Key Takeaways
- Tucker Carlson’s claims about Jewish plots to destroy Al-Aqsa and his questioning of Britain’s decision to fight Hitler echo the antisemitic propaganda of Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini, whose lies helped fuel deadly violence against Jews.
- The Al-Aqsa libel has a deadly history, helping incite the 1929 Hebron massacre and resurfacing in Hamas’s justification for October 7.
- Britain’s fight against Nazi Germany saved Jewish lives, preventing Hitler’s planned extermination of the Jews of British Mandatory Palestine.
Within the space of a few months, Tucker Carlson has made two claims that at first seem to have nothing to do with each other. In March, he told his audience that people behind the war with Iran wanted to tear down the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque and build a Third Temple in their place. This month, he asked why Britain had bothered to fight Hitler at all. One is a conspiracy theory about Jerusalem and the other is an apology for Nazi Germany, but in the twentieth century a single man made both arguments central to his life’s work: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
“Who Cares?“
On Friday, October 2, Carlson sat down with Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg to talk about Britain’s readiness for a war with Russia. Within minutes, the conversation had wandered somewhere else entirely.
“I never understood why fight the Second World War in the first place,” Carlson told the former Conservative minister.
When Rees-Mogg reminded him what Hitler was, Carlson reached for Versailles, insisting that the notion that Hitler “just randomly rolled into Poland is a lie.”
When Rees-Mogg observed that, had Hitler won, Britons might today be speaking German, Carlson needed only two words: “Who cares?”
Rees-Mogg told him he was “verging on defending Hitler.”
Carlson replied with a sneer, “I guess I’m just a secret Nazi,” and insisted that he was “certainly not here defending Hitler.”
Yet that is exactly what he was doing, and he has been doing it for some time. In 2024 he hosted Darryl Cooper, who called Winston Churchill, not Hitler, the “chief villain” of the war, and Carlson praised Cooper as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”
Al-Aqsa in Danger
The Hitler remarks did not come out of nowhere. On March 5, as the United States and Israel fought Iran, Carlson released a video suggesting that the war was being driven by a religious agenda in Jerusalem. He claimed that some people wanted to “begin the process of tearing down the Dome of the Rock” and rebuild the Temple. He placed the Chabad movement at the center of this supposed plot, and offered as evidence a patch worn by an Israeli soldier. Two weeks later he went further, telling another interviewer that the United States must make sure the Dome of the Rock is protected, because its destruction “would end the world as we know it.”
There is no such plot. Chabad rabbis responded that Jewish tradition leaves the rebuilding of the Temple to God, not to human hands. When Israel captured the Old City in 1967, it chose to preserve the Dome of the Rock rather than destroy it.
The Mufti’s Libel
The claim that Jews are plotting against Al-Aqsa is not new, and Carlson did not invent it. It was the Mufti’s signature lie. In 1928 and 1929, he accused the Jews of trying to seize Muslim holy places, including Al-Aqsa, and in August 1929 that libel turned into a wave of violence across Mandate Palestine. Within days, 133 Jews had been murdered and 339 wounded. In Hebron, where Jews had lived for centuries, rioters killed 67 Jewish men, women and children, and the survivors were relocated to Jerusalem. It was one of the worst pogroms outside Europe before the Holocaust, and it was instigated by the Mufti.
The libel outlived him. Hamas named its massacre of October 7, 2023, “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” and its military commander Mohammed Deif presented the attack as a response to supposed Israeli threats to the mosque. In footage later aired by Al Jazeera, Deif repeated the Mufti’s lie almost word for word: “The Jews want to build a temple on the ruins of al-Aqsa.” Hamas’s own statements justifying the attack made the same accusation. Nearly a century after Hebron, the same charge was used to justify the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Hitler’s Mufti
The Mufti’s alliance with Hitler grew from the same hatred. On November 28, 1941, Hitler received him at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, and the official German record of their conversation survives. In it, the Mufti told Hitler that the Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they shared its enemies, the English and the Jews chief among them. Hitler described Britain as one of the two great citadels of Jewish power, and he promised that once his armies reached the Middle East, Germany’s sole goal there would be the annihilation of the Jews living “under the protection of British power.”
This is the history Carlson’s question erases. In 1942 the SS formed a killing unit under Walther Rauff which, according to the historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, waited in Athens, ready to follow Rommel into Palestine and murder its roughly half a million Jews. The unit never left Greece, because the British Eighth Army stopped Rommel at El Alamein. Britain had a great deal to do with it. The Jewish community in the Land of Israel survived because Britain fought.
The Mufti spent the rest of the war in Berlin. The Nazi regime financed his antisemitic broadcasts into the Middle East, and in 1943, when there was a chance to bring Jewish children from Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria to Palestine, he wrote to the Axis governments demanding they block it. He suggested the children be sent to Poland instead, at a time when Poland was where Europe’s Jews were being sent to die.
Why It Matters
Carlson has now taken up both halves of the Mufti’s legacy. He has repeated the libel that Jews are scheming to destroy Al-Aqsa, and he has argued that Britain should never have gone to war against the regime the Mufti served. Whether or not he knows the history, the effect is the same. He is broadcasting, to an audience of millions, the precise accusation that preceded the murder of Jews in Hebron in 1929 and in southern Israel in 2023.
That is why this is no longer a matter of provocation or bad history. The claim that Jews threaten Al-Aqsa is not an opinion about foreign policy. It is a charge with a body count, one that has been used for a century to turn crowds against their Jewish neighbors. Carlson has crossed many lines over the years, but reaching for a flashpoint that has led to the slaughter of innocent Jews is a new low, even for him.
Jew-hate has always adapted, borrowing whatever language a society finds persuasive. Today it arrives as contrarianism, as “just asking questions,” as a podcast host who has never understood why anyone fought Hitler at all. The costume changes, but the accusation does not.
Tucker Carlson asked who cares. The Jews of Palestine cared in 1929 and again in 1942, and we still care today.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
