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 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.