Yesterday, Israeli police working in cooperation with U.S. law enforcement arrested a nineteen-year-old dual Israeli-American citizen for making dozens of bomb threats against Jewish institutions in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand. The young man has reportedly suffered from a brain tumor for several years, which may have affected his behavior. David Bernstein makes sense of this unexpected discovery in light of some of the more overwrought reactions to the recent wave of threats:

Even if the threats had been the work of an anti-Semitic alt-righter, one [lunatic] with a phone shouldn’t cause panic, nor should one [lunatic’s] actions be used to extrapolate wild exaggerations about the declining safety of American Jews. But . . . various groups and individuals had an incentive to hype the “threat” and, not incidentally, blame it on President Trump.

Note also what this does not mean. It does not mean that all reported hate crimes, or all reported anti-Semitic hate crimes, are a hoax. Most of them are not, and the anti-truck-bomb barriers in front of my local JCCs and Jewish day schools bear witness to actual threats. It also does not mean, as I’ve seen far too many commenters on the Internet assert, that all anti-Semitism in the United States and/or around the world comes either from the left or from Muslims. That is not just false, but egregiously false. . . .

Unfortunately, the points above will be lost on many, and the fight against actual anti-Semitism and other forms of racism will likely have been dealt a blow because self-serving groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) chose to hype and politicize the threats without any idea of their actual origin. The ADL’s board of directors needs to clean house to regain credibility, starting with anyone who publicly attributed the bomb threats to emboldened white supremacists.

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.