Attending a memorial at New York University for the victims of the New Zealand mosque massacre, Chelsea Clinton was accosted by two students who made clear to her that her “rhetoric” had caused the bloody attack in Christchurch. The pair later wrote an article explaining their rationale: Clinton had gently criticized Representative Ilhan Omar for her anti-Semitic remarks; Omar is a Muslim; therefore, Clinton “stoked hatred” of Muslims. Since the man who slaughtered Muslims at prayer was motivated by anti-Muslim animus—their syllogism concludes—Clinton was clearly responsible. To James Kirchick, this tortured logic is also symptomatic of an emerging leftist attitude toward Jews:

For a growing number of progressives, anti-Semitism has become an ideological obligation as central to their political identity as the universal basic income, the Green New Deal, a 70-percent marginal tax rate, and free higher education. These progressives, of course, cannot openly say this. Anti-Semitism is bad. Some of their best friends are Jews. The Holocaust happened. So they need to redefine anti-Semitism out of existence, while redistributing the valuable cultural capital of Jewish historical suffering to more deserving groups. Thus, [they have begun to speak] of “white Jews.” . . .

“White Jews” is, . . . first and foremost, an epithet—an attempt to make “Jews” synonymous with “white supremacy.” This move is especially invidious, since Jews—“white” or not—are themselves the primary victims of theories of racial supremacy, and anti-Semitism is central to white-supremacist ideology. . . .

But the larger point of marking Jews as “white” is to render them politically unassimilable into the left’s virtuous coalition of the oppressed, which includes plenty of third-worldist groups and alignments that are rooted in a political discourse in which conspiratorial anti-Semitism is normal. The solution that progressives have apparently alighted on is not to educate their allies out of bigotry and ignorance but to trim “Jewishness” of any traits that might set off wild, conspiratorial fulminations by the people they wish to position as innocent victims.

Notice how it is only Jews who are endowed with a racial descriptor; no one on the left is busy fingering “white Muslims.” This assault on reason and history puts Jews, or “white Jews,” in their place as inherently oppressive and vile, while [donating] their valuable history of oppression to its “true” inheritors—namely progressives and their handpicked allies.

Those handpicked allies are Muslim foes of Israel eager to find common cause with the hard left.

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.