U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee this week urged Jewish leaders not to be silent in the face of antisemitism as GOP circles increasingly split on attitudes toward Israel and Jews.
During a visit to Israel, Huckabee was approached with concerns from the Jewish community that figures such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are fomenting antisemitism and perpetuating false claims about the Jewish state. Rabbi Efrem Goldberg, who helps lead a Florida synagogue, asked Huckabee during a panel event if it would be better strategically to ignore such people than engage with their claims, given fears that addressing them might add “fuel to the fire.”
Huckabee emphatically replied that all antisemitism must be “confronted” or else risk becoming “only the narrative that’s being put out there.” He said “half-truths” from Carlson and others must be exposed, and swatted down the commentator’s accusation that Israel systematically persecutes Christians. Huckabee also rebuked claims from Carlson that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “bossing” around President Donald Trump, saying it “insults the president” to pretend he is “not strong enough to make his own decisions.”
“You cannot let it go unanswered. Letting it go unanswered is essentially agreeing with it,” Huckabee warned. “If you speak a half-truth as if it is the whole truth, it becomes an untruth.”
His comments come as the GOP world has become increasingly divided on the issue of Israel and Jews. Anti-Israel influencers such as Carlson, Owens, and Nick Fuentes have been gaining traction on the idea that antizionism is not antisemitism and have been accused of spreading antisemitic tropes about Jews seeking to control institutions and political systems, including in the United States. Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk’s death sparked much of the debate around Jews, as Owens and others suggested Israel bore some of the blame for his assassination.
“The sad reality is, there is a risk, and that risk is that by calling attention, giving them even that much credibility, if you will, will probably draw eyeballs to them, and it may cause people to say, ‘Oh, you know, yeah, that guy’s, I like his message,’” Huckabee said this week. “It’s the risk we have to take, because speaking against something that we know is evil and is factually wrong, demonstrably wrong, if we don’t do it, then the narrative of the lie becomes, in essence, the only narrative that’s being put out there.”
Addressing Carlson’s claims that Israel is deeply hostile to Christians, Huckabee said in the “100 times” he’s been to the country, and the year he lived there as an evangelical, “nobody’s ever heckled me.”
“Everybody I know in Israel that I personally know finds it repulsive. The prime minister has spoken out strongly against it, as has the president and the foreign minister. I don’t know of anybody who has said that’s a wonderful thing, but it’s a very limited thing. It’s isolated,” he said.
Huckabee expressed concern that Carlson has been consistently offering antisemitic voices such as Fuentes ample opportunity to express their views, without significant pushback, while keeping viewpoints sympathetic to Israel at bay. And the ambassador ripped Carlson’s claims that he was unfairly detained at an Israeli airport earlier this month, after meeting with Huckabee.
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Carlson said security “hauled” his executive producer into a side room at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport complex, seized their passports, and demanded to know what they had spoken to Huckabee about. Video footage of Carlson smiling and taking photos with the airport personnel appeared to disprove his account, which U.S. and Israeli officials disputed as false.
“He was sitting in the most luxurious private lounge that I’ve ever been in in the world, and I’ve been in quite a few. And he didn’t get his passport confiscated. They took it so that they could go and do the processing while he could sit and have a nice snack in a La-Z-Boy recliner,” Huckabee said. “But then somehow, when it was all over, he made it sound like he was mugged.”
