President Obama recently declared May to be Jewish Heritage Month. Analyzing the attendant proclamation, David Bernstein notes the emphasis it places on Jews’ devotion to fighting for the rights of other groups, and finds it telling:

It’s no secret that many liberal American Jews emphasize the “social-justice” part of their identity. But this doesn’t preclude also recognizing, as part of Jewish Heritage Month, that Jews have contributed disproportionately to the arts, business, medicine, academia, science, and so forth. Nor does it preclude recognizing that American Jews have successfully created unique and innovative Jewish communal charities, educational institutions, and internal religious movements (such as Conservative Judaism), . . . [or] recognizing that American Jews have been at the forefront of helping to establish and defend Israel and in rescuing persecuted Jews, from Ethiopia to the USSR.

I’m sure if you asked whoever drafted the president’s proclamation about these other [achievements], he would say something along the lines of, “yeah, that stuff is nice, too.”

But for some on the far left, including some progressives of Jewish descent, that other stuff isn’t “nice, too.” To them, Jews exist only for the role assigned to them by the progressive mythos—to use their experience of oppression and their “privilege” to fight for the rights of others, and then to assimilate or disappear.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.