Tucker Responds to Israel’s Attacks on Jesus Christ & the American Christian Leaders Supporting It

**Tucker Carlson** (0:01)
On Sunday, one of the weirdest images of recent times, and there are a lot of weird images, appeared on the internet. I'm gonna put it up on the screen. It appeared to show an Israeli soldier, an IDF soldier, using a sledgehammer to smash the face of a statue of Jesus.
Now, when people first saw this, we don't have a poll on it or anything, but we can imagine very few thought it was real. For one thing, social media is famously full of manufactured images created for who knows what purpose, mostly political, using AI. They're not real. And this one seemed especially fake, because it was supposedly shot in Lebanon. And there was a war going on in Lebanon, and this is an Israeli soldier. Now, we know a couple of things. One, what's happening in Lebanon is critical to the security of the state of Israel. And we know that because Israel is also partnered with the United States in a war against Iran, which is critical to its national security. Of course, taking out the famed Iranian nuclear program is essential for the existence of the state of Israel. That's why the United States joined in this war. But in the middle of that, Israel had to take time out to invade southern Lebanon, not just invade, but according to its own defense minister, take over, settle, expel the people and create a permanent security zone in southern Lebanon below the river. Now, it had to have been pretty pressing for them to want to do something like this because they had a lot else going on. And it was pressing. Hezbollah, or as it is often known on American television, Hezbollah, kind of the Keeve of pronunciations, people who know what they're talking about call it Hezbollah. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terror militia had been attacking Israel, northern Israel from southern Lebanon, and Israel just had no choice but to go in and kill the terrorists. So in the face of that kind of threat, you had to ask yourself, looking at this picture, how would an IDF soldier have the time to take a sledgehammer to smash the face of Jesus when he's defending his own country against terror? And so then you had to assume, well, obviously, he knows something that we don't know. This so-called statue of Jesus was probably some kind of terror weapon. It was the Hezbollah equivalent of an exploding pager. There were probably C4 charges inside the head of that Jesus statue. And the IDF soldier, a member of the world's most professional ethical army, was just defusing what could have been incredibly dangerous to the children of Israel. So this was basically yet another necessary step taken in defense of Israel's right to exist.
But then you had to ask yourself, wait a second, why would a soldier smash a statue filled with explosives? That doesn't make any sense. Clearly, he didn't think the thing was going to explode, or he wouldn't be hitting with a sledgehammer, a sledgehammer that you paid for as an American taxpayer, wearing a uniform you paid for. In fact, everything that soldier has in his possession, you paid for because the entire IDF is paid for by the United States taxpayer.
So then you think, well, this just can't be real. And of course, that's what they told you right off the bat. This is not real. This is just more terror propaganda. The state of Israel, its many agents in the United States, in our media, on our social media told you, don't believe it. That's fake. It's AI. But very quickly it emerged, no, this actually was real. And that raised a whole new set of questions, beginning with why would an Israeli soldier want to smash the face of Jesus? This is a country, we're often told, that is a safe haven for Christians in the region. In fact, it's the only country in the Middle East where Christians feel safe. Obviously, that's why there's so many happy Christians in Israel and in the territories Israel controls.
Well, before any of those questions could be answered, the Israeli media jumped in with their concerns. Having confirmed it was real, here was the first response from Israeli media. Watch.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:32)
This does not look good at all for the Israelis and it's going to be circulating online in the US as well.
We know who will take advantage of this. IRGC accounts already talk about this, post it everywhere. Definitely Hezbollah affiliated accounts. And this is again, another incident that is going to make a lot of bad portraying of the IDF.

**Tucker Carlson** (5:00)
Did you hear that? The problem with an IDF soldier smashing the face of Jesus is not that he smashed the face of Jesus. The problem is that he got caught on camera. And in fact, it turns out not only did the guy who did it get punished, punished, but so did the guy who filmed it. Because exposing what the IDF does to the rest of the world is the real crime. And you just heard the news presenter say that. This is already on Hezbollah controlled accounts. The IRGC is making a lot of this. What you don't hear is any examination of why it happened in the first place. Why would an Israeli soldier want to do this? What does it reflect of the attitudes of the Israeli military and of Israel itself toward Christianity?