The increasingly loopy Tucker Carlson doesn’t come out and say what he is getting at, but it’s clear enough anyway. He platformed and lavishly praised a historian who repeated National Socialist talking points about World War II and claimed that the Holocaust was simply an accidental result of insufficient planning for the brutal Russian winter. He claimed that “hummus eaters” put Jesus Christ to death, and insinuated that they were behind the murder of Charlie Kirk as well. And now he knows, or claims to know, who is really responsible for the worldwide Islamic jihad against America and its allies. That’s right: it’s all the Jews’ fault.
In his latest newsletter, Tucker mocks what he calls the “fiction that Iran is somehow a threat to the United States.” He is ready with the good news, he says flatly: “It is not.” Well, that’s a relief! Anticipating the most obvious objection to this claim, Carlson continues: “Yes, they scream ‘Death to America,’ but they do so in response to our behavior in their region, not out of inherent hatred. America had no Islamist terrorism problem before 1948. That is no coincidence.”
As the activist Shabbos Kestenbaum, who posted this section from Carlson’s newsletter on X, pointed out, it is not actually true that the U.S. “had no Islamist terrorism problem before 1948.” Kestenbaum writes: “The U.S. Navy was created in 1798 because Islamic terrorists off the coast of Libya kept kidnapping American sailors and merchants, calling them ‘infidels.’”
Indeed. America fought its first war against Islamic jihadis, who made their Islamic motivations abundantly clear. As The History of Jihad details, in 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met in London with Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, an official in the service of Tripolitania’s ambassador to London. Jefferson recounted to Congress what Abdrahaman’s response was when he and Adams asked him “concerning the ground of the pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury”:
The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
Carlson, of course, could claim that he was referring to the modern phenomenon of jihad violence against random civilians and key installations in Western countries, and it’s true, the U.S. had none of that before 1948, and very little after that, either, until the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. The most obvious reason for that is that there were hardly any Muslims in the U.S. before the 1990s, and particularly after 9/11, and so very few jihadis.
Tucker Carlson, however, is not interested in such explanations. In saying that there was no problem with “Islamist terrorism” before 1948, he is making the claim that modern-day jihad violence against the U.S. is because of Israel. If the U.S. didn’t support the Jews, there would be no problem with Muslims. It’s because of our meddling in their backyard that they’re lashing out.
That’s what Carlson means when he says: “Yes, they scream ‘Death to America,’ but they do so in response to our behavior in their region, not out of inherent hatred.” This is a variant of the old libertarian argument against interventionism in the wake of the 9/11 jihad attacks. Ron Paul and the late columnist Justin Raimondo and others insisted that if we just left them alone, they would leave us alone. The fact that our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were misguided, wrongheaded, and poorly executed from the start doesn’t change the fact that this is a naive and uninformed argument. In stating it, the libertarians then and Carlson now demonstrate their ignorance of Islamic theology and history.
Related: Washington State: Man Asks Another Man His Religion, and Then Things Get Crazy
Carlson appears to be unaware of the Qur’anic imperative to “fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah” (8:39), which is an open-ended declaration of war against anyone, no matter how benign and harmless, whose religion is not all for Allah.
The idea that they hate us because of what we’re doing in “their region” also founders on the fact that it wouldn’t be “their region” at all had it not been for a series of aggressive jihad conquests against peoples who were not waging war against the Muslims or threatening them in any way. As The History of Jihad shows, there have been 1,400 uninterrupted years of jihad conquest, and never a period in which there were cordial relations of mutual respect between Muslim and non-Muslim political entities, based on the non-Muslim entities’ good behavior in staying out of “their region.”
For Tucker Carlson, however, it was just another chance to scapegoat the Jews. For him, such opportunities are always too good to pass up.
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