In his letter of resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, sent to President Donald Trump on March 17, Joe Kent declared that “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.” The rationale for Operation Epic Fury, he wrote, was cooked up by “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” who “deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.” This “echo chamber,” Kent continued, “was used to deceive” the president just as it had been employed two decades earlier “to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.” Kent told the president that he had “lost my beloved wife Shannon” — a U.S. Navy intelligence chief killed in a 2019 ISIS suicide bombing in Syria — “in a war manufactured by Israel.”
Kent is hardly the first person to blame the Jewish state and its American supporters for personal or national misfortunes, and he won’t be the last. His variant of antisemitic incitement — that Jews start wars for their own material benefit — has a long and ignominious history. In 1919, Henry Ford told a group of friends sitting around a campfire that the Jews caused the Great War; this idea and others like it featured prominently in the weekly newspaper he went on to publish, the Dearborn Independent. More than 20 years later, Charles Lindbergh infamously said that “the three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.” When an inebriated Mel Gibson was pulled over for speeding in Malibu and arrested on a drunk-driving charge, he demanded to know whether the officer was of the Hebraic persuasion and then flat-out declared that “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”
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