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Researchers say Japan has exaggerated the story of Chiune Sugihara, the ‘Japanese Schindler’
YAOTSU, Japan (JTA) — Three years before the Olympics began in 2021, Tokyo was already developing the national image it would display as the world looked on.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education issued a handout to the city’s public schools in 2018 highlighting “the outstanding achievements of our predecessors” that were meant to “raise [students’] self-awareness and pride as Japanese.”
Occupying a majority of the four-page handout was the story of diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who wrote thousands of life-saving visas for Jews fleeing Europe in 1940. The pamphlet recreates a dramatized version of Sugihara’s life and actions, bolstered by quotes from nameless descendants of the Jewish refugees he saved.
“Sugihara should be remembered and honored as an amazing hero who sacrificed his profession and family to save strangers from a different ethnicity and culture,” one of the quotes reads.
Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat to Lithuania from 1939 to 1940, helped thousands of Jewish refugees flee wartime Europe by issuing transit visas that allowed them to travel across the Soviet Union to Japan. Today, his name and story can be found all over the country, from his supposed hometown in Yaotsu to a museum at the northern Tsuruga port where Jewish refugees landed.
His likeness is found in memorials in Tokyo and in manga series and films, in addition to nearly every modern history school textbook. In 2017, the Tokyo Weekender magazine dubbed Sugihara the “best Japanese person ever.” Some Catholics have even expressed hope that Sugihara will be officially canonized by the Catholic church as a Saint.
But over the past few years, a growing number of researchers — in addition to his own son — have publicly challenged Sugihara’s superhero status and many details of the version of his story pushed in Japan and around the world. Some researchers say that Japan has used him as a symbol of humanitarianism in the face of criticism of Japan’s World War II record.
And some note that Japan is taking the nationalist narrative one step further, by boosting another World War II-era figure whom they believe can achieve a similar level of national fame and hero status — whether or not his story is verifiable.
A Sugihara visa seen at the Sugihara Chiune Memorial Hall museum in Yaotsu. (Jordyn Haime)
The Sugihara story
Issuing visas was not part of Sugihara’s job description. He was stationed in Kaunas, Lithuania, from 1939 to keep an eye on Soviet military activity in the region.
But when rumors spread of a Japanese diplomat issuing transit visas, Sugihara one day found a crowd of Jews lined up outside of his home hoping they would be lucky enough to get one. They were running from the Soviets; no one had yet predicted the havoc that would be unleashed on them by the Germans when they finally invaded one year later.
Sugihara issued some 2,140 transit visas, some used for entire households. But Meron Medzini, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Department of Asian Studies, wrote in his 2016 book “Under the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Japan and the Jews during the Holocaust Era” that “Not all of the visas were used, and this makes it difficult to substantiate the claim that Sugihara was instrumental in helping [the commonly accepted number of] between 6,000 and 7,000 Jews leave Lithuania.”
Sugihara’s act was also only one step in a series of events that led to the refugees’ escape. Tokyo required them to have a final destination permit as a condition of their transit through Japan, and those were provided by Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch consul in Kaunas at the time who stamped thousands of Jewish passports to visa-free Dutch Curacao. Jewish organizations stepped in to pay for the refugees’ transit across the Soviet Union, which was miraculously granted by Soviet authorities.
Andrew Jocubowicz, whose parents escaped wartime Europe with the help of a Sugihara visa, emphasized the importance of Zwartendijk’s role in an interview. In recent years, the Dutch consulate has also attempted to boost the profile of their own Holocaust hero, who is often “hidden” in the shadow of Sugihara.
“The critical person in the whole game was really Zwartendijk,” said Jocubowicz, a professor of sociology at the University of Technology Sydney who has spent four decades researching the conditions of his family’s survival. “Without those visas, it would not have happened at all. There’s no way Sugihara could have cooked up something that didn’t have people moving on from Japan.”
After arriving in Japan, Jews left for Australia, Canada, the United States and other countries. Others were later deported to Japanese-controlled Shanghai, where authorities imprisoned them in a ghetto for the remainder of the war.
A view of the Visas for Life monument in Yaotsu, Japan. (Jordyn Haime)
The hometown museum that isn’t
Claims that Sugihara helped several thousand Jews; that his requests for visas were rejected “three times” by his superiors; and that he was dismissed and punished for his actions are all important details that make Sugihara a hero. But they are also all claims that researchers have debunked.
Jocubowicz said his father barely met Sugihara, whose visa was just one chapter in a long journey to safety. The survival of this group of Jews was “almost pure luck at every point,” he said, especially their allowance by the Soviets to cross through Russia. After several months in Kobe, his family spent the remainder of the war in the Shanghai ghetto before boarding a ship to Australia, where Jocubowicz was raised.
“My feeling is that it was an extraordinary wormhole that opened up through these essentially conflicting empires, and as they crashed into each other, this little hole opened up and people were able to scurry into it,” he said.
Yaotsu’s claim as Sugihara’s birthplace is also disputed, said Nobuki Sugihara, the consul’s only surviving child. Nobuki said that according to family documents, his father was born in Mino, about 30 miles away from Yaotsu.
“It’s shocking. People come from around the world to visit Yaotsu [but] my father was not born there, he has never lived there,” Nobuki told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “They made a story that he was born in Yaotsu in order to get tourists because in that village there is nothing.”
The memorial and museum in Yaotsu, despite its distance from a major city, receives 20,000 tourists per year both foreign and domestic, according to Ito Yuko, who works in Yaotsu’s regional development and promotion division. She said the Sugihara family once lived in their small town, and elderly townspeople still remember them.
“For our museum, we are telling the truth that we know. Not exaggerated, not right or left, we just tell the story that we think is true,” she said.
Local tourism officials have also promoted a “Sugihara Remembrance Route,” part of a multimillion-dollar effort promoted widely in Israel that is described as “a nostalgic journey of discovery that will take you to places associated with the great man and areas where the Japan’s [sic] original landscape and traditional culture remain strong.” Although sometimes referred to as the “refugees remembrance route,” the route curiously excludes the city of Kobe, where Jewish refugees lived for months before leaving Japan for other destinations.
Sugihara had no connection to many of the areas on this route, Nobuki said. He explained that much of the common narrative about Sugihara comes from his mother Yukiko’s memoir, published in 1995.
“She didn’t know exactly what happened in Kaunas, in Europe. So she asked a ghostwriter. She wanted to make a novel, not a documentary. So she put here and there some fiction stories. And this became famous in Japan,” he said.
A memorial to Chiune Sugihara was established in 2018 outside of Sugihara’s former high school in Nagoya, Japan. A project of Nagoya’s board of education, the memorial space has hosted ambassadors from Lithuania and Israel. (Jordyn Haime)
The rise to stardom
A decade or two ago, a much smaller portion of Japanese society knew the Sugihara story. Today, he is a household name.
In a recent article for the academic journal American Historical Review, University of Haifa professor and prominent Japan scholar Rotem Kowner examined how Sugihara became a “Holocaust paragon of virtue.” Sugihara, he wrote, “was not the only consul to issue visas to Jews during this period, and not every consul who issued visas turned into a hero.”
As Japan rebuilt and rebranded into a peace-loving nation after the war, said Chiharu Inaba, a professor who researches Jewish refugees in Japan, “The people didn’t know what a hero was anymore. They needed a new hero.”
The legacy of Japan’s wartime actions, including its military’s sexual “comfort women” system, continues to hinder its relations with China and South Korea.
The start of Sugihara’s rise to hero status can be traced back to his nomination as one of Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations in 1968. According to Kowner’s research, Sugihara did not earn the honor for 16 years after his initial nomination because of Yad Vashem’s initial doubts over whether he risked his life or professional position to help Jews — normally a requirement of Righteous Among the Nations status. Instead, Sugihara was at first given a certificate of recognition for his actions.
Eventually, though, when a panel was presented with new evidence and testimony from survivors, it determined that Sugihara had taken a career risk, and his Righteous status was granted in 1984. Authorities also saw it as an opportunity to improve Israel’s image in Japan, Kowner argues, as Japanese public opinion about Israel had sharply deteriorated amid the conflict with Lebanon at the time.
A former head of Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations department recently disputed the claim that political considerations were involved in Sugihara’s nomination.
Recognition of Sugihara remained scant within Japan until 2000, when the Japanese government for the first time officially recognized him at a centennial celebration of his birth. But Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — known throughout his 2012-2020 tenure for his conservative politics, revisionist views of Japan’s World War II activities and desire to ramp up Japan’s military — embraced Sugihara more than any other Japanese leader.
In Sugihara, Abe saw an opportunity to not only boost diplomatic relations with Israel and Lithuania, but to make Sugihara a positive representative of the Japanese people in its darkest historical period.
But the process had already started before Abe’s tenure. In the 2000s, revisionist writers began adding Sugihara’s name into texts that denied the Nanjing Massacre — a Japanese attack on the Chinese city in 1937 that resulted in an estimated 300,000 deaths — “to show that wartime Japan did not resemble Nazi Germany,” Kowner wrote.
Sugihara has been a key component of what some have called Asia’s “memory competition” to have documents and memorials receive recognition from UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural heritage authority. In 2017, Japan nominated Chiune Sugihara Memorial Hall, the museum at Sugihara’s supposed hometown in Yaotsu, for UNESCO Memory of the World status; the bid failed.
“Sugihara posthumously allowed his country to shed a long-lasting self-justifying policy of victimization and, instead, rebrand itself as possessing proactive humanitarian values,” Kowner wrote. “Critically, Japan could cast itself in the role of a ‘good’ country that helped the Jews rather than that of an Axis villain.”
An undated photo of Kiichiro Higuchi. (Wikimedia Commons)
The next Sugihara
Sugihara’s vast fame has also paved the way for a new World War II-era Japanese hero to emerge: Kiichiro Higuchi.
Higuchi, a general, allegedly defied orders from his superiors to allow between 2,000 and 20,000 stranded Jewish refugees to cross the Russian border into Manchukuo, according to media reports and his supporters in Japan. This path to safety is now known as the “Higuchi route.”
Though far lesser known than Sugihara, efforts to attract attention to Higuchi have received mild success: through a manga series, media reports, and other commemoration efforts, such as a statue in his hometown of Awajishima. The Japanese embassy in Israel has reportedly been in discussions with Yad Vashem since 2005 about Higuchi’s Righteous Among the Nations status, but efforts have been unsuccessful.
When researchers began looking into the Higuchi story, it started to fall apart. Dylan Hallingstad O’Brien, a doctoral candidate at the University of California San Diego, has found that Higuchi likely facilitated the entrance of “at least 18 people” into Manchukuo. “There’s just no record” of more than that, O’Brien said.
“It just doesn’t add up that you have thousands and thousands of people flooding in and then there’s no record,” he said. “Especially when there are records of other Jewish refugee groups, [that have] receipts, letters, communications, and there’s just nothing for this group that supposedly went the ‘Higuchi route.’”
The website for the General Higuchi Association, an organization created to encourage the commemoration of Higuchi in Japan and pursue donations from abroad, is saturated with nationalism and false statements. Hideaki Kase — a right-wing politician who advised Shinzo Abe — chaired the association until his death last year.
“What would have happened if [Anne Frank’s] family knew of the ‘Higuchi Route’?” the website asks. “Perhaps the family would not have lived in the attic but instead would have sought passage for Manchuria, like so many other Jews did, and survived. At the time, neither the United States nor Britain accepted Jews; Japan was the only country in the world that opened its doors to Jews.”
The goal, O’Brien argued, is to promote the idea that Japan had a policy of racial harmony — in this case, of helping Jews during the war.
Madoka Sugihara says “the way the government changed their attitude” to her grandfather is “a very cynical thing.” (Courtesy of Madoka Sugihara)
The consequences
Japan is far from the only country that has faced criticism for promoting Holocaust narratives for nationalist ends that historians disagree with. Poland has been widely derided for denying the part that many Polish citizens played in the killing of local Jews throughout the war. And in China, Shanghai’s history as a former home to thousands of Jewish refugees has been used as a diplomatic tool, at times to deflect from international accusations of genocide against Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang.
Small inconsistent details or a selective use and omission of certain facts can be dangerous, Jocubowicz said. Holes in Holocaust stories give antisemites and Holocaust deniers ammunition for their arguments that Jews were not in danger, he argued.
“What happens if something is inaccurate and could be corrected is then the readers have no idea whether anything in the story is accurate,” Jocubowicz says. “So anything could be a fake. Maybe it’s all a fake, and maybe this is a signal that the whole Jewish story about the Holocaust is rubbish.”
Rabbi Mendy Sudakevich, a Chabad-Lubavitch movement emissary who has been living in Tokyo since the 1990s, sees the narrative differently. He thinks that the Sugihara story — whether it is 100% true or not — has a positive effect on people and endears them to Jews.
“Kids in Japan grew up not knowing what Japan did in the war. They don’t know the story. And Japan tried to build up a new story,” Sudakevich said. “I want the new generation of Japan to know that saving Jews is an important task. I want them to know that. And if that’s what they know about World War II, it is a good result for me.”
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, many in Japan ventured out to Yaotsu, Kobe or Tsuruga to learn more about Sugihara. Invoking his memory, Inaba and his university students have organized a 5 million yen ($37,490) donation drive for Ukrainian refugees dubbed “donations for life.” The Visas for Life organization, founded by the Sugihara family in 2000, has raised 1.7 million yen ($12,746) for Ukrainian evacuees now living in Japan.
Madoka Sugihara, Chiune Sugihara’s granddaughter and soon-to-be-director of Sugihara Visas for Life, noted the dramatic change in the government’s reception of Sugihara in the past several years.
“The way the government changed their attitude is a very cynical thing,” but “it is a good thing that they regard Sugihara-san’s act very fairly. I’m convinced that it’s a good thing,” she said.
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Pro-Hamas Campus Groups Call for Toppling US Government, Killing Soldiers
A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a megaphone at Columbia University, on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, in New York City, US, Oct. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar
The National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) organization condemned the US bombing of nuclear facilities in the Islamic Republic of Iran over the weekend, threatening that the American government will be deposed.
The anti-government comments came one day after US President Donald Trump ordered the bombing of three key Iranian nuclear sites — Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz — where Western governments believe the Islamist regime was working to build nuclear weapons. Tehran has claimed its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes
“The empire will fall, from Gaza to Tehran,” NSJP said, writing on the Instagram social media platform. “The unprovoked attacks the US and the Zionist entity have launched against Iran prove only one thing: imperialism in the region will not stop at suffocating Palestine. From Iraq to Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and now Iran, the Empire [sic] demands constant expansion and destabilization.”
It added, “We must be clear: Nuclear development is neither a crime nor the reason for the US’ war against Iran. The US Empire cannot permit the continued existence of a country that dares to stand against Zionism and imperialism.”
On Monday, Asaf Romirowsky, a Middle East expert and the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), said that NSJP is mirroring an ideology that university professors have trafficked and taught to their students since the 1960s.
“Left-wing academics have loathed ‘American imperialism’ since the Vietnam War and used it to explain and more importantly justify violent ‘’iberation movements’ around the world. Both communist and Muslim revolutions and insurgencies have been applauded over the years by American academics and their European counterparts,” Romirowsky said. “Some of that has been transmitted to students disinterested in the details of Islamic theology (which underlie Iranian policy). Anti-imperialism situates the Palestinian cause firmly on the political left and glosses over its theological basis in Sunni theology — which is perfectly well expressed in the Hamas Charter and countless other Hamas statements.”
SJP splinter groups across higher education rallied to share NSJP’s post, as noted by the antisemitism watchdog group AMCHA Initiative on Monday. Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Florida reposted it to their Instagram stories, while an SJP group for graduate students of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) did so as well. At Columbia University, a group which calls itself “Unity Fields” posted a photograph of the coffins of fallen US soldiers, captioning it, “Soon, Inshallah,” which means “God willing” in Arabic.
Within Our Lifetime (WOL), another pro-Hamas group which directs campus activities, said, “From Iran to Palestine, from Lebanon to Syria to Yemen, it is our duty from within the belly of the beast to stand against the US empire and zionist [sic] entity’s barbaric, illegal genocidal aggression, and to stand by all those resisting the ongoing genocide in Gaza by any means necessary.”
The tight coordination of the group’s messaging demands a complete accounting of NSJP’s funding, according to Alex Joffe, a historian and editor of the BDS Monitor for SPME.
“The relationship between NSJP and other action-oriented groups, such as Within Our Lifetime and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, suggest nearly complete overlap in interests and even personnel. Most problematic are the relationships between these Muslim and communist vanguard groups and the nominally legitimate Democratic Socialists of America and Working Families Party,” he explained. “These overlaps and penetrations into broader politics leaves outstanding the question of who is directing whom. The instant pivoting of Communist Chinese Party-backed groups like Code Pink to support Iran points to the fact that they, like NSJP, are not grassroots movements but primarily tools for state actors, above all Qatar, China, Iran, Russia and North Korea.”
He continued, “The question of who funds NSJP is therefore more important than ever. With NSJP and other organizations threatening and engaging in domestic violence, the national security threats have increased and should be addressed by local and federal authorities.”
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, has publicly discussed its strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US.
“Divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said in September 2024. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
The tweet was the latest in a series of revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
On the same day the tweet was posted, Columbia University’s most strident pro-Hamas organization was reported to be distributing literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group’s movement to destroy Israel during the school’s convocation ceremony.
“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” said a pamphlet distributed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) spinoff, to incoming freshmen. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Other sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to an event which took place the previous December. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
Middle East experts have long suspected that foreign agents are conspiring with SJP chapters — and its spinoffs — in the US to convulse college campuses and lobby for the disintegration of the US-Israel relationship, an outcome that would benefit Middle Eastern powers such as Iran, whose leaders regularly call for the destruction of both the US and Israel.
In July 2024, then-US National Intelligence Director Avril Haines issued a statement outlining how Iran has encouraged and provided financial support to the anti-Israel campus protest movement and explaining that it is part of a larger plan to “undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.” Haines also confirmed that US intelligence agencies have “observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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UK to Ban Group Palestine Action Under Anti-Terrorism Laws
Police officers block a street as pro-Palestinian demonstrators gather in protest against Britain’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s plans to proscribe the “Palestine Action” group in the coming weeks, in London, Britain, June 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jaimi Joy
Britain said on Monday it would use anti-terrorism laws to ban the organization Palestine Action, making it a criminal offence to belong to the group after its activists damaged two UK military planes in protest at London’s support for Israel.
The proscription would put the pro-Palestinian group on a par with Hamas, al-Qaeda, or ISIS under British law, making it illegal for anyone to promote it or be a member. Those who breached the ban could face up to 14 years in jail.
Palestine Action has regularly targeted British sites connected to Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems as well as other companies in Britain linked to Israel since the start of the conflict in Gaza in 2023.
In its latest and most high-profile action, two of its members entered a Royal Air Force base in central England on Friday, spraying paint into the engines of the Voyager transport aircraft and further damaging them with crowbars.
“The disgraceful attack on Brize Norton … is the latest in a long history of unacceptable criminal damage committed by Palestine Action,” Home Secretary [interior minister] Yvette Cooper said in a written statement to parliament.
“The UK’s defense enterprise is vital to the nation’s national security and this government will not tolerate those that put that security at risk.”
She said the group‘s actions had become more aggressive and caused millions of pounds of damage.
Under British law, the Home Secretary can proscribe a group if it is believed it commits, encourages, or “is otherwise concerned in terrorism.” The banning order will be laid before parliament on June 30 and will come into effect if approved.
Palestine Action, which says Britain is an “active participant” in the conflict in Gaza because of military support it provides to Israel, called the ban “an unhinged reaction” which it would challenge, and accused Cooper of making a series of “categorically false claims.”
“The real crime here is not red paint being sprayed on these war planes,” it said in a statement.
Earlier on Monday, the group was forced to change the location of a planned protest after police banned it from staging a demonstration outside parliament, otherwise a popular location for protests in support of a range of causes.
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MAGA Commentators Clash Over Trump’s Choice to Bomb Iran
Tucker Carlson speaks on July 18, 2024, during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo: Jasper Colt-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect
US President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three of Iran’s key nuclear facilities over the weekend has divided his longtime supporters, with some prominent voices in the so-called Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement opposing the strikes and others standing with the administration’s military action.
Mark Levin, the longtime conservative talk radio host and vocal pro-Israel voice, called out US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) for her disagreement with the US strikes, known as Operation Midnight Hammer.
On Sunday, Greene wrote on X, “I don’t know anyone in America who has been the victim of a crime or killed by Iran, but I know many people who have been victims of crime committed by criminal illegal aliens or MURDERED by Cartel and Chinese fentanyl/drugs.” She warned that “Neocon warmongers beat their drums of war and act like Billy badasses going to war in countries most Americans have never seen and can’t find on a map, but never find the courage to go to war against the actual terrorists who actually do kill Americans, invade our land, and make BILLIONS doing it day after day, year after year.”
In response, Levin labeled Greene a “shameless nitwit” and asked, “How incredibly dumb is this Marjorie Taylor Green? She doesn’t know anyone in America who has been a victim of crime or killed by Iran? You mean the thousands of Americans, especially military personnel, killed and maimed by the Iranian terrorist regime?”
Levin aimed his ire at other leaders on both left and right who he christened “America’s Iranian nukes coalition.” He wrote that “if the radical Democrats and their Isolationist fake MAGA reprobates had their way, Iran would have nuclear weapons. This is the new gravely dangerous coalition of Marxists-Islamists-isolationists-grifters. They’re represented by the likes of Bernie Sanders- AOC-Schumer-Jeffries and Rand Paul-Massie-MTG- Qatarlson-Bannon. And they’re giving aid and comfort to a regime that has murdered directly and indirectly thousands of Americans. Never forget. They will forever be opposed and challenged by we, the people — America First loving patriots.”
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host-turned-podcaster, has faced recent accusations promoted by social media influencer Laura Loomer, alleging links to Qatar, claims which he denies, thus prompting Levin’s “Qatarlson” epithet. Carlson had clashed over Iran in a recent interview with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), reportedly watched by Trump.
Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart News CEO-turned-presidential adviser-turned America First podcaster, declared his disagreement with Trump’s invocation of America’s potential engagement toward regime change in a Truth Social post on Sunday.
“Is this because the ultimate goal is regime change?” Bannon asked. “And if that’s fine, Israelis, have at it. If you want regime change, go for it, baby. Just no participation by the United States government.”
The Daily Beast reported that according to anti-Trump biographer Michael Wolff, unnamed sources within the administration described how Trump had initially leaned toward the Carlson-Bannon isolationist position until shifting Friday under congressional Republicans’ influence toward seeing the value to his image of a successful strike. “The tenor of the phone calls was him saying, ‘I think I’m gonna look very good if I do this,’” Wolff said.
Further exposing the extent to which the Iran strikes have diverged from the last decade of the MAGA movement’s tilt toward isolationism, two of Trump’s former close allies who later parted ways with him and went on to criticize his actions have now voiced their support.
Former Vice President Mike Pence and former National Security Adviser John Bolton have both historically identified with former President Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” hawkish foreign policy philosophy. Each praised the bombings of Iran’s nuclear sites.
Pence said to Fox News on Sunday that even though “the president and I have had our differences,” he “couldn’t be more proud [sic] of President Trump’s decisive leadership in this moment or the extraordinary professionalism and courage of our armed forces that brought about this historic mission.”
On Sunday morning, the conservative magazine Washington Examiner published an article with the headline “Trump did the right thing in Iran” by Bolton, one of the conservative movement’s most steadfast and robust Iran hawks.
“It was long past time that Washington did more to aid Israel in defeating Iran and took direct action against Tehran’s nuclear proliferation efforts,” Bolton wrote. “There are undoubtedly additional measures now underway to protect American deployed forces and civilian personnel in the region against Iranian retaliation now that we have taken offensive military action. Similarly, we should continue bringing forward additional forces to bolster Israeli and Gulf Arab state defenses against Tehran military retaliation.”
Bolton warned that “peace and security in the Middle East are impossible while the ayatollahs rule in Tehran.” He urged that “overthrowing the current regime is a necessary, even if not a sufficient, condition to reach that goal. The sooner the better.”
Trump said after Saturday night’s strikes that the US was acting to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons but not seeking regime change. The next day, however, he seemed to entertain the idea. Writing on Truth Social, he posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
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