Here we go again, with a vengeance. As in the Peter Allen song from the 1979 movie, “All That Jazz,” it would seem that to the far-right provocateur Tucker Carlson, “everything old is new again.”

The “new” in this case is Carlson blaming Jews, specifically the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement, for the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. The “old” is that he is recirculating antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories that we have heard many times before.

In last Thursday’s episode of “The Tucker Carlson Show” the podcaster proclaimed that the Iran war is not being waged primarily for geopolitical reasons but is “a global religious war” instigated at least “in part” by Chabad. He contends that Chabad’s goal in doing so is a messianic “building of the Third Temple” following the destruction of the Muslim holy sites of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Moreover, he considers the war to be “between Muslims and Christians” rather than between Muslims and Jews. “The Europeans,” he bloviates unctuously, “are the enemies, the mortal enemies of the Israelis. That’s the Israeli perspective, obviously. Look at the effects. And so if that were to happen in this conflict, it’s not the Israelis who would bear the brunt of it. It’s the Europeans, it’s the Canadians, it’s the Australians, and it’s us. And it’s the Russians. 20% of Russia is Muslim. All of those countries would be in for serious turmoil and bloodshed.”

And then, Carlson asks, “What happens in all those countries — those Christian western white countries — what happens there? If there’s the religious war that , , , clearly the Israeli government and some in our government are hoping for, what happens? Oh, those countries suffer more than they have........

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