Israel, Islam, and the Persecution of Christians
An Objective Response to Tucker Carlson
On numerous occasions, Tucker Carlson has spoken about what he presents as Israeli hostility for and outright persecution of Christians.
On the one hand, and to be sure, if Israelis—or anyone else for that matter—attack Christians and/or express hostility for Christianity—breaking crosses or statues, and/or desecrating churches—they should be exposed and questioned. Only recently I interviewed Dr. Iddo Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s brother, and asked him directly about this issue (video here).
In this sense, Tucker is not to blame: Wherever there are injustices, wherever innocents are abused, we should know about and have the right to look into and examine it.
On the other hand, what, exactly, is Tucker’s motive? He says he’s a Christian who cares about fellow Christians around the world—and yet it seems that he only talks about Christians under Israeli authority.
This would suggest that Christians suffer more from Israeli actions than anything and anyone else around the world. Why else would Tucker only focus on the Holy Land’s Christians?
Is that the case?
Here is where the narrative falls apart.
Christians all around the world—at the very least, 388 million of them—are being persecuted. Indeed, earlier this week, I summarized the latest findings of the World Watch List, an annual report by the human rights organization Open Doors, which ranks the 50 countries where Christians are most persecuted.
It found that in 2025, 4,849 Christians — more than 13 a day on average — were murdered for “faith-related reasons.” Another 4,712 were detained without trial, and 3,632 churches and Christian properties were attacked, vandalized, desecrated, torched, or merely shut down by authorities.
Now here’s the part you would never know if you only listened to Tucker: the persecution that occurs in 39 of the 50 worst nations—that is, 78%—is a byproduct of “Islamic oppression” and/or occurs in Muslim majority nations.
Moreover, this Muslim persecution of Christians is often outright heinous, and far transcends hostility for Christian symbols. See the Appendix below which lists dozens of examples of Muslims massacring and blowing to bits a total of over a thousand Christians who were peacefully worshipping inside their churches.
By the way, guess which nation does not even make the list of 50 worst nations persecuting Christians?
The one Tucker Carlson would have you believe is the new Nero—or rather Dhu Nawas—of our age: Israel.
Again, this is not to deny what appears to be a troubling animus for Christians among segments of Israel’s Jewish population. According to one study by a Jerusalem-based human rights organization, in 2025 there were 61 physical attacks on Christians in Israel—from spitting, using pepper spray, to outright blows—28 cases of verbal harassment, and 52 cases of church vandalism.
Even as I write, just a few days ago in Jerusalem, a Jewish man violently shoved a nun to the ground from behind, before kicking her.
The point is not that we should sideline or minimize what happens to Christians when Israelis are involved. That would be hypocritical.
Rather, the point here is one of context: both quantitatively and qualitatively, Christians are suffering far worse abuses around the world; and, as seen, most of that global persecution takes place at the hands of Muslims.
And yet, Tucker Carlson—who appears to care about the plight of persecuted Christians—never touches on this topic. In fact, he regularly covers for and even promotes the religion behind this persecution—Islam.
If this assertion strikes you as overly “Islamophobic,” consider: the 39 Muslim nations making the aforementioned list of 50 worst persecutors are different in many respects—racially, socially, economically, and governmentally: some are filthy rich (Saudi Arabia), while others are unimaginably poor (Somalia); some are technologically advanced (Iran), while others are far from it (Yemen); they are represented by a variety of governments (republics, monarchies, theocracies) and various races—Arabs, Persians, black Africans, Indonesians, Afghans, and Pakistanis.
Their only commonality—the common denominator these Christian persecuting nations all share—is Islam. Hence, that is the root cause of the majority of persecution around the world.
Nor is Muslim hostility for Christianity a new development. It was always like this—for well over a millennium, a time during which Muslims violently conquered three-quarters of the Christian world. Consider the rather prophetic words of Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), a prominent European intellectual:
Millions of modern people of the white civilization—that is, the civilization of Europe and America—have forgotten all about Islam… It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past.
Keep in mind that Belloc wrote this in 1938—more than a decade before Israel came into being and when the Islamic world was at its absolute weakest relative to the West. Time has only proven him correct.
Despite all this—and here we come to the real issue—Tucker has repeatedly suggested that “Islamic terrorism” is a bogey man, apparently made up by the “Israeli lobby.”
He has repeatedly praised Muslim nations, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia—even though both nations have called on their citizens to hate all non-Muslims, including Americans, in keeping with the Islamic doctrine of al-wala’ w’al bara’.
Worse, Saudi Arabia is a notorious and “extreme persecutor” of Christians (ranked #13). In that nation, no church can, by decree of fatwa, ever be built and any found must be destroyed. Homes are raided for any signs of Christian activity. Christians quietly celebrating Christmas in their apartments are arrested, thrown in prisons, and tortured. Christians cannot openly wear crosses or display religious items—even tattoos with Christian imagery have led to arrests (e.g., a Colombian soccer player in 2015).
Meanwhile, the same Tucker Carlson who is keen on talking about Christians in Israel says not a word about Christians in Saudi Arabia. Instead, while being hosted by the Saudis, he congratulated them by saying, as “a pretty fervent Christian, I feel completely comfortable here in the seat of Islam.”
He has also insisted that “Muslims love Jesus”—a claim which, if believed, would suggest that Muslims never persecute the followers of Jesus, aka Christians (see my response here or here).
Most recently, I saw a video clip of Tucker being awed as a Mideast man explained to him how Muslims take care of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (no mention was made that it was Muslims who had repeatedly attacked, defiled, and demolished it over the centuries—most dramatically in 1009—precipitating the First Crusade).
Now we come to the big question—why is Tucker not talking about and even covering up the Muslim persecution of Christians?
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