During the Rosh Hashanah ritual of tashlikh, Jews traditionally gather by a river or stream and symbolically cast the previous year’s sins into the water. This year, a group of students and faculty at the University of Illinois used the ritual to condemn others: namely, supporters of Israel and the university itself, which withheld tenure from Steven Salaita over his public expressions of anti-Semitism. Among the collective sins being ostentatiously enumerated, Jonathan Marks writes, were “allowing violence against Palestinians to be committed in our name as Jews and as Americans” and “not speaking out against anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.” Marks adds:

To be sure, all this is now part of the playbook of Jewish Voice for Peace, a group for whom the sum and substance of Judaism is criticism of Israel and the United States insofar as it refuses to cast Israel off. But the loathsomeness of this particular activity, because it turns even the High Holy Days into an opportunity for activists to hit Israel with one hand and pat themselves on the back with the other, remains fresh.

With the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program damaged, and its regional influence diminished, the U.S. must now prevent it from recovering, and, if possible, weaken it further. Benjamin Baird argues that it can do both through economic means—if Congress does its part:

Legislation that codifies President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” policies into law, places sanctions on Iran’s energy sales, and designates the regime’s proxy armies as foreign terrorist organizations will go a long way toward containing Iran’s regime and encouraging its downfall. . . . Congress has already introduced much of the legislation needed to bring the ayatollah to his knees, and committee chairmen need only hold markup hearings to advance these bills and send them to the House and Senate floors.

They should start with the HR 2614—the Maximum Support Act. What the Iranian people truly need to overcome the regime is protection from the state security apparatus.

Next, Congress must get to work dismantling Iran’s proxy army in Iraq. By sanctioning and designating a list of 29 Iran-backed Iraqi militias through the Florida representative Greg Steube’s Iranian Terror Prevention Act, the U.S. can shut down . . . groups like the Badr Organization and Kataib Hizballah, which are part of the Iranian-sponsored armed groups responsible for killing hundreds of American service members.

Those same militias are almost certainly responsible for a series of drone attacks on oilfields in Iraq over the past few days