Yesterday, the rapper Kanye West appeared on Chris Cuomo’s television program to discuss his series of anti-Semitic outbursts over the past week; he used the opportunity to make clear his conviction that he is a victim of “the Jewish underground media mafia,” and said much else in that vein. Since West has repeatedly voiced his support for Donald Trump—who praised West in an interview yesterday—certain segments of the American right rushed to defend him amid the latest controversy. Stephen Daisley comments:

David Horowitz, a conservative writer, says that: “Jews in Hollywood and Big Tech and in the donor base of the Democrat party and in the media” are out to “destroy” Kanye. “Realizing that his words would be twisted by the fascist left, Kanye added that blacks are Jews,” he added.

Progressives can’t claim the moral high ground. . . . Vice frets that [West] “has recently displayed an intense negative fixation on Jews.” There is nothing recent about it. Back in 2013, when he was a cookie-cutter celebrity Democrat, Kanye told a U.S. radio show Barack Obama was struggling to make good on his promises “because he ain’t got those connections. Black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people.”

A Think Progress piece described the [2013] comments as “unfortunate and frustrating” but decided “it’s worth parsing what West actually said, rather than dismissing him as a crude anti-Semite” because “his remarks do capture a number of important anxieties.”

What conclusions can we draw from all this? One is that the new right, the very-online millennial right that calls itself conservative but is really just anti-liberal, is not doing enough to patrol its own boundaries.

Another conclusion is that Kanye’s anti-Semitic statements only became a problem for progressives when he stopped being one. This volte-face is another reminder of Jewish invisibility in the politics of anti-racism, a problem that afflicts progressives but many others too. Whether Kanye is a hate-filled anti-Semite or a desperately disturbed man—or whether the truth lies somewhere in between—he is not the only one who needs to reflect. He’s been saying these things for years and his fans, old and new, have told him it was okay.

In the past few days, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the al-Qaeda offshoot that led the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, has consolidated its rule in the core parts of Syria. Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has made a series of public statements, sat for a CNN interview, and discarded his nomme de guerre for his birth name, Ahmad al-Shara—trying to present an image of moderation. But to what extent is this simply a ruse? And what sort of relationship does he envision with Israel?

In an interview with John Haltiwanger, Aaron Zelin gives an overview of Shara’s career, explains why HTS and Islamic State are deeply hostile to each other, and tries to answer these questions:

As we know, Hamas has had a base in Damascus going back years. The question is: would HTS provide an office for Hamas there, especially as it’s now been beaten up in Gaza and been discredited in many ways, with rumors about its office leaving Doha? That’s one of the bigger questions, especially since, pre-October 7, 2023, HTS would support any Hamas rocket attacks across the border. And then HTS cheered on the October 7 attacks and eulogized [the Hamas leaders] Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar when they were killed. They’re very pro-Palestinian.

Nonetheless, Zelin believes HTS’s split with al-Qaeda is substantive, even if “we need to be cognizant that they also aren’t these liberal democrats.”

If so, how should Western powers consider their relations with the new Syrian government? Kyle Orton, who likewise thinks the changes to HTS are “not solely a public-relations gambit,” considers whether the UK should take HTS off its list of terrorist groups:

The better approach for now is probably to keep HTS on the proscribed list and engage the group covertly through the intelligence services. That way, the UK can reach a clearer picture of what is being dealt with and test how amenable the group is to following through on promises relating to security and human rights. Israel is known to be following this course, and so, it seems, is the U.S. In this scenario, HTS would receive the political benefit of overt contact as the endpoint of engagement, not the start.