The Ottoman state and its heir, modern Turkey, committed a series of massacres against Christian minorities so vast and so systematic that the death toll between three to six million people, more than half of them Christian. What began in the spring of 1915 with the arrest and execution of more than 350 Armenian community leaders and intellectuals, a deliberate decapitation of the people’s civic and cultural backbone, became the first methodically organized genocide in the modern era: mass killing, death marches, the rape of women, the abduction of children, and the destruction of entire communities stretching back centuries.

But Ottoman crimes against Christians did not begin in 1915. They stretched back generations.

A Long History of Ottoman Massacres Against Christians

The fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453, opened with three days of sanctioned pillage, killing, rape, and enslavement. What followed across the next four and a half centuries was a recurring pattern of organized violence against the empire’s Christian minorities, Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians, and Syriacs, whose cumulative death toll represents one of the largest sustained campaigns of communal destruction in the pre-modern and modern world combined.

Among the documented massacres:

The Constantinople massacre of 1821–1830, carried out against the Greek population during the Greek uprising. Tens of thousands were killed, churches burned, property seized. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch Gregory V was hanged in full vestments on Easter morning 1821, by order of Sultan Mahmud II.

The Badr Khan massacres of 1847 against the Assyrians, in which approximately ten thousand people were killed.

The Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896, ordered by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, known as the Red Sultan for the scale of his killing, in which approximately 300,000 Christians were killed by irregular cavalry units known as the Hamidiye.

The first Armenian massacre of 1909, in which approximately 30,000 Armenians were killed in the Adana region.

The Seyfo massacres, meaning “sword” in Syriac, against the Assyrian and Syriac populations, which claimed approximately 500,000 lives between 1914 and 1922.

The Armenian Genocide of 1915–1922, which killed approximately 1.5 million Armenians.

Subscribe now

The Greek genocide of 1914–1923, which killed between 350,000 and 600,000 Greeks depending on the source consulted.

The names associated with these crimes, Sultan Abdul Hamid, Said Halim Pasha, Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha, Cemal Pasha, Midhat Pasha, belong in the same catalogue of history’s perpetrators as those of the twentieth century’s other architects of mass death.

The ultimate achievement of this campaign was demographic: a Christian population in Anatolia estimated at between 2.5 and 3 million people was effectively eliminated. Those who survived were those who converted to Islam. The land was emptied of its ancient Christian communities and has remained so ever since.

The Evidence: Irrefutable and Extensive

The Armenian Genocide is among the most thoroughly documented atrocities in history. The evidence comes from multiple independent streams, none of which can be attributed to Armenian partisanship alone.

First: Approximately 400,000 survivors carried detailed first-hand accounts that they transmitted to their children and grandchildren, ensuring that the history remained a living rather than merely archival record.

Second: Diplomatic dispatches from the ambassadors of the United States, Great Britain, Russia, France, and Austria, nations with no common interest in fabricating such accounts, describe the killings in real time. These documents are preserved in the national archives of those countries and in their major museums.

Third: In 1916 the British government published what became known as the Blue Book, a compilation of eyewitness accounts and diplomatic evidence of the genocide, with an introduction written by the historian Arnold Toynbee, who concluded that the plan had no purpose other than the extermination of the Christian populations living inside the Ottoman state.

Fourth: Ambassador Morgenthau compiled his contemporary diaries into Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story and wrote a separate volume called Murder of a Nation, in which he stated:

“In the spring of 1914 the Turks drew up their plan for exterminating the Armenian people, and criticized their predecessors for failing to rid themselves of the Christian peoples or guide them to Islam… The Turkish rulers gave orders to destroy an entire race… The history of humanity has never before seen such horrifying events.”

Fifth: The German researcher Hilmar Kaiser² identified 350 documents issued by the Turkish government between 1915 and 1916 confirming orders for the extermination of Armenians.

Sixth: The Turkish historian Taner Akçam³, who fled Turkey and continued his research in exile, established that the decision to exterminate the Armenians was taken on October 31, 1914, just 31 days after the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War, and that the chief Islamic religious authority of the time issued a fatwa declaring the Armenians to be infidels and traitors, and that killing them was jihad, a religious obligation on every Muslim.

Seventh: The Turkish journalist and historian Murat Bardakci⁴ obtained Talaat Pasha’s personal documents from his widow Hayriye in 1982 and published them in 2008 in The Remaining Documents of Talaat Pasha. Talaat himself wrote, with evident pride, that he had accomplished in a matter of months what Sultan Abdul Hamid had failed to accomplish in thirty years.

Eighth: In 1997, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) formally recognized the Armenian events as the first genocide of the twentieth century. In 2007 the same body recognized the Assyrian, Syriac, and Aegean Greek massacres as genocide as well.

Ninth: Under Sultan Abdul Hamid, architect of the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896, the Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha declared publicly that the Armenian question could only be resolved by the complete elimination of the Armenians from existence. The Ottoman government went further, announcing severe penalties for any Muslim or non-Muslim who provided sanctuary to Armenian victims.

Tenth: Elie Wiesel⁵, the American Jewish novelist, Holocaust survivor, and Nobel Laureate, wrote a public letter recognizing the Armenian Genocide, signed by 53 other Nobel Prize recipients.

Finally: From the Allied declaration of May 28, 1915, the first use of the phrase “crimes against humanity” in international law, issued specifically in response to the Armenian massacres, to the United Nations War Crimes Commission of 1948, to the UN Human Rights Commission, to the Vatican and the World Council of Churches, to the United States Congress and dozens of other national parliaments, to hundreds of specialist historians: all have affirmed that what happened to the Armenians was a deliberate, premeditated genocide against a nation and a people.

And it was the Armenian Genocide that gave the world the word “genocide” itself. The Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin⁶, who would lose 49 members of his own family in the Holocaust, became interested in mass atrocity law as a young law student in the 1920s after learning of the Ottoman destruction of the Armenians. He stated explicitly in a 1949 CBS television interview:

“I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times, to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action.”

He coined the word “genocide” in 1944 by combining the Greek genos (people, race) with the Latin cide (killing), and his tireless lobbying produced the UN Genocide Convention of 1948. The Armenian Genocide did not merely precede the Holocaust, it inspired the legal framework through which the Holocaust would eventually be named and prosecuted.

How the Armenian Genocide Paved the Way for the Holocaust

The relationship between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust is not merely sequential, one atrocity followed by another in the general moral deterioration of the twentieth century. It is structural: the Armenian Genocide created the conditions, the precedents, the conceptual frameworks, and the institutional lessons that made the Holocaust possible.

The most cited evidence for this connection is a statement attributed to Hitler on August 22, 1939, one week before the German invasion of Poland. Addressing his commanders at Obersalzberg, Hitler authorized the physical destruction of men, women, and children of Polish ethnicity in pursuit of Lebensraum, living space, and concluded with the question:

“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

The deeper connection is the one documented by the historian Stefan Ihrig⁷ in his 2016 study Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Harvard University Press), the most comprehensive scholarly examination of the relationship between the two genocides. Ihrig demonstrates that Germany’s decades-long habituation to excusing and then openly justifying Ottoman violence against Armenians created a cultural and ideological environment in which genocide could be conceived as a legitimate solution to an ethnic problem. From the 1890s onward, Germany, a close Ottoman ally, became accustomed to defending massacres of Armenians as a foreign policy necessity.

Subscribe now

After the First World War, German nationalists participated in what Ihrig calls “the great genocide debate” of 1921–1923, in which they first denied and then openly justified the extermination. The Nazis absorbed this justificatory tradition: in their reading of history, the Armenian Genocide had produced the astonishing rise of Kemalist Turkey, proof that the destruction of an inconvenient ethnic group could be accomplished, survived, and even rewarded by history.

The conceptual parallel between the Ottoman “solution” to the Armenian question and the Nazi Final Solution to the Jewish question is not metaphorical. Said Halim Pasha had stated explicitly that the Armenian question could only be resolved by the complete elimination of the Armenians. This is the same logic, translated almost verbatim, that Hitler applied to the Jews. The Ottoman policy of creating a homogeneous Anatolian Islamic space⁸ by eliminating its Christian populations, a Sason without Armenians, as the original formula went, applied to territory after territory, was the direct structural antecedent of Hitler’s Lebensraum doctrine.

The Turanist ethnic nationalism that drove Ottoman genocide policy, the ideology of a unified Turkic racial identity superseding all other identities within Ottoman territory, was the direct ideological ancestor of the Aryan racial nationalism that drove Nazi policy. Hitler drew from this well explicitly. The Nazis studied the Ottoman experiment with attention.

The impunity that the Ottoman perpetrators enjoyed after 1918 was perhaps the most consequential lesson of all. A Turkish military tribunal convicted Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and several others in absentia for their roles in the genocide. But the convictions produced no punishment. The perpetrators fled, lived in exile, and Turkey reconstituted itself as a republic with no systematic international consequences. The lesson available to any future planner of mass murder was clear: it can be done; the world will not remember; there will be no lasting punishment.

That answer, the answer of impunity, was the enabling condition of Auschwitz.

Islamic Nazism: The Third Thread

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, met with Hitler in November 1941 and provided active support for the Nazi extermination program, recruiting Muslim volunteers in the Balkans for the Waffen-SS, working to block the emigration of European Jews to Palestine, and collaborating with the Nazi leadership. Benjamin Netanyahu cited al-Husseini’s role at the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, and while historians continue to debate the precise degree of his operational influence on the Final Solution’s timing, his documented collaboration and enthusiasm for the program are not in question.

This represents the convergence of two distinct but structurally related traditions: the Ottoman-Islamic tradition of eliminating Christian minorities in the name of religious and ethnic consolidation, and the Nazi tradition of eliminating Jews in the name of racial purification. Different foundations. The same target. The same method. The same willingness to pursue annihilation as a political solution.

The theological dimension cannot be separated from this history. The hadith recorded in Sahih Muslim (hadith 2922), in which the Prophet describes a time when Muslims will kill Jews hiding behind stones and trees, which will call out to their pursuers, is canonical within the tradition, its authenticity not seriously disputed, and its content has been incorporated into the Hamas charter, recited at Hamas rallies, and invoked as theological justification for the October 7 massacres. The Ottoman state eliminated its Christian millions. Hitler eliminated six million Jews. The theological program preserved in Islamic eschatology identifies the killing of all Jews as a divine promise to be fulfilled before the Day of Judgment.

The Ottomans had their Final Solution to the Christian question. Hitler had his Final Solution to the Jewish question. The theological tradition carries its own Final Solution to the Jewish question, one that predates both and outlasts them.

Sources

• Morgenthau, Henry Sr. Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1918.

• Morgenthau, Henry Sr. Murder of a Nation. New York: Armenian General Benevolent Union of America, 1974.

• Toynbee, Arnold J., and James Bryce. The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16 (The Blue Book). London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1916.

• Kaiser, Hilmar. The Extermination of Armenians in the Diyarbekir Region. Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2014.

• Akçam, Taner. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.

• Akçam, Taner. The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

• Bardakci, Murat. Talat Pasha’nin Evrak-i Metrukesi (The Remaining Documents of Talaat Pasha). Istanbul: Everest Yayinlari, 2008.

• Ihrig, Stefan. Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

• Ihrig, Stefan. Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

• Bardakjian, Kevork B. Hitler and the Armenian Genocide. Cambridge, MA: Zoryan Institute, 1985.

• Lemkin, Raphael. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944.

• Lemkin, Raphael. CBS Television interview with Quincy Howe, 1949. Transcript cited in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia, “Coining a Word and Championing a Cause: The Story of Raphael Lemkin.”

• International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). Resolution on the Armenian Genocide, 1997. Resolution on Assyrian, Syriac, and Greek Genocides, 2007.

• Sahih Muslim, hadith 2922. In Sahih Muslim, compiled by Imam Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (817–875 CE). Standard Arabic edition with English translation by Abdul Hamid Siddiqui.

• United Nations. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, December 9, 1948. UN Doc. A/RES/3/260.

• Allied Powers Declaration of May 28, 1915, regarding Ottoman massacres of Armenians. Reproduced in Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide. Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995.

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Coining a Word and Championing a Cause: The Story of Raphael Lemkin.” encyclopedia.ushmm.org.

• Wiesel, Elie, et al. Open letter recognizing the Armenian Genocide, signed by 53 Nobel Laureates. Available through the Armenian National Institute, Washington, DC.

  ---

  Magdi Khalil is a senior fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

  ---

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI

When a photograph emerged of an Israeli soldier striking a statue of Jesus Christ in southern Lebanon, the reaction was immediate and global. Heads of state condemned it. The BBC headlined it. Social media amplified it to tens of millions of views within hours. Israel’s Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and President each issued personal condemnations within a day. The IDF launched an investigation, located the soldier, and offered to restore the statue.

The outrage was loud, coordinated, and entirely selective.

Consider who was loudest among the outraged. Many were from Lebanon itself, a country where Hezbollah, a movement that explicitly subordinates Christian political rights to an Iranian theocratic vision, operates as a state within a state, controls territory, and has spent decades ensuring that the Christian population’s political weight is structurally diminished. The concern for Christian symbols there did not extend to Christian power, Christian safety, or Christian futures.

And the hypocrisy within Lebanon does not stop at Hezbollah’s political conduct. Four months before the IDF soldier’s photograph circled the globe, a group linked to an Islamic organization in Lebanon deliberately destroyed a statue of Christ on a cross in the Dora area of Beirut, near Saint Joseph Hospital. The motive was not military necessity, not the confusion of combat, not the action of a soldier in a war zone. The motive was theological: the group objected to the playing of Christmas hymns and carols nearby. The act was premeditated, ideological, and carried out in a civilian neighborhood in peacetime. The Lebanese state issued no condemnation. No prime minister was stunned and saddened. No foreign minister apologized to every Christian whose feelings were hurt. No investigation was announced. No offer to restore the statue was made. Video footage of the destroyed statue exists. The global media, which four months later would devote its front pages to the IDF soldier’s photograph, made a different editorial choice about the Dora incident. It chose silence, so complete that the event left almost no searchable trace online.

The same statue. The same act. A different perpetrator. An entirely different world.

Others expressed outrage from across the Arab world, from societies where churches require government permission to be built, where repairing a roof can trigger a mob, where converting from Islam to Christianity is a criminal act punishable by imprisonment, and in some jurisdictions by death. The statue of Jesus moved them. The living Christians did not.

In Europe, commentators who have consistently explained away, contextualized, or simply ignored the systematic vandalism of churches, the beheading of Christian statues, and the physical assault of priests — incidents numbering in the thousands annually, with radical Islam identified as the primary motivating ideology in documented cases — discovered overnight a passionate commitment to the integrity of Christian religious symbols.

This is not outrage at desecration. This is outrage deployed as a weapon, and the target is not the soldier. The target is Israel.

The distinction matters because genuine outrage would be consistent. It would have a memory. It would register the burning of Coptic homes in Egypt while residents were still inside, triggered by the rumor that Christians intended to build a church. It would notice that in Germany alone, one third of nearly one hundred arson attacks on churches in a single year occurred within a pattern that watchdog organizations identified as primarily Islamist in motivation, while the country’s Bishops’ Conference declared that all taboos had been broken. It would acknowledge that across the Middle East and North Africa, the Christian population has collapsed from nearly thirteen percent of the region at the start of the twentieth century to barely four percent today, not because of Israeli soldiers, but because of a sustained, theologically grounded campaign of legal discrimination, social pressure, and periodic violence that has never generated a comparable global headline.

Subscribe now

Genuine outrage has no political loyalty. What we witnessed was something else entirely.

The Theology the Outrage Ignores

The moral demand embedded in the global reaction to the IDF soldier’s photograph can be stated simply: he should have respected a religious symbol that was not his own. This sounds reasonable until you ask what, precisely, that respect would have required, and of whom.

The soldier is Jewish. Judaism is not merely a tradition that happens to be uncomfortable with religious imagery. The rejection of idolatry is its most foundational theological commitment, the axis around which its entire relationship with God is organized. It is not a cultural preference or a historical quirk. It is the Second Commandment, the prohibition that defined Jewish identity through centuries of living among Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Babylonians, each of whom surrounded Jews with the images, statues, and symbols of foreign gods. Jewish distinctiveness was maintained precisely by refusing to treat those objects as sacred. The question of what a Jew owes to someone else’s religious statue is not new, and the answer that Jewish theology gives is not reverence.

But here the argument goes further than Judaism, because the theology of images has never been a settled question within Christianity itself. It has been one of the deepest and most consequential fault lines in Christian history, one that produced not merely academic disagreement but revolution, war, and the physical destruction of religious art across an entire continent.

The Protestant Reformation was, among other things, an iconoclasm. Calvin did not merely discourage religious images; he identified them as a corruption of worship at its root, a concession to human weakness that inevitably displaced the living God with a man-made substitute. The Heidelberg Catechism, one of the foundational documents of the Reformed tradition, describes images in worship plainly as dumb idols. Zwingli had the statues removed from Zurich’s churches by legal order. The Beeldenstorm of 1566, the statue storm, swept through the Low Countries as Reformed believers, acting on their reading of the Second Commandment, destroyed Catholic images across Flanders and the Netherlands. In England, royal injunctions under Edward VI ordered the removal of all images from churches. In Scotland, John Knox’s followers stripped the great cathedral of St Andrews of its imagery entirely.

These were not acts of barbarism. They were acts of theological conviction, performed by Christians, on Christian religious objects, in Christian countries, based on a sincere and carefully argued reading of Scripture. The Reformers were accused of sacrilege by the Catholic establishment. They responded that the sacrilege was the idolatry they were destroying.

This history matters because the outrage over the IDF soldier’s photograph rests on an assumption that is neither universal nor religiously neutral: the assumption that a statue of Jesus is sacred in a way that places an obligation of reverence on everyone who encounters it. That is a Catholic and Orthodox theological position. It is not a Jewish position. It is not a Reformed or Evangelical Christian position. It is not a Muslim position. It is not, in fact, the position of the majority of the world’s monotheists.

When the global media and political class demand that a Jewish soldier show reverence to a statue of Jesus, they are not making a universal appeal to human decency. They are imposing one specific theology, post-Tridentine Catholic sacramentalism, on people whose own faiths explicitly and conscientiously reject it, while calling that imposition respect for religion.

There is a further irony that the outrage machine entirely missed. For a Reformed Christian, the greater theological offense in this episode is not the broken statue; it is the demand that the statue be treated as sacred. That demand is not a defense of Christianity. It is a defense of idolatry, dressed in the language of religious sensitivity. The Second Commandment does not mourn dumb idols. It forbids making them in the first place. A Reformed Christian reading this story in its proper theological light does not react with outrage. He says Hallelujah, and thanks the soldier.

The irony runs deeper still. Islam, the faith of the overwhelming majority of those who have destroyed Christian symbols across the Middle East and Europe with almost no comparable media outrage, shares with Judaism and Reformed Christianity an uncompromising rejection of religious imagery. The theological logic that led an Islamist group to destroy a statue of Christ in Beirut in December 2025, objecting to its very existence as an object of veneration, is structurally identical to the logic of the Beeldenstorm. The difference is not the theology. The difference is who is holding the hammer, and what political purposes the outrage over it can be made to serve.

Genuine religious respect does not demand that a Jew venerate what his faith calls idolatry. It does not demand that a Reformed Christian treat as sacred what his confessional standards call a dumb idol. It does not even, properly understood, demand that a Muslim suppress his theological conviction that no image should exist. What it demands, what any honest principle of mutual respect demands, is that none of these convictions be enacted through the destruction of what others hold sacred in their own space.

That is the actual standard. It is a standard of conduct, not of theology. And it is a standard that can be applied consistently, to every soldier, every mob, every Islamist group in Beirut, every act of church vandalism across Europe. The question is why it is only ever applied in one direction.

The Inversion

There is a map of Christian life in the Middle East that the global media does not show. It is not a complicated map. It has one country where Christian minorities hold full civil and political rights, where Christian communities are growing rather than shrinking, where a Christian Arab can serve in parliament, in the judiciary, in the military, and where no law governs what faith a person may leave or enter. That country is Israel.

Lebanon appears at first glance to be a second exception. Its constitution reserves the presidency for a Maronite Christian, distributes parliamentary seats along confessional lines, and formally recognizes Christians as co-founders of the state rather than a tolerated minority. This arrangement was possible because Lebanon’s Christians were numerous enough and historically rooted enough to negotiate it. But Lebanon today is not an exception to the pattern; it is the pattern in motion. Hezbollah, operating as a state within a state with Iranian backing, exercises effective veto power over Lebanese sovereignty regardless of what the constitution prescribes. Shia displacement into traditionally Christian areas, accelerated by successive wars, is redrawing the demographic map. The economic collapse is driving Christian emigration at rates that are changing the country’s composition faster than any census can capture. The constitutional protections that exist on paper are only as durable as the demographic and political balance that produced them, and that balance is shifting.

Subscribe now

Lebanon is therefore not a counterexample. It is a forecast. It shows what happens not if Christians become a minority in a Muslim-majority political environment, but when. And “when” has a consistent answer across every country, across every century, across every region where the process has completed itself: Christians become lesser citizens. The legal frameworks change, the timeframes differ, the degree of violence varies, but the destination has no exceptions in the historical record. The Copts of Egypt, the Christians of Iraq, the Assyrians of Syria, the Armenian survivors of Turkey: none of them were promised anything different from what Lebanon’s Christians were promised. The promise, in every case, was kept until it no longer needed to be.

Every other country on the map tells a story that has already reached its conclusion.

In Egypt, the largest Christian community in the Middle East, the Copts, who are not a minority that arrived but the original population of the land, present centuries before the Arab Islamic conquest of the seventh century, live under a legal framework that treats their faith as inferior by design. Building a church requires government permission that is routinely denied. Repairing a church roof can trigger a mob. Converting from Islam to Christianity is effectively criminalized. Christian women, particularly young women without male protection, face systematic risk of abduction and forced conversion. When Islamist crowds burn Christian homes in Upper Egypt, as they did in the village of al-Fawakhir in April 2024, with residents still inside, while police stood and watched, the story receives a fraction of the coverage devoted to one Israeli soldier with a sledgehammer. The Coptic word for Egyptian is the same word for Christian. These are not a minority. They are the people from whom the country was taken, and they are being slowly erased from it.

In Iraq, Christians numbered 1.2 million in 2011. By 2024 they numbered 120,000. That is not emigration. That is elimination, carried out through ISIS persecution, legal discrimination, and a security environment in which Christian existence became untenable. In Syria, the Christian population fell from 1.5 million to 300,000 over the same period. In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, Christians formed the majority of the population until the late 1980s. Today they are less than ten percent, displaced not by Israel but by the steady pressure of an Islamist political culture that made Christian life increasingly impossible. Across the region as a whole, Christians were nearly thirteen percent of the population at the start of the twentieth century. They are barely four percent today.

This is the largest ongoing displacement of a Christian population in the world. It is happening in the region where Christianity was born. It is being carried out almost entirely by Muslim-majority states and movements. And it generates no global headlines, no statements from heads of state, no viral photographs, no demands for accountability.

Meanwhile in Europe, the same pattern plays out at a smaller scale but with the same editorial silence. In 2024 alone, watchdog organizations documented over two thousand anti-Christian hate crimes across the continent. Arson attacks on churches nearly doubled from the previous year, with Germany accounting for one third of them, prompting the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference to declare that all taboos had been broken. In France, Islamist vandals entered Notre-Dame-du-Travail in Paris and drove a knife into the throat of a statue of the Virgin Mary, writing “Submit yourselves to Allah, infidels” across the church walls. In the German town of Dülmen, a local newspaper reported that not a single day passed without an attack on a Christian statue. In December 2025, in Beirut, an Islamist group destroyed a statue of Christ near Saint Joseph Hospital because they objected to the sound of Christmas carols being played nearby. Video footage of the destroyed statue exists. The global media that would four months later devote its front pages to the IDF soldier’s photograph made a different editorial choice about the Beirut statue. It chose silence.

The question this raises is not subtle. If the principle at stake is the protection of Christian symbols and the dignity of Christian communities, then the Middle East and Europe are producing thousands of violations of that principle every year, carried out by identifiable actors, documented by watchdog organizations, and in some cases captured on video. None of it produces the reaction that one Israeli soldier’s photograph produced in twenty-four hours.

The principle, therefore, is not the protection of Christian symbols. Something else is operating. What is operating is a hierarchy of acceptable victims and acceptable perpetrators, one in which Muslim actors are structurally exempt from the outrage that is freely applied to Israel, regardless of the scale, frequency, or ideological intentionality of the acts involved. Under this hierarchy, two thousand anti-Christian hate crimes in Europe in a single year are a sociological phenomenon requiring sensitive contextualization. One Israeli soldier with a sledgehammer is a moral emergency requiring statements from heads of state.

This hierarchy does not emerge from a principled commitment to religious freedom. It emerges from a political framework in which Israel functions as the permanent aggressor and Muslims function as the permanent victim, and in which any evidence that complicates this arrangement is quietly shelved, like a video of a destroyed statue in Beirut that left almost no trace online.

The Christians of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon did not build this framework. They are its casualties twice over: first from the persecution it refuses to name, and then from the silence it maintains about that persecution in order to keep the framework intact.

The Standard That Applies to One

Outrage is only a moral instrument when it is consistent. Applied selectively, it is not outrage at all. It is politics wearing the costume of conscience.

What the global reaction to the IDF soldier’s photograph demonstrated is not that the world cares about Christian symbols. The world has had ample opportunity to demonstrate that care. It has had two thousand anti-Christian hate crimes in Europe in a single year. It has had a statue of Christ destroyed in Beirut because someone nearby was playing Christmas carols. It has had churches burned in Egypt while police watched from the street. It has had an entire ancient Christian civilization in Iraq reduced in thirteen years from over a million souls to barely a hundred thousand. In none of these cases did the world’s editors, politicians, and commentators find the urgency they discovered within twenty-four hours of one photograph from southern Lebanon.

Subscribe now

The standard being applied is not a religious standard. It is not a humanitarian standard. It is a political standard with a single criterion: does this incident serve the narrative that Israel is the primary threat to peace, dignity, and civilized conduct in the Middle East? If yes, the outrage is immediate, global, and coordinated. If no, the silence is equally immediate, equally global, and equally coordinated.

This framework requires the suspension of several inconvenient realities simultaneously. It requires ignoring that Israel is the only state in the Middle East where Christian minorities hold full legal equality. It requires ignoring that the communities loudest in their outrage belong to a religious and political tradition that has reduced the Christian population of the broader region from nearly thirteen percent to barely four percent over the course of a century, through a combination of law, pressure, and violence that continues today without interruption. It requires pretending that the theological demand for reverence toward religious statues is a universal human obligation, rather than the position of one specific strand of one specific religion, a position that Judaism, Reformed Christianity, and Islam each reject on the basis of the same commandment.

It requires, above all, ignoring Lebanon’s Dora neighborhood in December 2025, where a statue of Christ was destroyed not in a war zone, not in the heat of combat, not by a soldier who will face a criminal investigation, but in peacetime, in a civilian area, by people whose motive was that they found the sound of Christmas music offensive. That story has almost no footprint online. The video exists. The choice not to amplify it was made deliberately, by the same editorial institutions that made the opposite choice four months later.

The Christians of the Middle East deserve better than to be used as instruments in a political argument that has never once been about them. Their churches have been burned, their daughters taken, their communities legislated into second-class existence, their ancient presence on the land of Christianity’s own birth reduced to a demographic footnote. They have been erased from Iraq, hollowed out in Syria, slowly squeezed out of Lebanon, and held in legal subjugation in Egypt for fourteen centuries with barely a pause. None of this produced the reaction that one photograph produced in one day.

If the broken statue in southern Lebanon is an outrage, then consistency demands that we name everything else as an outrage too. The burned homes in al-Fawakhir. The knife in the throat of the Virgin Mary in Paris. The Christmas carols silenced in Beirut. The churches that required a president’s signature to repair their roofs. The women whose identity cards were altered without their consent to show them as Muslim. The communities that have been waiting for a century for the world to notice that they are disappearing.

Consistency, however, is precisely what this outrage cannot afford. Because the moment you apply the standard evenly, the narrative collapses. And the narrative, not the Christians, is what is being protected.

Salam Almasri is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI

For more than seven decades, whenever conflict escalates in the Middle East, Jews around the world, far removed from the battlefield, become targets. Jews are singled out globally for events tied to Israel.

The circulation of myths, falsehoods, and conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel is not random or harmless, it is directed. These narratives converge toward a single objective: to dehumanize Jews and make hostility toward them appear justified. The result is targeting of Jews anywhere, regardless of their nationality or connection to Israel.

Throughout history, countless lies have been spread about Jews. In the modern era, one of the most consequential examples is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated text first published in Russia in 1903. It is widely regarded as one of the most infamous forgeries ever produced, a deliberate attempt to portray Jews as a global, malevolent force.

Although the document was thoroughly exposed as a forgery, including a 1921 investigation by The Times of London, its influence did not disappear. On the contrary, it was revived and amplified. In the Arab world, for example, the regime of Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser translated and widely distributed the text, embedding its narratives into public discourse.

Subscribe now

As someone who has closely followed Arab media for decades, I can attest that these ideas did not remain on the margins. They became normalized. In fact, I can identify at least ten recurring and deeply harmful falsehoods about Jews and Israel that have been repeatedly circulated in Egyptian media, lies that continue to shape public perception to this day.

The First Lie: “The Blood Pie, or the Blood Libel.”

This malicious lie alleges that the Jews have the habit of slaughtering children (often Christians) to use their blood for baking Passover matzoh or other rituals. Such a false notion started first in Europe and then became popular in the Middle East. I have read that story many times in Egyptian newspapers and it is mentioned in several television series and programs. The Jewish creed prohibits in an absolute way the shedding of blood. Imagine the negative effects of this type of lies on the psyche of readers, and how they would be perceiving of a Jewish savagery.

The Second Lie: Israel Does Not Want to Have Permanent Borders.

I have entered many discussions with Arabs where I stressed the fact that Israel wants to draw its borders with the Arab countries in ways like it did it with Egypt. This was evident when it withdrew completely from Sinai whose size is triple that of the State of Israel and gave up the Taba sliver of land when it consented to international arbitration. Israel as well demarcated its border with Jordan and has been demanding for several years now to define its boundaries with Lebanon under the conditions of signing a peace treaty or a non-aggression pact. How can a state seek peace treaties or draw final borders with its neighbors who always accuse her of being not willing to setting up its borders?

The Third Lie: “From the Nile to the Euphrates.”

It is the allegation that Israel strives to occupy the Arab countries. This false accusation is now being made alleging that after the end of Israel’s war against Iran, Greater Israel will commence to be extended from the Nile to the Euphrates. Israel cannot colonize the Middle East as they charge. This is confirmed by the rules of geography, the postulates of logic, the facts of religion, the realities of politics, the norms of culture, and the sheer numbers of population. Israel is a democratic state whose transparency makes everything well known. There are no plans on the part of Israel to colonize these states.

The Fourth Lie: The Jews Did Not Go to the World Trade Center on September 11…

because they were aware of the timing of the attack against the two towers. This is a vicious lie accusing the Jews of being accomplices in the crime of hitting the towers. This suggests that their knowledge of the onslaught is their betrayal of America, and that they did not report to the authorities what they knew. However, statistics confirm that many Jews were killed in the September 11 terror strike. Usama Bin Laden himself confessed that he and his terrorist group Al Qaeda were the perpetrators of this terror assault.

The Fifth Lie: Israel is the Cause of the Backwardness of the Region…

and is the reason beyond everything that goes bad in the Middle East. This is part of how authoritarian regimes escape their responsibilities by being the root of backwardness and destruction. They direct their official media to spread these false claims. Nevertheless, I have published earlier that the number of those Arabs killed in inter-Arab wars and Arab civil wars is one hundred times more than the total number of Arabs who were killed in all the Arab-Israeli wars.

The Sixth Lie: Free Masonry was Established by the Jews in Order to Conspire Against the Whole World.

Most of the members of free masonry clubs in the West are Christians who grew up in Christian environments, and they had among their famous members figures such as General George Washington and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Free Masonry associations had their existence before the coup of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and among their members was the ruler of Egypt Khedive Tawfik, in addition to the most prominent Islamic cleric during Tawfik’s reign, namely Sheikh Muhammad Abdou.

The Seventh Lie: There is a World Management Council Chaired by the Jews to Control the Entire Globe…

and to command the economy and the media all over the world and to stage crises. This is an abhorrent lie pushed forward to resist the excellent leadership of the Jews in the areas of science and business, which are enthusiastic pursuits by the Jews. They exert a tremendous effort to be successful. This is why this imaginary thing was fabricated to demonize the Jews. There is no such thing as a World Management Council, and no meetings take place among suspicious people to plan for controlling and governing the world. All these are lies and they lack evidence.

Subscribe now

The Eighth Lie: Israel is Planted in the Arab World to Disintegrate It.

The size of Israel is 0.14% of the whole space of the Arab countries. The number of the Jews inside Israel is 1.5% of the numbers of the Arabs in the Middle East. All of Israel’s wars have been its efforts to safeguard its small size against the attempts by the Arabs to annihilate it. The Arab and Islamic literature always predict the inevitable demise of the State of Israel. However, we have not heard nor seen one single Israeli who talks about the certain termination and ruin of the Arab countries. But they keep propagating these lies and fallacies about Israel.

The Ninth Lie : All the Wars in the Middle East Were the Creations of Israel, and all the Crises are the Plots of Jews!!

This lie persists even though all the wars against Israel were initiated from the side of the Arabs. This was the case in 1948, and it was the case of the June 1967 War when President Nasser of Egypt closed the Strait of Tiran and Saafir to isolate Israel, under the assumption that his army could occupy Tel Aviv. In 1973, it was Egypt which started the war. All the wars in Gaza were initiated by Hamas. Since 1979 in Iran, and according to the teachings of Vilayat Al Faqih, it made its official slogan “Death to Israel,” and it has been calling for its end. How could Israel be the mastermind of all these wars? What about the Arab civil wars, and the inter-Arab strifes, are they caused by Israel too? Was the war between Iraq and Iran which lasted for eight years the doing of Israel? Did Israel urge Saddam to occupy Kuwait? Was it Israel or Yasser Arafat who inflamed the Lebanese civil wars? Who ruined Syria for thirteen years, was it Iran, Hezbollah, Bashar Al Assad, or Israel? Who is agitating the conflicts in Sudan, Yemen, and Libya? Are not they the Arabs? Did the Jews tell Putin to wage a war against Ukraine. It is a long list...

The Tenth Lie: Israel is Persecuting the Christians Who Live Within its Borders.

This is a new lie which began following the Israeli war against Hamas right after the October 7 attack. It is now being extended to the war going on with Iran. Those who adhere to this allegation are exploiting a quotation attributed to historian William Durant. It is a quotation depicting Jesus Christ as the embodiment of ultimate goodness and Genghis Khan as the representative of maximum evil.

The purpose of what historian Durant wrote was to illustrate how goodness must defend its values on order to protect innocent people. Otherwise, evil will prevail. This is the very exact meaning of what Saint Augustine wrote in his famous book, The City of God. They also took advantage of the policy of limiting the number of worshipers inside churches for security reasons during the current war. This policy applies to all places of worship mainly due to the war and it is not directed against Christians exclusively.

Those who accuse Israel of persecuting Christians know for sure that the rights of Christians inside Israel are the most respected in the whole region. The restrictions on religion in the whole region of the Middle East cannot be comparable to the religious freedoms found in Israel. While the numbers of Christians in most of the countries in the Middle East are decreasing, their figures in Israel are increasing.

At the end, all these lies portray the Jews as a hidden enemy conspiring against the world and that their goal is to get rid of Islam. They aspire to control the United Nations, and they are in control of the debts owned by states. They plot wicked schemes against the whole globe. The goals of disseminating these accusations are to spread hate and justify violence against the Jews. This has occurred many times throughout history.

Maghdi Khalil is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI

Durant said no such thing. And understanding what he did say reveals something uncomfortable—not just about the critics, but about how poorly modern audiences grasp the relationship between virtue and survival.

The quote in question comes from The Lessons of History, the slim 1968 masterwork Durant wrote with his wife Ariel, distilling a lifetime of historical study into its starkest conclusions. The passage reads: “Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under; and the universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Genghis Khan.”

Subscribe now

This is not a moral comparison. Durant is not saying Christ and Khan are ethically equivalent. He is making a descriptive claim about the physical world: that nature and history are morally indifferent. The universe does not protect the righteous simply because they are righteous. It does not guarantee that the gentle outlast the brutal, that the civilized outlast the barbaric, or that the good outlast the ruthless. The contrast between Christ and Khan is chosen precisely because it is so stark—to drive home the point that even the most profound moral distance between two figures offers no guarantee of physical survival.

To read this as a slur against Christ is to miss the argument entirely. If anything, Durant is issuing a warning on behalf of everything Christ represents.

The irony is that this idea is not remotely alien to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Hebrew prophets wrestled with exactly this problem—not occasionally, but repeatedly, across centuries, with a raw honesty that modern readers often underestimate.

Jeremiah, standing amid the ruins of his world, asked directly: “Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?” (Jeremiah 12:1). Job observed that “the tents of robbers are at peace, and those who provoke God are secure” (Job 12:6), and pressed the point further: “Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power?” listing in forensic detail how the violent and the godless thrive, raise families, and die in comfort, having never been made to account (Job 21:7–15). Habakkuk, surveying a world in which Babylon devoured nations, could not reconcile what he saw with what he believed: “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil,” he told God, “yet you remain silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves” (Habakkuk 1:13). Malachi echoes the same grievance from the mouths of the disillusioned: “Surely the evildoers prosper; even when they put God to the test, they escape” (Malachi 3:15).

The Psalms return to this wound again and again. “Do not fret because of those who are evil,” the Psalmist urges in Psalm 37—twice, in verses 1 and 7—the repetition itself a tell, an acknowledgment that the temptation to despair is persistent and reasonable. Psalm 92:7 concedes openly that the wicked “spring up like grass,” flourishing visibly and abundantly. And in perhaps the most psychologically brutal of these passages, the author of Psalm 73 confesses that his faith nearly broke entirely: “I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked”—watching them grow “fat and sleek,” free from the burdens that crushed better people, until he could barely see the point of virtue at all (Psalm 73:3–12).

These are not the complaints of skeptics or cynics. They are the anguished observations of believers who refused to pretend that temporal justice was automatic or guaranteed—who looked at the world as it actually was, rather than as they wished it to be. What Durant articulates in secular, historical language, the prophets expressed in theological terms millennia earlier: that in the world as it actually operates, goodness does not come with a built-in defense mechanism. The lamb does not survive because the universe favors lambs. It survives, when it survives, because someone has taken on the responsibility of protecting it.

This is where Edmund Burke’s famous formulation becomes essential. If the universe has no inherent prejudice in favor of the righteous, then that preference must be created and maintained by human agency. Goodness is not a physical law. It does not enforce itself. Peace is not a natural condition—it is a constructed one, and its construction requires people willing to defend it.

Durant makes this concrete. He asks what would have become of Europe’s classical and Christian heritage had Charles Martel’s Frankish infantry not held at Tours in 732. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the very moral frameworks through which we now debate these questions—all of it was contingent, at that moment, on soldiers who were not debating philosophy. The culture was the passenger. The military was the vehicle. More recently, we have seen what happens when the vehicle fails: the Buddhas of Bamiyan, dynamited by the Taliban. The antiquities of Mosul, systematically erased by ISIS. No argument of cultural or spiritual value slowed them. Only force, eventually, did.

The backlash to Netanyahu’s quotation is, in its own way, a perfect illustration of Durant’s point. We live so safely downstream of centuries of successful defense that we have begun to mistake the achievement for the atmosphere. We assume that the freedom to read, to worship, to criticize, to write op-eds denouncing world leaders—that all of this simply is, rather than that it was built and is maintained at considerable cost. The statues to the generals have long since been erected; we are free to argue about whether they deserve them precisely because the battles were won.

This produces a particular kind of moral confusion: the belief that force is inherently corrupting, that the person who raises the sword is as culpable as the person who made it necessary. It is an understandable confusion, even a sympathetic one. But it is a confusion that a Genghis Khan—or any of his modern successors—is under no obligation to share.

Durant was not endorsing brutality. He was issuing a warning about what happens to beautiful, gentle, philosophically sophisticated civilizations when they forget that their survival is not guaranteed by their virtue alone. The universe, he observed, has no prejudice in their favor.

History, however, has a very clear record of what happens when they act as though it does.

Salam Almasri is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI

The most troubling aspect of this proposal is its instrumentalization of the Jewish Diaspora’s tragedies. For two millennia, Jewish communities in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East endured crusades, expulsions, systemic persecution, and pogroms. Mass rape was repeatedly employed as a weapon of conquest and subjugation. To interpret “non-Levantine” genetic markers—the direct biological legacy of such violence—as evidence of imposture is to weaponize the very crimes committed against the Jewish people. It implies that a people’s victimization through forced displacement and atrocity can ultimately serve as biological proof to nullify their identity and rights.

The Pitfalls of Bio-Essentialism

This approach rests on bio-essentialism: the assertion that “blood” supersedes history, language, law, and self-identification. Modern genetics demonstrates that no human population is 100 percent “pure”; human history is instead a story of perpetual migration, admixture, and adaptation.

Subscribe now

Imposing a purity threshold that no group can meet supplies a pseudoscientific pretext for dismissing three millennia of documented Jewish history. By reducing the Jewish experience to a laboratory result, the demand reframes the genetic traces of survival through centuries of adversity as proof of inauthenticity—effectively penalizing a people for having endured exile.

The selectivity of this “DNA rule” exposes its political, rather than scientific, character. Carlson applied it exclusively to Jews—particularly “Eastern European Jews”—while declining to subject other populations to equivalent scrutiny. He acknowledged genetic evidence of long standing presence among certain groups in the territory yet refrained from challenging their rights or demanding their biological credentials. He explicitly stated that he would never require an Irishman to prove sufficient “Irishness” via DNA to reside in Ireland. This reveals a worldview in which Western European indigeneity is accepted as self-evident, while Jewish indigeneity is treated as a suspicious claim requiring forensic validation.

The same double standard is evident in the demographic history of the Palestinian population. By the late Ottoman and early British Mandate eras, the region was not a monolithic indigenous society but a dynamic mosaic shaped by successive waves of immigration from across the Islamic world.

One wonders whether Carlson would demand DNA tests from Palestinian citizens whose surnames—al-Masri, al-Jazairi, Bushnak—openly proclaim recent Egyptian, Algerian, or Bosnian origins, or whether the “DNA rule” applies only to those whose historical connection he seeks to undermine.

Historical Waves of Migration

The Egyptian Waves

The demographic landscape of the southern Levant was profoundly altered by 19th-century Egyptian expansionism. Following Napoleon’s failed invasion of Egypt (after 1798), Sheikh Hassan Tobar led approximately 6,000 Egyptians from the Manzala region to settle in Gaza, where many established permanent roots. During Muhammad Ali Pasha’s modernization campaigns, thousands of Egyptian fellahin fled conscription and forced labor to seek refuge in Gaza and Jaffa. Egyptian records document the resulting diplomatic tensions with the Governor of Acre, which became a casus belli for Ibrahim Pasha’s decade-long conquest (1831–1841). Ibrahim Pasha imported additional thousands of Egyptian and Sudanese settlers to secure military and agricultural control. Later, the construction of the Suez Canal (1859–1869) triggered further northward migration driven by the brutal corvée labor system, creating Egyptian neighborhoods in Palestinian coastal cities that endure to this day.

The North African Wave

The collapse of resistance movements in the Maghreb spurred further migration. After the French conquest of Algeria, Emir Abdelkader al-Jazairi relocated to Ottoman Syria with thousands of followers. Ottoman authorities settled many in the Galilee, around Safad and Tiberias, granting them land as a loyalist agricultural buffer. These families preserved their distinct Algerian identity for generations, yet their presence has been integrated into local history without demands for genetic validation.

The Ottoman Refugees

The Levant served as a strategic resettlement zone for the empire’s displaced Muslim populations, known as Muhajirun. Bosnians fleeing Austro-Hungarian rule established communities in Caesarea, even constructing a mosque that remains a testament to their recent arrival. Circassians and Chechens, displaced by Russian expansion in the Caucasus, were settled in the Galilee and Jordan Valley to reinforce the Ottoman frontier. Armenians escaping the 1915 genocide found refuge and built a permanent presence in Jerusalem and its environs. By the early twentieth century, the region comprised a patchwork of refugee communities—Arab- and Muslim-speaking groups originating from as far west as Morocco and as far east as Afghanistan—forming a diverse population rather than a singular, isolated indigenous society.

Documentary and Genealogical Evidence

These migrations are extensively documented in Palestinian genealogical literature and oral traditions that openly celebrate diverse roots:

• Hassan Abu al-Majd’s Jordanian and Palestinian Families of Egyptian Origin systematically records hundreds of families whose lineages trace explicitly to the Nile Delta.

• Muhammad Shurab’s 1,307-page Dictionary of Palestinian Clans (Muʿjam al-ʿAshāʾir al- Filasṭīniyyah) catalogs numerous clans with external origins, documenting the region’s demographic fluidity.

• Omar al-Husseini’s The Noble Families of Jordan and Palestine: A Look at the Legal Records draws on Sharia court registers to trace lineages frequently linked to Hijazi, Egyptian, or other non-local sources. Surnames such as al-Masri (the Egyptian), al-Jazairi (the Algerian), Bushnak (the Bosnian), and al-Kurd (the Kurd) serve as living testimony to these arrivals. DNA tests are never demanded of groups whose surnames and family traditions attest to recent external origins.

By insisting on such testing solely for Jews, Carlson implies that the Diaspora “severed” the Jewish connection to the land, while disregarding both the archaeological, documentary, and continuous physical Jewish presence in the Land of Israel for over three millennia and the well-documented recent immigrant components within Palestinian society.

The Erasure of Continuous History

Assertions about the “European” origins of Jews routinely overlook two historical realities that no genetic test can capture:

1. Continuous Presence: A Jewish presence persisted in the region throughout the centuries of dispersion, substantiated by extensive archaeological evidence and the Cairo Genizah, which preserves centuries of correspondence reflecting unbroken legal, religious, and communal ties to the Land of Israel.

2. Involuntary Exile: The Diaspora resulted from expulsion, coercion, or flight—circumstances never invoked to nullify indigeneity for other displaced populations, such as Japanese Americans.

Jews alone are expected to forfeit their connection through the “crime” of having been exiled. Moreover, Jews were never fully assimilated as “Germans” or “Russians”; they were consistently identified as German Jews, Spanish Jews, and so forth, precisely because their primary identity remained anchored in their ancestral homeland. The selective application of standards is clear: one can readily imagine Carlson’s justified indignation if he were required to submit DNA evidence to prove “how Swedish” he is before speaking on heritage, yet the same scrutiny is deemed appropriate only for Jews.

Scientific Limitations

The premise of DNA-based indigeneity is scientifically untenable. Genetic studies rely on limited ancient samples—such as Bronze and Iron Age individuals from southern Levantine sites—drawn from a region under prolonged Egyptian imperial influence. These samples cannot be verified as “pure” baselines free of external genetic input. Modern analyses also fail to account fully for the layered admixtures introduced by the 19th- and 20th-century migrations described above. Small sample sizes and the inherent constraints of population genetics render any “DNA rule” unreliable.

When applied selectively, such tests become instruments of “g-science”—garbage science—deployed to construct narratives of exclusion rather than to illuminate biological truth.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the emphasis on DNA revives “Blood and Soil” ideology in modern, clinical guise. By privileging genetic signatures over the cultural, linguistic, historical, and legal ties that define peoples worldwide, it bypasses the conventional criteria of indigeneity recognized by international law and social science. This intellectual maneuver circumvents a substantial body of evidence—archaeology, liturgy, continuous settlement, and recorded migrations—to impose a biological metric engineered to fail one side while exempting the other. By portraying Jewish survival through history as genetic “dilution” that invalidates identity, while overlooking the documented recent arrivals of others, such arguments advance a contemporary intellectual pogrom. They seek rhetorically to accomplish what violence once attempted: the erasure of a people’s enduring connection to their ancestral homeland.

Salim Almasri is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI

Drawing from a detailed analysis of his public statements, interviews, and social media activity, cross-referenced with factual records, historical context, and direct refutations, this report catalogs specific lies and misleading claims. These falsehoods are not isolated errors but part of a coordinated pattern that whitewashes Islamic jihad, demonizes Israel as a manipulative force, and promotes isolationism that weakens Western interests.

Subscribe now

Israel drags the US into Middle Eastern wars

Tucker Carlson has repeatedly peddled the falsehood that Israel’s alliance with the United States is a one-way street of manipulation, dragging America into endless Middle Eastern conflicts against its own interests. This claim, echoed in his interviews and speeches from 2024 to 2026, paints Israel as the aggressor and the U.S. as a hapless victim, forced into wars by “Zionist control” or undue influence. It’s not just misleading, it’s a deliberate distortion that ignores history, strategy, and the real drivers of regional instability.

The fact is that the U.S. has engaged in Middle Eastern conflicts long before Israel’s founding in 1948, and many without any Israeli involvement. The Barbary Wars (1801-1805) saw America fighting Islamic piracy in North Africa, establishing a pattern of defending its interests against regional threats. In the 20th century, U.S. interventions like the 1953 Iranian coup, the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, and the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were driven by American priorities: oil security, countering Soviet influence during the Cold War, and combating terrorism.

In a 2025 broadcast, he warned that standing with Israel would pull America into a broader conflict with “Islamic jihad.” This ignores that jihadist threats predate Israel and target the West inherently. Islamic expansionism conquered vast territories from the 7th century onward, subjugating Christian and Jewish populations across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. The Ottoman Empire’s wars with European powers, including the sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683, were not about Israel, they were about imposing Islamic dominance. Iran’s proxy wars through Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and militias in Iraq and Syria aimed at global hegemony, chanting “Death to America” alongside “Death to Israel.” These groups have killed thousands of U.S. troops, from the 1983 Beirut bombing (241 Marines) to over 600 in Iraq via Iranian-backed IEDs. Attacking America is inevitable for jihadists. Israel isn’t dragging the U.S. in; it’s the frontline bulwark, buying time and intelligence that protects American lives.

9/11 Was Due to U.S. Foreign Policy

The core of Carlson’s lie reduces al-Qaeda’s motivations to “blowback” from American interventions on behalf of Israel. In truth, Osama bin Laden’s 1996 and 1998 fatwas declared war on the U.S. not just for its presence in Saudi Arabia or support for Israel, but for the existence of Western civilization itself. Bin Laden explicitly called for the global imposition of Sharia law, viewing democracy, secularism, and freedoms as blasphemous affronts to Allah. The hijackers chanted “Allahu Akbar” as they crashed planes into towers, driven by a theology that mandates jihad against infidels, first the “far enemy” (America), then the near. This ideology traces back to the the Islamic canonical books, which inspired the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, demanding submission or death for non-believers. To claim it’s about foreign policy is like saying the Inquisition was about trade disputes, it’s a deliberate evasion of the religious totalitarianism at play.

Al-Qaeda’s attacks predated major U.S. interventions: the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania (killing 224), and the 2000 USS Cole attack (17 sailors dead). These weren’t policy protests; they were doctrinal strikes against symbols of Western power. Even after 9/11, bin Laden’s messages celebrated the attacks as divine victories, not retaliatory measures. U.S. intelligence reports, including the 9/11 Commission, confirm al-Qaeda’s goal was a caliphate, not negotiation. Carlson’s recent “9/11 Files” series, released in late 2025, amplifies conspiracies about cover-ups and foreign foreknowledge, but it conveniently sidesteps this ideological root, instead blaming U.S. “incompetence” or hidden agendas.

The implications are dangerous and unforgivable. By regurgitating jihadist excuses, that America is the villain deserving blowback, Carlson undermines counterterrorism and emboldens terrorists. His rhetoric fractures American resolve, much like pre-9/11 complacency did. Isolationism isn’t strength; it’s surrender, allowing threats to metastasize until they strike home again. Carlson may chase clicks with this drivel, but facts don’t bend to his narrative. 9/11 was jihadist ideology in action, not policy fallout. Ignoring that invites history to repeat itself, and Carlson bears responsibility for peddling such suicidal nonsense.

Israel Wouldn’t Exist Without U.S. Tax Money

Tucker Carlson insists U.S. aid is the lifeline without which Israel would collapse, framing it as a parasitic drain on American resources. This narrative ignores Israel’s self-reliance, economic powerhouse status, and the mutual benefits of the alliance. It’s revisionist nonsense that demands exposure.

Israel’s founding in 1948 happened despite U.S. obstruction, not because of it. During the Holocaust, America slammed its doors on Jewish refugees, turning away ships like the MS St. Louis in 1939, dooming hundreds to Nazi death camps. In 1948, as Israel fought for survival against invading Arab armies, the U.S. imposed a weapons embargo, leaving the nascent state to scrounge arms from Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Israel won its War of Independence through grit, innovation, and Diaspora support, not Uncle Sam’s checkbook.

U.S. aid only materialized later, during the Cold War, when Israel proved a strategic asset against Soviet-backed Arab regimes. The first significant military assistance came post-1967 Six-Day War, where Israel decisively defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, nations armed by Moscow. This aid, peaking in the 1970s-1980s, was quid pro quo: Israel shared intelligence, tested U.S. weapons in real combat, and curbed Soviet expansion.

By 2026, Israel’s GDP stands at approximately $612 billion, driven by tech innovation, pharmaceuticals, and defense exports. That’s larger than many U.S. states and equivalent to economies like Sweden or Poland. The $318 billion in aid over 78 years equates to roughly half a year’s GDP, hardly the foundation of existence. Israel funds 90% of its defense budget domestically, exporting $12.5 billion in arms annually.

Christians Oppressed in Israel

Tucker Carlson’s insidious claim that Christians thrive equally and safely under Islamic regimes in the Middle East while facing persecution in Israel is a blatant fabrication. By cherry-picking guests from Jordan and the West Bank, Carlson inverts reality, portraying Islamic societies as tolerant havens and Israel as a bigoted oppressor.

Carlson asserts the decline of Christians began with Israel’s 1948 establishment, implying Israel drives their exodus. In reality Christian populations plummeted across the region long before Israel due to centuries of Islamic subjugation. Christians dropped not from Israeli actions, but from systemic pressures under Islamic rule. Freedom of worship exists, but only behind church walls. Public expressions are forbidden: no evangelism, no crosses in streets, no handing out Bibles. Last year, in Fuheis, the last Christian-majority town in Jordan, a Jesus statue was erected in the town square and dismantled within hours as “provocative” to Muslims. Two years prior, Bible Society ads for Independence Day were yanked for the same reason. Across the Islamic world, churches have mosques built adjacent to “suffocate” them symbolically. Naming children with Christian identifiers invites discrimination, pushing assimilation with Islamic names. Protection is conditional on loyalty to the regime; dissent, like Nahed Hattar’s 2016 Facebook post criticizing Islam, led to his assassination with government inaction.

In Israel christians enjoy genuine equality and safety. Israel’s 2% Christian population has full citizenship rights: voting, parliamentary representation, and open evangelism. Messianic Jews proselytize near the Western Wall without fear. Isolated incidents, like ultra-Orthodox spitting on clergy, are condemned by Israeli leaders and prosecuted, unlike unchecked murders in Islamic states. Christians in Israel grow their communities freely, with public symbols and festivals.

Israel is the Most Violent Country

Tucker Carlson portrays Israel as an aggressor engaging in systematic violence against Arabs. The numbers, drawn from historical records and verified reports, reveal the opposite: Israel’s actions have consistently been defensive responses to existential threats from Arab states, terrorist groups, and jihadist ideologies aiming to eradicate it. Over 78 years, Arab casualties in conflicts with Israel total approximately 65,000 deaths, a figure dwarfed by intra-Arab violence and far lower than casualties in other global conflicts, underscoring Israel’s restraint and precision amid perpetual aggression.

Pre-October 7, 2023, Arab casualties in major Israel-Arab conflicts amounted to about 65,000 deaths across seven decades. In the 1948 War of Independence, initiated by five Arab armies invading to destroy the nascent state, 10,000 Arabs died. The 1956 Sinai Campaign, triggered by Egyptian blockades and fedayeen attacks, resulted in 3,000 Egyptian deaths and 4,500 injuries. The 1967 Six-Day War, launched preemptively by Israel against mobilizing Arab forces led by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, caused 21,000 Arab deaths. The 1973 Yom Kippur War, a surprise assault by Egypt and Syria on Israel’s holiest day, led to 18,500 Arab deaths. The 1982 Lebanon War, aimed at expelling PLO terrorists shelling northern Israel, saw 19,000 Lebanese and Palestinian deaths, primarily from intra-Lebanese fighting. Subsequent Gaza operations, 2008-2009 (1,400 Palestinian deaths), 2012 (160), and 2014 (2,100), responded to thousands of Hamas rockets.

These figures reflect Israel’s defensive posture: every major war was initiated by Arab coalitions or terror groups seeking Israel’s annihilation, with Israel minimizing civilian harm through warnings and targeted strikes.

Post-October 7, 2023, through March 2026, Arab casualties escalated due to Hamas’s barbaric attack killing 1,195 Israelis and taking 251 hostages, igniting multi-front wars. In Gaza, the Health Ministry reports 73,188 Palestinian deaths, These stem from urban warfare where Hamas embeds in civilian areas, using hospitals and schools as shields, forcing Israel’s precision operations to root out terrorists.

These numbers do not indicate systematic violence but self-defense against a jihadist axis, Iran-backed Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, responsible for initiating hostilities. Israel’s civilian-to-combatant ratio in Gaza (estimated 1:1 by urban warfare experts) is lower than in U.S.-led Iraq or Afghanistan campaigns, reflecting advanced targeting to avoid mass slaughter. Intra-Arab conflicts, like Syria’s civil war (600,000 deaths) or Yemen’s (377,000), far exceed Israel-related tolls.

Mossad Behind Epstein

Tucker Carlson’s baseless assertion that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent running a blackmail operation for Israel is a conspiracy theory. This claim, devoid of evidence, surfaced prominently after October 7, 2023, aligning with Carlson’s anti-Israel pivot.

The facts is that no credible evidence links Epstein to Mossad or any Israeli agency. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who oversaw Mossad from 2021 to 2022, stated unequivocally on July 14, 2025: “The accusation that Jeffrey Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false.” Bennett described it as “vicious slander” and “a lie with no basis in reality,” part of a wave of disinformation targeting Israel.

U.S. intelligence agencies, the CIA, FBI, ODNI, and DHS, have never corroborated any foreign government involvement in Epstein’s activities, let alone Israel’s. Investigations into Epstein, including the 2019 federal charges and subsequent document releases, reveal no Mossad connections.

Carlson’s claim often hinges on Epstein’s association with former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, who visited Epstein’s properties. However, no evidence suggests intelligence operations. Carlson’s rhetoric, ”everyone believes it was Israel”, relies on innuendo, not proof. In a February 2026 interview with Mike Huckabee, Carlson extended this to falsely claim Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited Epstein’s island. Herzog’s office issued a denial, confirming no meetings, communications, or relationships ever occurred. Carlson apologized on X, admitting he “didn’t mean to suggest” factual knowledge and that the claim was unfounded.

Mossad Planting Bombs in Qatar/Saudi Arabia

Tucker Carlson’s explosive claim that Israeli Mossad agents were arrested in Qatar and Saudi Arabia for planning bombings is pure fabrication, a conspiracy he unleashed on his March 3, 2026, broadcast to smear Israel and inflame tensions. Carlson asserted that authorities in both countries detained Mossad operatives the previous night, framing it as Israel’s effort to destabilize Gulf states and drag them into war with Iran. He questioned why Israel would bomb allies against Iran, implying a sinister false-flag operation.

Qatar’s foreign ministry immediately refuted Carlson’s allegation. On March 4, 2026, a spokesperson for Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Al Jazeera that they had “no information about Mossad cells operating within our borders,” categorically denying any arrests of Israeli agents for bombing plots. Saudi Arabia issued no official statement corroborating Carlson’s story, and independent verification from U.S. intelligence or regional sources yielded nothing.

The irony is that Qatar arrested actual Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) cells in recent operations, not Mossad.

Chabad Behind War with Iran

Tucker Carlson’s outrageous accusation that the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish movement is secretly orchestrating Israel’s strikes on Iran to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and rebuild the Third Temple is nothing short of a modern blood libel. Carlson claimed IDF uniform patches featuring Chabad symbols reveal a hidden agenda: escalating war with Iran to raze Islamic sites on the Temple Mount and erect a new Jewish Temple, describing it as “totally anathema to Christianity.”

Chabad-Lubavitch, founded in the 18th century by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, is a Hasidic outreach organization dedicated to Jewish education, charity, and spiritual revival. With over 5,000 emissaries in 100 countries, Chabad operates synagogues, schools, soup kitchens, and drug rehab centers, serving Jews and non-Jews alike. It emphasizes love, kindness, and Messianic hope through mitzvot (good deeds), not political intrigue or violence.

Israel has controlled the Temple Mount for nearly 60 years. It has protected a mosque built atop the site of the biblical Temple, just as it has protected churches. If Israel had wanted to destroy the mosque, it could have done so many years ago, during one of the several wars waged against it by Arab states.

And why condemn Israel for hypothetically turning a mosque into a Jewish temple when Muslims historically destroyed or converted thousands of churches and synagogues into mosques? Hagia Sophia? was it not once the most sacred church in Eastern Christianity?

Al-Aqsa was built decades after Muhammad and later connected to Islam through a theological narrative developed during the reign of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan amid political rivalry in Mecca. Yet Israel has continued to act as a democratic government, enforcing order at the site and arresting violators regardless of its historical right.

Jerusalem held no foundational significance in early Islam. Muhammad never set foot there. There was no mosque and no Islamic presence tied to the city during his lifetime. At the beginning, Muhammad instructed his followers to pray toward Jerusalem as a strategic move to gain favor with the Jews. When that effort failed and the Jewish tribes rejected his claims, he changed the qibla (direction of prayer) toward Mecca.

Islam’s so-called connection to Jerusalem was manufactured out of necessity. By the late 7th century, Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr controlled Mecca and Medina, the religious heart of Islam. His rival, Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, ruled from the Levant, but lacked control over Islam’s holiest cities. To undercut al-Zubayr’s legitimacy and redirect pilgrimage traffic away from Mecca, Abd al-Malik declared the Temple Mount to be the site mentioned in the Qur’an as “al-Masjid al-Aqsa” and built the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The real Masjid al-Aqsa referred to in the Qur’an pointed to a structure between Mecca and Ta’if, not Jerusalem. The retroactive claim to Jerusalem was a power play.

If Israel operated by the same logic as Islamic conquerors, it would have turned Al-Aqsa into a museum, demolished it entirely, or built the Third Temple in its place, just as Muslim rulers throughout history erased churches and synagogues to assert dominance. But Israel didn’t do that. It didn’t ban Muslim prayer. It didn’t claim exclusive access. Instead, it chose to protect Al-Aqsa, even while it being used as a platform for incitement and propaganda.

When examined collectively, these falsehoods minimize or excuse Islamic jihad, fabricate Israeli culpability, and seed suspicion about longstanding Western alliances. Aggressors become victims. Defensive wars become imperial plots. Terror networks become misunderstood actors.

The danger is not merely reputational harm to Israel or Jews. The real damage is strategic and civilizational. When a prominent voice with millions of followers normalizes conspiratorial thinking, amplifies antisemitic tropes, and erodes trust in factual reality, it weakens democratic societies from within. It fractures public consensus about genuine threats. It feeds polarization. And it hands ideological ammunition to hostile regimes and jihadist movements that openly declare their intent to dismantle Western order.

Subscribe now

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI