A Christian Beauty Queen Challenges Zionist Power
A Christian Beauty Queen Challenges Zionist Power
The Political Courage of Carrie Prejean Boller
All of us have our personal biases, and I’m hardly free of that failing.
In my case I’ve casually assumed that most beauty queens should hardly be taken seriously. So although they’re certainly very easy on the eyes, anything that they said or did could safely be disregarded.
President Donald Trump seems to have given such individuals some important roles in his administration and as I explained late last year, their performance often tended to reinforce my view:
No sooner had Trump come into office than he demanded his subordinates prosecute former FBI Director James Comey on the rather doubtful charges of giving misleading testimony to Congress. When the experienced prosecutor whom Trump had appointed balked, arguing that the case was too weak to proceed, he was immediately fired and replaced by Trump’s own personal lawyer, a former Colorado beauty queen who lacked any prosecutorial experience. She proceeded with the case only to have it thrown out by the courts.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James had earlier prosecuted Trump, so he demanded that she be prosecuted in return for allegedly filing misleading mortgage documents. That case was also eventually thrown out, with the grand jury refusing to reindict her.
Even more farcical was the example of Kristi Noem, a former South Dakota beauty queen installed as secretary of Homeland Security in the second Trump Administration.
Back in 2024 she had attempted to burnish her credentials by publishing an autobiography in which she described some of her international diplomatic triumphs, boasting of her success in “staring down” North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. However, the media soon discovered that those incidents were entirely fictional, merely the product of her inventive ghostwriter. Worse still, Noem was unaware of those claims, having apparently been too lazy to even bother reading the book that she proudly claimed to have written. But when journalists questioned her about some of the remarkable things she had supposedly done, she was unwilling to admit that the falsehoods were any serious problem and she reacted angrily, leading to widespread media ridicule.
Given that background, it’s hardly surprising that Noem seemed equally confused by the operations of the enormous domestic security department that she nominally controlled, instead telling people that she merely followed the instructions of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, whom she theoretically outranked. It’s unclear whether she was aware that her department’s masked and militarized federal ICE agents were clearly violating the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments or whether she was familiar with those important elements of our famed Bill of Rights. Her absurd claim that the two American citizens killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis had been domestic terrorists was also hardly encouraging.
Indeed, the media has widely reported the belief that she had received her important Cabinet post mostly because of her ongoing extra-marital affair with Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
But ironically enough, I recently discovered that another far more successful former beauty pageant winner from my own state fell into an entirely different category.
In 2009, Carrie Prejean had won the title of Miss California and was then voted first-runner up in the Miss USA competition later that same year, an achievement far beyond those Colorado or South Dakota competitors. The year after that national triumph, she’d married former NFL quarterback Kyle Boller, and soon had a couple of children, thereby fulfilling the storybook dreams of so many young girls across America.
Although she has described herself as merely a stay-at-home California mom with two children, she had been widely celebrated by conservatives over the years for her deep Christian faith. So it was hardly surprising that Trump appointed her last year as a member of his newly established White House Religious Liberty Commission, which was otherwise heavily stocked with individuals who were deeply immersed in the worlds of politics and public policy.
These sorts of government commissions rarely attract much visibility, and until the last week or two I hadn’t even been aware it existed. But a public battle suddenly drew considerable media coverage and brought it to the attention of many millions, myself included.
Over the last couple of years, ideological controversies over anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have become flashpoints in American society, notably leading to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard University and several of our other top Ivy League academic institutions. And Prejean and other commissioners suddenly clashed over exactly that same issue.
According to her Wikipedia page, Prejean had attended a Christian college in San Diego, worshipped at the local Rock Church, and then volunteered for a ministry, with all of these institutions affiliated with Evangelical Christianity, which apparently represented her own religious background.
Although not all Evangelical Christians in America consider themselves outright Christian Zionists, many do, and even the remainder have almost always been quite supportive of the Zionist State of Israel. There was no indication that her own views had ever departed from that longstanding religious consensus.
But she seems to have been deeply disturbed by the horrifying scenes of death and devastation coming out of Gaza over the last couple of years, and she may have even shifted her own religious affiliations as a consequence.
After having spent her entire life as an Evangelical Christian, less than a year ago she converted to Catholicism, only a few weeks before she was appointed to that religious commission.
The most recent public hearing focused upon anti-Semitism and some of the commissioners shifted the entire discussion to Israel and Zionism, prompting her to declare that as a Catholic, she completely rejected Zionism. That totally outraged several of her most vocal fellow commissioners, who followed the current party-line that anti-Zionism was a form of anti-Semitism and they immediately denounced her.
Our media has spent generations conditioning Americans to immediately back down whenever accused of harboring anti-Semitic sentiments, but that former California beauty queen was made of sterner stuff and she refused to be intimidated. Instead, she declared that her own Catholic Church had always rejected Zionism so she asked her critics whether they were accusing all 72 million American Catholics of being anti-Semites. They notably refused to directly answer that very telling question, merely repeating the statement that anti-Zionism was anti-Semitism. She also asked whether they approved of the horrific massacres of innocent women and children that Israel’s Zionists had been committing in Gaza during the last couple of years, and aside from some obvious gnashing of teeth, they also avoided answering that question.
Prejean had spent her entire life as a staunch religious and political conservative, so her views were mostly polar-opposite to those of American left-liberals such as The Young Turks (TYT) podcast, the leading progressive channel on YouTube. But TYT co-host Ana Kasperian covered her story and expressed enormous admiration for her outspokenness on that very important issue. The segment attracted hundreds of thousands of views and over 5,000 overwhelmingly favorable comments.
A few days ago, TYT invited Prejean for a lengthy personal interview. Despite never having worked as a professional talking-head, I thought she did extremely well, being very smart, articulate, and poised. The progressive hosts seemed just as impressed, and that segment again attracted hundreds of thousands of views with more than 7,000 overwhelmingly favorable comments.
As Prejean told the story, six months ago some White House staffers had demanded that she stop posting her views on Gaza on social media, then tried to persuade her to resign, but she had refused. Just before the start of the recent session of the commission, the chairman and a couple of the other members had pressured her to remain silent, but she’d firmly rejected their demands.
Her subsequent public exchanges about Zionism and anti-Semitism attracted media coverage, leading to massive waves of angry attacks by prominent Zionists. The chairman of the commission was Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and he’d quickly announced that he had fired her. But Prejean explained that although he had apparently assumed that she was just “some dumb blonde bimbo” from California who would be intimidated and go quietly, she had absolutely no intention of doing so. Instead, she pointed out that she had been appointed by the president and only he had the authority to remove her, while Patrick certainly did not, a legal conclusion that she had confirmed with lawyers.
She emphasized that Trump had received the votes of 56% of American Catholics, a far higher percentage than his protestant support, and removing the only Catholic female on his religious liberty commission would be an outrageous blow against that huge religious community. Large numbers of Catholics had rallied to her defense on social media and were lobbying the Trump Administration on her behalf. So although she was disappointed that Trump had not yet publicly supported her, she was hopeful that he would ultimately do the right thing.
Personal courage is notoriously in very short supply among those who inhabit the political world, and she later mentioned that numerous members of the Trump Administration—and perhaps even some of her fellow commissioners—had privately texted her, saying how much they admired what she was doing and entirely agreed with her. But they were unwilling to publicly say so.
One of her hosts noted how strange it was that American government officials were so fearful of speaking out regarding a foreign country, apparently being sure that they would be fired if they did that. So he raised the question “Is this our government or Israel’s government?” The courageous California mom he was interviewing agreed that was the crucial question.
Prejean explained that she’d researched the history of Israel and had been shocked to learn that during its founding some 700,000 helpless Palestinian civilians had been brutally driven from the homes and villages their families had inhabited for centuries. In her journey of discovery, she was following in the footsteps of the very distinguished academic Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, who in 2023 had explained how he had recently been forced to “unlearn” so much of the supposed history of that region that he had casually absorbed over the years.
Prejean had begun discussing this true history of Israel with knowledgeable individuals who had spent decades as critics of Zionism. She requested that the commission invite some of them as witnesses to provide the other side of the story, suggesting Norman Finkelstein, Israeli dissident Miko Peled, and an anti-Zionist rabbi, as well as a couple of representatives from Palestinian organizations. But the commission hadn’t allowed any of them to attend.
She’d earlier made many of these same points in an interview with Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, and a short segment of that had been initially released the same day as the TYT interview. A few days ago, she powerfully presented many of these same points in an interview with Palestinian podcaster Wally Rashid.
In her TYT interview, Prejean said she had little respect for most of her fellow commissioners, nearly all of whom had kept silent during those angry exchanges, and she explained why they did so:
“They worship money and power and fame more than they have a soul. They are slaves rather than free people…Too afraid to speak out.”
But although many Christian groups in America had been brainwashed into blindly worshipping a foreign country no matter what horrible crimes it committed, she would “rather die than worship Israel, a genocidal state.” She made that same point in a Tweet that has been viewed more than 600,000 times:
Many of our country’s leaders claim to be devout Christians. Prejean may or may not be aware of just how completely they have turned their backs upon their own religion because of their service to Israel and the powerful lobbyists in its camp. In a 2024 article, I had described some of these striking political developments.
Some years ago a former senior AIPAC official once boasted to a friendly journalist that if he wrote anything on a simple napkin, within 24 hours he could get signatures of 70 Senators to endorse it, and the political power of the ADL is equally formidable. Therefore it was hardly surprising that last week an overwhelming bipartisan 320-91 majority in the House passed a bill broadening the meaning of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the anti-discrimination policies of the Department of Education by codifying the definitions used in our Civil Rights laws to classify those ideas as discriminatory.
Although I haven’t tried to read the text, the obvious intent is to force colleges to expunge such noxious activities as anti-Israel protests from their campus community or face loss of federal funds. This represents a striking attack against academic freedom as well as America’s traditional freedom of speech and thought, and may also pressure other private organizations to adopt similar policies. In a particularly ironic twist, the definition of antisemitism used in the bill clearly covers portions of the Christian Bible, so the ignorant and compromised Republican legislators have now wholeheartedly endorsed banning the Bible in a country in which 95% of the population has Christian roots.
While I doubt that we will see any arrests that would survive legal challenge, once controversial ideas are increasingly banned from all respectable venues, much of the public, perhaps even including some confused law enforcement officers, may vaguely begin to assume that they have actually become illegal.
Although it received very little media coverage, the implications of this proposed legislation are certainly dramatic. Put simply, “antisemitism” is the dislike or criticism of Jews and “Anti-Zionism” is the same thing with regard to the State of Israel. So potentially banning any criticism of Jews or Israel would certainly represent a remarkable legal development in our society.
This massive suppression of all political opposition to Zionism through a mixture of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means has hardly escaped the notice of various outraged critics. Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are young Jewish progressives very sharply critical of Israel and its current attack on Gaza, and in their most recent livestream video a day or two before that Congressional vote, they agreed that Zionists were the greatest threat to American freedom and that our country was “under political occupation” by the Israel Lobby.
They may or may not have been aware that their angry denunciation closely paralleled one of the most notorious Far Right phrases of the last half-century, which condemned America’s existing political system as nothing more than ZOG, a “Zionist Occupation Government.” Over time, obvious factual reality gradually becomes apparent regardless of ideological predispositions.
- Israel/Gaza: The Masks Come Off in American Society
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 6, 2024 • 6,800 Words
In all of her interviews, the former California beauty queen emphasized that she was someone who was willing to stand by her moral and religious principles rather than sacrifice them in order to get invitations to fancy dinners or retain her “access” to the White House. And I discovered that her personal history strongly confirmed those bold claims.
When this battle over Zionism first erupted, her name had seemed vaguely familiar to me though I couldn’t quite place it. But some of her interviews quickly refreshed my memory of an earlier controversy surrounding her participation in the 2009 Miss USA competition.
Back then the antics of socialite heiress and reality television star Paris Hilton were attracting enormous popular interest, so a flamboyantly gay Hollywood gossip-blogger took the name “Perez Hilton” in a successful attempt to raise his own media profile.
Gay Marriage was a leading national issue at that time, the subject of numerous divisive political campaigns around the country. Although he was a gay male, Hilton had been named as a judge in the Miss USA female beauty competition, then sought to exploit that role to support a political cause he considered important.
The Wikipedia account explains that as one of the judges, he’d asked Prejean whether she believed that every U.S. state should legalize same-sex marriage. He probably assumed that she would be intimidated and say that she did, thereby allowing him to nail down the endorsement of a prominent Christian conservative, someone idolized by many young women and girls across the country. But based upon her deep religious faith, she instead responded:
Well, I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one way or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And, you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that, I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there. But that’s how I was raised and I believe that it should be between a man and a woman.[11][12][13][14]
He was outraged at what she said, bitterly attacking her and her words, declaring:
“She gave an awful, awful answer that alienated so many people.” He also told ABC News that she lost the crown because of how she answered the question.[9] Prejean has also stated that she believes that her answer cost her the crown.[16][17]
Prejean later wrote:
I was being dared—in front of the entire world—to give a candid answer to a serious question. I knew if I told the truth, I would lose all that I was competing for: the crown, the luxury apartment in New York City, the large salary—everything that went with the Miss USA title. I also knew, or suspected, that I was the frontrunner, and if I gritted my teeth and gave the politically correct answer, I could be Miss USA.[18]
Despite that immediate firestorm of controversy, she was still voted first runner-up. Both she and her antagonist agreed that she would have been named Miss USA if she had instead given the expected, politically correct answer.
Not long after being appointed to Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission last year, she recounted that personal story in an interview with a popular religious podcaster:
At the time of that 2009 incident, she was a young 21-year-old girl, raised in difficult family circumstances and deeply involved in beauty pageant competitions. Consider how remarkable it was for someone like that to publicly maintain her personal beliefs, knowing that by doing so she was foregoing such a tremendous honor and the chance to compete in the Miss Universe competition. That sort of personal courage is all too rare in today’s decadent America, and it certainly helps explain her current unwillingness to bend her knee to the powerful Zionist forces that dominant our society.
The term “Cancel Culture” had not yet been invented in 2009, but one of Prejean’s recent interviewers suggested that she may have been one of the very first non-political public figures ever vilified and “cancelled” merely for expressing her politically incorrect views.
The Explosive Holy Land Interviews of Tucker Carlson
For decades the political base of the Republican Party has consisted of conservative, religiously devout Christians. During his 2004 campaign, President George W. Bush probably owed his reelection to the series of state initiatives banning same-sex marriage that his party had put on the ballot to draw his voters to the polls. All 11 of those state ballot measures passed, mostly in huge landslides, but the media ridiculed them as completely unnecessary, declaring that Republicans had invented a fictitious threat to traditional marriage where none actually existed.
Yet less than a dozen years later, the heavily Republican Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage across America, declaring that for more than two centuries our American Constitution had actually guaranteed a right to Gay Marriage without anyone having ever been aware of that fact. Many wealthy and influential Republican donors strongly supported that new policy, and the Republican Party soon fully embraced what it had so vehemently opposed just a few years earlier.
For very similar reasons, an overwhelming majority of House Republicans voted in 2024 for legislation that banned the Christian bible from all of our colleges and outlawed its teachings. The obvious explanation of that bizarre development was a mixture of ignorance, gullibility, and the eager pursuit of the financial support of wealthy and powerful lobbyists.
But for decades, that same sort of harsh suppression of Christianity has already been steadily increasing in the holy land of the Middle East, the very place in which Jesus was born, proclaimed his doctrine, and accepted his martyrdom. Tucker Carlson is the leading figure in America’s conservative media landscape and in the last couple of years his shows have finally broken the wall of media silence preventing Americans from learning those bitter facts.
In April 2024 he released a long interview with a Christian evangelical pastor in the holy city of Bethlehem who described the severe oppression that he and his flock regularly faced at the hands of Zionist militants. These fiercely anti-Christian groups were bizarrely receiving the full support of America’s own Christian establishment.
This may have been one of the very first times that sizable numbers of Americans discovered that much of their own Christian leadership was supporting attacks against the Christian communities living in the very birthplace of Jesus.
Six months ago, Carlson aired another such interview, this time with Mother Agapia, the sister of George Stephanopoulos and a Christian Orthodox nun from New Jersey who had moved to the holy land in 1996. Their conversation ran for 90 minutes and accumulated more than two million views on YouTube.
She described the very difficult circumstances that she and her fellow Christians faced under Israeli domination and control. They lived in a brutal Zionist Apartheid state that oppressed both Christians and Muslims alike, and sought to drive out the centuries-old Christian communities, some of which stretched back in time to the very days of Jesus.
As the conversation progressed, a somewhat disbelieving Carlson asked her whether it was really true that Jewish settlers sometimes spit on Christian clergy. Sure, she said, they’ve spat on me.
At another point, she casually mentioned the case of an elderly American citizen who had been beaten to death by Jewish settlers, and once again, Carlson couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing, asking her to clarify it. She explained that the retiree was from Florida and had been visiting some of his local relatives when he had been brutally killed by Jewish militants. Naturally no one was ever been arrested or otherwise punished for that crime.
Carlson was equally startled to discover the extremely amicable relations long enjoyed between the Christians and Muslims of the area. For example, Mother Agapia mentioned that she taught at a Christian girls school but that 98% of her students were actually Muslim, a reality very different than what Carlson would have expected.
Another minor tidbit that seemed to surprise Carlson was when she mentioned the total contempt most Israelis expressed towards America and Americans. He considered that very odd given the enormous funding that America supplied to Israel, which could not continue to exist without American money and American political and military support. But she suggested that perhaps that bottomless support without any reciprocity was exactly the reason for such feelings of contempt.
During the last couple of weeks, Carlson strongly returned to this same important theme, with two long interviews that together ran well over three hours and were viewed a couple of million times.
While on a trip to the Middle East, he visited Jordan and interviewed the Christian Archbishop of the region, born in Israel and holding Israeli citizenship. Carlson seemed almost disbelieving when he was told of the severe restrictions and hostility that the local Christian community suffered at the hands of an Israeli government that received billions of dollars each year in American financial support, the vast majority of it coming from taxes paid by American Christians.
For two thousand years the entire region had been home to large and often thriving Christian communities, but over the last generation many of these had been destroyed or expelled because of the aggressive foreign policy initiatives undertaken by the American government, and this sharp decline was certainly true of the Christians of the holy land itself.
For decades our dishonest media had persuaded the American people and especially our Christian conservatives that their fellow Christians of the Middle East faced severe oppression at the hands of Muslim extremists, and in some cases this was correct. But those extremists usually gained power in Iraq, Syria, or elsewhere because of the military actions taken by the American government, overthrowing the previous, Christian-friendly governments of those countries. This led to the destruction of local Christian communities that had stretched back to the days of Jesus.
In the second part of that long video, Carlson interviewed a prominent Christian banker in Jordan, who explained to his audience that although his country was perhaps 97% Muslim, its small Christian minority was disproportionately wealthy and influential, and had the full support of the ruling Hashemite monarchy, direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammed.
Yet although the very successful Christian whom Carlson interviewed had lived his entire life just a few miles from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the other most sacred sites of his own religion, the Israeli government made it so difficult for nearby Christians to visit those places of worship or undertake a pilgrimage that he had only been there once in his entire life.
Another, even longer interview aired just a few days ago, running nearly two hours and watched on YouTube well over a million times.
Nablus had been the birthplace of Jesus, and Carlson spoke with a Christian Palestinian-American minister from that area, whose own family had lived there for the two thousand years since the founding of Christianity. But now the Christians of his village were being steadily pushed out of their lands by Jewish militants, who demanded that they permanently uproot themselves and go elsewhere, claiming that all of this territory had been granted to the Jews by divine right.
Just as in these other cases, Carlson was told that the Christians were regularly denied access to the holiest Christian sites of the region, even though they were the native people who had lived there for a thousand or two thousand years. Meanwhile, the Jewish militants who harassed and mistreated them were often recent arrivals from Brooklyn whose roots were in Eastern Europe, having no real connection whatsoever with the lands that they now claimed as their own.
The actions of these Jewish militants sometimes took a far more violent turn. Carlson’s guest explained that as a youngster, his own mother had been shot and severely wounded in her own home by a settler for no reason at all, and although she survived, if the trajectory of the bullet had been an inch or two different, she would have been killed.
All of these different Christians, whether American, Palestinian-American, or Palestinian, told exactly the same story of constant oppression or worse at the hands of the non-Christian Israeli government that America funded and supported.
Even just a few generations ago, no one in the West could have ever imagined that such a bizarre possibility might occur.
Indeed, as all of us learned from our basic history textbooks, the Popes of the Middle Ages had launched the Crusades almost a thousand years ago because they claimed that the Christians of the holy land were being mistreated by the local Islamic rulers and denied access to their sacred Christian sites. Some of the colonial interventions of the British and French empires of the two centuries title=”https://hal.science/hal-03996222/document” href=”https://hal.science/hal-03996222/document”>had involved similar justifications.
But today this same sort of harsh religious oppression of the Christians of Bethlehem, Nablus, Nazareth, Jerusalem, and that entire holy land was occurring with the complicity or even the active support of the leading Christian elements of the United States, the world’s most powerful nation and one having an overwhelmingly Christian population. Surely it would have been difficult for any science fiction writer or satirist to have invented such a strange story.
In her interview six months ago, Mother Agapia told Carlson that all the Christians and Muslims of the West Bank firmly believed that they would eventually suffer the same fate as their Gazan relatives, and a couple of Carlson’s interviews from that same period provided a very disturbing glimpse of just how dire that fate might be.
Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar had graduated West Point then spent the next twenty-five years as a Green Beret in the American military, including a dozen deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and numerous other conflict zones around the world, then retired in 2024.
Some months later, he was approached by a military contracting firm that was recruiting American combat veterans to provide security for the supposed humanitarian relief efforts aimed at feeding the starving Palestinian population of Gaza. Despite some concerns, he ultimately accepted that offer and spent part of mid-2025 serving at a senior role in that operation.
He was appalled by what he saw and after two months resigned his position. He then became a whistleblower, informing American media outlets of the horrific true circumstances of the Gaza situation. He was interviewed twice by Tucker Carlson for a total of more than three hours, and those two video segments attracted over 2.3 million views on YouTube.
In those interviews, he described Gaza as a post-Apocalyptic hellscape, in which everything had been totally destroyed, but was filled with an enormous mass of desperate, starving civilians, who were receiving only a small fraction of the food they needed to remain alive.
During his more than two decades as a Green Beret, he had been regularly deployed to major urban combat zones around the world, but he said that he had never seen anything remotely as terrible as these scenes from Gaza. There was a constant stench of death everywhere, due to the decaying human bodies.
Throughout his entire time there, he had never encountered a single armed Gazan, but the IDF forces still regularly fired at those desperate, unarmed crowds of civilians with rifles, machine-guns, tank shells, and mortar rounds.
As a West Point graduate and long-serving American military officer, he had been taught the laws of war as codified by the Geneva Convention. But he explained that what he regularly saw occurring in Gaza almost seemed the inverse-image of those legal requirements. He said that it was as if someone had taken the full catalogue of universally recognized international war crimes and turned those into a to-do checklist, directing the Israeli military forces deployed in Gaza and the military contractors assisting them to commit each and every one of those war-crimes.
His Wikipedia web page provided a useful summary of the accusations that he discussed at considerable length with Carlson and other media outlets:
- Witnessing contractors firing automatic weapons at crowds of civilians, which he described as “indiscriminate and unnecessary force”[6]
- Characterizing the aid sites as “designed as death traps,” built in active combat zones and surrounded by razor wire, which he stated violates the Geneva Conventions[11]
- Alleging that the aid sites served as “biometric surveillance honeypots,” where Palestinians’ faces were scanned to identify “persons of interest” for the IDF to target.[3]
- Reporting that a young boy named Amir was killed by gunfire shortly after collecting aid at one of the distribution points [12]
- Alleging that a woman was killed by a stun grenade fragment, contradicting GHF’s claim that she suffered from heat exhaustion [12]
- Claiming contractors were armed with armor-piercing ammunition and were in Israel on tourist visas, which he argued violated international law[11]
- Describing the aid distribution process as chaotic and insufficient to address famine conditions in Gaza[14]
Carlson seemed deeply moved by all of these horrific details of the situation in Gaza, especially since they were provided by such a highly trained and experienced American military combat veteran.
I think that these first-hand accounts about the dire current situation of Gazans and other Palestinians, whether Christian or Muslim, under Israeli rule are best understood within a broader conceptual framework.
Back in 2018, I’d drawn upon the remarkable research of Prof. Israel Shahak, an award-winning Israeli academic, to provide an overview of the astonishing tenets of traditional Judaism. Although mostly abandoned over the last couple of centuries by Jews living in the West, those resurgent religious doctrines have now become increasingly influential among Israeli Jews, with important political consequences. And both the grisly details of the Gaza conflict and Carlson’s interviews seem to strongly affirm the accuracy of Shahak’s remarkable claims.
If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyim frequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.
Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine and indeed obligatory to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.
As a further illustration of the seething hatred traditional Judaism radiates towards all those of a different background, saving the life of a non-Jew is generally considered improper or even prohibited, and taking any such action on the Sabbath would be an absolute violation of religious edict. Such dogmas are certainly ironic given the widespread presence of Jews in the medical profession during recent centuries, but they came to the fore in Israel when a religiously-minded military doctor took them to heart and his position was supported by the country’s highest religious authorities.
And while religious Judaism has a decidedly negative view towards all non-Jews, Christianity in particular is regarded as a total abomination, which must be wiped from the face of the earth.
Whereas pious Muslims consider Jesus as the holy prophet of God and Muhammed’s immediate predecessor, according to the Jewish Talmud, Jesus is perhaps the vilest being who ever lived, condemned to spend eternity in the bottommost pit of Hell, immersed in a boiling vat of excrement. Religious Jews regard the Muslim Quran as just another book, though a totally mistaken one, but the Christian Bible represents purest evil, and if circumstances permit, burning Bibles is a very praiseworthy act. Pious Jews are also enjoined to always spit three times at any cross or church they encounter, and direct a curse at all Christian cemeteries. Indeed, many deeply religious Jews utter a prayer each and every day for the immediate extermination of all Christians.
Over the years prominent Israeli rabbis have sometimes publicly debated whether Jewish power has now become sufficiently great that all the Christian churches of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other nearby areas can finally be destroyed, and the entire Holy Land completely cleansed of all traces of its Christian contamination. Some have taken this position, but most have urged prudence, arguing that Jews needed to gain some additional strength before they should take such a risky step. These days, many tens of millions of zealous Christians and especially Christian Zionists are enthusiastic advocates for Jews, Judaism, and Israel, and I strongly suspect that at least some of that enthusiasm is based upon ignorance…
If the Gentile population became aware of these Jewish religious beliefs and the behaviors they promote, major problems for Jews might develop, so an elaborate methodology of subterfuge, concealment, and dissimulation has come into being over the many centuries to minimize this possibility, especially including the mistranslation of sacred texts or the complete exclusion of crucial sections. Meanwhile, the traditional penalty for any Jew who “informs” to the authorities on any matter regarding the Jewish community has always been death, often preceded by hideous torture…
My encounter a decade ago with Shahak’s candid description of the true doctrines of traditional Judaism was certainly one of the most world-altering revelations of my entire life. But as I gradually digested the full implications, all sorts of puzzles and disconnected facts suddenly became much more clear. There were also some remarkable ironies, and not long afterward I joked to a (Jewish) friend of mine that I’d suddenly discovered that Nazism could best be described as “Judaism for Wimps” or perhaps Judaism as practiced by Mother Teresa of Calcutta…
Obviously the Talmud is hardly regular reading among ordinary Jews these days, and I would suspect that except for the strongly Orthodox and perhaps most rabbis, barely a sliver are aware of its highly controversial teachings. But it is important to keep in mind that until just a few generations ago, almost all European Jews were deeply Orthodox, and even today I would guess that the overwhelming majority of Jewish adults had Orthodox grand-parents. Highly distinctive cultural patterns and social attitudes can easily seep into a considerably wider population, especially one that remains ignorant of the origin of those sentiments, a condition enhancing their unrecognized influence. A religion based upon the principle of “Love Thy Neighbor” may or may not be workable in practice, but a religion based upon “Hate Thy Neighbor” might have long-term cultural ripple effects that extend far beyond the direct community of the deeply pious. If nearly all Jews for a thousand or two thousand years were taught to feel a seething hatred toward all non-Jews and also developed an enormous infrastructure of cultural dishonesty to mask that attitude, it is difficult to believe that such an unfortunate history has had absolutely no consequences for our present-day world, or that of the relatively recent past…
The notion that the world is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine has often been misattributed to the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, and over the last fifteen-odd years I’ve sometimes begun to believe that the historical events of our own era could be considered in a similar light. I’ve also sometimes joked with my friends that when the true history of our last one hundred years is finally written and told—probably by a Chinese professor at a Chinese university—none of the students in his lecture hall will ever believe a word of it.
- American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 16, 2018 • 7,800 Words
Israeli Rule of the Middle East… and of America?
Some of Carlson’s recent shows had been quite critical of Mike Huckabee, a conservative Republican political figure and Christian Zionist pastor, whom Trump had appointed as our ambassador to Israel.
Carlson had known and been friendly with Huckabee for decades, and after the two of them clashed on Twitter, he had agreed to travel to Israel and interview Huckabee on political issues and also on his religious doctrines, with that long interview airing a couple of days ago.
Some of the circumstances of Carlson’s short visit to Israel for the Huckabee interview were so unusual that he found it necessary to describe them at length in a prologue to the interview itself.
Over the last couple of years, Carlson’s outspokenness had led to a ferocious campaign of vilification by prominent pro-Israel American Jews, and at the beginning of January Carlson was named “Antisemite of the Year” by the organization StopAntisemitism. Some of those pro-Israel activists had gone so far as to denounce him as “a Nazi” and members of the Israeli government had said the same thing.
So as Carlson attempted to make arrangements for his trip, he became concerned by the very peculiar behavior of the Israeli officials whom he had contacted. Israeli airspace is heavily militarized, but they seemed strangely uninterested in the flight plan of the private plane that he had been forced to charter, and he was also informed that his security arrangements on the ground would be handled by a government official who had previously denounced him as “a Nazi.” Over the last couple of years, the Israeli government had killed around 200 journalists, some of them extremely prominent ones and American citizens, so even rather trusting individuals might become alarmed at this situation. According to Carlson, he shared his text exchanges with highly experienced foreign correspondents and he was told that they had never heard of a government behaving in such a strange and suspicious manner.
After enlisting the support of some highly placed American officials and taking whatever precautions he could, Carlson ultimately decided to confine his visit to the grounds of the Israeli airport. But after the interview had been completed and he was about to depart, members of his team were detained by Israeli security officials, who interrogated them about all sorts of personal and professional matters, none of which had anything to do with legitimate Israeli security concerns.
Carlson had spent more than three decades as a journalist, visiting numerous countries during his career, but nothing like this had ever previously happened to him.
The actual interview with Amb. Huckabee ran a couple of hours and raised a number of very interesting questions.
Carlson noted that at the height of the Cold War, our war-fighting plans against the USSR had been stolen by Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish spy working for Israeli intelligence. Israel had then traded those secret plans to the Soviets in exchange for various other considerations, while Pollard had eventually been caught and received a long prison sentence. He was often described as the most damaging spy in our entire national history.
But after being paroled, Pollard was later allowed to depart to Israel, where he was lauded as a national hero. He then began publicly urging all American Jews to follow his personal example and similarly spy against their own government on behalf of the Jewish State.
All of this was serious enough, but Carlson wondered why Huckabee had recently had a very friendly meeting at his American embassy with Pollard, who was arguably the worst traitor in all of American history. Other than suggesting that the meeting had not been as long nor as important as many people made it out to be, Huckabee really had no other defense of his official behavior.
Carlson also pointed out that considerable numbers of Jewish pedophiles who had been accused or arrested for crimes committed in America had fled to Israel and the government of that country had refused to extradite any of them. He asked what Huckabee had been doing on those legal cases, but the ambassador argued that they were outside his own bailiwick and instead were the responsibility of the Israeli and American court systems.
But the most interesting and enlightening elements related to Christian Zionism. Huckabee was an ordained minister, so Carlson hoped that he could clarify its doctrinal tenets.
Although many such religious matters were covered in their long discussion, I think the most important related to the Christian Zionist perspective on Israel’s rightful territory, which Huckabee claimed had been permanently deeded to the Jewish people by divine command in the Old Testament. The American ambassador emphasized that this certainly included the lands of Judea and Samaria, otherwise known as the Palestinian territories of the West Bank. According to Huckabee and other Christian Zionists, there was not the slightest doubt that these were lands that must be exclusively under the control of the Jews of Israel.
But Carlson then raised a very crucial point. According to the biblical passage that Huckabee and so many Israelis always cited, God had granted the Jews all the lands stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. So Israel’s divinely-mandated territory not only included the West Bank and Gaza but also all of Jordan and Lebanon, most of Syria, and very large portions of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Thus, Israel’s true borders encompassed nearly all of the Middle East.
Indeed, maps have been produced of this divinely-authorized Greater Israel and right-wing Israelis sometimes wear small images of that same map on their clothing.
Huckabee’s response amounted to sidestepping this issue. He repeatedly emphasized that the Israeli government had no current plans to seize the territories of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. But he never really disputed that Israel had as much legitimate right to the lands of all those other countries as it did to the West Bank and Gaza, and based upon the very clear meaning of that biblical passage, probably nearly all Christian Zionists would take the same position. Huckabee certainly never gave any indication that his own American government would strongly oppose any such program of massive Israeli territorial expansion. Instead, Huckabee even said “It would be fine if they took it all.”
Thus, an American ambassador had essentially endorsed the notion that Israel had a divine right to nearly all the lands of the Middle East, regardless of which other countries currently controlled those territories. Combined with Israel’s massive waves of recent aggression, launching major military attacks against seven other countries in the last year or two, this naturally set off considerable alarm-bells in most Middle Eastern capitals, and a firestorm of angry protest resulted.
If Huckabee’s statements were considered totally outrageous and unacceptable by the Trump Administration, he would immediately be fired, but I very much doubt that this will happen. Huckabee’s beliefs were shared by a large portion of the Israeli government and that government has massive influence over our own. Christian Zionists are an extremely important part of electoral base of the Republican Party, and Huckabee’s views reflected that of Christian Zionism. But if Huckabee holds his job, most other Middle Eastern countries will recognize the huge and troubling implications for their own regional security, perhaps with important political consequences.
Just over 65 years ago, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as our first Catholic president. Although that denominational distinction soon faded in importance, at the time it was considered quite remarkable, with all thirty-four of his predecessors having been protestants, the largest number of them sharing Carlson’s own Anglican roots.
Religious matters including confessional ones seemed to play little role in the Kennedy Administration, which marked the High Noon of what had already become known as the American Century. But within just a couple of years, the tragedy in Dallas forever changed the trajectory of our national history, and it was soon seen as the opening blow in a decade filled with other major assassinations, violent urban unrest, and a long and unsuccessful foreign war.
In the vacuum of space, the lack of air resistance means that objects once set into motion continue on their trajectories almost indefinitely. A single, gentle shove can send a massive structure on its way to the edge of our solar system and far beyond.
Most of us have become aware of the extremely strange behavior of our elected government on so many important matters, especially those related to Israel and the Middle East. We are now on the very verge of a major new war against Iran, the sort of aggressive military action that so many of President Trump’s supporters had thought they were voting against, and such a war is currently opposed by some 80% of the American people.
Given that Iran has promised to retaliate against the vulnerable energy infrastructure of those nearby countries that lend any assistance to an American attack and may close the Strait of Hormuz that constitutes the world’s oil windpipe, the consequences of such a war might be utterly disastrous for our own country and for the entire world. Yet despite such seemingly strong reasons to avoid it, that war seems likely to occur.
In many respects, the American motives for an attack on Iran seem very difficult to comprehend. But I think that a case can be made that the origins of such a war actually stretch back to the 1963 events in Dallas and the political trajectory that was then set into motion, and more and more thoughtful Americans are beginning to consider that seemingly astonishing possibility.
Although JFK conspiracy theories had been widely popular for six decades, a few years ago I doubt that even 1% of the numerous JFK conspiracy researchers would ever contemplate the possibility that Israel and Mossad had been involved in that assassination. Michael Collins Piper had published his seminal book more than three decades ago, but almost no one in the conspiracy-community ever even acknowledged its existence, let alone endorsed it.
But in the last couple of years, that situation has suddenly started to change. As I wrote in late 2024:
When I first came across Piper’s assassination framework a decade or so ago, it immediately struck me as very compelling, and I was hardly surprised to discover that his book spent many years as an underground bestseller. But his theory was so exceptionally explosive that for more than three decades it has been almost totally boycotted within the large JFK conspiracy-community, so that scarcely a sliver of the major books in that genre or their authors have even been willing to acknowledge its existence.
However, at very long last, there are indications that his theory may now finally be reaching wider public awareness. Anya Parampil is a young progressive journalist at the Grayzone, married to Max Blumenthal, the editor of that publication, and she has always seemed someone of very mainstream if left-leaning views, holding few if any conspiratorial beliefs. But in a remarkable recent interview on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s YouTube channel, she strongly hinted at her awareness of the Piper Hypothesis, and the very self-confident tone of her statements suggested that such ideas have now become widespread in her personal political circles.
Then last year, former CIA officers Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson also came extremely close to fingering Israel and its Mossad in the JFK Assassination:
Johnson followed up his remarks by making an explicit statement:
The failure to do a proper forensic analysis of the entry and exit wounds is another bit of circumstantial evidence that Kennedy’s murder was planned and orchestrated. Yes, it was a conspiracy. I think Michael Collins Piper’s book, Final Judgment, provides the best explanation of the conspiracy.
But the most dramatic development came last week as Prof. Jeffrey Sachs was discussing the terrible dangers to the world of an American war with Iran and his desperate hope that Trump would somehow find the personal courage to avert an attack:
I cannot recall the last time that anyone of his enormous mainstream stature and respectability had made those sorts of public remarks.
Source: The Unz Review
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