Since September 11, 2001, if not since the 1979 Iranian revolution, the American left has sought to minimize or deny the threat to Western civilization posed by violent Islamism. Peter Berkowitz examines the effect of this delusional thinking on the Obama administration and the effort of one notable left-wing figure to counteract it:

Only last week, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest and Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz staunchly denied to an incredulous press corps that the Taliban is a terrorist organization. . . . The purpose of the White House’s ludicrous denial is to hide that the basis of the Taliban’s enmity, strategy, and objectives is a doctrine of Islamic supremacy. Such suppression is nothing new for the administration. As early as early 2009, it renamed campaigns in the struggle against Islamic extremism “overseas contingency operations.” . . . Last September in a White House speech, Obama actually declared that IS—even as it was establishing a new caliphate in Iraq and Syria—had nothing to do with Islam.

As Berkowitz notes, “The president . . . has reasons grounded in the progressive or left-liberal sensibility that he epitomizes to avoid mention of the Islamic roots of the jihadists’ rage.” Those reasons have recently been laid bare in an essay, “Islamism and the Left,” by Michael Walzer, “one of the nation’s outstanding political theorists . . . [and] a politically engaged man of the left [who] criticizes fellow leftists from within the tent.”

Although he never mentions Obama by name, Walzer argues persuasively that the left has failed to adjust its thinking to the rise of “Islamist zealotry” because of a set of increasingly typical moral and intellectual errors. . . . [One can only hope that] Walzer’s bracing critique . . . will ascend speedily to the top of Barack Obama’s reading list.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.