On Monday, Tucker Carlson interviewed Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos, a Christian Orthodox nun, under the libelous headline, “Here’s What It’s Really Like to Live as a Christian in the Holy Land”. A closer look reveals that Mother Agapia has a long history of lying about Israel and siding with actual terrorists who are actively engaged in brutalizing Christians in Israel, and her talk with Carlson was no exception.

She opens by complaining about checkpoints in Israel.

“A Christian who lives in Bethlehem cannot go to Jerusalem, to the Holy Sepulcher without a permit by Israel,” Mother Agapia claims. What she fails to note is that Israelis are forbidden from entering Bethlehem or any city in Area A of the Palestinian Authority. They were ethnically cleansed as per the Oslo Accords II in 1995.  This area includes eight Palestinian cities and their surrounding areas (Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jericho, and 80 percent of Hebron). Gaza was ethnically cleansed in 2005 when nearly 10,000 Jews were forcibly removed and their homes destroyed as an attempt to make peace with the Palestinians. 

Tucker seemed shocked that Christian Arabs who were citizens of the Palestinian Authority required permission from the Israeli government to enter their country. Ironically, by agreeing with Mother Agapia, Carlson seemed to be advocating for open borders, a policy he opposes. 

Tucker then laments that the Christian population in Israel has decreased. This is factually inaccurate.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a growing Christian population, and it has been steadily increasing, with a 1.3% growth in 2023. 

In comparison, the Christian population in the areas controlled by the Palestinian  Authority has been decreasing. In 1922, Christians constituted 11% of the population. Today, in 2024, they are just 1%. The Christian population in Gaza shrank from 5,000 before Hamas took over the area to only 1,000 in October 2023. A 2024 report by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs explained that religious and legal discrimination, desecration of holy sites, and social exclusion were behind the decline in the Christian population. In 2003, the Palestinian Authority closed the Ministry of Religious Affairs and announced its intention to impose Sharia law on all Palestinians. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Bethlehem. According to the Christian Information Center, in 1994, when the PA took control of Bethlehem, it was the most populous Christian town in the Holy Land. Once 86% Christian in 1950, the city’s Christian population plummeted to 10% by 2017, when the last Palestinian census took place. Meanwhile, Hamas has increasingly intervened in city leadership, with its members occupying most seats on the city council.

Mother Agpia then denied a connection between terrorism in Israel and Islam, referring to the October 7 massacre of over 1,200 Israelis by Hamas as “the October event”, describing Hamas as  “a resistance move. They’re simply people fighting for their people, trying to protect their land.”

“I don’t think it’s Islamic terror that’s taking place in the first place,” she said, justifying Hamas for the “October event”. “Hamas are people who have had their homes taken from them, who, if they live in Gaza, have…basically been in an open air prison for certainly the last 20 years going on. Even when Israelis withdrew from Gaza, they didn’t leave open borders.”

She went on to accuse Israel of carrying out genocide in 2002 during the second Intifada.

“When I first went there in 2002, after the second intifada started, I remember saying to my mother back home, ‘You know, this is genocide, even that genocide by Chinese water torture,” Mother Agapia said. “But now we’re seeing genocide on steroids.”

She went on to make the claim, “Pious Muslims are not Jihadists.”

“I think the best parts of Islam come from its development from Christian ideas that Muhammad came to know,” she said. 

Again, her statement may have some basis in fact, but it is hugely misleading.  By the time Muhammad was born around 570 CE, Christianity had been around for over five centuries. Churches and monasteries dotted Arabia’s trade routes. The Qur’an names Jesus more times than it names Muhammad — the former is mentioned by name around 25 times, the latter only four. But Islam believes Jesus was a Muslim and a prophet of Muhammad.

Quite incongruously, she laments the Holocaust, saying, “ that the Holocaust is a horrible, horrible thing that happened.” She then compares the genocide of six million Jews to the tunnel road that goes from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. 

“That tunnel road has been carved out of land that belongs to people in Bethlehem, in Beit Jala, which you’re passing by on that tunnel road,” she claims. “So it’s like a living death.” 

She lies, claiming that Palestinians are prohibited from traveling on that road. Israeli citizens, including Arabs, drive on the tunnel road in Gush Etzion, which is located in Area C of the West Bank. Israeli citizens, including Israeli Arabs, are allowed to travel freely in Area C, where the tunnel road is situated. Jews, on the other hand, are prohibited from entering Palestinian-controlled areas and risk being lynched if they do.

She then claims that no form of Christianity or Catholicism is valid except for her brand, claiming that the Christian belief in the Rapture is “false”.

“Someone like Ted Cruz, Senator Cruz is staying and doing what he’s doing because he’s following a Christianity that is not the Christianity of the Holy Land. It’s not the Christianity of a Catholic or an Orthodox, or a traditional Christian. It’s a heretical belief.” 

While Tuckler Carlson is Episcopalian, he has frequently stated that it is an “angry, hateful organization” that is “non-Christian.”

Tucker asks her about the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002. Mother Agapia blamed Israel and the IDF for any death and destruction, bringing several anecdotal examples. Tucker failed to ask her about the lies she spread at the time. During the siege and in its aftermath, several e-mails from the area, accusing Israeli soldiers of all manner of barbaric conduct, began to circulate widely on the Internet. The emails accused the IDF of looting. One of the e-mails claimed Israeli troops had “defecated” on the floors of a Bethlehem medical clinic they’d reduced to “shambles,” leaving “bullet holes all over the walls…and most of the equipment…damaged.”

Mother Agapia also made an appeal to US Christians in which she claimed that IDF troops had destroyed a clinic in Bethlehem, leading to the deaths of several infants. 

The emails claimed the terrorists were “policemen and parishioners of these churches, husbands and brothers trying to defend their homes.”

An earlier e-mail from the same party had accused Israeli soldiers of raping Palestinian girls, but that account, wrote WorldNetDaily’s Paul Sperry at the time, was quickly discredited. 

It was later revealed that the author of the emails was Mother Agapia. Agapia urged all recipients to “Get on the phone and ask your congressmen and senators why the United States government is backing this invasion of Israeli forces into sovereign areas, why so many innocent civilians are being terrorized in their homes, their towns and livelihoods being destroyed by the Israeli government, all in the name of stopping terror…”

None of these accusations against the IDF were ever substantiated, and Mother Agapia was forced to admit that she had not witnessed any of the events she claimed had happened.

Three weeks into the siege, three Armenian monks escaped from the church through a side entrance and told a very different story.  Friar Narkiss Koraskian told reporters: “They stole everything. They stole our prayer books and four crosses. They didn’t leave anything.” When the siege ended, the released hostages told of frequent beatings of clergymen. The terrorists, they told The Washington Times, “ate like greedy monsters,” gorging themselves on food and slurping down beer, wine, and Johnny Walker scotch they stole from the rectory as their hostages went hungry. Catholic priests said that the terrorists used their Bibles as toilet paper. Franciscan priest Nicholas Marques from Mexico reported: “Palestinians took candelabra, icons, and anything that looked like gold.”

Bethlehem’s Christians spoke of a “reign of terror” at the hands of the Palestinian terrorists. They told of rape, murder, and extortion that the men had waged against them over the previous two years.

Not only did Carlson not challenge Mother Agapia on her past libels, but she repeated several during the interview.