There must certainly be a word-stacking German term for the uncanny feeling of watching as a patently unqualified, far-right, election-denier white nationalist freak becomes the only administration figure to resign over the increasingly disastrous Iran War with an at least vaguely anti-Semitic gripe. It is an interesting moment. Let’s remember that Kent isn’t just some administration official. He’s a white nationalist extremist who had no business holding any position of trust in the U.S. government. He’s been friends to numerous anti-Semites long before today’s news broke.
Some people are inclined to be sympathetic to the ideas contained in Kent’s claim that “[i]t is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” If that’s you, think a bit more seriously about just how Israel would be in a position to exert this “pressure” and don’t let your animus toward Trump make you a fellow traveler with someone as odious as Joe Kent.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a lifelong manipulator, schemer and liar. No foreign country can pressure the U.S. into doing something as catastrophically stupid as what we’ve seen over the past three weeks. Did Netanyahu want this? Of course he did. Netanyahu has wanted to convince American leaders to believe they have interests identical to his narrow, usually wrongheaded and always regional goals for 30 years. Only Donald Trump is so stupid, so desperate for the adrenaline fix of another regime change on the cheap that he went for it. It is Trump who insulated himself from all but the advice of two or three ignorant toadies so that he was able to stumble this badly into a situation in which the strategic initiative — notwithstanding all the damage Iran has sustained — is now in the hands of the Iranians.
Think how bad you have to screw things up to get into that position?!?!
Kent’s comments, predictably, revealingly, are not so much to blame Israel as to exonerate Trump. And that’s precisely how anti-Semitism works. It’s not Trump’s fault. He was taken in by “pressure” from the Israelis. The U.S. has its own vast intelligence resources. It has its own region experts. Israel couldn’t pressure or convince Trump that Iran posed some imminent threat to the U.S. Indeed, no one in the Trump White House thought anything like that. The U.S. and Israel went to war not because Iran was strong or about to do anything to the U.S. or really anyone else but because they are currently so weak. Iran was on its back and it seemed like you could go to war with them and they wouldn’t be able to strike back. (Mostly true — except the thing they can do easily, harry the Strait of Hormuz.) Trump thought this would be easy. Donald Trump made this decision on his own, because he thought it would be fun and that it would be easy, as a vast, kinetic kind of self-soothing because of the skids his presidency is on at home.
It’s a very weird time for anyone serious about the scourge of anti-Semitism in this country. One simultaneously has to make the point again and again and again against the claims of bad faith operators that being critical of Israel is not anti-Semitic. At the same time more and more Americans, left and right, are jumping into conversations, ideas and fetid ancient dialogs that are just that: anti-Semitism. Both are true. Let’s call this what it is and remember who Joe Kent is.
