Released in the U.S. last month on Netflix, Operation Mincemeat tells the real-life story of the successful effort by British intelligence to convince the Nazis that the Allies planned to invade Sardinia and Greece rather than Sicily in 1943. The team that pulled off this dramatic coup included a young Ian Fleming—author of the James Bond novels—and was led by Ewen Montagu, the film’s hero. Michael Medved explains what the movie leaves out about this extraordinary figure:

The real Ewen Montagu took special pride in outwitting Hitler in light of his family’s background. “Joy of joys to anyone, and particularly a Jew, the satisfaction of knowing they had directly and specifically fooled that monster,” he once wrote. Operation Mincemeat, based on Ben MacIntyre’s 2011 book, makes only the briefest mention of its hero’s Jewish identity—when Montagu dispatches his wife and two children to the relative safety of America, in view of “the nightmare that is marching this way that is only too real” and poses especially acute dangers for a Jewish family.

What the movie fails even to hint at is that Montagu’s family constituted one of the most conspicuous, powerfully connected, and philanthropically committed of all Jewish tribes in the realm, with members playing distinguished roles in politics, business, the arts, and synagogue leadership.

Montagu’s grandfather, Samuel Montagu (1832–1911), won elevation to the peerage as First Baron Swaythling, honored for his generosity to the poor, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. . . . In 1885, he won election as a Liberal member of Parliament for Whitechapel until he stood down five years later. He also organized the Federation of Synagogues, representing 51 small congregations in the crowded, Yiddish-speaking East End of London. While hoping to Anglicize and uplift recent immigrants from the Russian Empire, he simultaneously supported “Lovers of Zion,” promoting resettlement of Jewish communities in Turkish-controlled Palestine.

[Ewen] continued the long family tradition of Jewish service, as president of the United Synagogue (1954–62), and president of the Anglo-Jewish Association from 1949, pressing restitution claims against Germany and promoting the welfare of Holocaust survivors. He also came to welcome and support the establishment of the new Jewish state, moving beyond the doubts about Zionism that had motivated his father and the elite but short-lived League of British Jews. He died at age of eighty-four in 1985.

For many years, Lebanon has been a de-facto satellite of Tehran, which exerts control via its local proxy militia, Hizballah. The problem with the U.S. policy toward the country, according to Tony Badran, is that it pretends this is not the case, and continues to support the government in Beirut as if it were a bulwark against, rather than a pawn of, the Islamic Republic:

So obsessed is the Biden administration with the dubious art of using taxpayer dollars to underwrite the Lebanese pseudo-state run by the terrorist group Hizballah that it has spent its two years in office coming up with legally questionable schemes to pay the salaries of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), setting new precedents in the abuse of U.S. foreign security-assistance programs. In January, the administration rolled out its program to provide direct salary payments, in cash, to both the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the Internal Security Forces (ISF).

The scale of U.S. financing of Lebanon’s Hizballah-dominated military apparatus cannot be understated: around 100,000 Lebanese are now getting cash stipends courtesy of the American taxpayer to spend in Hizballah-land. . . . This is hardly an accident. For U.S. policymakers, synergy between the LAF/ISF and Hizballah is baked into their policy, which is predicated on fostering and building up a common anti-Israel posture that joins Lebanon’s so-called “state institutions” with the country’s dominant terror group.

The implicit meaning of the U.S. bureaucratic mantra that U.S. assistance aims to “undermine Hizballah’s narrative that its weapons are necessary to defend Lebanon” is precisely that the LAF/ISF and the Lebanese terror group are jointly competing to achieve the same goals—namely, defending Lebanon from Israel.