Last week, the Washington Post published an in-depth article about a woman who appeared at a 2018 Halloween party—hosted by a Post columnist—wearing blackface. The subject of the article, who is not a public figure of any kind, was swiftly fired from her job. The same week, the comedian Chelsea Handler posted a video of a Louis Farrakhan speech on Instagram, subsequently shared by numerous other celebrities. Handler responded to the ensuing criticism by insisting that Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism might not be nice, but, in effect, it shouldn’t be held against him. While she eventually took down the video, she—unlike the partygoer—hasn’t been “cancelled.”

This double standard, whereby even a whiff of prejudice against some groups can lead to vicious censoriousness, whereas prejudice against Jews is given a pass, is what concerns Jonathan Marks when considering recent events at Florida State University, where the student-senate president Ahmad Daraldik appears to have created a website dedicated to the spurious and perverse claim that Israel harvests organs from Palestinians:

[A] student senate that quite recently, in an overwhelming vote, removed its [former] president over remarks he’d made in an online group chat—he’d stressed the incompatibility between his Catholicism [on the one hand] and queer and transgender politics on the other—voted to keep Daraldik in office. Perhaps they were motivated to do so by a letter, signed by numerous purportedly progressive organizations, that mentions Daraldik’s First Amendment rights, doesn’t mention the website, and pretends that Daraldik is the victim of a “smear campaign” to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel.

As a rule, I am not in favor of taking the extraordinary measure of removing someone from office over troubling remarks, even in student governments. Nor am I in favor of picking on young people who may well know better when they’re a little older. What we should object to and be concerned about is this: even in a time of heightened scrutiny of people’s utterances and actions, even in a time when admissions offers are being rescinded for racist social-media posts, anti-Semitism wins plaudits.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, the “woke” are fast asleep.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”