You Do Not Have To Hand It To Tucker Carlson

The antisemitic Nazi is not a pro-Palestinian ally

Image source: Gage Skidmore, CC

Last week, disgraced Nazi broadcaster Tucker Carlson sat down for an interview with despicable Christofascist US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee to hash out just what kind of fascist garbage fire the GOP should be. Carlson argued that Republican racism and nativism should be grounded in traditional Nazi hatred of Jews. Mike Huckabee countered that the GOP’s genocidal Islamophobia is best paired with condescending appropriation of Jews as lesser partners.

You’d think it would be easy for the left to repudiate both of these evil hateful gasbags. But alas, a good number of progressives have rushed to praise Carlson and claim him as some sort of anti-genocide beacon of Palestinian activism.

I do not have the heart or the stomach to watch three hours of Huckabee and Carlson trying to out-bigot each other. So I’m just going to focus on one viral exchange which really distills the mutual pile of steaming bad faith and bad intentions in which both Huckabee and Carlson repulsively wallow.

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You don’t repudiate genocide by parsing ethnonatonalism

Here’s the exchange:

Huckabee: In the entirety of the world there are about 16 million total Jews. They have connection to this land.

Carlson: Do they? Bibi’s family, they lived in Eastern Europe, there’s no evidence they ever lived here. He’s not religious. In what sense does…

Huckabee: But ancestrally…

Carlson: How do we know that? Do you have his family tree? We don’t.

Huckabee: Do you?

Carlson: No. He doesn’t. So no one does. So how do we know that he has any connection to the land at all?

Huckabee: If they are Jewish, and if there has been a practice of Judaism…

Carlson: He doesn’t practice Judaism in any rigorous way. His ancestors didn’t live here. They didn’t speak the language and there’s no evidence they ever lived here, so on what basis does he have the right to be here?

Huckabee: He very much speaks the language. His family has fought for the land.

Carlson: I feel like you’re dodging a very obvious question, which is where does this right come from? How do we know that Bibi’s ancestors, specifically Bibi’s, ever lived here. How do we know that?

Huckabee: I’m not sure I understand your question.

Again, some progressives (as you’ll find at the link above) have treated this as an awesome rhetorical knock-out blow for Carlson. But the truth is that Carlson is just doing what he always does; spewing gutter fascism in an effort to smear Jewish people, immigrants, Muslims, and, yes, Palestinians as well.

The core of Carlson’s claim is that Netanyahu—and all other Jews—are rootless wanderers who have no real nationality and no real faith and that they therefore have no right to be in Israel—or, really, anywhere. Netanyahu does not have a certified ancestral tree; few Jewish people do, because we’re a diasporic and historically persecuted people.

More, Carlson insists that Netanyahu does not have a real Jewish faith, delegitimizing all secular and atheist Jews and positioning himself, a Christian, as arbiter of Jewish identity. Since antisemites generally believe all Jews are artificial and inauthentic, it’s no wonder that Carlson concludes that Netanyahu is not a real Jew—no Jews, in Carlson’s view, are real, just as the right in general believes that no trans people exist. The erasure and rejection of identity is a prelude to, and a preparation for, the erasure and extermination of the people who hold that identity.

It’s important to underline that Carlson is focused on undermining Netanyahu’s identity as an identity, rather than focusing on what Netanyahu has done. Netanyahu is committing an ongoing genocide against Palestinian people, with the goal of destroying them in whole or in part and seizing their land. He has bombed them; he has starved them; he is preventing humanitarian aid from reaching them; he is moving forward to annex and steal their land—all this after personally heading a decades long regime of apartheid and grinding violence.

But Carlson couches his gestures of support for Palestinian’s very carefully—focusing on the fact that Palestinian Christians get less aid from the US than Israel does, for example. That’s because for Carlson, Netanyahu’s real crime is not his campaign of death and evil. His real crime is the fact that he’s Jewish.

Fascist ethnonationalism will not help Palestinians

Carlson does not condemn discrimination or hate. That’s because he supports discrimination and hate; he just wants to make sure that both to extend to Jewish people. He resents US support for Israel not because US bombs are being used to kill Palestinians, but because he feels the money we send to Israel should be spent at home to protect people from immigrants who he whines are “completely changing” people’s neighborhoods—a strikingly fascist formulation at a time when ICE is literally murdering people in the street in the name of immigration enforcement.

Carlson worries that funding apartheid and genocide in Israel will prevent us from finding the funds to institute apartheid and genocide in the US. That’s what he means when he says, “I’m mad at my lawmakers for not protecting my country with the care they’ve protected Israel.” It’s why his comments about Netanyahu are consistent with his 2019 attacks on Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American who Carlson claimed was working to subjugate white people (“Give us power because of our skin color. That’s the argument Tlaib is making,” Carlson lied.)

Huckabee also wants more apartheid and genocide in the US. He just thinks that handing bombs to Israel advances the fascist agenda rather than distracting from it. “They [Israelis] are the tip of the spear,” Huckabee insisted. “Every enemy they have is our enemy. Things that are targeted toward us often go through them.”

Carlson wants to hoard resources at home to terrorize Muslims and non-white people; Huckabee thinks that the best way to terrorize Muslims and non-white people is to give Israel the funds to bomb whoever it wants, up to and including conquering the entire Middle East.

Fascism will not end genocide

Huckabee imagines a world in which Christian nationalists make strategic alliances with Jewish nationalists to establish a global hegemony of apartheid and ethnic cleansing abroad and at home—where his daughter, the Arkansas governor, is eagerly partnering with ICE.

Carlson, for his part, imagines a world in which the US carves up the globe with Putin into Christofascist bailiwicks, each with their own concentration camps, each starving the rest of the world of as many resources as possible. (Carlson did propaganda for the USAID cuts that have killed more than 800,000 people already.)

The argument between Carlson and Huckabee is not an argument over whether to engage in genocide and mass Christofascist, ethnonationalist terror. It’s an argument about how to best go about maximizing violence and hate. Target Jewish people now or wait for the apocalypse to send them to hell? Spend funds to bomb non-white people abroad, or starve them abroad and horde funds to commit genocide at home?

Progressives and the left do not need to take sides in this game of “Which genocide first?” We can, and should demand dignity for all people, wherever they happen to be living, wherever they happen to come from.

Genocide is wrong not because this person or that person doesn’t have the right to commit it, but because targeting thousands or millions of people for death on the basis of their identity is wrong no matter who does it. Apartheid is wrong because discrimination against and degradation of your neighbor is wrong, regardless of whose ancestors were on whatever patch of land first.

When we allow Tucker Carlson and Mike Huckabee to establish the borders of debate on Israel, on Palestine, on belonging, on genocide, on anything, we lose. We cannot let our horizon of justice be delimited by fascist appeals to blood and soil.