Joe Kent And The Mindless Hatred That Never Dies

    People were stunned by the recent resignation of Joe Kent, director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center. He got bounced over the Iran war, embarrassing President Trump (which, trust me, is not easy) and titillating the digital left. Personally, I’m more stunned that Mr. Kent ever held high office in our republic; which, to be honest, could be said about numerous people in the current administration, including Trump himself. But I digress. Kent, 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 idolized online. At last, cried both left and right critics of the U.S. / Israel intervention in Iran, someone with a sliver of principle has emerged. I kid you not. I read a couple of posts on Facebook that made Kent seem like Abraham Lincoln! The funniest was some guy who wrote, with no irony whatsoever, that Kent should be paid homage because he’s smarter than Trump. Please…Forrest Gump is smarter than Trump. If that’s the liberal measuring stick, then the Democratic Party of FDR, Truman, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan truly is extinct. 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 less about geopolitics than I know about astrophysics. And this dope was in charge of counter-terrorism? Really??

    Kent talks about the United States – 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 lapdog 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 “deceived you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States of America.” Please. For the love of Captain Kangaroo…why are there so many whiney juveniles in this administration?

    Unfortunately, there’s more: Kent 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 diatribe. The first is that it is incredibly stupid. 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 and bigoted religious creed. 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 four weeks, Trump, and for that matter, every President since Carter, 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 steroids. Indeed, not long ago Trump publicly rebuked Israel for striking Iran’s South Pars gas field. Not very lapdog-like of him.

    The second, more serious thing to say about Kent’s hatred for Israel is that it has the disgusting odor 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 nation 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-absorbed letter would be out of place in the mouth of some blue-haired campus moron 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 “America’s Favorite Neo-Nazi” 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, believe it or not, was 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.

    The MAGA movement needs to sort itself out, or better yet, just slowly die. Just as the old left was dragged down by the anti-intellectualism 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 penis AND be a lesbian, the latter being more ‘tradwife,’ and somehow being stupid enough to believe that Trump is some kind of political messiah. But they are as one in their vain, self-exonerating hatred for the world’s only Jewish state. Listen up MAGA juveniles, Israel isn’t the cause of your wars or your depression or the fact that you can’t get laid, or even your baldness – grow up and take responsibility.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com