In contemporary academic circles, “settler-colonialism” has come to be considered among the gravest of sins. The term—which refers to one country taking control of another and sending some of its inhabitants to live there—is applied with particular frequency, and venom, to Israel, although the U.S., Australia, and others also qualify as culprits. But, writes Alex Joffe, it is not Jews but Palestinians whom this term best describes:

According to apologists of Bashar al-Assad, and those they have managed to dupe, he has been making war for the past ten years against terrorists, and any Western attempt to engineer his ouster would be to let the terrorists win. But in fact Assad did much to help Islamic State (IS) come into being, and to keep it alive. Matthew Levitt writes: