Candace Owens shouldn’t use the Bible as a shield against legitimate criticism of her commentary on Israel.
Candace Owens shouldn’t use the Bible as a shield against legitimate criticism of her commentary on Israel.
T ensions between Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens — one of the site’s most prominent voices — have burst into the open over the past week. Owens and her partisans, including Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, are scrambling to frame this as a religious dispute between the outspokenly Christian Owens and the devoutly Jewish Shapiro, or perhaps as some form of attempted cancellation of Owens.
The reality is quite different: Owens and Shapiro disagree profoundly on the conflict between Hamas and Israel, and Owens is more than dabbling with antisemitism by siding against Israel. Shapiro is right to call her out on this, and Owens’s defenders should be ashamed of themselves for hiding behind Christianity to obfuscate what she has been saying. Jesus Christ was executed by the same empire that drove the Jews out of Israel in the first place.
The 34-year-old Owens, a vocal and combative black conservative who has risen in prominence over the past eight years, joined the Daily Wire in 2020. Her gift for attracting an audience and a fight made her a logical fit with the 39-year-old Shapiro, who shares that gift, despite their different backgrounds, approaches, and perspectives. She was undoubtedly paid well to bring her voice to that platform. I’m not privy to the inner workings of the Daily Wire, but prior to the October 7 attacks on Israel, there was little public friction between Owens and Shapiro other than a disagreement over her defense of Kanye West past the point at which Shapiro thought he should be denounced for antisemitism. There were some occasional differences of opinion, but of the sort that are common in the opinion-journalism industry.
Owens after 10/7
Owens’s behavior since October 7 has been enough to make any observer wonder how long Shapiro can tolerate her under the same masthead. While Shapiro, as editor emeritus, no longer has the sort of control of the Daily Wire to fire people solely on his own initiative, one assumes that his influence as a co-founder and face of the organization still counts for quite a lot.
Our old friend Isaac Schorr summarizes the problem:
The past few weeks have seen Owens repeat a series of blood libels. In one breath, she’s implied the Israeli government is committing a genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
In the next, she’s submitted that Jerusalem’s historic Muslim Quarter (population: 22,000) is a ghetto where the city’s Muslims (population: 350,000) are forced to live.
After being called out on her ignorant smears by . . . Shapiro, Owens responded on X. “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake,” wrote Owens, quoting the Book of Matthew’s fifth chapter. “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other,” she added. “You cannot serve both God and money. Christ is King.”
The David Horowitz Freedom Center, a longtime booster of Owens, has disowned her:
She has falsely compared Israel to the “segregated South.” This is the sort of ignorant ‘Apartheid State” slander that we expect from Black Lives Matter – and the Jew-killers of the Middle East.
When Candace implied that Israel was engaged in “genocide” for defending itself against the atrocities committed by Hamas, that’s the kind of genocidal lie we expect to hear from Hamas.
And when she suggested that to remove the Hamas auxiliary — Students for Justice in Palestine — from campuses would increase antisemitism, that’s what we expect to hear from the New York Times. . . . The David Horowitz Freedom Center wishes to express its deep disappointment with Candace’s ignorant, hateful and morally obtuse remarks about Israel and the Jews.
The pro-Israel Jewish news site VIN News added,
Last week Owens expressed heavily anti-Jewish sentiments, falsely claiming that Neturei Karta represent mainstream Charedim, Israel forces Muslims to live in ghettos, and Jews themselves are responsible for antisemitism. Owens invoked Neturei Karta as an example that “Charedim” are opposed to Israel as a Jewish state, and that the right to Israel is political but not Biblical.
As the controversy with Shapiro has escalated, Owens responded by interviewing Norman Finkelstein on her podcast. Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors and author of The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, has become a sort of go-to Jewish voice for all of the worst criticisms of Israel (such as his comparing Israel to Nazi Germany). Finkelstein’s response to October 7 reflected his moral bankruptcy:
On his Substack, academic and activist Norman Finkelstein wrote that Hamas’ actions “warms [sic] every fiber of my soul” and compared the attacks to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: “. . . if we honor the Jews who revolted in the Warsaw Ghetto—then moral consistency commands that we honor the heroic resistance in Gaza. I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.”
Finkelstein was last seen speaking at Georgetown University in Qatar.
Christ Is King, Hamas Is Not
Shapiro was not prepared to take this sitting down, but he was also not quick to take up the fight in public. Things began to escalate when he was asked a question at a private event, and his answer — that Owens’s “behavior during this has been disgraceful, without a doubt,” that “her faux sophistication on these particular issues has been ridiculous,” and that the things she has said are “disreputable” — was leaked to the public.
Ben Shapiro condemns a “disgraceful” Candace Owens for her “faux sophistication” on the issue of Israel. She has been checked on air for getting basic facts wrong. pic.twitter.com/mBRX3mvHxI
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 14, 2023
After Owens’s “you cannot serve both God and money” tweet, Shapiro responded directly: “Candace, if you feel that taking money from The Daily Wire somehow comes between you and God, by all means quit.” It may not have been the best occasion to do so, but he was clearly tired of Owens’s pushing an anti-Israel line without taking responsibility for doing so. She played the religious victim: “You are utterly out of line for suggesting that I cannot quote biblical scripture. The Bible is not about you. Christ is King.” Owens added:
You have been acting unprofessional and emotionally unhinged for weeks now. And we have all had to sit back and allow it and have all tried to exercise exceeding understanding for your raw emotion. But you cross a certain line when you come for scripture and read yourself into it. I will not tolerate it.
This is where Carlson and Kirk weighed in, each hosting her on their shows. Kirk tweeted, “I am genuinely confused why asking questions and quoting Bible verses about peace warrants a call to resign from Dailywire. There should be more room in the conservative movement for disagreement. We can do better than this.”
Carlson compared Owens to Galileo (who was persecuted for saying that the Earth revolved around the sun), argued that Shapiro is “on the left” on multiple major issues, pretended that there is no possible reason for anyone to criticize anything Owens has said or characterize her statements as “radical,” and (like Kirk) highlighted Jewish donors’ giving to “anti-white” causes. Naturally, Carlson failed entirely to mention any of the reasons why Owens is actually being criticized.
Some Owens defenders went even further (or more explicitly so), circulating an old clip of Shapiro telling Joe Rogan that Jesus was not the Messiah, as if this has anything to do with the issue at hand.
It is possible — not likely, but possible — that Kirk is dense enough to believe all this. It is not plausible that Carlson is. He’s a smart guy, and he knows what he’s up to, just as he did when he tried to pass off his own firing as some sort of persecution for his being a Christian. Moreover, when Carlson downplays the October 7 murders as “foreign” — and then heads to Spain to raise alarm about events in that country — he is playing a double game with plainly unequal rules.
Whether or not Owens should be fired, she has not been. She has not, so far as I can tell, been subjected to any workplace discipline. She has been criticized by a senior co-worker, which is not always good form, but her job — like Shapiro’s — is to hold strong opinions, defend them, and take and receive criticism. That’s not an impairment of her job, it is the job. If she is angling to get fired in order to saddle the Daily Wire with the cost of getting rid of her, she will have to point to more than criticism.
The Christian Mission
Owens is creating a smoke screen by pretending that the issue is over Bible verses. But that she and some of her supporters are taking to social media to declare “Christ is King” as a tribal signal rather than as a humble profession of faith — and that they are claiming to take offense at the fact that Ben Shapiro rejects the divinity of Christ, which of course he does because he is a devout Jew — is ominous.
Christians are sometimes accused of wanting to convert everybody. We should happily plead guilty to this. If you can’t be accused of it, you probably aren’t putting much effort into being a Christian. If you truly believe that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through Him, why wouldn’t you want your Jewish friends, or your friends who are Muslim or atheist or Hindu or whatever else, to follow Him? For that matter, if you, like me, are Catholic, why wouldn’t you want your Protestant friends to cross the Tiber?
But, by the same token, if you wish to be a good friend, a good neighbor, a good colleague, a good American citizen, or a good political-coalition partner, you have to respect the fact that we’re not the only ones with deeply held religious convictions. We live in a religiously diverse society in which civil disagreement is necessary. Just as other people should not be offended when we Christians profess our faith, we ought not to take offense when they do the same, or when they remain unconverted. Jews and other non-Christians don’t regard Jesus as the Son of God. There is nothing wrong with their saying so any more than there is anything wrong with our saying the opposite. My basic rule is that I don’t care who else thinks I’m going to Hell so long as they don’t consider it their job to send me there.
Candace Owens isn’t being criticized for being too Christian. She shouldn’t use the Bible as a shield against legitimate criticism of her commentary on Israel.