By Jonathan Feldstein
April 14, is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. In Israel this will be observed with local memorial ceremonies, and ones broadcast on national TV. Interviews, documentaries, and feature films related to the Holocaust will be aired across all TV and radio channels, with entertainment channels suspending broadcasting. An air raid siren (different from that which we have spent the last several weeks dreading and sending us to our bomb shelters) will be sounded, stopping traffic and bringing people across the nation to stand in silent prayer and reflection.
This year, there are an estimated 196,000 Holocaust survivors remaining. It’s a drop of 20-25% from five years ago (240,000-250,000), an even bigger decrease from approximately 300,000 just a decade ago. As many die and the remainder age, their medical and other needs increase. Since 2023, other challenges have also increased with many suffering poverty and, in Israel, living through the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, and the war that followed. Many are reliving the memory of traumas of their early lives in their final days.
With fewer survivors branded with Nazi concentration camp tattoos among us, it’s jarring to see the increase in the permissiveness of antisemitism on so many levels, all over the world. We’re witnessing an increase in the outright denial that the Holocaust ever happened, or the distortion of the realities.
While there are no outright quotes (yet) of Tucker Carlson overtly denying the Holocaust happened, among the most jarring and public instances of legitimizing antisemitism and Holocaust denial are his platforming overt antisemites and, in doing so, not only not challenging their evil thoughts, but in fact giving them legitimacy. Tucker himself has also crossed the line many times, mainstreaming antisemitism in a way that would make the Nazis proud.
Over and above the hateful and historically inaccurate ideas of people he has platformed, Tucker has put a big wind in the sail of such deniers and antisemites in a way that’s nuanced and sneaky, deceiving the world by reviving antisemitic tropes that have been historically disproven.
There are more than a few instances where this is the case, showing a deliberate, calculated, and possibly even scripted plot. One example is Tucker referring to “Jews” and following that with the statement/question “whatever that means/is.” Doing so he set up the more recent lies by questioning the historic and biblical reality and lineage of the Jewish people.
Having sown the soil with this toxic fertilizer, he started planting his deadly seeds. Tucker has overtly embraced a fringe and disproven claim that Ashkenazi Jews are not really descendants from Abraham (and therefore not part of God’s covenant and thus foreign occupiers in Israel), known as “Khazar theory.” Through this discredited allegation, today’s Jews of European descent are actually descendants of a tribe of medieval Turkic Khazar converts to Judaism.
Forget that there are ample Biblical examples of gentiles converting and becoming part of the People of Israel (including the “mixed multitudes” who left slavery in Egypt with the Jewish people, Jethro, Ruth, and others), and who are every bit as much part of the Jewish people then as converts are today. Tucker willingly, deliberately distorts historical truth, specifically calling out Prime Minister Netanyahu and making up statements that there’s “no evidence they ever lived” in the Land of Israel.
“Khazar theory” has been as debunked as the notion that the world is flat. But antisemitic flat-earthers like Tucker don’t care about truth. The theory has been rejected by geneticists, historians, and archaeologists. Yet Tucker calls for Jews to do DNA tests, despite evidence showing substantial Biblical ancestry alongside European admixture, consistent with our 2000-year diaspora history.
“Khazar theory” has long been weaponized by antisemites (from Soviet propagandists, white nationalists, Holocaust deniers, Tucker, and other modern pundits) precisely to delegitimize Jewish identity, claims to Israel, or the reality of the Holocaust.
While Tucker hasn’t said it himself (yet), one could see him platforming Adolph Hitler today (as he has with modern tyrants like Russia’s Putin, Iran’s Pezeshkian, and others), defending doing so as his “duty” as a “journalist,” to preserve Americans’ “constitutional right and the God given right to all the information about matters that affect them.”
You can almost hear him saying it, “Mr. Hitler, many people despise your views but Americans want to know the truth about how you’re really not antisemitic, because the Jews – whatever that means – that you allegedly killed were not really Jews, isn’t that right? I think you even wrote about it in your “Kampf” book, that those people identified as Ashkenazi Jews aren’t really descendants of Abraham, and so all you’ve tried to do is eliminate a foreign occupier from among pure Europeans, setting up a network of transit camps to help them get back to their indigenous land, Turkey.”
By this “logic,” if the Nazi’s victims weren’t really Jews, then there was no holocaust against the Jews, and no genocide: Holocaust denial by denying that the victims were not Jews to begin with.
Maybe Tucker’s interview with Hitler would be a debate, with Hitler defending the Nazi definition of Jewishness as racial, classifying people as Jewish based on ancestry, religious practice, or having one Jewish grandparent. Or maybe he’d have hit Tucker’s softball question out of the park, denying he’s an antisemite as Tucker does, saying some of his best friends are Jews. Maybe he’d even praise Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel as his favorite Jewish authors.
Would there be a Hitler-Carlson dispute, or a love-fest? Who knows. But Hitler and millions of European antisemites sure believed that Ashkenazi Jews murdered in the Holocaust were Jews by every definition: history, self-identification, community, culture, religion, and the Nazis’ own criteria. Their descendants today – me and my family as well as the Prime Minster and his – remain part of the continuous Jewish people with documented ties to ancient Israel and an unbreakable bond to modern Israel.
By full disclosure, I did something lazy starting this article. I asked AI to write it for me. It’s interesting that in this case, artificial intelligence is indeed more intelligent and has more integrity than Tucker Carlson. The response I got was, “I am committed to truth-seeking and will not produce content that revives discredited tropes, or distorts the documented genocide of 6 million Jews to fit a narrative.” If only Tucker were half as honest, or intelligent.
Stand with truth and righteousness. Don’t let Tucker get away with his twisted “logic” that, as absurd as it is, can make this exact case I just did.
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