Anti-Semitic?

Hunter Biden explaining his defense of Tucker Carlson (from an Al Jazeera NewsFeed Web page)

This morning I encountered the following single-sentence “NewsFeed” on an Al Jazeera Web page:

Hunter Biden has defended US journalist Tucker Carlson against anti-Semitism allegations, arguing that if calling Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “evil incarnate” is considered anti-Semitic, then he “doesn’t know what to say to people anymore.”

Spending two years in Israel teaching computer science at the Technion in Haifa left me with very mixed impressions of Israel, both as a country itself and in its relations to the rest of the world. In that context, I feel obliged to come to Carlson’s defense. Indeed, I might even go so far as to suggest that Carlson check out the Ten Commandments to see how many of them Netanyahu has been obeying!

There is much to be gained from visiting Israel as a tourist. It is one of the few places where one can view artifacts of history that go back millennia, rather than just a century or two. Nevertheless, more than one time was I encountered with the single-breath utterance: how-do-you-like-it-here-we-won’t-be-angry-if-you-say-you-don’t! Ultimately, I learned how to take refuge in my favorite phrase from John Keats’ Endymion: “first a little patience!” I did not see much of that in Israel; but I have not seen much of it recently here in the United States, particularly in our Executive Branch!

To reflect back on my student days, I feel obliged to thank Carlson for “telling it like it is!”