While the U.S. has been taking in refugees from the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, it has declined to make any special effort to absorb Middle Eastern Christians, despite the fact that they are being systematically enslaved, raped, and slaughtered. Elliott Abrams writes:

[T]he Obama administration has abandoned Middle Eastern Christians and other minorities during years of violent assaults. The president’s refugee program has simply ignored the plight of such religious minorities, treating them as no better than Muslims despite the obvious fact that their own situation is far worse.

Why is it worse? Because Muslims can find easier and safer refuge in neighboring Muslim-majority countries such as Jordan and Turkey. Because the UN’s refugee camps, run by the high commissioner for refugees, are almost entirely Muslim and Christians do not feel safe in them. Because the U.S. refugee program accepts refugees mostly from those camps, where Christian refugees fear to live. Because there are no efforts to eliminate Muslims in the Middle East, while there are efforts to demonize, penalize, and convert Christians—and (according to the U.S. Holocaust Museum) there are genocidal attacks on the Yazidi minority.

The president’s argument is that distinguishing the cases of Muslim and Christian refugees would be “shameful.” As a question of national security, that is a difficult argument to sustain: in the United States and Western Europe, Christian refugees have not become terrorists, and it’s a simple fact that their admission does not present the same security risk. That does not mean no Muslim refugees should be admitted, but it does suggest that an adamant refusal to distinguish among refugees on religious lines is illogical. The 1930s provide a useful comparison: would it have been “shameful” for the United States to provide special help to Jewish refugees, who were the targets of special persecution and genocide? Or was it instead “shameful” to refuse such help?

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.