Last month, someone knocked down a statue of a demonic figure at the Iowa state capital, which had been installed by an organization called the Satanic Temple. This group, which also runs after-school activities at public schools, does not represent worshippers of Lucifer, but atheists who object, inter alia, to the presence of religious symbols and activities in public spaces. Timothy Carney examines its motivations:

Some people believe that we have too many civil liberties in this country. Specifically, they believe that the exercise of religion deserves less accommodation than any other sort of activity.

That’s the motive of the pretend satanists. They want to curtail the exercise of religion. . . . Most atheist liberals who try to gain accommodation of their non-religion are doing so not because they really want the accommodation, but because they are protesting the accommodation of others, whom they dislike.

You may recall last decade that a handful of . . . atheists formed a parody religion called “pastafarianism” that pretended to worship a spaghetti god and that claimed colanders as their religious head garb. When the atheist Austrian politician and commentator Niko Alm fought for the right to wear a cheap plastic spaghetti strainer on his head in his driver’s license photo, he was, in fact, protesting against the right of Muslim women to wear headscarves and Jewish men to wear yarmulkes.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.