Tucker Carlson, Columbia, Hillsdale Stoke Jew-Hate With Anti-Israel Lies

“Neocons…pushing for war,” says email from Trump campaign hanger-on

A promotional image for a Tucker Carlson episode that did a fine job of demonstrating why Fox News made a correct decision when it got rid of him.

Online video personality and former Fox News star Tucker Carlson was a fixture of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, with speaking roles at the fourth night of the Republican National Convention and at Trump’s pre-election Madison Square Garden rally. So it’s concerning to see Carlson use his influence to spread vicious, outlandish, conspiratorial lies about Israel.

In a video posted last night to Elon Musk’s X platform, Carlson hosts a Columbia University professor, Jeff Sachs, who says that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and “neocons in the U.S.” are “dragging the United States into countless wars in the Middle East.” Sachs says the “Netanyahu wars” have resulted in “a million or so deaths” and cost America $7 trillion.

“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.”

Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs in a 2024 picture by Gabriella C. Marino that is made available for use by Sachs on his website.

“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.”

Sachs blamed Netanyahu for wars in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Lebanon, and Sudan, and said the Israeli leader also wants to drag America into war with Iran. “The United States broke apart Sudan. Why? Well, Sudan was an enemy of Israel, so we have to break apart Sudan,” Sachs said.

He accused Israel of being dominated by what he called “religious zealots” who want Israel to rule from the Nile to the Euphrates.

“There happen to be 7 million Palestinians there. That's a minor problem. Maybe they can be ethnically cleansed, maybe they can be thrown out. Maybe they can just be ruled in a militarily dominant way,” Sachs says. “Of course, probably well over 100,000 have been killed in the most recent war by Israel.” He noted an “official count 45,000 of bodies claimed from the rubble. But we know that there are a lot more that have died since this war in Gaza began.”

“All of this is to say this greater Israel idea says we can't make peace with the Palestinians, so anyone that supports the Palestinians is by definition, a mortal threat to us. And when you have a mortal threat, you must destroy it. And so this is the opposite of diplomacy. It's war,” Sachs says.

Carlson treats all this with the utmost respect, rather than the nonsense that it is. As of this morning, the video had racked up 23 million views on X.

The content is sponsored by what Carlson says is a “paid partnership” with Hillsdale College: “Take a free online course today at https://TuckerforHillsdale.com.” And in the video itself, Carlson takes a break from interviewing Sachs to pitch Imprimis, a Hillsdale publication. “Hillsdale will send Imprimis right to your house. No charge. …It's free. Don't wait. Sign up now,” Carlson says. A spokesman for Hillsdale did not reply to an email from The Editors seeking comment on the content.

Hillsdale, a small, conservative Christian college in Michigan, is about as distant as you can get in the higher education universe from Columbia University, a global research university based in New York City. Yet it is an example of the so-called horseshoe effect, where the far right (Carlson, Hillsdale) and the far left (Columbia, Sachs) converge on an extremist position of groundlessly blaming a single Jew—Netanyahu—for vast ills.

An email sent by the Tucker Carlson Network to promote the episode doubles down on the blame-Israel message. “Why does America let foreign countries drag the U.S. military into their wars?” the subject line asks. The only “foreign country” mentioned by name as a warmonger in the text of the email is Israel. “Is war with Iran inevitable?” the email text says. “If the neocons get their way, it will happen soon. That would be a disaster for American citizens, but that is neither here nor there for the people pushing for war. They see America as nothing more than a useful tool for advancing their destructive agendas.”

The promotional email uses this quote from Sachs: “What happened in Syria last week was the culmination of a long-term effort by Israel to reshape the Middle East in its image… and [they’re] going to do that by bringing down any government that supports the Palestineans. [sic] It’s a rather shocking amount of hubris. It has been, in my view, a complete disaster for the United States and for the Middle East.”

The Sachs claims are false in so many ways that it is hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with a few specifics, going country by country.

The claim that Israel was the driving force in dividing Sudan? Nonsense. There was a humanitarian crisis in Sudan that had little to do with Israel. Some of the loudest voices calling for international action there to alleviate the crisis were people like Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch and Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who are among Israel’s harshest public critics. The conflict had to do with tribes and fighting between Islamists and adherents of native religions, and with Arab anti-black racism.

The claim that Israel lured the U.S. into war in Iraq? Israel was more concerned about Iran than Iraq. I tried, personally, myself, face to face, during the 1990s to get Netanyahu (and, for that matter, Ariel Sharon, too, also face to face and personally, myself) interested in backing Ahmad Chalabi’s effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq, and Netanyahu was not interested. I wrote about it at the time. The most similar response I can remember was when I tried to get Mayor Bloomberg interested in privatizing the New York City subway, and he replied by asking me what I’d been smoking. That was the nature of Netanyahu’s reaction.

The Iraq War is attributable more to a post-September 11, 2001, American concern about Arab terrorism than to Netanyahu. If Sachs is looking for someone to blame for it, Osama Bin Laden is a better target than Netanyahu is. Britain’s Tony Blair was an enthusiastic ally in the Iraq War. Why not blame him rather than Netanyahu?

Lebanon has been the scene of internecine warfare between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Christians, and other factions for decades, centuries even. U.S. troops were there in the early 1980s to help support the government against the Soviet-backed PLO, but they left, and the American role since then has been limited.

And Turkey, not Israel, was the driving force in pushing out Assad in Syria, though Israeli pressure on Assad’s Iranian patrons and Ukrainian pressure on Assad’s Russian patrons were contributing factors.

The $7 trillion figure for the costs of war is vastly inflated and includes items like homeland security (making sure that another September 11 hijacking attack doesn’t happen), health care for veterans of the war in Afghanistan, and overall defense spending that also helps keep America strong against China and Russia, keep oil flowing from Saudi Arabia, contain Iranian influence, and achieve other American foreign policy goals. The idea that Israel can be blamed for it all is totally delusional. What was America supposed to do after Al Qaeda hijacked four planes and attacked the Pentagon and New York City on September 11, 2001, just let them get away with it? What was America supposed to do after the Boston Marathon Bombing, just let it keep happening?

Likewise, the 1 million death toll includes combatants in Yemen and Pakistan, along with members of ISIS. What was America supposed to do when ISIS was posting beheading videos of Americans? When the Pakistani military or Saudi Arabia acts against Islamist extremists, or America acts against ISIS, how are those deaths attributable to Netanyahu? Such an accounting is not reasonable or fair, and blaming the Israeli leader says more about Sachs and Carlson, and the universities that respectively sponsor them, than it does about the reality.

“Greater Israel”? Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula, it withdrew from Southern Lebanon, it withdrew from Gaza, it withdrew from much of Judea and Samaria. If this were genuinely the agenda driving Israeli government decisions, we’d have seen different outcomes.

As for the prospect that Netanyahu is about to drag America into a war with Iran, a recent Mar-a-Lago visitor, Israeli Brigadier General (Reserve) Amir Avivi, recently explained in a briefing of Israel’s Defense and Security Forum, Iran is already at war with America. A U.S.-Israel military attack on Iranian nuclear sites and other targets would not be starting a new war, it would end the existing war immediately, with a decisive victory.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism, which is the one the U.S. Government uses, includes as examples “Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions” and “Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.” Both the Tucker Carlson show and the email he sent to promote it meet that definition.

As troubling as that is, so is the mendaciousness. Touting the Hillsdale College publication in a paid promotion in between Sachs’s lies, Carlson says, “Do you ever feel like you can't trust the things you hear or read, like every news source is flawed, distorted or fully just propaganda lying to you? Well, you're not imagining it. …. The only way this stays a democracy is if the citizenry is informed. You can’t fight tyranny if you don't know what's going on.” So true.