Wars have a way of clarifying a great many things, and of reshuffling existing partnerships in profound ways. This is what's happening with Israel's views of China and Russia, which are now undergoing a redefinition because of its current conflict with terrorist organization Hamas.

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My fellow Americans, as you know, the war between Israel and Hamas has resumed.

That's because Hamas broke the humanitarian ceasefire that my administration worked so hard to arrange.

Hamas fired more rockets at Israel, murdered four Israelis in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem, and refused to release, as they'd agreed, women and children they're holding hostage – American citizens among them.

This conflict could end tomorrow if Hamas commanders in Gaza would release those hostages, put down their weapons, and surrender.

Hamas leaders living in luxury in Qatar could order their Gaza commanders to end the fighting.

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The murderous Hamas attack on Israel can be described as a success only in a limited and horrific tactical sense: More Jews were murdered in a single day than at any time since the Holocaust. The surprise was achieved thanks to elaborate planning and lavish Iranian funding and to Israeli complacency on the part of the military and distracted political echelon. The price was immense and terrible.

But in a strategic sense, the attack was a failure and illustrates a truism of Middle Eastern history: The Palestinians, in this case Hamas, are their own worst enemies. Even their successes are, or will be, failures. Consider some of the unintended consequences of the Hamas attack. These range from local to regional to global effects.

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Henry Kissinger, the German-born geopolitical strategist and master bureaucratic infighter, has died at 100.

Born in Furth, Germany, in 1923, Kissinger and his Jewish family escaped Hitler's antisemitic Third Reich in 1938, fleeing to America. Only a few years later, he would return to Germany with the U.S. Army, where his fluency in his native language made him a valuable asset to U.S. intelligence.

A brilliant student, Kissinger earned three degrees from Harvard. His doctoral thesis was more than 300 pages and led to Harvard's "Kissinger rule," which limited the number of pages of future theses.

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Israel's growing legion of critics never tire of warning the Jewish state not to make the same mistakes in answering Hamas's savage attack that the United States made after 9/11—namely, the Bush administration's post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Those invasions, critics say, led the U.S. into a morass of "forever wars." So, too, will Israel's military effort in Gaza, they assert. As Israel contemplates whether to resume its mission of eradicating Hamas's leadership in Gaza after hostage diplomacy ends, the Biden administration's warnings not to make a similar mistake have grown more intense.

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In the seven weeks since Hamas invaded Israel and massacred over 1,200 people, growing international attention has been directed toward the terrorist organization's primary backers and paymasters, chief among them Iran and Qatar.

The two autocratic regimes, which have provided Hamas with various forms of support over the course of many years, both bear responsibility for the savagery that was inflicted by their Gaza-based client. Largely overlooked, however, has been the role of yet another nefarious dictatorship, one that also deserves to be held to account for the part that it played in the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.

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Chairman Wilson, Ranking Member Phillips, and distinguished members of the subcommittee, on behalf of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, thank you for the opportunity to testify. My testimony is built upon the premise that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is valuable to Israel and the United States but only if it functions properly. Today, with chaos in the West Bank mounting, the PA is in danger of collapse, due primarily to Iranian malign activity and corruption. These and other issues in the Palestinian arena all contribute to the challenge of curbing the deplorable Palestinian policy of rewarding terrorism through "pay-for-slay." At the conclusion of this testimony, I will offer a handful of concrete recommendations on how to tackle some of these challenges.

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I can't believe we're having this discussion in September 2023, just as the fall respiratory virus season commences and we're experiencing a new wave of COVID-19, but the politicizers of COVID won't let up. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) this week introduced legislation that "would prohibit any federal official, including the President, from issuing mask mandates applying to domestic air travel, public transit systems, or primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools."

There was also the ill-timed article by John Tierney in City Journal on August 27th claiming that "maskaholics are incorrigible" and everyone should reject masks because "we're rational."

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While the ongoing protests in Syria's southern province of al-Suwayda' against the Syrian government and its policies are noteworthy, the tribal uprising in the eastern countryside of the eastern province of Dayr al-Zur against the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) is arguably of greater significance, as it amounts to an actual armed revolt that has posed a serious challenge to the SDF's authority over the area- an authority that was only established because of the American-led campaign against the Islamic State. In turn the revolt raises very serious issues about U.S. policy in the region and the supposed ongoing American mission to ensure the "enduring defeat" of the Islamic State.

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A new report about "anti-Muslim hostility" commissioned by the German government has faced a barrage of criticism after it was revealed that Islamist groups linked to Iran and Turkey were involved in producing the document. Unsurprisingly, the long-awaited report paints a highly distorted picture of Muslim discrimination in Germany: It brands virtually all criticism of Islam or Islamism as "anti-Muslim hostility" and reprimands German lawmakers and even reformist Muslims who oppose the spread of Islamism in Germany.

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