Afrasianet - Tariq Al Qizani - Conservative American media personality Tucker Carlson has been stirring up a lot of water in a number of podcast episodes he runs, as he repeatedly raises the debate about the relationship between Christianity and Israel, in a proposition in which the religious intersects with the political, revealing the US administration's "subordinate" policy with President Donald Trump, and a rising division within the right-wing nationalist camp of the MAGA movement.
Carlson, who appears to be a defender of traditional Christian values in the West, refuses to directly use religion to justify his country's U.S. policies and military interventions abroad, and opposes the dominance of political and religious lobbies within decision-making circles.
"Slavery"
Tucker Carlson's speech is not without direct criticism of the close and unconditional alliance between Washington and Tel Aviv, an alliance that culminated, in the opinion of the media, with "American silence" toward Israel's successive military campaigns in the Middle East, including the war on Gaza and the ongoing military harassment in Lebanon, and then pushing to gamble on a dangerous and draining war in the region against Iran.
For Carlson, the U.S. administration's support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's policies goes beyond mere cooperation and "strategic partnership" between two allies to what his opponents describe as absolute dependence and "slavery" in which no decisions opposing or criticizing Israeli policies are eliminated.
Carlson bases this assessment on at least two convictions:
• The decision to go to war in Iran was an Israeli decision subject to power networks in Washington, not an American decision.
• The ceasefire agreement and thus the manipulation of the United States of America are also Israeli decisions.
• But behind this dependence is not excluded by the Christian Zionist belt and the narrow circle of businessmen and the influential lobby in the media sector over decisions of the White House and Trump's mind, most notably Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, channel owner Rupert Murdoch, billionaire Miriam Adelson, one of Trump's most vocal campaign donors, and anchor Mark Levine, who has urged Iran to be hit with a nuclear weapon.
While the US president's policy is supposed to be based on protecting the interests of the American economy, Americans and voters, in Carlson's estimation, he prioritizes a country that does not have natural resources and relies entirely on American support to wage long wars and drain the capabilities of the American economy.
Wings inside MAGA
In the eyes of observers, Carlson's speech reflects not only a criticism of the US president's policies but rather a division that is beginning to emerge among the wings of the right-wing nationalist "MAGA" coalition, which is originally based on goals that are at odds with the current policies of the Trump administration, including:
• Focus on "America First" and National Identity.
• He rejected long wars abroad.
• Unconditionally questioning the financing of wars and allies.
• Advocating a more isolationist or "pragmatic" policy.
Beyond the veiled accusations of treason along the MAGA lines, experts predict a potential electoral fallout from this division months before the midterm elections, not only in relation to the candidacies but also on the "electoral discourse" itself as skepticism toward unconditional support for Israel expands.
But at the same time, the debates that Tucker Carlson is provoking are also seen as a reflection of another division within an influential religious base. For example, a U.S. news agency that specializes in spreading religion-related news has reported that there is a growing divide within American evangelical Christianity over U.S. support for Israel.
Persecution of Christians
In podcast episodes, Tucker Carlson clearly focuses on the expansion of Christian Zionism's influence and the marketing of religious foundations behind unequivocal support for Israel, despite criticism from theologians of linking religion to politically oriented agendas.
In fact, Carlson does not focus on the debate over the manipulation of "religious legitimacy" to serve Israel's interests, but at the same time puts the persecution of Christians in the spotlight as a neglected corner of the Western media, by hosting Christian figures of Palestinian origin and provoking debate about:
• The number of Christians in Palestine has declined, such as Bethlehem.
• The social and political conditions they live in.
• Incidents targeting churches and clergy and banning Christian evangelization activities.
In some passages, Carlson goes on to directly hint that Israel is pursuing a broader policy of violence against Christians or at least does not provide them with full protection, without neglecting to sharply criticize what he calls "American silence" on the killing of Christians in Gaza, but also the idea that the Christian presence is disappearing with current Israeli policy.
In general, the essence of Carlson's speech in this context is based on key reservations about employing a religious reference to shape the relationship with Israel, including:
• The need to separate Christianity as a moral religion that calls for peace, and to use it as a tool to justify foreign policies.
• Linking the Christian faith to another state is a destructive simplification that involves justifying the violence, extermination, and suffering of peoples.
Wrong image
In this speech, Carlson not only raises doubts, but also puts to the test the common and contrived belief of evangelicals of the expedient interdependence between evangelical Christianity and Israel, presenting Israel as a protector of the holy sites when reality suggests otherwise.
The reason, according to Carlson's analysis, is the expansion of an anti-Christian current within Israel, which is based on the harassment of Christian clerics, and even attacks on them by ultra-Orthodox Jewish currents, in incidents documented by church rights organizations, in addition to repeated tensions in Jerusalem between Jewish and Christian religious people.
Behind it all, Carlson invokes President Trump's own cynical style of portraying Christ through an AI-generated image, which in his estimation contradicts the fact that Christ is a red line for Christians in the United States and around the world.
Ultimately, Carlson's speech is not limited to a critique of U.S. foreign policy, but also reopens a broader debate about the relationship between religion and politics in the West and the limits of employing and manipulating faith to justify international positions and policies, at a time when the U.S. conservative movement is increasingly divided at home.
Source: The American Press
