Tucker Carlson may currently be Israel’s biggest nightmare in all of America

Asaad Abu Khalil

Tucker Carlson may currently be Israel’s biggest nightmare in all of America. I remember this man as an extreme Zionist in the 1990s, and as an enemy of the Palestinian cause. He is a talented and energetic writer who rose to prominence at a time when print journalism was becoming scarce. Yet he is among the few who transitioned smoothly from print to visual media.

He achieved great success and now has millions of viewers online. In fact, Carlson’s audience is larger than the combined viewership of all the news programs on CNN, which will soon come under the ownership of the hardline Zionist Ellison family. The podcast phenomenon on YouTube now rivals all the so-called “legacy” media (that is, traditional media) here.

Carlson’s rise is due to the fact that he was one of the theorists behind the “America First” and “Make America Great Again” movements, which were embodied by Trump’s election campaign and later his administration.

He is a polished, eloquent, and well-informed speaker who prepares extensively for his interviews (like Ahmad Mansour on Al Jazeera, and unlike Taher Barakeh on Al Arabiya). The interview he conducted recently with Senator Ted Cruz (one of the heroes of the Cedar Revolution and a pillar of the current political order because of his deep attachment to Israeli interests) contributed to undermining Cruz’s standing even within his own party.

Carlson questioned him repeatedly about Iran, exposing his ignorance of its affairs (despite Cruz calling almost daily for war against it), and also embarrassed him over his loyalty to the state of Israel. Cruz continues to criticize Carlson on a daily basis.

Carlson and Candace Owens are the two greatest enemies of Israel in America today because of their effectiveness and because they do not belong to the left or to liberalism, but rather to the new right. Owens often goes too far in her rhetoric, and there are indications of emerging signs of hostility toward Jews in her discourse, but Carlson is careful in his speech to make distinctions.

He has admitted that, because of the genocide, he educated himself on the Palestinian cause and its history and has begun to argue in its defense. Israel accused him of being an agent of Qatar without any evidence. He is not weak when confronted with criticism or attacks by the Israeli lobby (unlike Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders).

This new trend within the American right (which is expanding among young Republicans and conservatives) constitutes the greatest threat to American policy aligned with Israel — even if only in the long run.