Perhaps the most shocking thing about the remarks Joe Kent released when he resigned as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center was just how illogical what he had to say was.
Kent claimed that “Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq War;” that he “lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel;” and he could not work for a U.S. government that was “sending the next generation to fight and die in a war that served no benefit to the people.”
Israeli politicians are not angels (I would never claim that they are); still, the leaders of the Jewish state see the United States as their nation’s most important ally and this goes back several generations. Kent’s accusations are completely baseless and echo anti-Jewish conspiracy theories from the darkest days in Jewish history.
Kent’s wife died in Syria in a suicide bombing 2019 at the age of 35. ISIS claimed responsibility for the bomber, and Kent’s blaming of her death on Israel has no basis in reality.
From the story of the Jewish people’s enslavement in Egypt as recorded in Exodus 1:10 we see that Egyptian antisemitism was at once both illogical and conspiracy driven: “Let us deal shrewdly with (the Jews), so that they may not multiply; otherwise, in the event of war they may join with our enemies in fighting against us and leave the land.” Not one segment of the concerns of the Egyptians makes any sense.
Later in Jewish history, Haman persuaded the king to allow the extermination of the Jews (Esther 3:8-9, by stating: “There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of thy kingdom; and their laws are diverse from all people; neither keep they the king’s laws; therefore it is not in Your Majesty’s interest to tolerate them.” Again, there is zero evidence that the Jews are anything but loyal to the nation that they live in, but that does not stop the conspiracy theorists.
These ideas of secret Jewish plots clearly go back to ancient times. Where do these modern conspiracies originate?
In order to combat these fabrications and defamations in our time, it is worthwhile to shed light on the two main sources: Hitler and the Nazis are the better-known source, and the other is the Russian tsar’s secret police and the Soviet KGB.
Hitler released his infamous Mein Kampf in 1925. In it, he wrote: “For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb goyim. It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.”
Also in Mein Kampf, Hitler praised The Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax as true. First widely used in Russia, The Protocols has long been a primary source of Jew-hatred and has inspired anti-Jewish violence for more than 120 years. It’s telling that Hitler hated the Russians, and yet he found agreement with his enemy when it came to the Jews.
What does that say about people who believe these falsehoods and fabrications are authentic? Which brings us back to Kent.
Kent is fully aware that Iran held American hostages for 444 days, beginning in 1979. If Iran’s sponsoring of international terrorism and simultaneous pursuit of nuclear weapons is not enough for him and for other critics of the war against Iran, they know that there is more. The assassination plots by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps against U.S. President Donald Trump and other U.S. citizens were real.
Americans should be shocked and concerned that someone capable of believing outrageous conspiracies could rise to a position of such extreme importance.
The American government can and must do better. There is no place in our society for anti-Jewish disinformation.
