This week, Donald Trump made some disparaging remarks about Al Sharpton, leading the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination to rush to praise this notorious race-baiter who twice incited deadly violence against Orthodox Jews in New York City. Seth Mandel takes them to task for following the now-standard political principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my infallible hero”:

Sharpton is unworthy of such praise, so much so that the decision to back him reflexively is a massive moral demerit. Calling Sharpton a lifelong fighter for “justice,” [as did Elizabeth Warren], ignores his history of race-baiting and deadly anti-Semitic incitement.

Sharpton [remains] free of shame or apology. “You only repent when you mean it, and I have done nothing wrong,” he insisted years [after the murders he encouraged in the 1990s]. In 2011, he wrote a gobsmacking piece of revisionist history for the New York Daily News, claiming his remarks were being manipulated by “extremist Jews.” [Evidently], Sharpton doesn’t think he’s getting enough credit for his behavior.

[But] at Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, no one asked [Elizabeth] Warren about Sharpton’s record or the message she might be sending with such full-blown praise. Nor was Pete Buttigieg—who has struck up a very public alliance with Sharpton in an attempt to burnish his standing with black voters—prodded about the hypocrisy on display. Republicans, Buttigieg lectured, “are supporting naked racism in the White House, or at best silent about it.” . . . What would Buttigieg say about his own support for a public figure with a long history of bigotry? We don’t know, because no one thought to ask him at the debate. (I have repeatedly asked his campaign for comment, to no avail.)

We are routinely told that harsh criticism of minority members of Congress amounts to incitement to violence. What of Sharpton, who initially made his career out of explicit incitement to violence? [These days] this is no idle concern.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.