People were stunned by the resignation this week of Joe Kent, director of the US National Counterterrorism Center. He flounced out over the Iran war, embarrassing President Trump and titillating the digital left. I’m more stunned that Mr Kent ever held high office in the American republic. A man who once consulted fascist midget Nick Fuentes, chinwags with neo-Nazis and seems to think the Jewish State is the puppetmaster of global disaster? Forget cheering Kent for leaving – ask why he was there in the first place.
No sooner had Kent fired off his Trump-mauling letter than he was being idolised online. At last, cried both left and right critics of the US / Israel intervention in Iran, someone with a sliver of principle has emerged. In truth, Kent’s resignation letter is a hot mess of witless foreign-policy posturing and infantile Israel-hate. Before the eyes of the world he has made it abundantly clear he knows zilch about geopolitics. And he was in charge of counter-terrorism? God help us.
Kent talks about the US – a military powerhouse of the like humankind has never known – as if it were the panting little poodle of Israel, which is the size of Wales. That bastard of a state has dragged us into yet another war, he fumes. He depicts Trump as a gurning marionette of the Jewish nation. You were on the right track with your opposition to ‘forever wars’, he says, but then Israel ‘deceived’ you into bombing Iran.
In Kent’s mind, Trump is merely gullible while the Jewish State is monstrously sinister. He says the president was led by the nose towards this infernal war by ‘pressure from Israel’ and its ‘powerful American lobby’. He bemoans the ‘high-ranking Israeli officials’ and ‘members of the American media’ who deployed a ‘misinformation campaign’ that ‘sowed pro-war sentiments’ and ‘deceive[d] you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States of America’.
He goes further: he sees the long-fingered hand of that nefarious nation not only behind the Iran war but behind pretty much every war. Israel uses lies as ‘a tactic’ to foster bloodshed, he says. They ‘[drew] us into the disastrous Iraq War’, he writes. The US-ISIS war in Syria was ‘a war manufactured by Israel’, he cries. He tells the president he has a choice: either come back to your MAGA senses or keep doing Israel’s bidding and cause our great nation to ‘slip further toward decline and chaos’.
There are two things to be said about Kent’s frothing missive. The first is that it is incredibly dumb. George W Bush and Tony Blair, not Israel, were responsible for the calamity of Iraq. In fact, some Israeli officials warned against invading Iraq. They told the White House ‘Iraq is not the enemy – Iran is the enemy’. And it was the barbarians of the Islamic State who inflamed mayhem in Syria by violently subjecting large swathes of that nation to their cruel, bigoted writ. Treating Israel as the cauldron of all human wickedness absolves the true culprits – in this case, Islamist monsters – of responsibility for their crimes.
As for Iran – as has been well documented over the past three weeks, Trump has long been worried about the Islamic Republic. As the Atlantic says, he ‘telegraphed his bellicose intentions toward Iran for decades’. In his two terms as president, ‘he escalated conflict with the country at every opportunity’. Painting not only a brash president but mighty America itself as the plaything of Israel is historical illiteracy on stilts. Indeed, this week Trump publicly rebuked Israel for striking Iran’s South Pars gas field. Not very poodle-like of him.
The second, more serious thing to say about Kent’s animus for Israel is that it has the pungent whiff of anti-Semitic conspiracism. The damning of Israel as the author of all war, as the chief manipulator of the Western powers, as the dragger of our nations into the pit of ‘decline and chaos’, has clear and eerie echoes of the Jew-baiting of old. Where it was once the Jewish people who were seen as the source of our cultural decline, now it’s the Jewish homeland. Same shit, different century.
Kent sums up everything that’s wrong with the MAGA Israelophobes, that wing of Trumpism that is fast disappearing into the sewer of Jew-linked conspiracism. These people are morally indistinguishable from the woke mob they claim to hate. Not one word of Kent’s self-regarding letter would be out of place in the mouth of a blue-haired campus loon screaming obscenities about ‘Isra-hell’. Both the crank right and gender-bending left see the Jewish nation as the rotten seed of our moral crises. There’s a fascist feel to their neurosis.
It didn’t surprise me when Kent’s first big post-resignation interview was with Tucker Carlson, the man who sacrificed his skills of critical thinking at the altar of blind rage for Israel. Or that Kent has reportedly had associations with certain members of the ‘groyper army’. Trump is right to say ‘it’s a good thing he’s out’. But why was he in? I can’t be the only person horrified that the head of counter-terrorism was an anti-Israel nut. You might as well have Mehdi Hasan up there. The Israelophobic intrigue of the Very Online right runs directly counter to the open, hopeful spirit of the tens of millions of Americans who took a punt on Trump. In fact, it threatens to undermine it, by replacing that working-class yearning for greater democracy with the obsessional delusions of the digitally addicted.
The MAGA movement needs to sort itself out. Just as the old left was dragged down by the carbuncle of wokeness, so American populism is at risk of serious ailment from the crankery of its digital flank. These movements might seem miles apart, the former believing you can have a cock and be a lesbian, the latter being more ‘tradwife’. But they are as one in their vain, self-exonerating hatred for the world’s only Jewish state. Listen, Israel isn’t the cause of your wars or your depression or your girlfriend troubles or your baldness – grow up and take responsibility.
