Meet the Real Mother Agapia: Tucker Carlson's Extremist Podcast Guest
In a Tucker Carlson interview, American-born Orthodox Nun Agapia Stephanopolous defended Hamas and spread false claims about Christian demographics. But that's just a small taste of her radical views.
On Monday, Tucker Carlson interviewed Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos, a U.S.-born Russian Orthodox nun, under the headline “Christian Zionism Is Killing Christians in the Holy Land.” Born Anastasia and formerly known as Sister Maria, Mother Agapia had lived in Jerusalem for decades overseeing a convent school for mostly Palestinian Muslim girls.
During the interview, Agapia defended Hamas as "a resistance movement" while making a series of demonstrably false claims about Christian demographics in the Middle East. But this inflammatory rhetoric represents just the tip of the iceberg for a religious figure whose social media history reveals a disturbing pattern of extremist sympathies, terrorist apologia, and radical anti-Western sentiment.
Less than a month after the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre that killed 1,139 Israelis and saw over 250 taken hostage, Agapia took to Facebook on November 3, 2023, to write: "context matters" — a chilling defense of terrorism that would set the tone for years of increasingly radical public statements.
Debunking the Tucker Carlson Interview Claims
The Hamas "Resistance Movement" Myth
During the interview, Agapia characterized Hamas as "a resistance movement" whose "purpose is primarily to resist and to protect their people and their land." This characterization ignores Hamas's founding charter, which explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state. The organization is designated as a terrorist group by the United States, European Union, Canada, and Israel for its decades-long campaign of suicide bombings, rocket attacks, and other acts of terrorism against civilians.
The Church of the Nativity Distortion
Agapia claimed the 2002 terrorist seige of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was not a terrorist attack, arguing that "it is a Christian tradition for people to take refuge in a Church"—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
She failed to acknowledge that 250 armed Palestinian terrorists from various terrorist groups, including Hamas, had occupied one of Christianity's most sacred sites for 39 days, taking clergy and civilians hostage while desecrating and looting the church built over Jesus's traditional birthplace. Among the occupiers were Ibrahim Musa Salem Abayat and Ismail Musa Muhammad Hamdan who were wanted for multiple terrorist attacks including the murder of 72-year-old American citizen Avi Boaz.
While survivors told of beatings, theft, and desecration, Mother Agapia circulated emails portraying the gunmen as harmless “parishioners,” accusing Israeli forces of atrocities such as rape and infant deaths — allegations she later admitted she did not witness and which were proved false. The actual hostages reported that the terrorists stole religious artifacts, destroyed property, starved them and used Bibles as toilet paper according to Israel365 News.
The terrorists who occupied the church were documented participants in deadly attacks, including shooting attacks that killed Israeli civilians, bombing attempts in Jerusalem, and systematic mortar attacks on civilian neighborhoods. Israeli forces found 40 explosive devices left behind in the church by the terrorists, several of them booby-trapped.
The Christian Population Contradiction
One of Agapia's most deceptive claims involved blaming Israel for declining Christian populations across the Middle East. This assertion is not only factually incorrect but represents a troubling distortion of documented demographic trends. The data reveals an entirely different reality: Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where Christian populations are actually growing.
Official Israeli statistics show Christian population growth of 1.4% in 2021, 2% in 2022, and 1.3% in 2023, with numbers increasing from 182,000 to 187,900 Christians. The Christian population in Israel has grown from 34,000 in 1949 to 187,900 as of 2023.
This growth stands in stark contrast to the catastrophic decline of Christian communities elsewhere in the region. Lebanon's Christian population has plummeted from 77.5% in 1900 to just 32.4% today—a loss of 45 percentage points. From 1910 to 2024, Turkey's Christian population collapsed from 21.7% to a mere 0.2%, while Syria's dropped from 15.6% to 2.0%. The broader Middle East has seen Christian populations decline from 12.7% in 1900 to 4.2% in 2020, with projections showing further decline to 3.7% by 2050.
A Pattern of Extremist Associations
The Code Pink Connection
Agapia's radical sympathies became public when she was arrested on July 1st during a congressional protest alongside members of Code Pink, a far-left organization with documented ties to hostile foreign regimes and terrorist-designated groups.
Code Pink, founded by Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, has a troubling history of collaboration with America's enemies. The organization has repeatedly visited Iran, met with Iranian officials, and defended Iran-backed terrorist groups including Hezbollah and Hamas.
According to the Canary Mission, Benjamin and Evans organized protests in Yemen with Al Qaeda-affiliated groups, while Benjamin has attended Iran's New Horizon conference — a gathering known for Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The organization regularly uses terms like "American terrorism" and "state-sponsored terror" to describe U.S. foreign policy while excusing actual terrorist attacks by Iranian proxies.
Mourning Terrorists as "Journalists"
Agapia's terrorist sympathies extended to social media, where she made a post mourning the death of Hossam Shabat, describing him as a "journalist" while omitting his terrorist activities. Israeli intelligence identified Shabat as a Hamas sniper who "carried out attacks and participated in terrorist activities against IDF forces and citizens of the State of Israel."
The Israeli Defense Forces confirmed that despite his media credentials, Shabat was "a sniper terrorist from the Beit Lahiya area" who was listed in Hamas documents as an operative in company 1 of the terrorist group’s Beit Hanoun fighting battalion.
The Elias Choudry Connection
Agapia has endorsed those who celebrated Hamas as credible voices on the conflict. In a Facebook post eulogizing Elias Choudry, a Lebanese Palestinian writer, she described him as "a voice to better understand the Israel-Palestine conflict," writing that "resistance to Israeli occupation began long before Hamas and came not only with violence or from Palestinian Muslims."
Yet after the October 7th massacre, Choudry wrote in Al-Quds Al-Arabi that the "besieged ghetto of Gaza had struck back at Israel" and later posted Facebook comments praising the "steadfast and unshakable" defiance in Gaza—effectively celebrating the terrorist attacks that killed over 1,200 people.
Stephanopoulos’s “Resistance” Rhetoric During the Intifada
Mother Agapia’s defense of Hamas as a “resistance movement” is not limited to recent events—it dates back to the days of the Second Intifada, when Palestinian groups, including Hamas, launched waves of suicide bombings and attacks on Israeli civilians. In a resurfaced radio interview from the early 2000s, she repeatedly refused to classify Hamas’s violent actions as terrorism, instead arguing in support of suicide bombers.
This framing, directly at odds with international consensus and U.S. law designating Hamas as a terrorist organization, minimizes the systematic targeting of civilians in Israel and the group’s explicit calls for Jewish genocide found in its founding charter.
Amplifying Iranian Propaganda
Perhaps most troubling in Agapia's pattern of extremist advocacy is her active promotion of pro-Iranian regime propaganda, particularly her sharing of Chris Hedges' article "The Folly of A War With Iran." This piece, which Stephanopolous distributed on her social media platforms, serves as a lengthy apologia for the Iranian theocracy while portraying any American or Israeli defensive actions as unjustified aggression.
The article Agapia endorsed dismisses legitimate concerns about Iran's nuclear weapons program, downplays the regime's support for terrorist organizations, and portrays the Islamic Republic as a victim of Western imperialism rather than a state sponsor of terrorism. Hedges' piece ignores Iran's well-documented role in funding and arming Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis — the very groups responsible for attacks on American forces and Israeli civilians.
By promoting Iranian regime talking points, Agapia either ignores or tacitly endorses a government whose official ideology centers on hatred of America. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, "Death to America" has not been merely a protest chant, but an official slogan of the Iranian state. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has repeatedly defended these chants, while Iranian lawmakers regularly convene parliamentary sessions with organized "Death to America" demonstrations.
Not to be mean, but I thought she was a man in a hijab (like a Muslim cross dresser). Seriously, do we know that this is actually a woman?