Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson earned the renewed ire of the pro-Israel crowd when he hosted a two-hour interview with Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University who has repeatedly accused Israel of genocide. Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and combating antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, characterized the interview in a Twitter post:
“Congratulations to Tucker Carlson for becoming the leading platform for fringe Holocaust deniers, conspiracy theorists, and blood libel enthusiasts who oppose the State of Israel,” Chikli tweeted.
In a claim that could have been taken directly from the anti-semitic propaganda Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Sachs implied that Israel has a hidden expansionist agenda to take over the Middle East. It was for the “Greater Israel” agenda that would rule from the Nile to the Euphrates that Israel opposed Palestinian rule over Judea and Samaria, Gaza, and the Golan.
In a shocking modern-day blood libel, Sachs accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of creating Hamas and Hezbollah to expand the Jewish state’s borders and achieve “greater Israel.”
Sachs claimed that Netanyahu had manipulated US foreign policy, tricking the government into going to war with Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Sudan.
“Netanyahu, I regard as one of the most delusional and dangerous people on the planet, and he has engaged the United States so far in six disastrous wars, and he’s aiming to engage us in yet one more,” Sachs says in the Carlson video. “We are engaging in war on Israel’s behalf all over the Middle East.”
Sachs claimed the “Netanyahu wars” have resulted in “a million or so deaths” and cost America $7 trillion.
“Israel has driven so many American wars,” Sachs says. “These have been at huge cost to the United States, cost of trillions of dollars, cost geopolitically, but somehow we gave away our foreign policy to Israel years and years ago, and it’s been absolutely devastating.”
During the interview, Sachs described former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which killed over 380,000 of its civilians, many through chemical weapons, as “largely harmless.”
“Syria was a normal, functioning country at the time, despite whatever you read, whatever propaganda,” Sachs said.
On Monday, the head of a US-based Syrian advocacy organization said that a mass grave outside of Damascus contained the bodies of at least 100,000 people killed by Assad’s former government.
Sachs is a strong advocate for the so-called “two-state solution” which would create an unprecedented militarized Palestinian state in the center of Israel that has been ethnically cleansed of Jews and with an exclusively Muslim capital in Jerusalem. He uses the Palestinian propaganda term “Nakhba” (disaster) to refer to Israel declaring independence in 1947.
He routinely accuses Israel of “genocide” and described the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis by saying that “Hamas fighters made a surprise incursion” that only lasted one day, blaming it on “a shocking failure of Israeli security.”
David May, the research manager and a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, emphasized the absurd juxtaposition of Carlson’s conservatism and Sachs’s left-wing views.
“They should call this the horseshoe episode,” wrote May. “The conspiracy theories of the nationalist right meet the conspiracy theories of the socialist left for a party—a national socialist party.”
Carlson has been slammed for his anti-Israel views before, a fact noted by Joel Pollak, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart News.
“This is the third rabidly anti-Israel interview Tucker has done and at this point, it is fair to ask why,” Pollack tweeted.
On the October 6 and 7, 2022 episodes of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson aired an edited version of an interview with rapper and fashion designer Kanye West. One week later, the Vice website Motherboard published leaked unaired footage from the interview. In the unaired footage, West expressed Black Hebrew Israelite views, denying that Jews are the descendants of the Biblical Hebrews. He also repeated the antisemitic trope that Jews are greedy and control the financial systems.
In April, Carlson hosted Munther Isaac, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, who has a long history of antisemitism. Carlson remained silent during Isaac’s answers that demonized Israel. Still, at one point, Tucker criticized pro-Israel Christians, claiming that Evangelical leaders care more about the “highly secular” government of Israel than they care about Christians of the Middle East.
Carlson, one of the most widely viewed political commentators, raised ire again on September 2, 2024, when he hosted podcaster and amateur historian Darryl Cooper. Without correction or contradiction from Carlson, Cooper endorsed Holocaust denial. Cooper called Winston Churchill “the chief villain” of World War II and claimed that the Nazis did not intentionally perpetrate the Holocaust. Cooper claimed that the death of Nazi prisoners of war and political dissidents was because of poor planning and logistical issues rather than murder.
Carlson has also advocated for US isolationism, criticizing both President Joe Biden and Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson for their support for military aid to Israel and calling for American neutrality during the current conflict. Carlson also sparked backlash last year after he compared Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky, who is Jewish, to a “rat” and asserted that he “persecutes Christians.”
Carslon’s anti-Israel commentary predates his independent career. While reporting on the 2006 Lebanon War for NBC News, he criticized the tactics used by the Israel Defense Forces in fighting Hezbollah.
Journalist Daniel Greenfield suggested that Sachs may have had a personal interest in expressing his anti-Israel theories.
“Tucker Carlson decided to promote UN adviser Jeffrey Sachs on his show,” Greenfield wrote. “He ‘forgot’ to tell his viewers that Sachs’ biggest backer was George Soros.”
Through his NGOs, most notably Open Society Foundations fueled by almost $6 billion, Soros has promoted extreme left-wing agendas around the world. The OSF funds a number of anti-Israel organizations that deny the legitimacy of Israel and Jewish sovereignty and are involved in demonization campaigns. In interviews, Soros has compared Israel to Nazi Germany.
Soros, born Jewish, lived through the Holocaust in Hungary, surviving as a courier for the Jewish council that identified and kept track of the Jews for the Nazi occupiers. He later assumed a fake name, and his father paid a Christian government official to take the boy in as his “godson.”
Greenfield cited that connection between Sachs and Soros.
“In 2006, Sachs launched the Millennium Villages Project, a daring five-year experiment designed to test his theories in Africa. The first Millennium village was in Sauri, a remote cluster of farming communities in western Kenya. The initial results were encouraging. With his first taste of success, and backed by one hundred twenty million dollars from George Soros and other like-minded donors.”
Sachs’s Millennium Villages Project in Africa cost the US $2.5 million over three years and was a disaster. Indeed, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein described Sachs as one of the architects of “disaster capitalism” after his recommendations in Bolivia, Poland, and Russia led to millions of people ending up in the streets.
“Sachs is the kind of globalist monster that we should be fighting and yet Tucker insists on promoting him,” Greenfield concluded.
Elon Musk, who platformed Carlson’s talk with Sachs on X, praised the interview, which garnered 24 million views in 24 hours, as “very interesting.” Rabbi Elie Mischel, Director of Education at Israel365, disagreed.
“Seriously @elonmusk?” Rabbi Mischel tweeted incredulously. “Tucker promotes another antisemite smearing Israel and accusing it of “ethnic cleansing” and you say it’s “very interesting”? Tucker is an antisemite – steer clear of him.”
Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, came to a similar conclusion in an editorial in the Jewish Chronicle, in which he warned that antisemitism is growing in the conservative movement.
“It is now incumbent on all decent people, and especially those on the right, to demand that Carlson no longer be treated as a mainstream figure,” Tobin wrote. “Call it cancel culture if you like, but the notion that someone who thinks it is acceptable or legitimate to question the truth about the Holocaust ought not to have access to a potential president, as Carlson appears to have with Trump, is entirely reasonable. That remains true even if Trump’s pro-Israel policies are the opposite of those of the former Fox News host.”
