On September 6, 2007, Israeli jets destroyed a nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert, provoking neither international condemnation nor significant retaliation. By coincidence, just after the tenth-year anniversary of this bombing, the IDF appears to have destroyed another Syrian installation producing dangerous weapons. Gabriel Scheinmann revisits the dramatic story of Israel’s bringing intelligence about the reactor to President George W. Bush, the Bush administration’s choice not to act, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s decision to solve the problem without U.S. support—a story that has significant implications for today’s concerns about Iran and North Korea. (Interview by Jonathan Silver. Audio, 57 minutes.)

Commenting on the wave of anti-Hamas demonstrations in the Gaza Strip, Seth Mandel writes:

Gazans have not have been fully honest in public. There’s a reason for that. To take just one example, Amin Abed was nearly beaten to death with hammers for criticizing Hamas. Abed was saved by bystanders, so presumably the intention was to finish him off. During the cease-fire, Hamas members bragged about executing “collaborators” and filmed themselves shooting civilians.

Which is what makes yesterday’s protests all the more significant. To protest Hamas in public is to take one’s life in one’s hands. That is especially true because the protests were bound to be filmed, in order to get the message out to the world. The reason the world needs to hear that message is that Westerners have been Hamas’s willing propaganda tools. The protests on campus are not “pro-Palestinian,” they are pro-Hamas—and the people of Gaza are Hamas’s victims.