In May, the Qatar-based Al Jazeera network requested that the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigate the death of its reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, who was hit by a stray bullet during a shootout between the IDF and Palestinian guerrillas. Rafael Medoff suggests that this exercise in lawfare may end up hurting Al Jazeera—not just because its claim against Israel has no merit, but because the proceeding might reveal the news organization for what it is: an arm of the Qatari government tasked with disseminating anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and Islamism. Medoff cites a historical precedent:

Al Jazeera’s suit against Israel is somewhat reminiscent of the legal actions initiated by the anti-Semitic agitator, Benjamin Freedman, against American Jewish organizations in the 1940s. Freedman, a New York businessman who was born Jewish but embraced Catholicism, placed large advertisements in the American press in 1946 accusing Jews of trying to, “drag [the U.S.] into a war to create a nationalist sovereign Jew state in Palestine.” The ads were signed by the “League for Peace with Justice in Palestine.”

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) charged that the purported interfaith coalition was a sham. . . . Freedman promptly filed suit, demanding $5 million in damages. An AJC leader welcomed the suit as, “an opportunity to demonstrate in court the nature and character” of Freedman and his alleged organization. The suit was dismissed before it went far enough to delve into those details, but two years later, the litigious Freedman re-opened that pandora’s box.

The defense [in the subsequent case] produced a cable sent by Freedman to Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Palestinian Arab mufti and Nazi collaborator, praising Husseini’s “vision, courage, strength, and struggle [on] behalf [of] justice” and vowing “fullest cooperation” with the mufti’s war against the Jews. The defense also revealed a document in which Freedman reported to an associate that he had recently, “negotiated [the] immediate establishment” of a “sub-machine gun factory” in Pakistan.

Not surprisingly, the judge dismissed the suit, finding that Freedman was “a crackpot,” and that [the criticism he claimed to be libelous] was “proven to be true.”

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.