As Tucker Carlson, the worthy recipient of StopAntisemitism’s 2025 “Antisemite of the Year” award, sucks up public attention, I want to recognize the non-Jews whose words and actions this year defended Jews and Israel.
President Donald Trump has to be at the top of the list. While Carlson earned his award by demonizing the Jewish state, Trump will be honored with the “Israel Award” for his steadfast defense of Israel and its people. Trump learned he was the recipient of Israel’s highest honor during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Mar-a-Lago this week, in a phone call with Education Minister Yoav Kisch. The Times of Israel reports:
Kisch thanked Trump for his “significant and consistent efforts on behalf of the Jewish people in the State of Israel,” citing among his “many contributions” his fight against antisemitism; efforts to return the hostages from Gaza; recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights; moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and “unwavering support for Israel’s right to defend itself, including during a period in which Israel confronted seven active fronts.”
Related: No Nobel, No Problem: Israel Honors Trump for Real-World Peace
Trump not only supported Israel’s right to defend itself but also recognized that Iran’s nuclear program posed a threat not just to Israel, but to the United States as well — and acted to eliminate that threat. Carlson had incorrectly predicted that such action would trigger World War III. Before approving U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, Trump dismissed Carlson as “kooky,” arguing that a genocidal regime cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons with which to threaten the free world.
Netanyahu called Trump Israel’s greatest friend ever in the White House, and Trump’s remarks at this year’s White House Hanukkah party reminded the world how fortunate Jews are that Kamala Harris is not residing there. “I will always be a friend and a champion to the Jewish people,” he said in a speech that warned of the rising level of antisemitism in Congress. Unlike Carlson, who says radical Islam isn’t an existential threat, Trump said he’d be resolute in the fight against jihad: “All nations must stand together against the evil forces of radical Islamic terrorism, and we’re doing that.”
Carlson may criticize Trump in private text messages, but Ben Shapiro is correct — he’d never call him out by name in public, “because Tucker is a coward when it comes to President Trump.” British author Douglas Murray, on the other hand, is no coward and openly called Carlson out at this year’s Global Conference for Israel:
Nothing is more delegitimizing for the conservative side than to have people who claim to be on the conservative side playing footsie with Nazis, antisemites, and racists. Nothing can be more destructive for our side than people like Tucker Carlson, who give the most virulent, hard-edged attack interview they possibly can to Senator Ted Cruz.
Carlson, of course, now reserves his softball interviews for Hitler admirers like Nick Fuentes.
Murray was called “one of the most steadfast and eloquent non-Jewish defenders of the Jewish people and the state of Israel” at the conference and asked to explain why he loved Israel so deeply:
There’s something said about the need to ask the question, by which I mean when Jewish friends and Israeli friends and others say, “But I don’t understand, like how come you’re on our side?” I said, “Who wouldn’t be? Who wouldn’t be?” And I think that’s a much healthier way to think of it. … I’ve never found it difficult. I mean, in a fight between a democracy and a death cult, between a society that loves life and a society that worships death, I don’t find it hard to choose.
Murray presciently warned about the decline of Europe in his 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. His latest book delivers a warning to all of Western civilization: On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization. Will enough people listen?
As Carlson has descended further into this anti-Israel madness, he’s directed a lot of his venom at Christian Zionism, calling it a “heresy” and a “brain virus” in his infamous interview with Fuentes. Some of the people he said were infected by this virus were Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, whose clear defenses of Israel, when contrasted with Carlson’s conspiracy theories, show who really is suffering from a brain virus. Also proving that there are not only biblical reasons for supporting Israel, the next person on my list, Victor Davis Hanson, begins his explanation of an “overlooked reason” to support Israel with an admission: “I must come clean. I am not a Christian Zionist. I support Israel for one reason: It is in the interest of my country, the United States.” He continues:
Israel is a consensual government. It’s surrounded by 500 million people of the Islamic world—Shia and Sunni, Iranian and Arab—that aren’t; they’re not consensual. There’s only one government that is truly a free, democratic government, and that’s Israel. So it has affinities with the United States and interest with the United States that transcends anything to do with the 7 million Americans who are Jewish Americans. That’s just a given. They are not directing American policy. They couldn’t unless Israel was democratic, consensual, Western, and an outpost in a dangerous part of the world that has key resources for global prosperity with oil and, more importantly, is an enemy of our existential enemy that transcends any question of Israeli or Iranian animosity, and that’s the theocratic government of Iran that began its existence by taking Americans hostage and storming our embassy.
This week, we learned that VDH is undergoing a major operation for a serious health issue. He wrote that all he can do is “trust in the power of prayer and faith.” Surely, Jews are among the many thousands keeping him in their prayers.
In a powerful Christmas Eve message on his radio show, Hugh Hewitt, who is Catholic, reminded listeners that it’s not just Iran that Israel helps us against:
Israel is objectively the most important in the United States in a world of free countries opposed by the alliance of tyrants led by Xi, Putin, Kim Jong-un, Khamenei, Maduro, the gang running Cuba. They’re a bunch of tyrants around the world. And they’re not our friends and Israel is. It’s a nuclear superpower. It’s an intelligence superpower. It has the will and ability to project power along with us as we did in Operation Midnight Hammer — thank you, President Trump — this summer.
In an earlier article titled “From Kristallnacht to Today: Why Jews Fear History Repeating,” I shared Hewitt’s warning about the rising tide of antisemitism in the West, but it’s worth citing here:
Mein Kampf came out 101 years ago, in 1925. That’s Hitler’s call to arms against the Jews. He takes another eight years to get to power in Germany. After he’s in power in 1933, it takes five years to Kristallnacht. That’s when the real pogrom came to Germany. Germany was as civilized as the United States was. All right. Just as civilized. And then after Kristallnacht, 1938, takes another three years till the killing operations, the Holocaust actually goes into killing mode. I believe at Chelmno in December of 1941. And I think the same cycle is repeating itself. Antisemitism is the evil of the day right now.
I began this piece with Trump; I’ll end it with a political figure from the other party, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. He’s stood out for calling out his increasingly anti-Israel party’s stance on Palestinian statehood, supporting the possibility of future strikes against Iran to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons, and displaying posters of every Hamas hostage in his office. He was asked this year what it’s like when his sense of what is right goes against his party and his base:
It’s always been a very easy choice to proudly, unapologetically stand with Israel and the Jewish community. There’s always been, for me, a moral clarity. … After 10/7, you really got to pick a side. Israel is the kind of place, and our key ally, that has, and defends, and projects the kind of values that we want to have and we would want to have for everybody. … After 10/7, it’s very clear. I said that I hope it’s not true, but I’m happy to remain the last man standing—to be standing with Israel through this.
It’s heartening to know that there are so many other individuals I could add to this list of non-Jewish defenders of Israel and Jews. Argentina President Javier Milei, Carl M. Cannon of RealClearPolitics, and Australian journalist Erin Molan are just a few. Who would you add to the list?
Many talented PJ Media authors could also be included on this list.
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