A Likud lawmaker openly urged American conservatives to turn on two of the most influential figures in the U.S. right-wing media ecosystem, warning that their rhetoric represents not just antisemitism, but a direct threat to Western civilization itself.
In a speech at the Knesset, Dan Illouz, a Canadian-born member of Israel’s ruling Likud party, called on American conservatives to reject Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, accusing both of poisoning the conservative movement with ideas he says are indistinguishable from the radical left.
In remarks that were unusually blunt for a sitting Israeli lawmaker speaking about U.S. media figures, Illouz described them as “a new enemy rising from within” the West.
“They sell poison as patriotism,” he said. “If the West allows these voices to rewrite history and erase the line between good and evil, it is committing civilizational suicide.”
The comments land squarely in the middle of an intensifying ideological rift inside the American right, particularly within the MAGA movement, where Carlson and Owens have emerged as leading voices pushing a more isolationist, conspiratorial and openly antisemitic worldview.
Carlson, who was fired from Fox News in 2023 following the network’s massive defamation settlement, has increasingly turned his fire inward on fellow conservatives. In recent months, he has accused conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, of being more loyal to Israel than to the United States and of promoting “usury,” a classic antisemitic trope.
Owens, who first rose to prominence after being promoted by Shapiro on the Daily Wire, has gone even further. She has derided Shapiro as a “Talmudic Jew,” encouraged her audience to purchase a long-discredited 19th-century antisemitic pamphlet, and promoted conspiracy theories claiming Jews orchestrated the transatlantic slave trade and believe they have “a right to own us.”
Illouz said he is unconcerned about accusations that he is meddling in American domestic politics.
“Defending the alliance between America and Israel is not interfering,” he said. “I am in touch with many pro-Israel conservatives who know that Candace and Tucker are a threat to America as much as to Israel.”
Shapiro himself publicly confronted the issue in December during a speech at the Heritage Foundation, where he warned that tolerating antisemitism on the right would destroy conservatism from within.
“If conservatives do not stand up and draw lines,” Shapiro said at the time, “conservatism and the dream of America itself will cease to exist.”
(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)
