By longstanding agreement, the United States has pledged to help Israel maintain its qualitative military edge (QME) over other countries in the region. Thus Washington’s decision to sell the F-35 fighter jet—the most advanced American aircraft—to the United Arab Emirates has raised concerns for some, despite Abu Dhabi’s friendliness toward the Jewish state. Yaakov Amidror sees no cause for alarm, so long as efforts are made to ensure that such sales don’t undermine Israel’s QME:

[T]hrough joint dialogue, there are creative ways to protect Israel’s QME while allowing the UAE to obtain the jets. For instance, some of the F-35’s software systems can be reserved for Israeli use.

[A more] significant concern with the UAE’s potential procurement of F-35s is that other countries may follow suit. For example, Qatar has already requested to purchase the jets. A sale to Doha, which has not normalized relations with Israel, remains extremely worrisome.

Qatar has supported radical Islamist groups across the Middle East, while its global media network Al Jazeera too often promotes their ideology. Doha also collaborates with Iran, which sows discord throughout the region, and maintains an intimate partnership with an increasingly belligerent Turkey. . . . Allowing Qatar to purchase the F-35s before it has formal diplomatic relations and real normalization with Israel would signal U.S. approval of Doha’s problematic policies, endanger Israel’s security, and encourage further regional procurement.

By shutting down the request, Washington could conversely hold Qatar accountable for its behavior and take a firm stance in support of Israel’s QME.

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.