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.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].