This week, the president released a video announcing his candidacy for the 2024 election that included four distinct images of Reverend Al Sharpton. John Podhoretz comments:

Sharpton’s key moment as a public figure came when he helped lead a pogrom in Brooklyn in 1991 after a tragic car accident in which a ḥasidic Jew struck and killed a black boy. During those three days of mob violence, Sharpton screamed into a microphone about “diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights” in the vanguard of a horde that shouted, “Kill the Jews!” A student named Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death.

Four years later, Sharpton called the Jewish owner of a Harlem building that housed a store called Freddy’s Fashion Mart a “white interloper” in the midst of a rent dispute. The mob he summoned then referred to Jews as “bloodsuckers” and shrieked about “burning the Jews.” The protests continued for two months, until an armed man stormed the premises with a gun and set Freddy’s on fire. Seven people were killed.

Yes, it’s a quarter-century later, and yes, Sharpton has not lit New York City on fire again or played a role in the deaths of eight people, as he had in the 1990s. [But] Sharpton has never accounted, nor been called to account, for his monstrous words and conduct.

And he never will be. After all, Joe Biden wants African Americans to vote for him in 2024 in record numbers, and to secure those votes, he has decided to run the gamut from Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson—who has spent her adulthood trying to serve as a constructive force in American public life—to Al Sharpton. And that’s an insult to Jackson, to African Americans, and to Americans altogether.

Robert Clark explains why the resumption of hostilities is both just and necessary:

These latest Israeli strikes come after weeks of consistent Palestinian provocation; they have repeatedly broken the terms of the cease-fire which they claimed they were so desperate for. There have been numerous [unsuccessful] bus bombings near Tel Aviv and Palestinian-instigated clashes in the West Bank. Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in captivity.

In fact, Hamas and their Palestinian supporters . . . have always known that they can sit back, parade dead Israeli hostages live on social media, and receive hundreds of their own convicted terrorists and murderers back in return. They believed they could get away with the October 7 pogrom.

One hopes Hamas’s leaders will get the message. Meanwhile, many inside and outside Israel seem to believe that, by resuming the fighting, Jerusalem has given up on rescuing the remaining hostages. But, writes Ron Ben-Yishai, this assertion misunderstands the goals of the present campaign. “Experience within the IDF and Israeli intelligence,” Ben-Yishai writes, “has shown that such pressure is the most effective way to push Hamas toward flexibility.” He outlines two other aims:

The second objective was to signal to Hamas that Israel is not only targeting its military wing—the terror army that was the focus of previous phases of the war up until the last cease-fire—but also its governance structure. This was demonstrated by the targeted elimination of five senior officials from Hamas’s political and civilian administration. . . . The strikes also served as a message to mediators, particularly Egypt, that Israel opposes Hamas remaining in any governing or military capacity in post-war Gaza.

The third objective was to create intense military pressure, coordinated with the U.S., on all remaining elements of the Shiite “axis of resistance,” including Yemen’s Houthis, Hamas, and Iran.