Sometimes, unfollowing public figures is a moral imperative.
I could swear on a stack of Bibles that I stopped following Tucker Carlson on X before President Trump described him as “kooky”. His interviews were becoming more bizarre and he was giving his large platform to some lunatics and charlatans. Even though I don’t follow the former Fox star, I do see some of his work via other people who publish the same on X. In his latest episode, he made at least three extraordinary statements, summarized as follows:
*He would definitely send his condolences to the family of Osama bin Laden.
*He finds it repulsive that people were so happy over the pager operation with the claim that Israel did not know who was in the vicinity of the exploding devices and that children were killed.
*He is somewhat in doubt if Hamas is an Islamic terrorist organization and not just a political party.
What is the problem with Carlson’s comments as stated above? He rejects the idea of good and evil. To him, killing bin Laden and wiping out floors filled with people in the Twin Towers are the same thing: people were intentionally murdered. Now, in a system in which there is no moral good and no moral evil, then all acts of killing are equally repugnant. But the world has never worked in this way. In one of the stranger scenes in the Torah, when Rivkah (Rebecca) leaves her family to meet and marry Isaac, her family blesses her: “You are our sister. You should produce thousands of legions and capture the gates of your enemies.” Now, she was a very young woman. Why were they talking about enemies and war? Her family understood that if she was joining Abraham and his kin, then there would be lots of people who would hate her and her offspring. Look today. Jews are tormented throughout the West even if they have nothing to do with Israel or the war in Gaza. One recent event had some guy chasing a Jewish woman and her children in the New York subway. So from time immemorial there have been good guys and bad guys. There has been good and evil. Blowing up Hezbollah operatives is a good thing. Those involved have claimed—and I have no evidence in either direction—that they were aware of all present in the vicinity of the beepers and in some cases did not set them off. Hasan Nassrallah’s son said that beepers went off in his father’s presence and the big boss knew that the game was up when the devices exploded and harmed so many of his operatives. No war is perfect, but the beeper operation that took years yielded thousands of terror operatives killed or severely wounded, with two children killed. Several passengers and Yoni Netanyahu were killed during the daring raid on Entebbe, yet history has judged it as an enormous success.
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As to giving condolences to the bin Laden clan, the implication is very clear: what Barack Obama ordered and what the SEALs accomplished was a moral wrong. Otherwise, why give condolences? Osama bin Laden engineered the mass murder of Americans on a scale not seen since Pearl Harbor, an event that completely changed our lives forever: more inspections at airports, the overseas “war on terror,” new broad powers for the government to spy on people, etc. He said in a well-known video that they did not expect the towers to collapse. Ignoring conspiracy theories and claims otherwise, the events orchestrated by bin Laden led to the murder of nearly 3,000 American citizens. There is no place for condolences but rather another mission to kill his kin as well. Again, if there is no good or bad and any killing is wrong, only then does Carlson make sense. I do not want to be part of a world where his twisted view of morality makes sense.
And then there is Hamas. The organization through its founding documents, thousands of statements and its behavior is a terrorist organization that uses Islam as the basis for its actions and planning. It is a de facto political party in that it defeated Abu Mazen’s folks in the last Gazan municipal elections long ago, but that is a side gig. Just as most people can walk and chew gum at the same time, Hamas has its political activities as a side dish to its primary murder-the-Jews Islamic terror program. Carlson reminds me of the scene in which Woody Allen insists that his bank robbery note says “gun” while the teller says that it reads “gub” and what is a gub? In the end the entire bank staff debates what is on the note until Allen is next seen in jail. Hamas would be infuriated in having its Islamic and terror bonafides put down by some fellow in his home studio. They have taken great pride in the mass-murder events, including those well before the October 7, 2023, massacre. Remember the 30 killed at the Park Hotel during Passover in 2002? Or the numerous bus bombings? Hamas proudly took responsibility for these activities and based it all on Islamic teachings. One convert to Judaism remembers one day in Gaza school when the head of a fellow classmate rolled into the room. He had listened to Western music and his beheading was a warning to others.
So why is Tucker Carlson suggesting (in a previous episode) that maybe we should have been on Hitler’s side and now that killing Islamists is bad? I don’t know if he gets checks from Qatar. I don’t know if his religious views play a role in his strange outbursts. What I do see is a very dangerous moral relativism peddled to his large fan base and his riding the coattails of his formerly successful Fox program. He shows revulsion over the pager operation and its anatomical impact on Hezbollah guys who happened to have their beepers in their pockets. If a group of SS officers were sitting in a restaurant in Paris and a Partisan-caused gas leak in the kitchen led to an explosion that killed half and badly disfigured half, I find it hard to believe that anyone in the U.S. or England would express dismay at such an outcome. People would be thrilled that cogs in the German killing machine no longer worked. When the U.S. shot down Yamamoto’s plane, the Japanese protested that such an action was “unfair.” The U.S. said that Yamamoto was fair game and that he alone was equivalent to an aircraft carrier.
Tucker Carlson is a very smart person and he can also be quite entertaining and funny. In his years since leaving Fox, he has taken a strange trajectory in which he expresses views and invites guests that often have horrific opinions. Carlson and his recent guest mourned the “coarseness” of a society where we can rejoice in other people’s death or injury. But while we do not do like the Palestinians in giving out candy and dancing in the streets, we are happy with the death of Yahya Sinwar and his ilk. They are evil. They murdered women and children. Their destruction is good for society. Period. The moral relativism of Carlson and his friends is disgusting and ahistorical. There are bad hombres out there and getting rid of them makes for a much safer and better world. That’s how it always has been and that’s how it always must be if we want a world where good reigns and evil is chased down and destroyed.
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