Tucker Carlson takes on the Bible

By the time Tucker Carlson trashed the Book of Esther, describing the source of the Jewish festival of Purim, it was already Passover. But timing was the least of his errors, and since he took it upon himself to rewrite Scripture and misinform the masses, those who revere the Holy Bible must now take a stand for God and his Word.

Carlson told his listeners that the Book of Esther was “controversial,” that the Book describes: A Genocide of Persians. Oh yeah, 75,000 Persians... Not just people who committed crimes but people who were Persian, and that’s why they were killed.

I would suggest that such a grievous misreading requires not only a “low IQ,” as President Trump recently put it, but a mind burdened by hate. Call it “Jew Derangement Syndrome.” And far from being an affliction limited to Carlson and a few others, this particular mental illness afflicts the multitudes claiming Israel committed a “genocide” in Gaza, rather than Persia. And that is why it is so crucial that those who wish to learn from the Bible, rather than rewrite it to serve their own bigoted interests, emphatically correct the record.

The account in the Book of Esther is quite the opposite of Carlson’s. There was indeed a planned genocide, but of the Jews, architected by the evil Haman. When Queen Esther intervened, disclosing that she was a Jew herself, King Ahasuerus was bound by Persian law that his decrees not be rescinded. Instead he issued a second one, permitting the Jews to defend themselves.

The fighting that followed, per the Biblical text, was not an offensive campaign, but self-defense against a genocidal mob.

Perhaps Carlson’s greatest offense was to claim that the mob was targeted because they were Persian. “That’s why they were killed,” he said. Scripture could not be more clear; those killed were “of those who hated them,” says Esther 9:16. They came from all 127 nationalities of the empire; their unifying characteristic was murderous hatred for Jews.

The obvious motivation for this inversion, misportraying a genocidal band of antisemites as innocent victims of Jewish bigotry, is that Carlson shares their same hate. Allowing Jews to defend themselves is what he terms “genocide.” By telling a lie so obvious, Carlson exposed a broader pattern which is as evident regarding Israel the modern country as Israel the ancient people.

The side responding to violence is recast as the initiator, while the culpability and hateful motivations of those that launched the attack is ignored. Context is ignored, in favor of an immoral calculus in which the side with the lower casualty count is presumed to be the villain.

This is just as obvious in media reports relying upon the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry as it is in Carlson’s dystopian version of Esther. This type of inversion is found not only in the charge of genocide, but also in the details. For example, it is a criminal violation of the laws of warfare to store weapons in a school, or to use a hospital as a military base. Once this crime has been committed, the former school or hospital becomes a legitimate military target as a result. Yet Hamas knew that it could commit war crimes with impunity, because global media outlets would falsely report that Israel bombed a school or hospital, rather than the Hamas base that they had become.

To offer a specific illustration, when Israel bombed the Hamas Command and Control center located in the Nasser Hospital building in Khan Younis, outlets from the BBC to NPR to CNN reported the “outrage” that Israel bombed a “hospital” and “killed journalists, health workers and emergency response crews.” It failed to mention that the erstwhile hospital was a base for Hamas fighters that had been used to imprison hostages.

This sort of omission of relevant context happened far too often to be brushed away as an innocent error. In a just and decent world, CNN executives would have faced federal charges under the Antiterrorism Act for having provided material support to Hamas.

Such lies have a real human cost: Hamas puts journalists, doctors, and children at risk knowing both that Israel will risk her own soldiers’ lives to take more efforts to avoid harming them than would any other military force, and that despite this, when civilians are inevitably harmed, Israel rather than Hamas will be blamed. Gazan children died in the conflict because Hamas knew it could rely upon CNN to cover for its crimes.

Antisemitism does not merely harm Jews.

The Book of Esther is deliberately structured to highlight the reversal of fortune—the oppressed rising up against their would‐be oppressors. But the story is also careful to preserve the moral logic of that reversal. The Jews defend themselves; they do not plunder, nor do they initiate violence. The text is a celebration of survival, not slaughter. And that is the account found in the most published Book on earth.

Esther, and Carlson’s distortion thereof, tells us how dangerous misinformation can be, especially when motivated by hate.

Newscasters can reverse victims and villains. Pundits can invert the moral order of a story. And podcasters can mislead us into condemning those who are simply fighting for their survival.

In an age saturated with data but starved for context, the ancient text offers both modern lessons, and an obligation to stand up in its defense.