Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and the Fight to Contain Radical Islam

If today is your day, have a happy one.

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Yesterday's column about Candace Owens drew an overwhelming, hugely positive response — and I thank you for that. Yesterday’s piece, however, leads us to today’s piece, but for reasons you might not expect.

Let me explain: One aspect people may not realize about writing in an environment like PJ Media is the research required to create this daily missive. Every column I write costs me a bare minimum of three to five hours, depending on what else the day throws at me. And as you can imagine, a lot of the material I analyze in the process of that research never makes it into the final piece.

I mention this not to fish for sympathy — in truth, I rather enjoy the work — but to explain how today’s column came about. It grew directly out of yesterday’s research. In the process of my backgrounding yesterday’s visit, my web crawler came up with an interview Dennis Prager gave with The Free Press in mid-March. It was one of the links I glanced at for yesterday’s column, but passed over.

The more I sat with it, however, the more I felt the interview deserved its own column. I’m going to draw your attention to two points raised in that interview. One, I guess, qualifies as an extension of yesterday’s column, and one makes a hugely valid point about our efforts to contain radical Islam.

I’ll link the video, but won’t embed it, for reasons of length and pacing. If you’d like to see the interview itself, follow the link, and you’re on your own. I will, however, share transcript excerpts from that interview. Most of you will know that Prager’s accident — the details of which I’ll spare you — left him paralyzed from the shoulders down. Take a moment and say a prayer for the man. That said, his mind is clearly intact, and as formidable as it ever has been.

Abigail Shrier of The Free Press conducts the interview. We pick up in mid-conversation:

Shrier: And examples of these unhealthy developments on the American right uh would include assertions that American Jews are all Israel first, that Israel was somehow involved in the murder of Charlie Kirk, that American support for Israel is being elicited by blackmail over Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, that today's Jews aren't the real Jews of the Bible, as Tucker Carlson re recently suggested. And of course, Tucker Carlson's most recent claim to his millions of viewers that Chabad, the Hasidic movement within Orthodox Judaism, was somehow involved in America's decision to strike Iran. And I wanted to know what appears to be happening from your point of view. These are not ideas we saw emanating from mainstream voices on the American right for generations, if ever. What is going on?
 
Prager: Nobody knows the answer. What animates Tucker Carlson to have this?
 If anybody has Jew first or Israel first, it's he and Candace Owens, they're the first people they blame for whatever happens including Charlie Kirk's murder, for example.

By the way, just to give people an idea of Charlie Kirk and Jews, Charlie Kirk's last book published posthumously, but which he finished before he was terribly killed, is “Stop in the name of God”.

It is an argument for keeping Shabbat. Not Sunday, but Friday night to Saturday night as Jews do. He turned off his cell phone for those hours as an example and he dedicated the book to Dennis Prager because he listened to all 245 hours of my Torah commentary that are available. He called me almost every week for years to discuss with me what he had just heard in that we last spoke together at Arizona State University. There were tremendous protests against both of us speaking and they spoke about how Charlie Kirk will speak hate.

Charlie Kirk's entire half hour, every minute of his half hour was devoted to making the case for Christians to observe Shabbat. Okay, that was his hatefilled speech.

This guy was the opposite of an anti-semite. He was probably a philo-Semite, a lover of things Jewish. So I can't explain Tucker or Candice, but there is… I can only say this, what they are doing is dividing the anti-left. And since the left destroys everything it touches, and that's its moral record, dividing the right means allowing the left to continue its nihilistic venture throughout society.

That’s an interesting angle. Clear divisions are opening on the right over Tucker Carlson — and by extension, Candace Owens. Not that I think either one planned it that way, mind; I don’t credit them with the mental ability for that kind of strategic foresight. Evil masterminds laying elaborate schemes to split the right? Nah. Not those two. Sorry.

However that may be, Prager’s correct here: that’s the effect, whatever the intent. He’s also correct in the next clip, which goes well beyond Carlson and Owens. Scan ahead a couple minutes in the interview and we find:

Shrier:You know what what what's interesting is that the you know Tucker Candace world view that you've been describing is is so dark. It's so uh damning of America and I wonder what is the antidote to its growing popularity in this country? What do we do?

Prager: Oh, the antidote is courage. It's always the antidote to what is bad. People have to come out and say they're advocating bad, indeed evil, ideas.

 Another example is Candace Owens in her very long dialogue with Tucker Carlson said near the end that Israel is the demonic country.  In other words it's the most evil country on earth that she will never support it and so on, and these are incredible statements.

One of the most decent societies in the world. The accusation that it's an apartheid state and committing genocide these are libels; they're not true.

There are five times as many Palestinians today as there were when Israel was founded. That's not an effective genocide. There is no notion of committing genocide.

Indeed. The claim of genocide in warfare is always shaky from the start and it is made so by the very definition of the word.

But what are you going to do when Hamas has in its charter the eradication, the annihilation, of the Jewish state of Israel and its Jews? Well, what is Israel to do?
 
 People say, well, they shouldn't be bombing any civilians. Well, as it happens, there's no way to know who is Hamas. It is a war crime not to wear uniforms. They don't wear uniforms. They wear the same clothing as civilians do in Gaza. So there would be no way if Israel could pinpoint. Israel sends leaflets: we will be bombing this apartment building, leave.
 
 How many countries have ever done that in the history of warfare?

Someone needs to deliver this message directly to, for example, the geniuses shrieking about a bombed girls’ school — and that outrage assumes the school was even an intentional target, which nobody has actually established. But let’s set that aside, because there are other, easier proofs of Prager’s statement. Iran. Lebanon. Gaza.

Let’s not kid ourselves. We’re fighting a multi-front guerrilla war in those places — and no, that’s not a talking point cooked up for cable news; it’s a military and legal reality that serious people have understood for decades.

Guerrilla warfare deliberately erases the line between combatant and civilian. That’s not a tragic side effect — it’s the whole strategy. Every civilian becomes a potential belligerent. Probable, even. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps didn’t stumble into this arrangement; they engineered it. They’ve spent decades perfecting the exquisite art of launching missiles from hospitals, stockpiling weapons beneath schools, and dressing their military infrastructure in children, using them as shields.

They built their entire war-fighting doctrine around a single, devastatingly accurate bet: that the West is too squeamish to name what it’s looking at.

To their great credit — they read the Democratic Party perfectly. When Democrats hold power in Washington, radical Islamists can count on their human shields pulling double duty: protecting military assets and generating the international outrage that sends Western liberals to the streets on their behalf for their weekend get-togethers blocking streets, shattering business windows, etc. Clever, really. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the IRGC don’t treat their civilian populations as people to be protected. They treat them as ordnance — just another weapon system to deploy against their enemies, which, as Prager points out, are in turn defined in their respective government charters.

The only difference between a rocket and a refugee, in their calculus, is which one the cameras follow. Put another way, one of the fronts of this war on radical Islam is being fought on is the PR war, on the screens of every TV in the West.

Thought of the Day: “Whose sore task does not divide Sunday from the rest of the week?” William Shakespeare, Hamlet

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