My dreaming of a white Christmas was rudely interrupted by a social media post containing a guide for antisemites on seasonal music to avoid. ‘White Christmas’ was on the blacklist, so to speak. Other ‘Christmas Songs written by Jews’ compiled by the self-styled Christian Nationalist included ‘The Christmas Song’, ‘Let It Snow’, ‘Winter Wonderland’, ‘Silver Bells’ and ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’: ‘Just an annual reminder that this is one major way they subverted our most holy holidays to remove Christ from them and turn them into consumerist slop,’ the compiler wrote. No need to ask who ‘they’ are.

The claim that Jews secretly undermine Christian faith is a mishmash of time-worn tropes about how ‘Jews control culture’ and ‘corrupt Christian traditions’. It’s not quite ‘Killing Christ’, just the usual whatever-has-gone-wrong-in-your-life, you-know-who-to-blame.

The post was followed by a quote from Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock: ‘Jews loathe Jesus…. They remove Christ from Christmas and Easter to turn Christianity into schlock.’ What the tweeter didn’t grasp is that the character saying this is not Roth (a Jew, he noted) it’s a fictional, deranged impostor who pretends to be Philip Roth while roaming Israel spouting anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

‘If they’re this upset to discover that Jews wrote the Christmas songs, we need to make sure they never find out who wrote the Gospels,’ quips writer Saul Sadka.

Sadka needn’t worry. Billions of people are preparing to celebrate the birthday of a Jew born in Bethlehem over 2,000 years ago, who grew up to be a rabbi, traced his lineage back to Abraham through King David, kept the Sabbath, taught in synagogues, celebrated Passover, and quoted Deuteronomy more than any other text. Yet they don’t think of him as a Jew. How could he have been when the Jews only arrived in the Holy Land sometime around the invention of television?

It’s odd, given that Israel is the only modern nation whose people still bear the same name, speak the same language, follow the same faith and live in the same land as they did 3,000 years ago.

Odder still, when the place is strewn with ancient Jewish sites: fifth-century synagogue mosaics in the Galilee, the first-century BC remains of the City of David, and Masada rising over the desert like a monument to Jewish resilience.

Filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici argues there’s a long tradition of explaining away archaeological evidence that supports the Jewish connection to Israel and the biblical record. Today’s attempt to paint Jews as recent arrivals is merely the latest version. Ancient Egyptians describe a foreign Semitic population that ruled in Egypt and was later expelled into the Sinai. Ancient sources link them with the Israelites; modern scholars insist they were the Hyksos. Likewise, circumcised desert tribes with side curls, worshipping a deity spelled YHW, appear in the Sinai just after the Hyksos expulsion. They walk like Israelites, worship like Israelites, and annoy the Pharaoh like Israelites – yet must, we are told, be Shasu, not Israelites. When they turn up in Canaan calling themselves Apiru or Habiru and behaving suspiciously like biblical Hebrews, the experts insist they couldn’t be. Rename the people, rename the land, and hey presto: the Jews become ‘settler-colonialists’.

There’s just one problem. If the Jews don’t come from Israel, where do they come from? As Marxists and post-modern identitarians like to remind us, America belongs to the Native Americans and Australia to the Aborigines – and as right-wing racists note approvingly Jews were expelled as foreigners from England, Spain, France (four times), Portugal, Austria, Hungary, Sicily, Sardinia, and scores of German, Italian, Swiss and Polish cities, repeatedly, before their slaughter in the Third Reich.

That doesn’t trouble Nick Fuentes, the mouthpiece for far-right antisemitic youth, who says he doesn’t ‘hate Hitler’, says he’s a ‘race realist’, believes in a ‘Jewish conspiracy’, and that ‘the Holocaust is exaggerated’.

Tucker Carlson interviewed Fuentes for more than two hours in a lovefest that has garnered more than 20 million views. It’s hardly surprising when Carlson says those in the ‘Israel lobby’ are ‘the most vicious people’ he’s ever dealt with – although he reserved his deepest loathing for Christian Zionists, whom he hates more than ‘leftist rioters’, ‘Islamic terrorists’, ‘Nazis’ and ‘Chinese communists’. Realising he had gone too far, he apologised to Christian Zionists, saying who he really hated were the Israelis (what a surprise!) for bombing churches in Gaza, ‘not an accident, of course’. In reality, they were accidents – publicly apologised for and nearly unavoidable in urban warfare – but in Carlson’s world, it’s always the fault of you-know-who.

Carlson has since declared that the true enemy of Western civilisation is ‘Zionism’ and Netanyahu is ‘literally’ Western civilisation’s ‘main enemy’. He explained that ‘the Nazis are bad because they said we’re fighting these people based on who they are… and Netanyahu believes the same thing.’ This is Carlson channelling Charles Lindbergh’s old refrain that Jews ‘distort American policy’ and endanger civilisation.

His latest outburst hit a new low, if that’s possible: a barely veiled threat aimed at American Jews. Warning Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin to stop supporting ‘their preferred little country’ or face a ‘real backlash’, he framed ordinary Jewish political engagement as ‘boutique interests’ corrupting democracy. Meanwhile, he never threatens the mobs burning American flags or praising Hamas; his outrage is reserved for Jews waving American flags at pro-Israel rallies.

In 2022, former Qatari prime minister Hamad bin Jassim boasted, ‘We have journalists on our payroll in many countries.’ With the Qatari royal family worth an estimated $335 billion, that buys a lot of Jew-hatred. It may even explain why some have begun calling America’s most famous anti-Zionist broadcaster ‘Tucker Qatarlson’.

This is odious coming from a self-proclaimed Christian. Which brings us back to Christmas, the celebration of a Jew who took the ethical genius of his people – the sanctity of life, the dignity of labour, the weekly day of rest, justice and mercy – and offered it to all nations. Those who find it odd of God to choose the Jews should remember, it’s ‘not so odd as those who choose a Jewish God, yet spurn the Jews,’ as Samuel Hoffenstein put it.

Let’s hope Carlson has a merry Christmas, but the next time he feels the urge to blame the Red Sea Pedestrians, let him ask himself first what Jesus would do.