“Joseph Kent, a top counterterrorism official under Trump, just resigned. Kent and I don’t agree on much, but he is right: ‘Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.’”
—Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), echoing Kent’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
The Jews are behind it all.
That’s the thinking behind an inordinate amount of conspiratorial thinking. The idea that Jews were responsible for everything from the Black Plague to 9/11 to last week’s weather (and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s infamous Jewish space lasers) is a kind of anti-Semitic thought that has been with us for a couple thousand years. (The Romans had their own versions of this way of thinking.)
It’s therefore no surprise that we have been hearing similar things about the Iran war, especially from the political extremes. But what is more worrying is that we’ve been hearing those sentiments from members of the Trump administration as well as elected officials.
Just this past week, the head counterterrorism official in the Trump administration, Joe Kent, resigned, and in his resignation letter, he blamed the Iran war on Israel and “its powerful American lobby,” blamed the Iraq war and apparently the rise of ISIS on Israel as well, and suggested that President Trump had been fooled into joining the war.
That idea didn’t just find resonance on the far-right, Kent’s natural allies. Leftists, including Senator Bernie Sanders, echoed the statement. The fact that Kent has had ties with neo-Nazis and showed himself to be a conspiracy theorist multiple times did not faze them.
That episode raises a larger question. When the dust settles, will Israel’s enemies use the Iran war to turn Americans even further away from Israel?
A troubling terror chief
In February of last year, President Trump nominated Joe Kent, a former Green Beret and CIA officer, to serve as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the country’s central organization for guarding against terror attacks.
Kent had unsuccessfully run for Congress twice, and that left him with a record that made a number of left-leaning advocacy groups, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and Democratic Majority for Israel oppose his confirmation.
Kent also had some Republican opposition. Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), a Trump opponent who was no longer in Congress at the time, said of Kent, “This guy is, I’m not going to say neo-Nazi, but as close as you can get to that without being labeled that is about what he is. Every conspiracy theory he buys into.”
One Republican, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), eventually voted against his confirmation.
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