Jews in the U.S. are in danger because of people like Joe Kent
For Joe Kent, who just quit as Donald J. Trump’s counterterrorism chief, it’s all about the Jews.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” he wrote in resigning as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “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.”
Then he went further. In his March 17 letter, which he posted on X, the Trump appointee blamed Jews – especially Israelis — for the 2003-2011 Iraq War, as well as the current Iran war.
“Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran,” he argued. “This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”
It’s tempting, of course, to dismiss Kent’s diatribe as the ranting of yet another conspiracy theorist. That’s what critics called Kent during his confirmation hearing, after which he squeaked into his job on a 52-44 Senate vote.
After all, he argued that federal agents had instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol and supported Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Also, he was quite chummy with white supremacists, paying a Proud Boys member for consulting work when he ran for Congress in 2022.
There’s little doubt that Kent is a few fries short of a Happy Meal. With a sensible president and a less supine Senate, he wouldn’t have gotten past the Capitol Rotunda, much less into an important Administration position.
But, on the other hand, like too many in the tinfoil-hat set who have come out of the woodwork in recent years, Kent also is an antisemite, casually invoking longstanding anti-Jewish tropes. Somehow, the Jews manipulate non-Jews into wars with shadowy “misinformation,” he holds. Operating behind the scenes, they form an “echo chamber” that bends the ears of national leaders.
“His reference to Israel and claims about Jewish Americans’ political influence highlight Kent’s previous ties to antisemitism and right-wing extremism,” reported the Associated Press. “It’s an antisemitic trope to suggest Jewish Americans have disproportionate control of media narratives.”
To be sure, an aggressive approach to Iran is something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has urged on American presidents for years, dating back at least to George W. Bush. It’s clear, too, that more recently the Israeli leader stepped up the pressure with an obliging Trump, pressing for military action at least as far back as last December, as The New York Times has reported.
And there’s no surprise in that. For Netanyahu and Israel, Iran has long been an existential threat. If the viciously antisemitic regime had a nuclear bomb, Israelis have every reason to believe it would use it against them. Indeed, that – and general nuclear deterrence – is why presidents going back to Bush have tried to contain the country’s nuclear efforts.
But don’t ignore the reality that the U.S. has long had skin in this game, too. Beyond the risks to the world of a theocratic repressive regime getting a nuclear bomb, the U.S. has long been a victim of Iran’s hatred of what it calls “the Great Satan,” with Israel as “the little Satan.” Since the 1979 revolution, the Iranians have badly bloodied America’s nose.
Recall that Iran supplied the I.E.D.s, or roadside bombs, that killed or maimed over 1,000 American troops during the war in Iraq. Consider its plots to assassinate former senior U.S. officials, including John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Trump himself. And remember that Iran backed the terrorists who in October 1983 killed 241 American Marines, sailors and others, and 58 French paratroopers who were in Beirut to keep the peace. The Iranians were also behind bombing the barracks for the United States Air Force 4404 Provisional Wing in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American airmen in 1996.
Iran has been acting out a slow-moving war against the U.S., as well as Israel, for decades, even as it sowed tumult across the region. “From Lebanon to Yemen and Syria to Iraq, the regime has armed, trained and funded terrorist militias that have soaked the earth with blood and guts,” Trump said in announcing his recent attack.
So, even if Netanyahu encouraged this war, the suggestion by Kent – and like-minded antisemites – that the Israeli leader is a puppet-master pulling Trump’s strings is crapola. Given reasonable fears about the country’s well-shielded nuclear research efforts, Trump had ample reason last June to attack Iran’s fortified facilities. And, with diplomatic moves to contain those efforts faltering, he had reason to attack again even more decisively.
In fact, Trump has been on Iran’s case for decades, as The Atlantic reported. In 1980, during the Iran hostage crisis, Trump agreed with a TV interviewer that “we should have gone in there with troops.” In 1987, The New York Times reported that Trump had told a New Hampshire audience that “the United States should attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields in retaliation for what he called Iran’s bullying of America.” In 1988, Trump told a Guardian interviewer that if he were a political leader, he’d be “harsh on Iran,” Later, in 2013, Trump tweeted “maybe we should knock the hell out of Iran and their nuclear capabilities?”
Soon after assuming the Presidency the first time, he scrapped the Obama administration’s nuclear deal (2018) and then assassinated Qassem Soleimani, a notorious leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (2020).
Admittedly, when Trump announced the current series of attacks in a far-too-short and unpersuasive video, he pointed to the 2023 atrocities in Israel to help make his case. “And it was Iran’s proxy, Hamas, that launched the monstrous Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, slaughtering more than 1,000 innocent people, including 46 Americans, while taking 12 of our citizens hostage,” Trump said. “It was brutal, something like the world has never seen before.”
But recall that it was Israel, of course, that responded with extraordinary force against Hamas in Gaza after the Oct. 7th monstrousness, losing many Israeli lives and taking far more Palestinian ones in the process. And it now is responding with force against another Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, putting more Israelis at risk. It can shoulder its own burdens, albeit with plenty of American military materiel.
The problem, however, is that people like Kent will fuel the already feverish antisemitism on the rise in the U.S. He and his ilk will drive the notion that Americans are being put at risk to fight Israel’s battle, a fight in which they don’t see a stake for America. That notion could put Jews across the country at even greater risk.
And that risk has been growing. The troubles in the Middle East have put every synagogue – indeed, every American Jew — in the crosshairs for anyone seeking to lash out.
Consider Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Lebanon. He drove a truck on March 11 into a Michigan synagogue filled with young children, apparently to avenge the deaths of four of his relatives who were killed in an Israeli airstrike on March 5. One of Ghazali’s brothers, it turned out, was a Hezbollah commander.
Last June, in Boulder, Colorado, a man hurled homemade incendiary devices and used a flamethrower to attack people gathered at a rally supporting the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Fifteen people were hurt and one later died. The suspect, 45-year-old Mohamed Sabry Soliman, said he’d been planning the attack for a year and that he had no regrets, instead “wished they were all dead.”
Less than a month before, on May 21, two Israeli embassy employees—Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26—were shot and killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., shortly after attending an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee. The murderer, Elias Rodriguez, said “I did it for Gaza” and “Free Palestine,” a witness told CNN.
According to the State of Antisemitism in America 2024 report, published in February 2025, 33 percent of American Jews said they have been the personal target of antisemitism, in-person or virtually, at least once over the prior year.
The rise of reported antisemitic incidents in the U.S. has followed a wider trend, as Time reported. According to the Anti-Defamation League, surveys show that “anti-Jewish sentiments are at an all-time high globally.” A report published in January 2025 found that 46 percent of the world’s adult population “harbors deeply entrenched antisemitic attitudes,” equating to an estimated 2.2 billion people worldwide.
Much of such antisemitism is not physical. Much has come in antisemitic hate speech on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.
“However, we shouldn’t be surprised that in a climate where all kinds of hatred and harassment are being normalized, eventually it spills over into deadly violence. It’s horrifying,” Mark Oppenheimer, a professor of practice at Washington University and editor of Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, told Time.
Whether Trump acted precipitously in joining with Netanyahu to launch this war is something we won’t know for a long time. Their endgame hasn’t been clear, with shifting explanations and goals. And we don’t know how long Trump – and war-averse Americans – will keep up the effort to get to some such endgame.
But, in the meantime, Jews around the world – and particularly in the U.S. and Israel – are in danger. And such peril begins with attitudes such as those of Joe Kent.