During last week’s presidential debate, the right-wing journalist Ann Coulter made a vulgar comment about the candidates’ alleged pandering to Jewish voters. Ruthie Blum responds:

Enough has been said about whether Coulter is an anti-Semite. A sufficient amount of ink has [also] been spilled on the fact that anti-Semites, both on the right and on the left, came out of the woodwork to put in their two cents.

What I would like to know is how any intelligent person in America can imagine that championing Israel in general, and in the face of the Obama administration’s abominable nuclear deal with Iran in particular, constitutes “pandering” or “sucking up” to Jews.

As Coulter well knows, Jews overwhelmingly voted for Obama, not once but twice. She is also aware that the vast majority of Iran-deal opponents are Republican. Sheldon Adelson, whom she [also] made a point of mentioning in her [subsequent] Daily Beast interview, is an exception, not the rule. . . .

As for the evangelicals whom she brought up in the same breath [in the interview]: well, the U.S. has a lot of those. And it is the job of a candidate in an American campaign to persuade the electorate to vote for him. If that is “pandering,” so be it.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.