Tucker Carlson’s sickening praise for Sharia tyranny

Tucker Carlson is smitten with Saudi Arabia. He calls it a ‘weirdly free place’. His proof? He once bigged up Jesus Christ at a dinner party in Riyadh and nothing happened. You can say, ‘I’m really kind of pro-Jesus’, and your hosts will reply, ‘That’s so great!’, he told a podcast bro last week. Okay, Tucker, here’s a challenge for you. Next time you’re in the desert kingdom, build a structure to your ‘pro-Jesus’ beliefs. Let’s call it a church. Take to the pulpit and preach His gospel, as is the solemn responsibility of all followers of Christ. Let’s see how your dinner buddies respond then.

Actually, don’t. I might find Carlson annoying but I don’t want him to suffer the savagery of Saudi intolerance. For if he did that, he would be instantly arrested. If he was lucky, he’d be deported; unlucky and he’d be condemned to a grim cell for months and possibly years. For public Christian worship is entirely prohibited in Saudi Arabia. It is forbidden by law to publicly praise Jesus Christ or promote the gospels. Calling Saudi Arabia ‘weirdly free’ is right out of the Orwellian playbook of authoritarian duplicity. Go tell it to your brothers in Christ who languish in the hell of a Saudi jail for their crimes of conscience.

The even more sickening thing about Carlson’s lauding of Saudi Arabia, all interspersed with his emotionally incontinent hyena cackle, is that he seems to have nothing to say about Saudi Muslims who decide to become ‘kind of pro-Jesus’. Their punishment is even more severe than that faced by born Christians who preach publicly. For their ‘apostasy’ they suffer lengthy prison sentences and sometimes death. How nauseating for a wealthy blabbermouth from the West to gloat about his ‘freedom’ to be pro-Jesus in Saudi polite society, while saying not a word for the Saudi apostate who might be beheaded before a baying mob for doing the very same.

Carlson really has lost it. Also on that pod, he sang the praises of Sharia law. He contrasted a place like New York City – where people are ‘shitting on the sidewalk’ and ‘having sex in ATM vestibules’ – with Sharia-ruled nations like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, where order rules and people are happy. They are? Even the gays, who in Saudi Arabia can be put to death for their acts of love behind closed doors? I’m as opposed to public shitting as the next person, but give me the occasional sight of a crackhead’s stool over the state murder of homosexuals, the forced veiling of women and the outlawing of religious conscience any day of the week.

Carlson comes off like one of those oddball ginger Brits who converts to Islam and then holds forth like a roadman imam on the glories of Sharia. He says the Sharia-governed Gulf states are ‘happy… welcoming of others… tolerant of diversity’. Okay, maybe he can explain why Qatar has not one synagogue (hint: it’s an anti-Semitic hellhole that strictly regulates non-Muslim religious belief). Or why a British grandad was once sentenced to 350 lashes in Saudi Arabia for having some homemade booze in his car. Or why a 19-year-old Saudi woman was flogged and jailed for six months after being gang-raped. I’ll tell you why: because she was rumoured to be having an affair with one of her attackers, and to the Islamo-psychos who rule that kingdom that’s as bad being raped. I bet she isn’t ‘happy’, Tucker.

Carlson’s truthless, childish gushing over Sharia nations puts him on a par with those 1930s Western leftists who bigged up Stalin’s regime and neglected to mention his violent purging of tens of thousands of ‘wrongthinkers’. Like them, it seems his need for a foreign entity he can point to as being morally preferable to the knackered West overrides any duty he might feel towards that old thing called truth. And the truth is this: Sharia law is inferior to the universal law of Western nations. Its emphasis on vengeance, where a criminal’s punishment is sometimes put at the discretion of the victim or the victim’s family, unleashes untold cruelty and clannish point-scoring. Carlson might not like poo in New York City but he should know that New York City is legally, morally and socially a more humane place than Riyadh.

Carlson even offered up a wet, dumb ‘explanation’ for why groups like ISIS exist: ‘They’re all from collapsed, pathetic societies dominated by colonial powers… and that’s why they’re so angry.’ I’m also angry about things but I have never defenestrated a homosexual or crucified an apostate or lined up Coptic Christians on a beach and cut their heads off with a knife. Carlson makes himself indistinguishable from the moral cowards of the relativistic left when he downplays the Islamist convictions of groups like ISIS and instead dolls them up as angry reactions to colonialism. It’s like he has a neurological disorder where his mind and mouth are physically incapable of forming critical words about Islamism.

Listening to Carlson, I found myself thinking that the real problem today is not so-called Islamophobia – it’s Islamophilia. On the woke left and increasingly on the crank right too, we are seeing a creepy embrace of Islamism as a better, more orderly way of life. Jihad-chic leftists wear the keffiyeh and big up Hamas and will demand your expulsion from public life if you crack a joke about Muhammad. The whackjob right, meanwhile, looks with envy at the shite-free streets and non-debauched culture of Sharia states and wishes we could have the same here. That such ‘order’ is underpinned by the threat of savage punishment for anyone who dares to believe or behave differently to their rulers doesn’t seem to bother them.

I’ll say it: occasionally having to see homeless people fucking at an ATM is a small price to pay for living in a society where you are free to obey the diktats of your own conscience. Tucker’s Islamophilia, like the left’s, is fundamentally an expression of his turn against America and the West itself. It is proof that the anti-Israel derangement, by which he is badly ailed, is a gateway drug to anti-Westernism. One minute you’re chanting ‘From the river to the sea’, the next you’re making excuses for regimes that whip women who get raped. Their Islamo-sympathy bubbles up like effluent from their haughty exhaustion with Western civilisation.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book, Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy, is out now. Find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.