Last week, the left-wing activists Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory arrived in Louisville, Kentucky, to organize and lead a protest march over the killing by police of Breonna Taylor this spring. The demonstration, which Christine Rosen describes as “cult-like,” was also intended to raise funds, and garner publicity, for their new organization. Rosen wonders what good the presence of these two notorious anti-Semites does for the people of Louisville, who have been organizing continuous protests for months without outside help:

Sarsour, an unapologetic bigot, shares the Black Lives Matter (BLM) cause only insofar as she can use it to promote her own anti-Israel and anti-Semitic agenda. Sarsour’s and Mallory’s anti-Semitism (and continued support of other anti-Semites such as Louis Farrakhan) prompted many local chapters of the Women’s March they are credited with helping found to break away from the national organization. Mallory and Sarsour have both been removed from the Women’s March board.

In another recent speech, Sarsour claimed, falsely, that an Anti-Defamation League-sponsored program in Israel for law enforcement led to American police officers harming black Americans. . . . The message seems to be spreading to other BLM supporters. During a recent BLM protest in Washington, D.C., marchers chanted “Israel, we know you, you murder children too.”

Sarsour’s eagerness to attach her noxious views about Israel and Jews to the BLM moment has brought her increased visibility. Her and Mallory’s arrests this week no doubt brought in a lot of earned media and donations for their organization. But BLM leaders and the many corporations and individuals who have been donating money to the cause might want to consider whether anti-Semites like Sarsour are really the allies they want to embrace.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.