During the recent staff shake-up at the Defense Department, the new acting secretary Christopher Miller appointed Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army officer, as his senior adviser. Melissa Braunstein comments:

Macgregor has made fairly extensive comments about “the Israel lobby,” which he claims has bought off high-level American officials, including the former national security adviser John Bolton and the secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

Like Representative Ilhan Omar, Macgregor criticized the “enormous influence” Israel supporters have on Congress and attacked the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Macgregor, who was once in line to be ambassador to Germany, lost out after [news] outlets reported on his saying that Germany’s efforts to grapple with its role in the Holocaust [reflected] a “sick mentality,” among other jaw-dropping comments.

But just as most elected Democrats—with a few notable exceptions—were loath to condemn Omar’s comments, most elected Republicans have not yet voiced displeasure over Macgregor’s appointment. And there are consequences to such spinelessness, notes Braunstein:

Public officials’ unwillingness to take deterrent action increases the likelihood that overt anti-Semitism would recur in government. It’s happening outside government too, by the way, and the FBI’s recently-released 2019 hate-crime statistics bear that out: Jews were targeted in 63 percent of religiously-oriented hate crimes last year, a 14-percent jump over 2018, even though Jews represent less than 2 percent of the population. This would certainly be a good time for Republican officials to pipe up about Macgregor. However, they remain notably quiet.

The proper conduct of foreign policy requires that government officials understand the world as it is, not as they believe it to be. That requires studying and acknowledging facts rather than allowing one’s vision to be clouded by conspiracy theories [about Jewish influence]. As such, Omar shouldn’t be on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Macgregor shouldn’t be advising the acting secretary of defense. Anti-Semitism harms Jews, to be sure, but it also disfigures the judgment of those it infects.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.