Former National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent told a podcast audience that Shia Muslims do not use suicide bombers and have never traveled to America to kill Americans. Both claims are false, and the man making them ran the federal government’s terrorism analysis hub until March.
Kent, a retired Green Beret who ran two failed campaigns for Congress in Washington’s 3rd District, resigned from the NCTC on March 17 over the war with Iran, saying Tehran posed no imminent threat and accusing Israel and its American supporters of dragging the country into the conflict. His exit reignited a fight inside the GOP over foreign policy and antisemitism, and he has spent the months since working the podcast circuit.
His appearance on the Julian Dorey Podcast took the argument somewhere his earlier complaints about the war’s origins did not go. This time he made historical claims that are easily disproven.
“The whole myth that Iran is full of like crazy suicide bombers and like crazed jihadis. Number one, like that’s not the Shi’as. Like the Shias don’t use suicide bombers. The Shias have never come over to America to kill Americans,” Kent said on the Julian Dorey Podcast.
He then separated Shia forces from Sunni terror networks.
“Now the Shias have been pretty proficient at killing Americans when we come to their shores, like in Iraq and in Lebanon. But the Safi jihadis, the ISIS, the Al Qaeda, those are the suicide bombers. Those are...
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