In The Washington Post, Dana Stangel-Plowe, the chief program officer of the North American Values Institute, raises concerns about the increasing politicization of the National Education Association under the leadership of its new president, Princess Moss, who has promoted teacher activism. “In saying so, the president of the nation’s largest teachers union advanced a specific vision for her profession: activism all the way down, no matter how much students struggle to keep up. Her union colleagues are citizens, too, free to have and act on their own political views. But Moss’s vision has no place in the classroom. A teacher’s job isn’t political organizing; it is to educate the nation’s youth.”

Politico’s Daniella Cheslow looks at the challenges facing the U.S. as the Iran-backed Houthis scale up their attacks in the Gulf. “The administration could join the fray after Yemeni forces, supported by Saudi Arabia, failed to repel the Houthis’ capture of the Red Sea port of Mokha and three islands key to controlling the waterway. Or the White House could leave the region to sort out the Houthis alone, and bear the pain of oil prices that spiraled up to $109 a barrel Monday. … Neither policy choice for the U.S. is terribly appealing, and one Arab diplomat in the region sensed inaction from the U.S., or ‘a kind of disregard.’”

Colossus magazine’s Jeremy Stern profiles Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “Unlike the Boomers and Gen X, he is the only trillion-dollar founder of his generation, and Millennials are cringe. He is Jewish and uncool, yet impervious to humiliation. He is, in one man, the personification of responsibility for alt-right populism; leftwing authoritarianism; the death of journalism; polarization; political propaganda; political censorship; the dangers of free speech; human rights violations; teenage depression; body dysmorphia; and male loneliness. He is an emperor for life. He is, in a word, an easy mark.”

The New York Times’ Farnaz Fassihi does a deep dive into the effort by Iranian hard-liners earlier this year to derail the ceasefire between Washington and Tehran. “The hard-liners succeeded in part because the only figure with the authority to resolve such disputes — the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei — has been a phantom since taking office in March. … Three Iranian officials said inquiries by the government and security forces traced the decision to strike the three commercial ships in July to the cleric Hossein Taeb, an influential spymaster who had opposed the peace deal with the United States from the outset.”

In The Wall Street Journal, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Orde Kittrie and Andres Munoz-Mosquera, a former NATO chief legal advisor, warn of an effort tied to an International Court of Justice case involving Gambia and Myanmar that would change the definition of genocide. “The Myanmar judgment, expected in October, would establish the lower threshold before the ICJ judgment on Israel. It would change the rule first in the less-watched case against Myanmar rather than seemingly invent it for Israel. … ICJ judges who vote to lower the genocide threshold will damage the court’s credibility, invite an avalanche of politicized cases, and undercut democracies’ ability to fight terrorists and autocrats.”

In Haaretz, Peter Lerner, director general of international relations at the Histadrut and a former IDF spokesperson, argues that Britain’s move to impose sanctions targeting Israeli settlements in the West Bank may prove to be politically counterproductive. “Britain has handed Netanyahu and his coalition an electoral gift. Extremists in the current government will present the sanctions as proof that the world is hostile to Israel and Israelis. … At the very moment Israelis must decide whether to replace the most extreme government in the country’s history, London has provided that government with an external enemy.”

Rachel Gorsky Bombach, chief policy officer at Democratic Majority for Israel, writes in the group’s Substack about her experience working in the intelligence community in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and what it tells her about today’s political moment. “The more I reflect on my career over nearly three decades, the more convinced I am that the central lesson of the post-9/11 era was that free societies cannot afford to ignore the ideologies that reject freedom itself. If ideas help create terrorists, then defeating terrorism requires more than military force. … The names of our adversaries will change, the technologies they use will evolve, and the battlefields will move. But free societies will always face movements that reject pluralism, glorify violence, and exploit our uncertainty about our own values. Defeating them requires more than military power. It requires moral confidence, intellectual clarity, and a willingness to defend liberal democracy without apology.”