Sponsored by the government of Qatar, and sharing the emirate’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Jazeera has succeeded in gaining not only immense popularity among Arabic speakers but also respectability for its somewhat newer English-language television channel and website. To these, it has more recently added AJ+, a web-only news platform directed at younger audiences. Samantha Rose Mandeles explains how the naked anti-Semitism of the network’s Arabic-language channel is put into polite form for Anglophone audiences:

[Since] Qatar and Al Jazeera have long portrayed themselves as defenders of the Palestinian cause, much of Al Jazeera English’s anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism is disguised as anti-Zionism or anti-imperialism. . . . For example, Al Jazeera English mostly avoids its Arabic counterpart’s fascination with “Jewish power,” preferring to discuss “Zionist influence” instead. One recent Al Jazeera English article argues that “every American administration over the past three or four decades was subject to major Zionist influence.” . . .

AJ+, [by contrast], takes the most care of all Al Jazeera sectors to spread anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism with an “anti-racist” slant; one AJ+ video in this vein is called “Why White Feminism Is Racist.” In the clip, a pink-haired journalist named Zab Mustefa claims that the racism of “white feminism” is exemplified by [the] Israeli actress Gal Gadot. Mustefa contends that Gadot’s feminism—and indeed, Gadot herself—is racist because she “supports the Israeli army, which oppresses Palestinian women on a daily basis.” . . . [T]he clip then launches into an interview with the Women’s March coordinator Tamika Mallory, whose association with the notoriously bigoted Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan has recently made headlines.

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.