Tucker Carlson is calling for Mike Huckabee to be fired as U.S. ambassador to Israel, after Huckabee did not defend a U.S. Congressman violently detained by Israeli settlers.
This is the second event in a few days where Israeli settlers have attacked Americans, including four CNN journalists.
Tucker Carlson
On Saturday, Carlson wrote: “An Amercian member of Congress is threatened by foreign terrorists carrying American rifles, backed by a foreign military paid for by American taxpayers, and the U.S. ambassador to that country says not a word in defense of his own countryman, and instead uses his social media accounts to promote his own vapid cable news appearances, which amount to propaganda for that same foreign country. It’s too much, too insulting and humiliating to America. This is how revolutions start. For the sake our nation, Mike Huckabee should be removed from his post immediately.”
Online commentator Josh Helfgott offered context to what happened: “Armed men surrounded a U.S. congressman’s van in the occupied West Bank, laughed while keeping him trapped, and refused to let him leave. When Israeli soldiers showed up, they didn’t help him. They stood with the armed men, the congressman said.”
That congressman was Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, who was touring the southern West Bank last Wednesday when his delegation stopped in Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian village where Bedouin families were displaced after settler attacks.
Khanna says the armed men who threatened him were Israeli settlers, some masked and some brandishing U.S.-made M4 rifles.
“They filmed the delegation, cursed at them, surrounded the van, and refused to let them pass,” Helfgott explained. “Khanna’s security aide said it was the most concerned he had been in decades of tours. Then four Israeli soldiers showed up.”
US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is presented with a gift as he visits the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews are allowed to pray, while accompanied by Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch. (Photo by GIL COHEN-MAGEN/AFP via Getty Images)
By Khanna’s account, the Israeli soldiers did not help him but talked and laughed with his attackers instead.
“The delegation was only able to leave after urgent calls to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem reached Israeli officials. Police eventually came and cleared the road,” Helfgott said. “Khanna is now calling on Israel to prosecute both the settlers and the soldiers involved.”
The congressman’s bigger point: “If they will do this to an American congressman, imagine what is happening to Palestinian families who are just trying to live.”
Carlson, a former Fox News host who now is highly critical of the Trump administration, brought the story to international attention.
And now, rather than apologizing to Khanna, Israeli officials are attacking him in the news media and claiming he created the problem. Huckabee appears to have joined the plan to blame Khahna for creating and overstating the crisis.
Ro Khanna
Huckabee and other far-right Americans have been unwilling to criticize Israeli settlers, whose possession of lands in the West Bank has been found illegal by international courts. Reports of settler violence are common.
At the same time, CNN reports four settlers have been arrested after an attack on CNN and other journalists in the occupied West Bank Saturday.
“The journalists were near the village of Sinjil north of Ramallah to cover the one-year anniversary of the killing of Saif Musallet, a Palestinian-American who was beaten to death by Jewish settlers last July,” the CNN reports states. “Within minutes of arriving at the location where Musallet was killed, Israeli settlers descended on the area. As the CNN team and other journalists tried to leave, a group of four settlers blocked the road with their car and tried to keep the vehicles from moving forward.”
In this case, when police officers and Israeli soldiers arrived, they arrested four suspects and seized clubs and a knife from inside the vehicle.
“The Israel Police and the (Israel Defense Forces) view any manifestation of violence or causing damage to property very seriously, especially when it concerns media personnel performing their work,” a police statement said.
That accountability for violence by settlers did not apply in Khanna’s situation, he said, and American citizens who live in the area are being threatened.
“I saw the arrogance in the eyes of those settlers, 21- and 22-year-olds with guns, laughing that they had detained us, the arrogance of those young IDF soldiers that my tax dollars are funding, having no respect for the fact that they were detaining Americans, no respect that there was an American congressperson in that bus, and laughing when our translator told them that there are Americans there and the American embassy is concerned,” Khanna told Reuters.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed Israeli courts for being “very lenient” against settler violence.