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The season of triangulation is upon us. First, presidential aspirant Rahm Emanuel tried to establish a compromise position on Israel to stave off the Democratic Party’s anti-Zionist bull rush. Now that the bull rush is on, Hakeem Jeffries—who will be speaker of the House if Democrats win enough seats in November—is trying a similar tactic. Yesterday, more than 100 House Democrats voted to end aid to Israel. The battle appears lost—unsurprising, since the battle was almost entirely one-sided. So now Jeffries is negotiating the terms of his surrender, and those terms are similar to the ones Emanuel tried to sell to the same party. Via Jewish Insider, Jeffries outlined some familiar principles.

Let’s see: Gulf War III is back in full swing, Mitch McConnell has become Schrodinger’s senator, but the biggest stories in America right now are a buffalo trying out to be an NFL placekicker, and Taco Bell deciding that a life-imitating-art menu is the best life after all. Too bad about the Whirled Cup soccer thing, but losing to . . . Belgium? Maybe we can appeal to the Whirled Court. Oh, wait. . .

Abe Greenwald’s July 15 newsletter discussed a bizarre scene in which Rep. Ro Khanna, an anti-Israel demagogue testing a run for president, was repeatedly badgered by left-wing podcasters to say that Palestinians have a right to kill Israelis, which they did on October 7. The Dropsite podcasters were precisely the sort of company Khanna has been keeping lately—anti-Zionists obsessed with violence. As Abe wrote: “Khanna came face to face with the lunacy of the mob that he’s been trying to please with tweets, speeches, stunts. And he let [Jeremy] Scahill down by refusing to speak the monstrous words that would have admitted him into the esteemed ranks of the radicals.

Left-wing violence has become almost a daily fact of our political life. And I am not talking about the extreme left, I am talking about the left that represents the center of gravity in the Democratic Party. Congressman Adam Smith illustrates the point in the tweet embedded below. Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, is a former supporter of Israel who voted with 102 Democratic colleagues to cut off military aid to that country. Smith says he cast his vote to send a message to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government, with which he is “frustrated.” But this is perhaps the more salient point: I am deeply concerned

Pakistan's Supreme Court quashed the sentences of three individuals convicted of murdering a Christian man and his pregnant wife — Shahzad Masih (26) and Shama Bibi (24). The couple was burned to death after being thrown into a brick kiln. The incident occurred on Nov. 4, 2014, in Punjab's Kasur District. Masih and Bibi, who worked as laborers at a local brick factory, were falsely accused of desecrating pages of the Quran. The brick kiln owner reportedly prevented the couple from fleeing due to a financial dispute. A local Islamic prayer leader used a mosque loudspeaker to incite a crowd against them. A mob of over 1,000 people then converged

A former Marine who attracted attention to his Florida write-in congressional campaign with an explicit assassination threat against Donald Trump is now in handcuffs. The U.S. Department of Justice announced on July 16 the arrest and charging of Jacksonville’s William L. Upham. It is illegal to make an explicit threat against the life of the president of the United States, and that is just what Upham did. Upham already appeared in federal court and is still being detained. He could be looking at five years in federal prison if the feds secure a conviction. Given the three nearly successful attempts on Trump's life already, the feds cannot afford to dismiss

Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a powerful public declaration against domestic political terrorism in front of an international audience Thursday in Washington, D.C. His concept of terrorism got at the heart of what fuels it: radical progressive leftism. As he put it, radical leftism is "a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice." Moreover, he put his finger on where this ideology comes from, what fuels it, and what protects it: universities, media and the courts. Domestic radicalism has many roots and branches, but those three institutions make up the primary “radicalism triangle” that is self-reinforcing. Their common output is language and ideology. Radical ideology

The New York Post has published an unsparing editorial calling out Rep. Ro Khanna for the patently manufactured incident he conducted in order to defame Israel: Rep. Ro Khanna’s latest showboating stunt is too much even for other Democratic electeds — not only a transparent ploy to get past his all-in bet on the Graham Platner campaign, but a transparently pathetic bid to play victim of those darn Israelis. Just days after his scorched-earth defense of the Maine Senate candidate failed to stop the implosion, Khanna (D-Calif.) rushed off to the Middle East to change his storyline. He headed to the West Bank, intentionally directing his entourage into a restricted zone, then pretended

This past Memorial Day, more than 1,000 teens swarmed the blocks around Lake Michigan in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. A resident described the scene: “Hundreds of people were walking and running down our street, jumping on top of cars, twerking, smoking blunts.” One group twerked on the top of a city bus. At about 9 pm, the Chicago Police Department closed Lake Shore Drive. As sirens wailed, the Hyde Park resident armed himself with bear spray to retrieve something from his car. An hour later, a gunman shot three teens a block from the resident’s home. The suspect remains at large, though police made 13 arrests for illegal gun possession,

I do not often write about movies. In fact, I have not written an essay about one in more than thirty years. (Snip) That film, of course, is Citizen Kane, returning this week for a commemorative limited engagement in theaters across the fruited plain. Does Citizen Kane live up to the hype? Of course not—not eighty-five years later, at least. But that is precisely the point. The picture was so different, so audacious, so avant-garde in 1941 that calling it “groundbreaking” understates the case. And because so much of filmmaking since has descended from it—or from films that themselves descended from it—it is easy now to miss the treasure

I do not often write about movies. In fact, I have not written an essay about one in more than thirty years. (Snip) That film, of course, is Citizen Kane, returning this week for a commemorative limited engagement in theaters across the fruited plain. Does Citizen Kane live up to the hype? Of course not—not eighty-five years later, at least. But that is precisely the point. The picture was so different, so audacious, so avant-garde in 1941 that calling it “groundbreaking” understates the case. And because so much of filmmaking since has descended from it—or from films that themselves descended from it—it is easy now to miss the treasure

The week began with Independence Day, and it featured a lot of World Cup action. If you can call anything that happens in soccer action. Europe sweltered under a non-air conditioned heat wave, and the Iran conflict resumed. But what motivated meme-makers more than anything else was the spectacular implosion of the Graham Platner Senate campaign. I suppose because it was so unexpected: who would have imagined that the campaign of a Nazi-tattooed Communist would come to grief?