Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur and quixotic challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, recently launched his campaign to run for the New York City mayoralty. To many Jewish voters, his vocal anti-circumcision stance, which he has sought to moderate somewhat since arriving on the national stage, is a source of concern. Jon Levine writes:

In a [March 2019] interview, . . . Yang elaborated, saying he originally planned to have his two boys circumcised but his wife talked him out of it. “From what I’ve seen, the evidence on it being a positive health choice for the infant is quite shaky,” Yang said. “It’s sort of pushed on parents in many situations.” Yang added that he supports anti-circumcision activists, known as “intactivists,” although he also believes in every parent’s right to choose.

Circumcision has existed in traditional Jewish culture for thousands of years. . . . “There are . . . anti-circumcision activists who are pretty aggressive and threatening. They call up [traditional circumcision providers] and threaten them,” one rabbi told the Post. . . . “I can tell you from a religious and multicultural standpoint, this can be taken in a very negative light,” added Mendy Mirocznik, a Staten Island rabbi. “I hope that comments like this do not cause the flame of anti-Semitism to be ignited even further.”

Yang said he supports a live and let live approach to the procedure. “I have attended multiple friends’ brises and felt privileged to do so. I believe in religious freedom. This is every parent’s personal decision and not a role of government,” he said in a December 2020 tweet.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.