Yoram Hazony Aggravates Discord on the American Right

In “Anti-Semitism and the American Right,” a speech he delivered at the Second International Conference on Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem in late January, Yoram Hazony leveled a grave charge at American Jews, Christian Zionists, and “liberal Republicans” – such as, in Hazony’s assessment, Sen. Lindsey Graham, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Sen. Ted Cruz. According to Hazony, the groups have failed to demonstrate that Tucker Carlson promulgates antisemitic sentiments and tropes.

Yoram Hazony – anti-antisemite

Hazony’s grave charge echoed the influential right-wing broadcaster’s fulminations against American Jews, Christian Zionists, and “liberal” or traditional Republicans. For Hazony and Carlson, it’s not the bigots and blowhards – those warping ideas, twisting history, and propagating vicious stereotypes – who sow discord on the right. Rather, for Hazony and Carlson, those espousing America’s founding principles, constitutional traditions, and good old-fashioned common decency – and opposing antisemitism, grotesque historical revisionism, and malicious conspiracy theories – debilitate the right from within.

Hazony’s attack on Jewish and right-wing critics of right-wing antisemitism is bound up with acrimonious disputes that have been roiling the right since the rise of Donald Trump. The disputes go well beyond Jews’ role in America and Israel’s place in U.S. foreign policy. They reach to America’s fundamental character. Contrary to America’s founders, who established a nation that provides sanctuary to religious faith by protecting citizens’ unalienable right to worship as conscience dictates, Hazony and Carlson endeavor to remake America so that government affirms Christian belief and practice.

An American citizen who has lived in Israel for more than three decades, Hazony played a major role in launching national conservativism. The transnational movement is a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which Hazony chairs. National conservatism prescribes core conservative convictions and principles of nationalism for all peoples and nations.

An appeal to nationalism

The National Conservatism website defines nationalism as “a commitment to a world of independent nations.” It also asserts that “the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing.” By putting the “idea of the nation” first, national conservatism breaks with the American political tradition, which puts first citizens’ basic rights and fundamental freedoms and conceives of government’s primary task as securing them.

The National Conservatism 2022 statement of principles, of which Hazony was a co-drafter, revealed that NatCons are less interested in preserving “unique national traditions” than in elaborating standards to which all nations should conform. Most NatCon principles comport with the American conservatism nurtured by William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan. The NatCons emphasize national sovereignty, liberty, limited government, federalism, rule of law, free enterprise, government-sponsored scientific research, and family and children, while opposing racism, unrestricted immigration, and imperialism, globalism, and international government.

However, the NatCon statement also curtails the religious liberty inscribed in America’s distinctive rights tradition.

The United States is not a small, homogeneous society

Under the heading of “God and Public Religion,” the NatCons assert that “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” But Christian-majority nations come in different shapes and sizes. Whereas some are small, ethnically homogeneous, and home to a single dominant Christian domination or church, the United States is large, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic.

It is, moreover, home to more than 150 million Protestants and more than 50 million Catholics, and those two branches of Christianity themselves divide into numerous denominations and churches. Assigning American government responsibility for honoring “Christianity and its moral vision” amid many forms of Christianity would turn Christians against Christians, non-Christian believers against Christianity, and the non-religious against religion. Considerations like these (and others) convinced the Constitution’s drafters to withhold from the federal government the power to regulate religion and, shortly after the Constitution’s ratification, persuaded the young nation to adopt the First Amendment, which heightened safeguards for citizens’ religious liberty.

Hazony has always criticized the modern tradition of freedom

National conservatism’s enlistment of government to bolster Christianity is in keeping with Hazony’s polemics of many years standing against the modern tradition of freedom, which he condemns as antithetical to conservatism. Hazony rightly defends national sovereignty and the “traditional beliefs, institutions, and liberties” that undergird citizenship. At the same time, he deforms the American national spirit by depicting the modern tradition of freedom – which is rooted in the conviction enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that human beings are equally endowed with unalienable rights – as alien to and destructive of the American nation.

Hazony and his critique of the Jews

In Jerusalem, Hazony advanced this deformation of America by shifting blame from purveyors of antisemitism to the purveyors’ critics.

An oddity of Hazony’s blame-shifting was his insistence that the problem was one of public relations. He conceded “that by now, not too many Jews are likely to accept Tucker’s disavowal of anti-Semitism at face value” since “for the last eighteen months, Tucker’s interview show has become a circus of aggressive anti-Jewish propaganda.” The “abusive, wild slanders” regularly heard on Carlson’s broadcast, Hazony indicated, range widely:

1. That Jews are a demonic force in history.
2. That Jews have a plan to systematically destroy every Christian community in the Middle East.
3. That Jews control the American government.
4. That Jews shot Kennedy.
5. That Jews propped up Winston Churchill financially so he could start an unnecessary war with Hitler.
6. That the Jewish Bible is about revenge and genocide, and doesn’t teach us to be gracious to one another.
7. That Christians who think Jews are God’s chosen people aren’t Christians at all, but heretics.

Hazony’s devastating summary builds on the labors of Jews, Christian Zionists, and traditional Republicans who over the last several months have sedulously highlighted Carlson’s vile and crackpot contentions. One would think that by now the fault resides with those who refuse to face up to Carlson’s resolute promotion of noxious opinions.

Fifteen minutes of explanation

Yet Hazony mocked and castigated Jews, Christian Zionists, and traditional Republicans for failing to persuade the White House, which only a few weeks ago hosted Carlson, to cut ties with him.

All that is needed, asserted Hazony, is a “15-minute explainer video, that I can show my friends on the political right, which proves that this very serious accusation against Tucker is true.” But, Hazony flatly stated, “There is no such 15-minute explainer video.” Such a video does not exist, he contended, because of the “extremely high level of incompetence” of Jews, Christian Zionists, traditional Republicans, “and the entire anti-Semitism-industrial complex.”

Whether a 15-minute explainer video would possess the magical properties that Hazony ascribes to it is a fascinating question. If journalist and author Orit Arfa is correct, the question already should have been answered.

Arfa worked closely with Hazony for four years as the Edmund Burke Foundation’s director of communications but broke with him recently over his refusal to speak publicly and “with moral clarity about the evils of antisemitism” and to offer “insights about how to handle ‘friends’ who flirt with antisemitic ideas or personalities.” In “Yoram Hazony’s 15 Minutes” published by Tablet, she maintains that Hazony is perfectly aware that a 15-minute explainer video corroborating the accusations against Carlson does exist “because Yoram himself produced it.” And Arfa should know: “Fellow employees and I worked hours to produce an explainer with video excerpts of Tucker’s seven slanders against Jews that Yoram enumerated in his speech.”

Where to find the video

Arfa’s article links to “Seven New Tucker Carlson Themes Since 2023,” which runs 14 minutes and 57 seconds. The video compiles on-air clips of Carlson expressing, and welcoming expressions of, animosity to Jews and Israel, and of Carlson and guests downplaying Hitler and the Holocaust. The clips affirm that the Old Testament is immoral, Christian Zionism is a heresy, Jews are murdering Middle East Christians, American Jews are disloyal to America, Jews are pernicious, and Churchill was World War II’s real culprit and the Holocaust was not as wicked as is commonly portrayed.

In his 2016 book, “God and Politics in Esther,” Hazony praised Mordechai the Jew for refusing to bow down to the king’s adviser, the evil Haman who, in retaliation, sought to destroy the Jewish people. But when put to the test, Hazony bowed to sectarian political exigencies. Instead of publicizing what he himself suggests is an open-and-shut case against Carlson’s dissemination of antisemitism, Hazony aggrandized national conservatism by heaping scorn on the American Jews, Christian Zionists, and traditional Republicans who have called Carlson to account.

Is this all Hazony has?

Whether or not Hazony possesses the 15-minute explainer video, at a painful and perplexing moment for American Jews and the American right he has left both in the lurch. If he possesses the video, then, while taunting Jews, Christian Zionists, and traditional Republicans for gross public-relations ineptitude, Hazony suppressed the very instrument he himself declared would counter surging right-wing antisemitism. If he does not possess it, then he has failed to marshal the considerable resources at his disposal as chair of the Edmund Burke Foundation and as a leader of the national conservatism movement to produce and distribute materials that he believes would decisively expose Carlson’s smears and slanders. Either way, Hazony has let down American Jews while dividing the American right by inciting his camp against the nation’s precious constitutional inheritance.

Needed now is an American right that rededicates itself to conserving America’s founding principles, constitutional traditions, and good old-fashioned common decency. Such a right would be well-equipped to repel the scourge of antisemitism and reknit the nation’s tattered fabric.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.