I'm confused. Where did Kent say all Jews were bad?
The Israeli government is the reason by in large for brainwashing their population, but to suggest the majority have a different opinion from their government is just untrue. There's polling.
Unfortunately.
"Liberals" are doing the work for the Republicans. Kent wasn't really wrong in any of the things you highlighted. Still failing to find any antisemitism.
Nobody is saying Kent called all Jews bad. That's not the bar for antisemitism, and that's not what's being argued. The issue is that Kent's letter leaned on conspiracy frameworks that have been used to scapegoat Jewish people for centuries, the idea that a shadowy Jewish lobby secretly overrides American democratic will, that "influential" media figures manipulate the president behind the scenes, that past wars were "manufactured" through Israeli deception. You don't have to say "all Jews are bad" for those tropes to be antisemitic. The tropes themselves carry that history whether you intend it or not.
And notice, @SlyPokerDog 's actual point was the same one you're making: criticizing the Israeli government is not antisemitism. He literally said "I think Israel's government is shit. That doesn't mean all Jews are shit." You two aren't even disagreeing on that.
The distinction is that Kent's letter went beyond government criticism. It assigned hidden, conspiratorial, deceptive agency to "Israel and its powerful lobby", which is a different thing entirely. That's what drew condemnation from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, not the mere fact that he opposed the war.
You can oppose the war, criticize Israeli government policy, and call out AIPAC's influence in perfectly legitimate terms. Kent's framing just happened to echo some very old and very loaded tropes in the process. That's the concern.
Also — the "
brainwashing their population" line deserves a second look too. Israel is a democracy with open internet access. Its citizens are on the same Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok as everyone else. In 2026, governments don't really have the power to brainwash entire populations the way that framing implies, if anything, the bigger driver of what people believe is social media algorithms and the influencer ecosystem, which are very much a free world problem. If Israeli public opinion skews hawkish, that's worth criticizing and analyzing, but calling it top-down government brainwashing undersells how much of that is driven by the same decentralized media forces shaping opinion everywhere else. It also, frankly, edges back toward the same "they're all just puppets" logic that doesn't hold up when applied to any other democratic population.
Which brings me to a genuine question, you're posting from the U.S, also a democracy with open internet.
Does that mean your views are a product of American government brainwashing? Or are you capable of forming your own opinions from the information available to you? Because if the answer is the latter, it's worth extending that same assumption to Israeli citizens before writing off an entire population as brainwashed.
(Reply assisted with Claude AI).
