In the midst of the Battle of the Bulge, a unit of the Waffen-SS massacred 84 captured American soldiers near the Belgian village of Malmedy. Having taken hundreds of members of the unit prisoner after the war, the Army arranged for their interrogation and trial, assigning Colonel Willis Everett the unenviable task of defending them in the courtroom. Everett tried to make the most of their stories of mistreatment at the hands of their interrogators—most of whom were German-speaking Jewish intelligence officers—and thus unleashed a familiar brew of anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and Holocaust inversion. Reviewing a recent study of the episode by Steven P. Remy, Gabriel Schoenfeld writes:

Remy shows that Everett had come to regard the Allied occupation of Germany as “corrupt and misguided.” Worse, his sympathies “lay not with the victims of Nazi Germany but with Germans—including former Nazis—victimized, in his mind, by ignominious defeat and a vengeance-filled occupation.” Everett’s fervor was fueled by a prejudice not uncommon at the time: believing that American military justice had been “subverted by vengeance-seeking Jews,” i.e., the interrogators.

In his anti-Semitism, as Remy shows, Everett was swimming in a broader current. Warren Magee, the American defense counsel for the last seven Nazi war criminals condemned to death at Nuremberg, regarded the Allied war-crime trials as “Mosaic” justice. . . .

As Everett and like-minded personages floated their accounts of German prisoners subjected to physical abuse, stories began to appear in various quarters of the American press. . . . It did not take long for the story to seep into the mainstream media and central institutions. Time hailed Everett for revealing abuses that “read like a record of Nazi atrocities.” . . .

The problem with all of this is that the allegations of abuse were false, [products of] a coordinated campaign devised by the SS defendants themselves while awaiting trial.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”