In a cynical ploy to boost his standing among African-American voters, the South Bend, Indiana mayor and presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg very publicly shared a meal with the notorious race-baiter and anti-Semitic agitator Al Sharpton. Most of the other candidates for the Democratic nomination joined Buttigieg in attending Sharpton’s annual conference. To Seth Mandel, the current rush to pledge fealty to Sharpton—who instigated the 1991 Crown Heights riots as well as the 1995 firebombing of Freddie’s Fashion Mart—is “particularly ghastly.”

Sharpton’s elevation comes amid an uptick in reported incidents of anti-Semitism. Just days before Buttigieg’s public celebration of Sharpton, a man fired shots at a Chabad synagogue in Poway, killing one person. In chilling echoes of the 1991 Crown Heights riots, in which Sharpton played a leading role, there’s been a rash of anti-Semitic assaults in Brooklyn. In New York on the whole, . . . the embrace of Sharpton isn’t coming in a vacuum. It accelerates a trend of enabling anti-Semitism in the service of an all-consuming [anti-Trump] “resistance.”

Sharpton’s comeback was helped along massively by President Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. The latter is also running for the Democratic presidential nomination this year. Sharpton was marginalized by their predecessors and by his actions, but Obama and de Blasio arguably made him more powerful politically than he’s ever been. Sharpton’s return to respectability surprised fans and critics alike.

Sharpton was and remains unrepentant [for the acts of violence and murder he instigated]. “You only repent when you mean it, and I have done nothing wrong,” he insisted in 2001. In 2011, on the twentieth anniversary of the Crown Heights pogrom, he blamed “extremists in the Jewish community” for setting a dishonest racial narrative.

There is little doubt that if Hizballah had participated more intensively in Saturday’s attack, Israeli air defenses would have been pushed past their limits, and far more damage would have been done. Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack, trying to look at things from Tehran’s perspective, see this as an important sign of caution—but caution that shouldn’t be exaggerated:

Iran is well aware of the extent and capability of Israel’s air defenses. The scale of the strike was almost certainly designed to enable at least some of the attacking munitions to penetrate those defenses and cause some degree of damage. Their inability to do so was doubtless a disappointment to Tehran, but the Iranians can probably still console themselves that the attack was frightening for the Israeli people and alarming to their government. Iran probably hopes that it was unpleasant enough to give Israeli leaders pause the next time they consider an operation like the embassy strike.

Hizballah is Iran’s ace in the hole. With more than 150,000 rockets and missiles, the Lebanese militant group could overwhelm Israeli air defenses. . . . All of this reinforces the strategic assessment that Iran is not looking to escalate with Israel and is, in fact, working very hard to avoid escalation. . . . Still, Iran has crossed a Rubicon, although it may not recognize it. Iran had never struck Israel directly from its own territory before Saturday.

Byman and Pollack see here an important lesson for America:

What Saturday’s fireworks hopefully also illustrated is the danger of U.S. disengagement from the Middle East. . . . The latest round of violence shows why it is important for the United States to take the lead on pushing back on Iran and its proxies and bolstering U.S. allies.