In January, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)—which was founded in 1910 for the explicit purpose of stopping “the defamation of the Jewish people,” among other things—hired a new outreach director, community organizer Tema Smith. In the aftermath of a series of attacks on religious Jews in New York, David Harsanyi documents, Smith declared that “the Jewish community’s reactions to anti-Semitism coming from Black people [are] inherently tied to (implicitly racist) fears of Black violence.” She also urged Jews to listen to Palestinians explain why they often resort to terrorism. These and other statements, Harsanyi argues, are part of what makes Smith “the perfect hire for the new ADL.”

The ADL, self-anointed arbiter of anti-Semitism, is useful in providing lazy journalists with quotes confirming preexisting notions about anti-Semitism being largely a right-wing phenomenon. There is the [occasional] condemnation of some leftist Jew baiting, but . . . in many ways, the ADL is now complicit in normalizing Jew hatred, by shielding from condemnation the progressive politicians who peddle it.

[T]he new ADL [is] a Democratic partisan outfit run by the former Barack Obama appointee Jonathan Greenblatt, who’s spent years degrading the group’s mission of fighting anti-Semitism and building its social-justice agenda. . . . Hiring Smith is just the latest example of this problem

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.”