Tucker Carlson takes aim at Chabad in latest rant targeting Judaism

In yet another video focusing on his criticism of Judaism, the anti-Israel pundit blames the Chabad Hasidic movement for the millennia-old Jewish aspiration to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

By David Rosenberg, World Israel News

Podcaster Tucker Carlson doubled down on his criticism of traditional Jewish beliefs on Thursday, assailing the idea of the Third Temple in Jerusalem.

In the latest episode of “The Tucker Carlson Show,” the 56-year-old former Fox News host addressed what he claimed are “Israel’s true motives” in the war with Iran.

Carlson predicted that Iran will not be toppled by the joint Israeli-American strikes and that unless President Donald Trump unilaterally ends US involvement in the next 48 hours, the conflict will escalate out of control.

“This thing takes a life of its own,” Carlson said. “The Iranians are not going to surrender. They are not going to stop popping off missiles.”

However, Carlson continued, Israel is likely to push for a continuation of the war with the goal of using it to distract from plans to demolish the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount.

“So, in that environment when you can’t really know what’s going on, it’s thousands of miles from here, all of a sudden the Al Aqsa complex is just vaporized. ‘Oops, the Iranians did it’,” Carlson said.

Carlson’s claim echoes debunked allegations that have circulated within the Arab and Muslim worlds for decades since Israel’s liberation of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967.

To bolster his theory, Carlson cited a viral video of an IDF soldier displaying a patch with a symbol of the Third Temple.

“Beit HaMikdash,” Carlson said. “That’s the Hebrew term for the Temple, the Third Temple.”

The soldier’s comments and the Third Temple patch, Carlson argued, are a sign that the IDF and the Israeli government are planning the demolition of the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque.

“We are doing this so we can rebuild the Temple,” Carlson continued. “Now, you’ll notice he’s pulling off patches from his IDF uniform. These are not civilian clothes. This is the uniform of the government of Israel, of its military.”

While belief in the eventual rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem is a cornerstone of traditional Jewish faith, mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel and codified some 1,600 years ago in the Babylonian Talmud as a basic tenet of Judaism, Carlson argued that the idea was in fact being spread by the Chabad movement.

A Hasidic dynasty that began engaging in global Jewish outreach to secular Jews after the Holocaust, Chabad has promoted Orthodox beliefs, including faith in the eventual rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem.

“This has been going on a long time in public through, in part, the efforts of a group called Chabad. And you may know people who give money to Chabad or run Chabad. Super nice people engaged in all kinds of charitable activities…”

“But what is Chabad exactly? Well, Chabad, you can look it up, is a very old organization, about 250 years old, and it’s a branch of Hasidic Judaism. It’s an organization that was overseen for many years by a guy called Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who was famously in Brooklyn, considered the Messiah by some of his followers, who was a friend of presidents or certainly someone presidents visited – a very powerful man in the Orthodox and his Hasidic community.”

“Chabad has been pushing in a pretty subtle way, unless you look carefully, for the reconstruction of the Third Temple. And it seems like from the reading we did recently, that those patches actually came from Chabad. Well, in any case, Chabad is pushing for the building of the Third Temple.”

“But it’s not just Hasidic groups from Brooklyn, and it’s not just IDF soldiers. There are amazingly a lot of American evangelical leaders, Christian Zionists, whose main point is rebuilding the Third Temple.”

While Christian views on the Third Temple and the biblical prophecies regarding its construction vary significantly, Carlson declared Christian believers in the Third Temple prophecy to be heretics.

“That’s more than apostasy,” Carlson said.

Earlier this week, Carlson released a video statement in which he denounced Jews and Christians who believe in the idea of the Third Temple as “deranged and demonic.”

“I’m not going to go into the theology of it, which is deranged and demonic, actually. But it is a fact that people want this. And that is the beginning of really the end of the world as we know it.”