boy, the Israelis, have wildly exaggerated, if not fabricated outright, the threat of “radical Islam.” Yet while one can imagine that Tucker’s designated enemies could conceivably have mounted false flags in Boston, Fort Hood, San Bernardino, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and all the many other places where Islamic jihadis have drawn blood inside the United States, what does Tucker Carlson think is the reason for jihad attacks in Thailand, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, and everywhere else that Islamic jihadis strike with lethal regularity?
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Does he think that the entire worldwide jihad since 9/11 — all 48,000 jihad attacks and counting — were all Israeli operations designed to manipulate the United States into thinking it needed to devote time, money, and resources to combating this nonexistent threat? If so, the whole endeavor has been a massive failure, for the United States government takes no official notice whatsoever of the jihad threat as such, and hasn’t since 2011, when Barack Obama ordered the removal of all mention of Islam and jihad from counterterror training. Those dastardly Israelis have created their massive sham threat for nothing.
Or maybe Tucker Carlson is, for his own purposes, refusing to see the obvious, even as it stares him in the face.
Tucker Carlson won’t tell you about it, and the establishment media certainly won’t tell you about it, but at PJ Media, we give you the truth about Islamic jihad activity in the U.S. and around the world. Become a PJ Media VIP today, and you’ll get all our content and none of our ads. Use code MERRY74 for 74% off.
