Remembered today as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Jabberwocky, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a/k/a Lewis Carroll) also produced important books and essays on mathematics and formal logic. Adam Roberts, as an admirer of the former works, decided to read the 1897 Symbolic Logic, Part I—and came across the following example of deduction:

No Jews are honest;
Some Gentiles are rich.
Some rich people are dishonest.

Adams responds:

No Jews are . . . hang on a minute. What?

But, look: one particular instance of anti-Semitic generalization surely doesn’t mean that Carroll himself hated Jews. Surely this is just one example of the ways that the background radiation of 19th-century British anti-Semitism fed through into particular texts. It’s not as if Carroll goes on and on about Jews in his dry little book about inductive logic. Is it?

To Roberts’s dismay, the Jews continue to return in such sample statements as “No Gentiles say ‘shpoonj,’” “No Jew is ignorant of Hebrew,” and “Some Jews are rich,” although he reports nothing else as nakedly bigoted as “no Jews are honest.”

Last week, the New York Times reported, based on unnamed sources within the Trump administration, that the president had asked Israel not to carry out a planned strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. That is, somebody deliberately gave this information to the press, which later tried to confirm it by speaking with other officials. Amit Segal writes that, “according to figures in Israel’s security establishment,” this is “the most serious leak in Israel’s history.” He explains:

As Israel is reportedly planning what may well be one of its most consequential military operations ever, the New York Times lays out for the Iranians what Israel will target, when it will carry out the operation, and how. That’s not just any other leak.

Seth Mandel looks into the leaker’s logic:

The primary purpose of the [Times] article is not as a record of internal deliberations but as an instrument of policy itself. Namely, to obstruct future U.S. and Israeli foreign policy by divulging enough details of Israel’s plans in order to protect Iran’s nuclear sites. The idea is to force Israeli planners back to the drawing board, thus delaying a possible future strike on Iran until Iranian air defenses have been rebuilt.

The leak is the point. It’s a tactical play, more or less, to help Iran torpedo American action.

The leaker, Mandel explains—and the Times itself implies—is likely aligned with the faction in the administration that wants to see the U.S. retreat from the world stage and from its alliance with Israel, a faction that includes Vice-President J.D. Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and the president’s own chief of staff Susie Wiles.

Yet it’s also possible, if less likely, that the plans were leaked in support of administration policy rather than out of factional infighting. Eliezer Marom argues that the leak was “part of the negotiations and serves to clarify to the Iranians that there is a real attack plan that Trump stopped at the last moment to conduct negotiations.”