Following the murder of a French priest by Islamic State-linked terrorists, a group of prominent French Muslims issued an unambiguous and strongly worded condemnation of this and previous attacks. Bernard-Henri Lévy was among many who greeted the statement with enthusiasm—observing that it contained “not a scintilla of denial”—until he noticed a troubling detail:

The letter begins with an enumeration of the recent terrorist acts that have beset France. It does not omit Charlie (“the murder of cartoonists”), Bataclan (“the murder of young people listening to music”), of Magnanville (“the murder of a pair of police officers”). Nor, of course, does it fail to mention Nice (“the murder of men, women, and children celebrating the national holiday”) or Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray (“the murder of a priest celebrating Mass”). Clearly, it purported to present an exhaustive list of the attacks.

Except it left one out. And what it left out was the hostage-taking at the kosher supermarket on January 9, 2015, which occurred less than three years after Mohamed Merah’s murders at the Jewish school in Toulouse. . . .

[A] slip like this cannot be allowed to go unremarked. And, given the prominence of those who signed the letter, it cannot fail to be upsetting. . . . One cannot purport to oppose Islamic State’s intention to immerse France in blood and fire and then, when the time comes to count the dead, display selective memory.

And above all, one cannot claim to be seeking a way out of an “intolerable situation,” one in which denial feeds the problem and confusion sows seeds of division and suggests the possibility (God forbid) of the war of all against all, while at the same time soft-pedaling the anti-Semitism that is, like it or not, one of the signs and, perhaps, one of the sources of what Abdelwahab Meddeb, the great scholar of Tunisian origin, called the “malady of Islam.”

Last week, the New York Times reported, based on unnamed sources within the Trump administration, that the president had asked Israel not to carry out a planned strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. That is, somebody deliberately gave this information to the press, which later tried to confirm it by speaking with other officials. Amit Segal writes that, “according to figures in Israel’s security establishment,” this is “the most serious leak in Israel’s history.” He explains:

As Israel is reportedly planning what may well be one of its most consequential military operations ever, the New York Times lays out for the Iranians what Israel will target, when it will carry out the operation, and how. That’s not just any other leak.

Seth Mandel looks into the leaker’s logic:

The primary purpose of the [Times] article is not as a record of internal deliberations but as an instrument of policy itself. Namely, to obstruct future U.S. and Israeli foreign policy by divulging enough details of Israel’s plans in order to protect Iran’s nuclear sites. The idea is to force Israeli planners back to the drawing board, thus delaying a possible future strike on Iran until Iranian air defenses have been rebuilt.

The leak is the point. It’s a tactical play, more or less, to help Iran torpedo American action.

The leaker, Mandel explains—and the Times itself implies—is likely aligned with the faction in the administration that wants to see the U.S. retreat from the world stage and from its alliance with Israel, a faction that includes Vice-President J.D. Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and the president’s own chief of staff Susie Wiles.

Yet it’s also possible, if less likely, that the plans were leaked in support of administration policy rather than out of factional infighting. Eliezer Marom argues that the leak was “part of the negotiations and serves to clarify to the Iranians that there is a real attack plan that Trump stopped at the last moment to conduct negotiations.”