By now, I’m sure everyone reading this has read Joe Kent’s letter about how “Israel dragged the US into war”. And of course it caught fire online.

Twenty-four hours after publishing his letter, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, one of the most prominent platforms amplifying antisemitic and anti-Israel narratives today. This is a conspiracy playing out in plain sight: two people, possibly more, with the same harmful agenda, promoting it together.

On the show, Kent pushed yet another narrative: that Israel may have been behind the murder of Charlie Kirk, who had begun to distance himself from Israel’s agenda and oppose the war with Iran. Just another tiny, harmless conspiracy. The known antisemite Jackson Hinkle amplified it online with a post that received over 200,000 likes.

It is telling when you see the white nationalist “America First” crowd collaborating with Islamic extremists, pushing the same agenda, possibly hoping to reach the same goals that have been promoted and executed throughout history.

They are right about one thing: Netanyahu and his supportive lobby (a lobby I hesitate to call pro-Israel) pressured the US government into war with Iran. Iran was not close to having a nuclear weapon, which undermines Trump’s stated justification for the war.

Online, on podcasts, and across social media, the internet was flooded with anti-Israel and antisemitic posts, tweets, and videos. Jake Shields, another popular antisemite, tweeted: “I’ll give you the cliff notes to what he wrote — it’s the Jews,” garnering thousands of retweets. Another popular figure in the MAGA audience, Alex Jones wrote: “Joe Kent resigned to publicly spotlight the fact that Israel has successfully conducted a coup and is now in control of the Trump White House,” and called for all Americans to “peacefully take action now to restore our nation’s sovereignty.” 

Sending Americans to fight in the Middle East and spending billions of dollars is never a popular move, especially in a post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan America. Especially when people believe this war was started because of Israel and for Israel’s interests.

Adding to all of this, the revelations of the past few months from the Epstein files (not coincidentally absent from media coverage during wartime, just as Trump would have wanted), read like a modern-day Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with the added element of allegations involving young girls in a pedophile network. This is simply too much to keep the antisemitic fire down.

This puts American Jews in danger (and Jews around the world as well) who have already been on high alert after two years of a war in Gaza and tens of thousands of Palestinians killed (while not forgetting the massacre of October 7th and our hostages). This danger has been caused and amplified primarily by the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu. I fear that Jews in the United States will face a significant wave of violence following so much antisemitic messaging. And this is precisely what white nationalists and Muslim extremists want. I believe, unfortunately, that what follows will not be minor and sporadic.

There are many legitimate reasons to oppose the Iranian regime. It has been the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism for 47 years. It has murdered thousands — arguably hundreds of thousands — of its own people. As seen in its crackdown on women and the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, it is a deeply repressive regime. And it is part of the China-Russia axis working to destabilize the international order.

This war with Iran will end without achieving much, except to help Netanyahu in the upcoming elections. Until the next round.

The damage Netanyahu has done to US-Israel relations may be irreparable, and that alone is devastating to the future of Israel. There is already a rupture between American Jews and Israel — but I fear the more pressing danger is a rift between American Jews and their neighbors, reminiscent of darker periods in Jewish history.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)