There are always glimmers in Shadi Hamid's writings of a decent thinker, both intellectually and morally. His new book looks promising in that regard. And then you get this utter folly and inanity. It took Shadi a long, long time to find his voice on Iran, and when he did, it wasn't about Iran. It was only about Israel. But that's not the bad part. The bad part is this odd notion that it's hypocritical for Israelis to hope that Iranians free themselves of a regime that tyrannizes them - a regime that has spent vast treasure and lives on tyrannizing, you know, us too. I watched Iranian missiles fly in the sky over my head. My children slept in a bomb shelter for 12 nights, and have had to think about war and danger since October 7. I watched Iran fund the demolition of Lebanon's state capacity via Hezbollah, enable Assad's massacre 600,000 of his own people (he would have fallen early in the civil war but for Iran), and learned over the past two years just how much Iran was involved in planning and funding both Hamas generally and October 7 specifically. Gaza would not now be demolished without Iran's machinations - a point that remains true regardless of how evil you believe the Israelis to be. I support Iranians' freedom from tyrants who would murder my children too, and I support Palestinian freedom from the grip of ideologies that will never do anything but lock in another round of the same endless war. And that's deemed hypocrisy by the brahmins of the American left. While Shadi, his voice now rediscovered, is no hypocrite at all for finally siding with Iranian freedom -- sorry, with kinda almost agreeing that in principle it's not entirely wrong to side with Iranian freedom as long as we make it about Israel. What a broken mental world they live in.