“Kent and I don’t agree on much, but he is right: ‘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’,” Bernie Sanders said.
The left must take Kent’s observations seriously, despite his rightwing background. If you are on the left, if you care about human lives, then you regard this war as a crime of monstrous proportions, brimming with the suffering of children and families and risk to civilians everywhere. A sequel to Israel’s genocide in Gaza that the press also seeks to dismiss, the war has coarsened American media in a horrifying fashion. “Decapitation” and “elimination” and “taking out” are used routinely by reporters to describe the slaughter of scientists and policy-makers that if it were done to Israelis or Americans, everyone here would regard as outrages. We do know that: Netanyahu says he has wanted this war for 40 years, and Netanyahu has met Trump <https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahus-war-alliance-with-trump-faces-test-iran-crisis-widens-2026-03-04/> a staggering seven times in the last 13 months. The hawkish Senator Lindsey Graham was openly part of Netanyahu’s war campaign. He visited Israel often and met with Netanyahu, “coaching him on how to lobby the president [Trump] for action,” per the Wall Street Journal. “Netanyahu then showed Trump intelligence that ‘persuaded’ him to launch the joint war on Iran, said [Graham],” as Al Jazeera reports <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/9/we-are-going-make-a-tonne-of-money-us-senator-graham-on-us-war-on-iran> . Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick (both Jewish) wrote in the Nation that “the tail has wagged the dog.” “[T]he war was born, planned, and insisted upon by Israel, and its long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” they assert. The writers go on: “I have tried to persuade successive American administrations to take firm action [against Iran], and President Trump did,” Netanyahu told Fox News <https://archive.ph/o/e4PEo/https:/www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahus-war-alliance-with-trump-faces-test-iran-crisis-widens-2026-03-04/>, acknowledging his own efforts to push the US into yet another war in the Middle East. Netanyahu famously overpromises what US interventions will achieve. In 2002 he told Congress <https://archive.ph/o/e4PEo/https:/www.c-span.org/clip/house-committee/user-clip-netanyahu-2002-i-guarantee-you/4529433>, “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” In dismissing the lobby’s influence, the media is also ignoring the “avalanche” of money <https://substack.com/home/post/p-186101195>that the rightwing Israel lobby will bring to the 2026 midterms. That money surely influences Trump’s decision-making. Trump trashed the Iran deal and moved the embassy in all-but-blatant transactions with the late Sheldon Adelson, his biggest donor in the 2016 race, who had pushed the U.S. to nuke Iran. Adelson used to crawl in the windows of the White House to talk to him. Trump joked last year—“a very aggressive man, but I loved him… very supportive of me.” Speaking at the Knesset in Jerusalem, Trump saluted Miriam Adelson, Sheldon’s wealthy widow, and suggested she loves Israel more than the U.S. “Look at her sitting there so innocently. She’s got $60 billion in the bank…I get her in trouble with this, but I actually asked her once… ‘What do you love more? The United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That might mean Israel.” *https://mondoweiss.net/2026/03/instead-of-taking-joe-kents-claims-seriously-the-media-is-disregarding-him-as-an-antisemite/ <https://mondoweiss.net/2026/03/instead-of-taking-joe-kents-claims-seriously-the-media-is-disregarding-him-as-an-antisemite/>* -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#41210): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/41210 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/118448702/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
