RON UNZ—Some of Carlson’s recent shows had been quite critical of Mike Huckabee, a conservative Republican political figure and Christian Zionist pastor, whom Trump had appointed as our ambassador to Israel.
Carlson had known and been friendly with Huckabee for decades, and after the two of them clashed on Twitter, he had agreed to travel to Israel and interview Huckabee on political issues and also on his religious doctrines, with that long video airing a couple of days ago.
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Some of the circumstances of Carlson’s short visit to Israel for the Huckabee interview were so unusual that he found it necessary to describe them at length in a prologue to the interview itself.
Over the last couple of years, Carlson’s outspokenness had led to a ferocious campaign of vilification by prominent pro-Israel American Jews, and at the beginning of January Carlson was named “Antisemite of the Year” by the organization StopAntisemitism. Some of those pro-Israel activists had gone so far as to denounce him as “a Nazi” and members of the Israeli government had said the same thing.
So as Carlson attempted to make arrangements for his trip, he became concerned by the very peculiar behavior of the Israeli officials whom he had contacted. Israeli airspace is heavily militarized, but they seemed strangely uninterested in the flight plan of the private plane that he had been forced to charter, and he was also informed that his security arrangements on the ground would be handled by a government official who had previously denounced him as “a Nazi.” Over the last couple of years, the Israeli government had killed around 200 journalists, some of them extremely prominent ones and American citizens, so even rather trusting individuals might become alarmed at this situation. According to Carlson, he shared his text exchanges with highly experienced foreign correspondents and he was told that they had never heard of a government behaving in such a strange and suspicious manner.
