Five years ago today, in Charlottesville, Virginia, a group of far-right fanatics chanting “Jews will not replace us” faced off against a group of counter-protestors chanting “Black lives matter.” The irony that the latter slogan has been adopted by a movement that believes that Jews—uniquely among all the world’s peoples—have no right to sovereignty in their native land was of course lost on those present. As for the first slogan, it did not indicate that the participants in the “Unite the Right” rally were worried that their place in society would be taken by Jews, but instead that Jews would nefariously “replace” white Americans with Hispanics and other non-white immigrants. In race-focused America, this particular combination of anti-Semitism and racism is often misunderstood. James Loeffler, drawing on evidence presented at the civil trial of some of the leaders of the Charlottesville march, adds some clarity:

The Charlottesville defendants were charged with civil conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence against the victims. Their defense strategy consisted of a repeated insistence that they were the true victims, the actual minority pursuing historical justice. They had come to town only to defend a Confederate statue, exercise their First Amendment rights, and confront the totalitarian Left. Any resulting violence was self-defense. The rise of non-white America, through mass migration, Democratic voting machinations, and Communist plots, genuinely imperiled their future.

Given this color-based binary, white Jews might seem irrelevant as a threat. Yet precisely because of their pseudo-whiteness, in supremacists’ telling, Jews constitute racial imposters, who have taken over American society. The proper transformation of American society would restore the demographic and political hierarchy and remove the “Zionist Occupied Government.” Barring that, though, violence was inevitable.

So, why did the Charlottesville marauders skip the town’s synagogue (the community was no less traumatized) to focus on pitched street fighting with Black Lives Matter and Antifa activists? The answer lies in the second dimension of replacement theory. Our enemy, said defendant, Michael Hill of the League of the South, is the “Jew-directed Communist horde” that threatens to destroy the white race.

Most likely, it was the Israeli Air Force that attacked eastern Syria Monday night, apparently destroying a convoy carrying Iranian weapons. Yoav Limor comments:

Israel reportedly carried out 32 attacks in Syria in 2022, and since early 2023 it has already struck 25 times in the country—at the very least. . . . The Iranian-Israeli clash stands out in the wake of the dramatic events in the region, chiefly among them is the effort to strike a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and later on with various other Muslim-Sunni states. Iran is trying to torpedo this process and has even publicly warned Saudi Arabia not to “gamble on a losing horse” because Israel’s demise is near. Riyadh is unlikely to heed that demand, for its own reasons.

Despite the thaw in relations between the kingdom and the Islamic Republic—including the exchange of ambassadors—the Saudis remain very suspicious of the Iranians. A strategic manifestation of that is that Riyadh is trying to forge a defense pact with the U.S.; a tactical manifestation took place this week when Saudi soccer players refused to play a match in Iran because of a bust of the former Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Suleimani, [a master terrorist whose militias have wreaked havoc throughout the Middle East, including within Saudi borders].

Of course, Israel is trying to bring Saudi Arabia into its orbit and to create a strong common front against Iran. The attack in Syria is ostensibly unrelated to the normalization process and is meant to prevent the terrorists on Israel’s northern border from laying their hands on sophisticated arms, but it nevertheless serves as a clear reminder for Riyadh that it must not scale back its fight against the constant danger posed by Iran.