In a recent interview, the rapper Kanye West seemed to blame “Jewish Zionists” for encouraging sexual promiscuity, and specifically seemed to blame Jewish influence for the private life of his ex-wife, who, he stressed, is “a Christian woman.” His probable source for these vile speculations, direct or indirect, was Louis Farrakhan, who holds Jews responsible for the “filth and degenerate behavior” found in Hollywood. As Jonah Cohen explains, the idea of the Jewish man as perverse sexual predator and corruptor of the innocent is both widespread and deeply rooted:

AltRight.com, a website founded by the white nationalist Richard Spencer, declared that the disgraced film producer and serial rapist Harvey Weinstein was “just one degenerate Jew” amid “the massive hive of degenerate Jews at the heart of Hollywood.” Lurid claims about Jewish lust spewed from the pages of the Daily Stormer, whose neo-Nazi founder, Andrew Anglin, laughed that the media is finally waking up to “the revelation that the perverted Jew Harvey Weinstein is in fact a Jewish pervert.”

On the last day of Passover 2019, a teenage gunman opened fire in a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one woman and injuring three other people. Among his reasons for the mass shooting, according to his manifesto, were the Jews’ “role in peddling pornography” and “their degenerate and abominable practices of sexual perversion.” Three years later, another teenager likewise left behind a manifesto accusing Jews of sexual perversion before he went on a racist shooting spree at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.

It is an arresting fact that medieval pictorial renderings of the “blood libel” legend do sometimes fixate on male genital mutilation. Witness the woodcut by German artist Michael Wolgemut (1434-1519), which portrayed the “Jewish” ritual murder of a Christian child named Simon in the Italian city of Trent. . . . Wolgemut’s imagery likely played a role in the Poway synagogue shooting in 2019. Before the rampage, the shooter felt compelled to write down in his manifesto that “you are not forgotten Simon of Trent, the horror that you and countless children have endured at the hands of the Jews will never be forgiven.” A year later, the well-known Italian painter, Giovanni Gasparro, unveiled on Facebook his own version of Simon of Trent, again combining the imagery of a child’s male sex organ with Jewish torture and pedophilia.

The Poway shooter’s cri de coeur for children can be traced back, almost verbatim, to what was said about Jewish child abuse in the 1700s. “Concerning the horrifying murders of tender, innocent little children by Jews there is much to write,” the orientalist Johann Andreas Eisenmenger wrote in Judaism Unmasked (1710), an influential anti-Semitic polemic that ran to more than 2,000 pages. . . . No less a rationalist than Voltaire (1694-1778), who sternly frowned on the descriptions of promiscuity in the Hebrew Bible, suggested that Jewish men and women hunger for carnal relations with goats (an animal often symbolic of unrepentant sinners).

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.