A 2024 interview clip in which Rabbi Shmuley Boteach moves from Mossad operations to “going after” Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens has circulated again in August 2026. The words are public. The meaning is contested.
Key Takeaways by Planet Today
The remarks are not new: They come from a September 2024 interview at the Israeli-American Council summit, republished and clipped in mid-August 2026.
Two readings sit side by side: Critics treat the Mossad-to-media pivot as a call for lethal targeting of U.S. commentators. Defenders treat “going after” as media confrontation, lawsuits, and deplatforming.
The feud is older than the clip: Boteach and Owens have exchanged FBI complaints, public accusations, and a televised debate. Carlson is a frequent target in Boteach’s columns on Holocaust language and Israel policy.
The legal bar is high: U.S. incitement doctrine requires intent and likelihood of imminent lawless action. Rhetoric that many find reckless is not automatically a crime.
The larger fight is definitional: What counts as antisemitism versus anti-Zionism, and how far political speech may go when audiences already feel under threat.
What the camera recorded
In September 2024, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach sat down with Arutz Sheva / Israel National News during the Israeli-American Council summit in Washington. He argued that American Jews had spent generations preferring to be loved rather than feared, and that October 7 had forced a choice. He cited Niccolò Machiavelli and then named enemies.
“The Jewish people have to be feared. Hamas has to fear the IDF, Hezbollah and disgusting, poisonous reptilian Iran has to fear the Mossad. Just think about this for a moment: When Israel goes in the heart of Tehran and kills Ismail Haniyeh, what do you think Khamenei himself is thinking? He’s thinking: ‘Uh-oh, I’m next. These Jews actually fight back.’
The same thing is true in media. Why aren’t we going after the Candace Owens of the world, the most disgusting reptilian anti-Semite in America? Why aren’t we going after Roger Waters? Why aren’t we going after Tucker Carlson?”
He added that he was “tired of being a scared Jew,” tired of “quaking and shivering and trembling before our enemies,” and that “we are going to bring the fight to our enemies.” He also called Carlson a Holocaust denier in connection with a guest who, Boteach said, accepted that six million Jews died but rejected the idea of a program of genocide. The full interview is published by Israel National News (23 September 2024).
🚨 DEVELOPING – Rabbi Shmuley calls for Israel to kill Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Incitement to murder is a crime. He’s surely going to get arrested, right, @FBIDirectorKash? RIGHT? pic.twitter.com/LNbicmeB1y
— Dr. Simon (@goddek) August 20, 2026
That sequence—celebration of a targeted killing in Tehran, then an immediate turn to named American media figures—is what later clips isolate. The missing connective tissue, critics say, is the point. Supporters say the connective tissue is obvious: he was talking about media pressure, not assassination.
Why the clip returned in August 2026
On 19–21 August 2026 the excerpt moved through X, YouTube reaction videos, and sites such as The People’s Voice. Accounts including Stew Peters framed the remarks as a call for Israel to kill Carlson and Owens. A 20 August 2026 piece on The People’s Voice used the headline that Israel “must assassinate” the two commentators so that Americans “learn to fear Jewish people.” See The People’s Voice.
The timing is not random. Boteach and Owens have remained public antagonists. In August 2026 Boteach wrote that Owens had publicized his family’s presence in Iceland and called for “Viking Power” to evict them while he said he was being harassed and twice assaulted in Reykjavík. Carlson, for his part, has spent 2025–2026 at the center of a split inside the American right over Israel, Iran, and Jewish institutions such as Chabad. A JPPI study using AI analysis reported a sharp rise in negative Israel coverage by both Carlson and Owens, and a rise in what the institute classified as explicit antisemitic framing in Owens’s output. See The Jerusalem Post.
Related Planet Today coverage of the same strategic environment includes Trump’s NATO withdrawal threat after the Iran war and reporting on sanctions pressure on Tehran. Those pieces sit in the same geopolitical file as this one: how wartime language travels from foreign battlefields into domestic media fights.
How mainstream and Jewish outlets have treated Carlson and Owens
Jewish and Israeli papers have not treated Carlson and Owens as ordinary conservative critics of Netanyahu. The Jerusalem Post, The Forward, Quillette, and the ADL have catalogued a pattern: Israel as a near-constant negative topic; claims of Zionist orchestration of U.S. wars; Owens’s language about “cult,” “Jewish supremacy,” and, in later episodes, Khazars and Chabad tunnels; Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes and his later claim that Chabad was driving a war with Iran in order to clear the Temple Mount.
Boteach’s own record is consistent with that institutional view. He has written that Carlson, Owens, Nick Fuentes, and others have succeeded in “demonizing the American Jewish community.” He filed an FBI complaint in August 2024 after Owens, he said, accused him and his daughter of trying to kill her and of involvement in Michael Jackson’s death. His daughter separately reported a pizza delivery she treated as a threat. See Jerusalem Post, 20 August 2024.
From this side of the argument, “going after” Owens and Carlson means what Boteach has already done: public debate, pressure on employers, legal complaints, and relentless naming. He has claimed credit for helping push Owens out of The Daily Wire. In a 2026 studio interview he said, “on social media, we would never hurt anyone, God forbid. We would never incite. They incite murder against us. But we must absolutely destroy their credibility.”
How alternative media and critics heard the same sentences
Alternative outlets and a large share of X commentary reject the charitable reading. Their case is structural, not merely lexical. Boteach first describes an intelligence service killing a Hamas leader in a foreign capital in order to make the enemy afraid. He then says “the same thing is true in media” and names three people, two of them U.S. citizens who live and work in the United States. He calls Owens “reptilian,” the same adjective he used for Iran. He says the Jewish people “have to be feared” and that the fight will be brought to “our enemies.”
If the analogy is taken at face value, the critics argue, American commentators are being placed in the same category as Ismail Haniyeh. Incitement to violence, they add, is a crime when it is specific. Carlson and Owens are named. The audience is a political gathering of Israel advocates. The emotional register is martial.
Legal commentators on the other side reply that the Brandenburg standard still governs: advocacy of force is unprotected only when it is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to produce it. A 2024 interview restaged in 2026 does not, by itself, meet that test. David Bernstein, among others, has argued that treating the clip as a hit order requires a missing ellipsis and a refusal to hear “go after” as the idiom of media combat. The disagreement is not only about kindness. It is about whether wartime metaphors, once applied to named civilians, remain metaphors.
The longer record between Boteach and Owens
The 2024 IAC remarks did not start the conflict. Owens and Boteach have been at odds since her defense of Kanye West and her refusal, as she put it, to condemn a friend on demand. She has accused Boteach and his daughter of a two-year harassment campaign that cost her The Daily Wire job. She has discussed Michael Jackson, Jeffrey Epstein, and alleged Jewish or Zionist networks in language Boteach and others call blood libel. He has called her the foremost female Jew-hater in America.
They debated on Piers Morgan Uncensored in September 2024. Each side claimed victory. Owens later said Boteach used her image to promote a family sex-product business. He later said she implied he had killed Michael Jackson. Both have asked federal authorities to look at the other. Neither has been charged in connection with those complaints, based on public reporting.
That history matters for interpretation. A rabbi who has already used the FBI, the press, and employer pressure against Owens is more plausibly read, by his allies, as promising more of the same. The same history makes critics less willing to grant him the benefit of the doubt when he places her name next to a Mossad killing.
Carlson’s place in the argument
Carlson is not a party to the Owens-Boteach lawsuit-and-complaint cycle in the same way. Boteach’s complaint against him is thematic: Holocaust minimization, closeness to Trump, platforming of Fuentes, and later the Chabad-Iran thesis. Carlson has denied attacking Chabad as an organization and has said he opposes violence against innocents, including in Gaza. He has also questioned U.S. entanglement in Israel’s wars. That is enough, in Boteach’s frame, to make him an “enemy” in the media theater. It is not enough, in Carlson’s frame, to make him an antisemite.
The JPPI numbers and the ADL backgrounders will not settle that dispute. They do show that both men occupy a space where criticism of Israeli policy, conspiracy language, and audience size overlap. After October 7 and during the 2026 Iran confrontation, that overlap became more expensive for everyone involved.
Fear, love, and a seventeenth-century handbook
Boteach has been writing the “feared rather than loved” thesis for years. A March 2024 Times of Israel blog used the same Machiavelli line and then limited it: Jews should take that advice “only and solely when it comes to fighting the Islamist radicals and neo-Nazis with whom there can be no negotiations.” In the IAC interview he extended the frame to media personalities. The extension is the controversy.
There is a documented rise in antisemitic incidents in the United States and Europe after October 7. There is also a documented rise in speech that treats “Zionist” as a free-floating villain and Jewish institutions as clandestine drivers of American war. Both facts can be true at once. Boteach treats the second as an existential media war that requires the same psychological goal—fear—as a raid in Tehran. His critics treat that equation as a permission structure for targeting Americans who reject his definition of the conflict.
Readers who want the primary text should watch the Arutz Sheva interview rather than the shortest clip. Readers who want the 2026 reception should look at the X thread that began with Dr. Simon (@goddek) and the Stew Peters cut, then at the replies that call for FBI action and the replies that call those demands a smear.
What “going after” has looked like in practice
In the two years since the IAC remarks, Boteach’s campaign has been public and legalistic: columns, television, complaints to the FBI, pressure on pastors and employers, and personal branding as the Jew who will not hide a Magen David. Owens’s campaign has been public and investigative: long podcasts, claims of organized slander, and an audience that now treats Boteach as a symbol of overreach. Carlson’s show has treated Israel, Chabad, and “neoconservative” influence as recurring subjects. None of those activities is a Mossad operation. All of them are the ordinary, ugly tools of a polarized information market.
Whether the 2024 analogy was reckless remains a judgment. Whether it was a criminal solicitation is a different question, and U.S. law has historically given speakers wide latitude when the call to action is not specific, timed, and likely to produce immediate violence. That latitude is why the clip can be condemned as dangerous and still sit on YouTube.
The choice the clip forces
One camp hears a rabbi telling a pro-Israel audience that Jewish safety requires enemies, including American talkers, to be afraid. The other camp hears a man who has been threatened, who has sons in the IDF, and who is using the only weapons he has—words, lawsuits, and shame—against people he believes are normalizing Jew-hatred. Both camps can quote the same paragraph. The paragraph does not resolve itself.
The useful work is not to collapse those readings into a single verdict. It is to keep the primary sources in view, to notice when an ellipse does the work of an argument, and to remember that named private citizens in a democracy are not Hamas commanders in Tehran, whatever anyone wishes were true about the other side’s motives.
For further Planet Today reading on the same fault line between war, speech, and domestic politics, see our geopolitics file and recent pieces on U.S. debt, sanctions, and alliance strain after the Iran campaign: planet-today.com.
Original source: Rabbi Shmuley Boteach interview with Arutz Sheva–Israel National News at the IAC Summit, published 23 September 2024: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/396559.
Recent amplification: The People’s Voice, 20 August 2026; X posts and reaction videos dated 19–21 August 2026, including the clip circulated from this post.
Disclaimer for fact-checkers: This article reconstructs publicly available remarks, contemporaneous reporting, and later commentary. Boteach did not, in the published 2024 transcript, use the word “assassinate” about Carlson or Owens. Critics infer that meaning from the Mossad analogy and the phrase “the same thing is true in media.” Supporters reject the inference. Readers should compare the full interview with the viral excerpt. Planet Today is not a party to any complaint or lawsuit described here. Interpretations of intent are noted as such. No statement in this piece is legal advice.
Original article: Rabbi Shmuley’s Remarks on Carlson and Owens: Clip, Context, Debate on Planet Today 🚀
Automatically republished from the main blog.