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

On the same day the cease-fire went into effect along the Israel-Lebanon border, rebel forces launched an unexpected offensive, and within a few days captured much of Aleppo. This lightening advance originated in the northwestern part of the country, which has been relatively quiet over the past four years, since Bashar al-Assad effectively gave up on restoring control over the remaining rebel enclaves in the area. The fighting comes at an inopportune for the powers that Damascus has called on for help in the past: Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and Hizballah has been shattered.

But the situation is extremely complex. David Wurmser points to the dangers that lie ahead:

The desolation wrought on Hizballah by Israel, and the humiliation inflicted on Iran, has not only left the Iranian axis exposed to Israeli power and further withering. It has altered the strategic tectonics of the Middle East. The story is not just Iran anymore. The region is showing the first signs of tremendous geopolitical change. And the plates are beginning to move.

The removal of the religious-totalitarian tyranny of the Iranian regime remains the greatest strategic imperative in the region for the United States and its allies, foremost among whom stands Israel. . . . However, as Iran’s regime descends into the graveyard of history, it is important not to neglect the emergence of other, new threats. navigating the new reality taking shape.

The retreat of the Syrian Assad regime from Aleppo in the face of Turkish-backed, partly Islamist rebels made from remnants of Islamic State is an early skirmish in this new strategic reality. Aleppo is falling to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS—a descendant of Nusra Front led by Abu Mohammed al-Julani, himself a graduate of al-Qaeda’s system and cobbled together of IS elements. Behind this force is the power of nearby Turkey.