Outrage over the Trump administration’s border-control policies, and especially the separation of children from their parents, has led to comparisons with the Third Reich. To John Podhoretz, such comparisons are obscene:

[T]here’s nothing new in deploying the Holocaust as a political or aesthetic cudgel. What’s different about [recent discussions] is that expressions of concern about the misuse of the Holocaust analogy have been the occasion for heated, even enraged, criticism: no, [the critics are saying,] it is those who object to likening the extremely bad policy of the Trump administration to the worst event in human history who are doing wrong. . . .

Bad things that happen on earth are not all the same. Some are bad. Some are worse. One or two in all of human history were of a scope and size and horror that they cannot be analogized.

Moreover, even those who want to liken the present moment to, let’s say, the rise of Nazi rule in Germany and say they’re doing so to prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust are doing something very wrong. By likening the Jews of Germany to the [prospective immigrants] at the border, they are implicitly accepting the Nazi contention that Jewish Germans were foreign presences rather than German citizens whose very existences on the earth were slowly and systematically being outlawed by the government of the country in which they were born. . . . When you make such an argument, you are lowering and lessening and making more invisible as time passes the unthinkable and unimaginable scope and size of the Shoah. . . .

[T]hose who treat the dreadful separation of parents from children at the border over the past months as though we are living through [William Styron’s novel] Sophie’s Choice are not expressing righteous anger. They are guilty of the worst kind of self-righteous preening. To paraphrase Elie Wiesel, they are cheapening the Holocaust and draining it of its substance.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.