OPINION:
Tucker Carlson and other members of the isolationist, so-far-right-they’re-becoming-left camp are a collective dog with a bone when it comes to Israel and the Jews.
The most recent bandwagon onto which they have jumped in an effort to get everyone else to find the Jewish people as loathsome as they do: the Jeffrey Epstein saga.
Last week at the Turning Point USA summit, the former Fox News host said that “every single person in Washington” thinks the convicted sex offender worked for Israel, “running a blackmail operation.”
“I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t think that,” he continued. “I don’t know any of them that hate Israel. But no one feels they can say that.”
Why don’t they “feel” they can say as much? Those familiar with Mr. Carlson’s recent rants about Jews and Israel can probably fill in the blanks: because the Jews control the world, of course. It’s a trope Mr. Carlson danced around during the remainder of his Turning Point USA speech, in which he also hinted that President Trump supporter and hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman had Epstein connections. (Mr. Ackman is — surprise, surprise — Jewish.)
Mr. Carlson is not alone on the political right in trying to smear prominent Jews or Israel with the Epstein brush; he wasn’t even alone in doing it at Turning Point USA.
Fellow former Fox alum Megyn Kelly said during an onstage chat with Charlie Kirk at the event that she suspected intelligence community involvement in the Epstein scandal and that if she had to choose a specific agency, it would be “Mossad, given [Epstein’s] connect to Ghislaine Maxwell.”
The gossamer-thin connection to which Ms. Kelly referred is the rumored tie between Robert Maxwell, the father of Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, and the Mossad some 40 years ago.
Yet even that link is tenuous. In 1991, The Sunday Times of London revealed that allegations made by journalist Seymour Hersh that Maxwell had been critical in the kidnapping of Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli activist who gave Israel’s nuclear secrets to the newspaper, were based on a hoax.
According to The Sunday Times, the hoax revelation cast “doubt on Hersh’s recent claims that Maxwell … was an agent for Mossad, [Israel’s] intelligence service.”
Then there’s the fact that former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett immediately dismissed the Epstein-Mossad connection.
“As a former Israeli Prime Minister, with the Mossad having reported directly to me, I say to you with 100% certainty: the accusation that Jeffrey Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false,” he posted on X. “Epstein never worked for the Mossad.”
What’s more, if Epstein had worked for the agency blackmailing high-profile people, it would have marked an egregious failure of U.S. intelligence.
That’s an unlikely scenario, particularly as it “overlooks the long-standing, deeply embedded relationship between the Clintons and the American intelligence community,” said journalist Yair Kleinbaum.
“The idea that Epstein operated as an Israeli asset, without the knowledge or involvement of U.S. intelligence, is highly implausible, especially considering the extraordinary access he gained to Bill Clinton,” Mr. Kleinbaum writes on JFeed.com.
Though Mr. Carlson would surely like to believe otherwise, nothing is groundbreaking about alleging that a rotten person who happened to be Jewish was engaged in a larger, nefarious conspiracy by a global Jewish cabal.
It’s just the centuries-old blood libel dressed in a bow tie.
In 1171, and for many years after, it was the claim that Jews use the blood of Christian children to make matzo; today, it’s Tucker Carlson’s evidence-free allegations that a Jewish pedophile was a spy for the Jewish state.
We’ve been here before, even recently. After the 2008 arrest of Bernie Madoff, who perpetrated the largest known Ponzi scheme to date, the internet was awash in theories that Madoff had Israeli intelligence ties and/or had funneled the money he stole, mostly from fellow Jews, mind you, to Israel.
In 2005, Newsweek reported that the Justice Department “played hardball” with thieving lobbyist Jack Abramoff “in part because of concerns he might flee to Israel.”
The unspoken contention is that Jews have only one loyalty: to their Jewishness and/or Israel. And when we uncover bad Jews, we can be sure their evil is connected to their ethnic fealty.
Epstein was a despicable human being, but his Jewishness and any affection he might have had or support he might have shown for Israel do not make him a Mossad agent.
It’s time for Mr. Carlson and his acolytes to move on.
• Anath Hartmann is deputy commentary editor for The Washington Times.
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