During last week’s presidential debate, the right-wing journalist Ann Coulter made a vulgar comment about the candidates’ alleged pandering to Jewish voters. Ruthie Blum responds:

Enough has been said about whether Coulter is an anti-Semite. A sufficient amount of ink has [also] been spilled on the fact that anti-Semites, both on the right and on the left, came out of the woodwork to put in their two cents.

What I would like to know is how any intelligent person in America can imagine that championing Israel in general, and in the face of the Obama administration’s abominable nuclear deal with Iran in particular, constitutes “pandering” or “sucking up” to Jews.

As Coulter well knows, Jews overwhelmingly voted for Obama, not once but twice. She is also aware that the vast majority of Iran-deal opponents are Republican. Sheldon Adelson, whom she [also] made a point of mentioning in her [subsequent] Daily Beast interview, is an exception, not the rule. . . .

As for the evangelicals whom she brought up in the same breath [in the interview]: well, the U.S. has a lot of those. And it is the job of a candidate in an American campaign to persuade the electorate to vote for him. If that is “pandering,” so be it.

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.