On Monday, the organization that runs the now-annual anti-Trump Women’s March announced that, after a variety of complaints, it had severed its ties with three of its four former leaders: Bob Bland, Tamika Mallory, and Linda Sarsour. Presumably among those complaints were Mallory’s close association with Louis Farrakhan and Sarsour’s record of venomous hatred of the Jewish state. Siraj Hashmi comments on what followed:

Monday’s announcement should have been a turning point for a movement that has been tainted by the recurring strain of anti-Semitism. Instead, in a move both remarkable and disheartening, the Women’s March has managed to find yet another anti-Semitic Muslim woman to serve on its board.

Zahra Billoo [is] an attorney and the executive director of the San Francisco chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Billoo’s hateful and anti-Semitic tweets, particularly in relation to Israel, were brought back into focus when she was promoted to the Women’s March board. In a June 2012 tweet, [for instance], Billoo wrote, “Apartheid Israel kills children as a hobby.” . . . Billoo also made direct comparisons between Israel and the terrorist Islamic State (IS), posting on Twitter, “Who has killed, tortured, and imprisoned more people: apartheid Israel or IS?”

In the intervening days, the organization announced that it was removing Billoo from her position; but, to Hashmi, the incident points to a larger problem, which he sees as well in the progressive left’s elevation of Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison:

Unfortunately, Billoo’s racist tweets do not stand alone. They seem to reflect the views of most prominent Muslims in America on the left. . . . [I]t’s disheartening, not least because not all Muslims are anti-Semitic. The left’s apparent alliance with American Muslims who hate Israel and are openly anti-Semitic is doing a great disservice to all Americans, including Americans who are Muslim like me, and is damaging to the fabric of our country.

In September, Cypriot police narrowly foiled a plot by an Iranian agent to murder five Jewish businessman. This was but one of roughly a dozen similar operations that Tehran has conducted in Europe since 2015—on both Israeli or Jewish and American targets—which have left three dead. Matthew Karnitschnig traces the use of assassination as a strategic tool to the very beginning of the Islamic Republic, and explains its appeal:

In the West, assassination remains a last resort (think Osama bin Laden); in authoritarian states, it’s the first (who can forget the 2017 assassination by nerve agent of Kim Jong-nam, the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur?). For rogue states, even if the murder plots are thwarted, the regimes still win by instilling fear in their enemies’ hearts and minds. That helps explain the recent frequency. Over the course of a few months last year, Iran undertook a flurry of attacks from Latin America to Africa.

Whether such operations succeed or not, the countries behind them can be sure of one thing: they won’t be made to pay for trying. Over the years, the Russian and Iranian regimes have eliminated countless dissidents, traitors, and assorted other enemies (real and perceived) on the streets of Paris, Berlin, and even Washington, often in broad daylight. Others have been quietly abducted and sent home, where they faced sham trials and were then hanged for treason.

While there’s no shortage of criticism in the West in the wake of these crimes, there are rarely real consequences. That’s especially true in Europe, where leaders have looked the other way in the face of a variety of abuses in the hopes of reviving a deal to rein in Tehran’s nuclear-weapons program and renewing business ties.