“McMinn County Bans Maus, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Holocaust Book,” ran the headline in the TN Holler, a progressive Tennessee-based news website. Soon viral outrage followed, and the story made its way to CNBC and CNN. Arthur Spiegelman, who authored the graphic novel Maus—based on his father’s own experience in the Shoah—declared that the McMinn County school board’s decision had “the breath of autocracy and fascism about it.” But the book was not banned, writes Thomas Balazs, as he attempts to cut through some of the hysteria:

First things first: Maus is not being “banned.” The McMinn County school board simply voted to remove it from the middle-school Holocaust curriculum. That’s not a ban, it’s a routine curriculum change. The Holocaust will continue to be taught, and Maus will be replaced with another text. Even if McMinn County removes Maus from the middle-school library (and it’s not clear they plan to do so), that still wouldn’t constitute a ban. They’re not saying kids can’t read it or that bookstores can’t sell it. They don’t have the power to ban Maus even if they wanted to. It’s freely available on the Internet to those who know where to look and can be found in nearly every library and bookstore in the country.

I’m a writer. I’m an English professor. I’m a comic-book lover. I’m a Jew and a [child of a] Holocaust survivor. I understand perfectly why Maus is great. It was important in my life. It helped me to understand my father, who was a lot like Spiegelman’s. That doesn’t mean I get to insist that every county in the country include the book in its eighth-grade Holocaust program. I don’t know the kids in McMinn County, but I doubt they’ll become Nazis because they didn’t get to read Maus until ninth grade.

Nor will they become degenerates if they read it in seventh grade. But it’s not my call (or yours) unless you live in that county, and it’s certainly not anti-Semitic or book-burning to replace one Holocaust text with another. Even on International Holocaust Day. Even if it’s Maus.

So, why all the weeping and gnashing of teeth? Some elements on the left clearly want to use this issue in order to discredit recent parental efforts to remove inflammatory texts about race or explicit sex-education materials from school curricula. . . . The debates about critical race theory and sexually explicit graphic novels have nothing to do with Jews or the Holocaust, and there’s something cynical and exploitative about political attempts to link these controversies.

On the same day the cease-fire went into effect along the Israel-Lebanon border, rebel forces launched an unexpected offensive, and within a few days captured much of Aleppo. This lightening advance originated in the northwestern part of the country, which has been relatively quiet over the past four years, since Bashar al-Assad effectively gave up on restoring control over the remaining rebel enclaves in the area. The fighting comes at an inopportune moment for the powers that Damascus has called on for help in the past: Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and Hizballah has been shattered.

But the situation is extremely complex. David Wurmser points to the dangers that lie ahead:

The desolation wrought on Hizballah by Israel, and the humiliation inflicted on Iran, has not only left the Iranian axis exposed to Israeli power and further withering. It has altered the strategic tectonics of the Middle East. The story is not just Iran anymore. The region is showing the first signs of tremendous geopolitical change. And the plates are beginning to move.

The removal of the religious-totalitarian tyranny of the Iranian regime remains the greatest strategic imperative in the region for the United States and its allies, foremost among whom stands Israel. . . . However, as Iran’s regime descends into the graveyard of history, it is important not to neglect the emergence of other, new threats. navigating the new reality taking shape.

The retreat of the Syrian Assad regime from Aleppo in the face of Turkish-backed, partly Islamist rebels made from remnants of Islamic State is an early skirmish in this new strategic reality. Aleppo is falling to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS—a descendant of Nusra Front led by Abu Mohammed al-Julani, himself a graduate of al-Qaeda’s system and cobbled together of IS elements. Behind this force is the power of nearby Turkey.