Tucker Carlson wants you to believe that Israel is the great persecutor of Christians in the Holy Land. Marjorie Taylor Greene wants you to believe it so badly she flew to Bethlehem, met with a mayor hand-picked by the Palestinian Authority, and posted his talking points on social media like she’d uncovered the Pentagon Papers.
They are lying to you. Not about everything—liars rarely do—but about the thing that matters most: who is actually destroying Christian life in the land where Christianity was born.
The answer, documented by every credible research institution, the U.S. State Department, the European Union, the World Bank, and Palestinian Christians themselves, is the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. And Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene are providing cover for both.
Bethlehem: The Crime Scene They Don’t Want You to See
Bethlehem is ground zero for this lie, so let’s start there.
In 1950, Bethlehem and its surrounding villages were 86% Christian. Today, Christians make up roughly 10% of the population. The birthplace of Jesus Christ has been effectively purged of the people who built their lives around His legacy.
Tucker Carlson blames Israel for this. Former Ambassador David Friedman corrected him publicly in February 2026: Bethlehem is governed entirely by the Palestinian Authority. It sits in Area A under the Oslo Accords. Not a single Israeli lives there. The mayor Greene met with—Maher Canawati—was appointed by the PA. Of course he blamed Israel. He’d be out of a job or worse if he told Greene the truth.
And the truth is ugly.
A landmark study by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, authored by Lt. Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch and Attorney Tirza Shorr, laid out the data that Carlson and Greene refuse to acknowledge. Palestinian Christians under PA governance face systematic employment discrimination, with 44% reporting they are discriminated against when seeking jobs or PA services. Forty percent of Palestinian Christians surveyed said they believe most Muslims do not wish to see them in the country. Nearly a third have been called “non-believer” or “crusader” by their Muslim neighbors.
In 2022, a Muslim man harassed young Christian women at the Forefathers Orthodox Church in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem. What followed was not justice—it was a mob of Palestinian men who hurled rocks at the church while congregants cowered inside, injuring several. PA security forces did nothing.
That same year, an unidentified gunman shot at the Christian-owned Bethlehem Hotel after a social media post associated it with a Star of David display. No arrests were made.
In April 2022, Palestinian evangelical pastor Johnny Shahwan was arrested by the PA itself—not for violence, not for incitement—but for “promoting normalization” with Israel. A Christian pastor, jailed by the government Carlson and Greene are running interference for.
As the JCFA report stated: “Christian individuals are afraid to report hate incidents in the PA for fear of being arrested or worse. This creates a skewed picture, one eagerly adopted by Western governments and media outlets.” Tucker Carlson is now one of those media outlets.
Gaza: Where Hamas Finished What They Started
Before Hamas seized power in 2007, approximately 5,000 Christians lived in the Gaza Strip. By October 2023, that number had collapsed to roughly 1,000. Hamas didn’t need bombs to drive Christians out. They used something more efficient: systematic terror, intimidation, and enforced Islamization.
The European Parliament documented it in formal proceedings: between 2007 and 2011 alone, there were repeated acts of vandalism and bomb attacks on Christian schools, homes, and institutions, as well as outright murder and attempted murder of Christians in Gaza. Hamas desecrated Christian graves, exhuming bodies to “decontaminate” the soil from Christian corpses. They forced Christians to collaborate under threats of rape and reprisals against their families. The European Parliament noted that the failure to investigate any of these incidents demonstrated Hamas had no intention of protecting Christians.
In 2007, the year Hamas took control, Islamic militants firebombed the last Christian bookstore in Gaza City—twice. Its owner, Rami Ayyad, a devout Christian who ran the Bible Society bookshop, had received death threats from jihadists for years. He refused to close. Hamas militants kidnapped him, tortured him, and murdered him. His killers were never found. Hamas “condemned” the murder. They always condemn. They never arrest.
The Gaza Baptist Church was repeatedly commandeered by militant groups as an observation post, resulting in church staff being caught in crossfire. A church librarian was shot. A 22-year-old church bus driver, a newlywed, was killed. In 2012, five Christians were allegedly kidnapped by an Islamist group and forced to convert to Islam. Hamas predictably claimed the conversions were voluntary. Gazan Christians organized daily protest rallies—and were ignored.
A professor at Palestine University in Gaza, Sana al-Sayegh, was kidnapped by Hamas militiamen and forced to convert to Islam. Reports of kidnapping and forced conversion of Christian women are documented but systematically suppressed.
Hamas banned Christmas celebrations in Gaza. Christmas trees and decorations disappeared from public view. Christian women who walked without a hijab were marked as outsiders and subjected to near-daily harassment. Converts from Islam to Christianity lived in hiding or fled, knowing that apostasy could be a death sentence.
Notre Dame’s Under Caesar’s Sword project put it bluntly: Hamas’s reign “began an insidious Islamization process from above and especially from below.” Christians in Gaza are “targeted on the basis of their religious faith in ways even more acute and systematic than Christians in the West Bank and Israel.”
Tucker Carlson has never once said the name Rami Ayyad on his podcast. He has never mentioned the forced conversions. He has never discussed the firebombing of Christian schools in Gaza by Islamic extremists. He has never addressed the fact that Hamas drove 80% of Gaza’s Christians out before a single Israeli bomb fell in the current conflict. He doesn’t mention these things because they destroy his narrative.
The PA’s $315 Million Terrorism Machine
While Christians suffer under PA neglect and Hamas terror, the Palestinian Authority is spending hundreds of millions of dollars rewarding the people who attack Israelis—money that comes, in part, from international aid.
The U.S. State Department formally determined in 2025 that the PA paid more than $200 million to terrorists and their families—in the same year PA President Mahmoud Abbas claimed he had ended the program. A 2026 analysis by Palestinian Media Watch found the PA will distribute $315 million this year to approximately 23,500 terrorists and their families, channeling payments through alternate budgets controlled by PA security forces, civil services, and pension offices to hide them from Western donors.
Monthly stipends range from roughly $1,280 to $3,800—with the highest payments going to those who committed the most brutal attacks. Prisoners who serve five or more years—the threshold that indicates serious violence—are entitled to permanent employment within the PA itself upon release. The PA isn’t just paying terrorists. It’s hiring them.
The Taylor Force Act, signed into law in 2018 after an American was murdered by a Palestinian attacker, cut approximately one-third of U.S. foreign aid to the PA. The Netherlands cut its annual payments. Norway demanded the PA stop using Norwegian aid for martyr stipends. The UK froze $30 million. The European Union confronted PA officials with evidence that payments continued through alternative channels despite explicit promises to stop.
Abbas’s response? He called efforts to stop the payments “an aggression against the Palestinian people” and pledged: “If we are left with one penny, we will spend it on the families of the prisoners and martyrs.”
This is the government Tucker Carlson is implicitly defending. This is the government whose appointed mayor Marjorie Taylor Greene is amplifying on social media. A government that would rather pay terrorists than protect its Christian minority.
Meanwhile, in the Country They’re Attacking
While Christians vanish under PA and Hamas rule, here is what is happening inside Israel—the country Carlson and Greene want you to believe is the problem.
Israel’s Christian population stands at approximately 184,200 as of 2025, representing 1.9% of the country’s total population. That number has been growing steadily. The Christian population has more than doubled since the 1970s. Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is increasing.
Eighty-four percent of Israeli Christians reported being satisfied with their life in Israel. Twenty-four percent said “very satisfied.” These aren’t government talking points—this is data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, verified independently.
Christian schools in Israel are among the finest in the country. In 2022, 84% of Christian 12th-grade students earned matriculation certificates—a higher rate than the general Israeli population, higher than Jewish students, higher than Muslim students, and higher than Druze students. Over half of all Israeli Christians pursue higher education. Arab Christians have the lowest unemployment rate and the lowest poverty rate of any Arab subgroup in Israel.
Christian enlistment in the Israel Defense Forces has tripled in 2025 compared to previous years. Lt. Col. Ihab Shlian, the highest-ranking Christian in the IDF, said publicly: “We Christians are at the forefront of the defense of Israel together with our Jewish siblings. For us too, there is no other country.”
Israel’s Declaration of Independence enshrined freedom of religion. The 1967 Protection of Holy Places Law criminalizes desecration of holy sites and obstruction of access for all faiths. Christians in Israel have the right to worship, build churches, operate religious schools, and celebrate their faith publicly and openly. Millions of Christian pilgrims visit Israel every year, welcomed and protected.
Compare that to what happened in Gaza, where Christmas was banned. Compare it to Bethlehem, where a Christian pastor was arrested for talking to Israelis. Compare it to PA territory, where Christians are afraid to report hate crimes for fear the PA itself will retaliate.
Then ask yourself why Tucker Carlson devoted 90 minutes to attacking Israel and zero minutes to any of this.
The Timeline of a Grift
Tucker Carlson spent years on Fox News building the Islamophobia framework that made Americans view the entire Middle East as a civilizational threat. He was part of the machine that taught Americans that Muslims—all of them, everywhere—were dangerous. He never once used that platform to highlight the persecution of Christians by Hamas or the PA. Not once.
Then he left Fox. He needed a new audience. He needed a new cause. In April 2025, he pivoted. A study by the Jewish People Policy Institute tracked his content and found that his negative coverage of Israel surged from 48.9% to 70.3% in the latter half of 2025. He platformed Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who praised Hitler and celebrated Hamas. He flew to Israel, never left the airport, staged a confrontation with security for content, and flew home.
This man does not care about Palestinian Christians. He cares about clicks, political influence, and building what Jeremy Boreing described as a “new American majority.” Palestinian Christians are props.
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s timeline is even more damning. In November 2023, she tried to censure Rashida Tlaib for criticizing Israel. By July 2025, she was voting with Tlaib to strip Israeli missile defense funding. She called Gaza a “genocide.” She met with a PA-appointed mayor and posted his talking points as fact.
What changed? Not the facts on the ground. Those have been the same for years. What changed is that Greene had a falling-out with Donald Trump over the Epstein files and AIPAC. Trump revoked his endorsement. Greene announced her resignation from Congress. She needed a new identity, and she found one by suddenly “discovering” Palestinian Christian persecution—a cause she had actively worked against for her entire political career.
The Numbers Don’t Lie. These Two Do.
Under Palestinian Authority control, Bethlehem went from 86% Christian to 10% Christian. Under Hamas, Gaza went from 5,000 Christians to 1,000. Under Israeli governance, the Christian population has more than doubled and continues to grow every year.
The PA spends $315 million per year paying terrorists while its police refuse to protect Christians from mob violence. Hamas murdered a Christian bookseller, firebombed Christian schools, desecrated Christian graves, forced women to convert, and banned Christmas. Israel protects holy sites by law, educates Christian children at the highest academic standards in the country, and fields a growing number of Christian soldiers who serve voluntarily because they believe in the state that protects them.
Tucker Carlson knows all of this. So does Marjorie Taylor Greene. They don’t care. They are not truth-tellers. They are not defenders of the faith. They are political operators who discovered that attacking Israel plays well with a new audience, and they are willing to bury the truth about who is actually killing, harassing, converting, and driving out Christians to keep that audience engaged.
Every minute they spend blaming Israel is a minute they are not spending holding the PA and Hamas accountable. Every viewer they convince that Israel is the problem is one more person who will never demand that the Palestinian Authority stop paying terrorists and start protecting Christians. Every post, every podcast, every airport stunt is a gift to the people who are actually responsible for the erasure of Christianity from its birthplace.
The next time Tucker Carlson puts on his concerned face and asks how Israel treats Christians, remember Rami Ayyad. Remember the firebombed schools. Remember the 86% that became 10%. Remember the $315 million in terror payments. Remember the Christian pastor the PA threw in jail.
Then change the channel.
Sources: U.S. State Department Taylor Force Act compliance reports (2025–2026); Palestinian Media Watch analysis (2026); Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (2025); Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs demographic study by Lt. Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch and Attorney Tirza Shorr (2024); European Parliament formal question E-006179/2011 on violence against Christians in Gaza; Notre Dame University Under Caesar’s Sword project; Open Doors World Watch List; International Christian Concern; AIPAC Israel Christian Community Fact Sheet; Jewish People Policy Institute podcast content analysis (2025); Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research polling; Zogby International polling (2006); Congressional testimony on PA terror payments; and reporting from the Times of Israel, Jerusalem Post, Washington Free Beacon, Haaretz, Foreign Policy, Christian Post, the Algemeiner, and VINnews.
