Tucker Carlson’s Apologia for Christian Antisemitism By Haley Strack
“In Isaac, Carlson has found a political activist who might support his anti-Israel views, Jewish Insider reported. The president of the Congress of Christian Leaders, Reverend Johnnie Moore, told the outlet that “those of us who track these things know that Munther Isaac has long been the high priest of antisemitic Christianity; sadly, he spreads his hate from the city of Jesus’ birth.” Moore added that, post–October 7, “Isaac seems to have graduated from being an anti-Zionist Lutheran preacher to a terror sympathizer.” “There’s really just no other way to describe him.”
“How does the government of Israel treat Christians?” Tucker Carlson asked Munther Isaac, the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, last week. For months since the October 7 attacks, Carlson has been at the forefront of a loose campaign of social-media influencers trying to convince Christians to abandon their support for Israel. He took things to a new level this week by turning to Isaac for answers, and claiming, “If you wake up in the morning and decide that your Christian faith requires you to support a foreign government blowing up churches and killing Christians, I think you’ve lost the thread.”
Isaac, though a Christian, has a long history of anti-Israel rhetoric that excuses terrorism. In 2021, he published an “Open Letter to U.S. Christians from a Palestinian Pastor,” in which he wrote, “We Palestinians are experiencing an occupation: one nation controlling another; the laws, policies, practices, and military of one state oppressing the people of another, controlling nearly every aspect of our lives.” Palestinians in Jerusalem, he continued, experienced ethnic cleansing at Israel’s hands and are subject to Israeli apartheid. In that article, Isaac told Christians to team up with groups such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voices for Peace — two of the groups organizing mass anti-Israel, and in many cases pro-Hamas, protests across the United States. Christians should embrace movements such as these, Isaac said, to “challenge the occupation.”
The pastor also said that Hamas’s October 7 attack was “an embodiment of the injustice that has befallen us as Palestinians since the Nakba until now. . . . Frankly, anyone following the events was not surprised by what happened yesterday. . . . One of the scenes that left an impression on my mind yesterday, and there are many scenes, is the scene of the Israeli youth who were celebrating a concert in the open air [the Nova music festival] just outside the borders of Gaza, and how they escaped. What a great contradiction, between the besieged poor on the one hand, and the wealthy people celebrating as if there was nothing behind the wall. Gaza exposes the hypocrisy of the world.”
Isaac is on the board of Kairos Palestine, whose founding document says that “Christian love invites us to resist,” Jewish Insider reported. Kairos and Isaac describe Israel’s campaign in Gaza as “genocide.”
It shouldn’t be difficult, Carlson told Isaac in the interview, for the U.S. government to offer aid to Israel on the condition that Israel does not harm Christians.
“They’re Christians,” Carlson said. “They’re not a threat to anyone.”
Isaac agreed — and added that Palestinian Christians are under greater threat from the Israeli government than they are from jihadists.
“One of the biggest problems we’re facing right now is the deterioration of our numbers,” he said. “People keep leaving because of the political reality. Life under a very harsh Israeli military occupation is difficult to bear and as a result, many young Palestinian Christians continue to leave, for example, Bethlehem, choosing to find a better, and easier life, elsewhere.”
The exodus of Christians from land now controlled by the Palestinian Authority or Hamas has little to do with Israeli policies and more to do with the ethnic cleansing of Christians. The Christian population in Bethlehem and Gaza shrunk under the control of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Carlson found it more convenient to publicize the toll that Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza is having on Christians instead of highlighting the toll that anti-Israel Palestinian governments have had on Christians. Christians are also targeted by “radical Jewish groups” in Israel, Isaac told Carlson. Yet Israel’s Christian population is growing (up about 2 percent in recent years) and Christians are fleeing other countries in the Middle East — Yemen, Libya, Iran, Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey — because of religious persecution.
Carlson argued that the U.S. should show unequivocal support for Palestinian Christians, without acknowledging the explicit political views of many Palestinian Christians (views that, as Isaac has espoused in the past, argue for an end to the Israeli “occupation” through “resistance”). Isaac claims he wants only peace and an American government that advocates for a land in which Palestinians and Israelis “live together.” By his own admission in previous writings, Isaac thinks that an end to the Israeli “occupation” would be beneficial to most Christians. He wrote in 2012 that the biggest threat to Palestinian Christians was not “radical Islam” or the brutal attacks on Christians by jihadists: “For us, the real issue and the core of our struggles is the Israeli occupation.”
Isaac doesn’t have much room to say otherwise given that he is living under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
In Isaac, Carlson has found a political activist who might support his anti-Israel views, Jewish Insider reported. The president of the Congress of Christian Leaders, Reverend Johnnie Moore, told the outlet that “those of us who track these things know that Munther Isaac has long been the high priest of antisemitic Christianity; sadly, he spreads his hate from the city of Jesus’ birth.” Moore added that, post–October 7, “Isaac seems to have graduated from being an anti-Zionist Lutheran preacher to a terror sympathizer.” “There’s really just no other way to describe him.”
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