by Dominick Mastrangelo, The Hill
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is on the receiving end of backlash this week after the organization called for Fox News host Tucker Carlson to be pulled off the air.
“Tucker must go,” the group’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said after Carlson made statements about what the ADL suggested was akin to “replacement theory” during an on-air segment last Thursday.
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Carlson, during “Fox News Primetime,” offered comments on why Democrats are pro-immigration, suggesting that they are trying to “replace the current electorate.”
“I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate,” Carlson said.
“But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening actually. Let’s just say it. That’s true,” he added.
Greenblatt said the theory of “Great Replacement” is “a white supremacist tenet that the white race is in danger by a rising tide of non-whites.”
“Carlson’s full-on embrace of the white supremacist replacement theory on yesterday’s show and his repeated allusions to racist themes in past segments are a bridge too far,” the group said.
But several prominent Jewish leaders are casting doubt on Greenblatt’s assertion, saying his critique of Carlson’s statements was unnecessary and unwarranted.
“Fox is not an anti-Semitic network,” said former ADL President Abraham Foxman. “It’s a lot of things but it’s not an anti-Semitic network and it’s certainly not an anti-Israel network.”
In a letter to the ADL this week, Lachlan Murdoch, Fox Corp.’s executive chairman and CEO, defended Carlson.
“A full review of the guest interview indicates that Mr. Carlson decried and rejected replacement theory,” Murdoch wrote. “As Mr. Carlson himself stated during the guest interview: ‘White replacement theory? No, no, this is a voting rights question.’”
The Jerusalem Post reported this week some 1,500 rabbis penned a letter of their own to Greenblatt, calling his suggestion that Carlson was promoting white supremacist ideology “grossly misplaced.”
“Alas, the ADL has become markedly partisan under your leadership,” they wrote, before accusing the organization’s current leader of being too focused on “partisan preoccupations.”