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A top Trump aide resigned over Iran. Liberals should stay away from him.

Anti-war antisemitism is still antisemitism.

This morning, Joe Kent — the director of the National Counterterrorism Center — resigned in protest over the war in Iran. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war,” he said in a resignation letter addressed to Trump and published on X.

You’d think that a war critic like myself should welcome this development. The war in Iran is a catastrophic mistake, and it seems like a good thing that such a high-ranking national official is taking a stance against it. Indeed, plenty of prominent Trump critics and war opponents have praised Kent for these reasons.

“I didn’t support Kent’s nomination. Yet I’m glad he is willing to acknowledge the truth — there was NO imminent threat to the United States, and this war was a terrible idea,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the top ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote on X.

But the actual text of Kent’s resignation letter suggests a very different conclusion: that he is not taking an admirable antiwar stance, but laying the groundwork for an antisemitic conspiracy theory that could define the future of the GOP.

Kent’s resignation should not be celebrated by principled critics of the Iran war, but rather serve as a cautionary tale for how a just cause could be hijacked by extremists to promote something awful.

Joe Kent’s thinly veiled antisemitism

In the letter, Kent lays responsibility for the war not at Trump’s feet, but Israel’s. In his telling, the president was helpless in the face of an Israeli “misinformation” campaign, an unwitting dupe for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to drag America into a war not in its interests.

“Iran posed no imminent threat to the........

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