SYRIAN REBEL Kamal Labwani wants an alliance with Israel.

Once, Israel was blamed for everything. But Israel is not our enemy anymore. We see how Israel opened its doors to our injured. We see how Syrian children are treated in Assad’s prisons and how they are treated in Israeli hospitals. Israel gave food while Assad starved his own people. Syria has only one enemy now: the Assad regime backed by Iran and Hezbollah. I meet with Syrian dissidents and military leaders daily and have seen how, after decades of brainwashing, their mentality has begun to change.

Guys like him rarely acquire hard power in the Middle East, and they certainly stand no chance in Syria now, but his point of view really is beginning to spread. It’s got to be hard to keep up the anti-Zionist hate in the middle of a scorched-earth war between Assad and Al Qaeda.

HOW THE WEST gets Iran wrong.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ON BOKO HARAM: “The death toll is usually claimed to be in the thousands, but no one has an accurate tally, in part because the Nigerian government misreports incidents and in part because in its hapless pursuit of Boko Haram, the government has killed so many people itself, many if not most of them civilians. The Nigerian armed forces claim that they kill only terrorists, yet the terrorists’ ravages become more frequent and more vicious with every such claim. So vast and mysterious is the carnage, many otherwise sane Nigerians have come to believe Boko Haram possesses supernatural powers. Its name has taken on an incantatory power. It has become a kind of national synonym for fear.”

LEE SMITH on George Clooney’s future in-laws in the Druze mountains of Lebanon.

Abdul-Latif’s husband, the non-Druze journalist Hussain Abdul-Hussain, also has some advice for Clooney. “The upside” of marrying a Druze, jokes Abdul-Hussain, “is that if he is worried about having to learn a new religion, he won’t. Most of the Druze themselves know nothing about their faith, so he doesn’t have to fear awkward moments at holiday celebrations like Passover or Christmas, because there aren’t any holidays.”

ROGER L. SIMON: Will the State Department’s refusal to declare Boko Haram a terrorist organization harm Hillary Clinton?

It certainly isn’t going to help.

THE CHINESE AND VIETNAMESE NAVIES got into a bit of an altercation yesterday, and Walter Russell Mead says the battle for the South China Sea is officially on.

It is. And it won’t be resolved any time soon as Robert Kaplan makes clear in his worthwhile new book, Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific.

HMM: Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu says Turkey has “substantially” overcome its problems with Israel.

PROBABLY NOT A BAD IDEA: NATO troops in Eastern Europe could be permanent after Crimea crisis.

BOKO HARAM commits another massacre in Nigeria.

The latest attack, on Monday, followed a classic Boko Haram pattern: Dozens of militants wearing fatigues and wielding AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers descended on the town of Gamboru Ngala, chanting “Allahu akbar,” firing indiscriminately and torching houses. When it was over, at least 336 people had been killed and hundreds of houses and cars had been set on fire.

Can we please not call people who do this sort of thing “militants?” There’s nothing necessarily wrong with being a militant. It depends on the context. You could say the fighters of the French Resistance were militants. They were not, however, terrorists. They did not just randomly shoot people.

If you don’t want to call Boko Haram terrorists for some nonsensical reason, how about “mass-murderers” and “slave-raiders?”

SYRIAN REBELS evacuate the capital of the revolution.

ELLIOT ABRAMS: Will the army save Egypt’s economy? The Egyptian military runs much of the economy like a plantation, and that’s not going to change, so the answer is no.

THE SULTAN OF BRUNEI imposes harsh Islamic criminal code.

The law applies to those of all religions in the sultanate, where Muslim Malays constitute a 70% majority of the country’s 400,000 citizens, the news agency reported. Non-Muslim Chinese account for about 15% of Brunei’s population.

A second phase of the law, which will come into force later this year, provides for severing of limbs and flogging for property crimes. A third phase set for late 2015 will allow the justice system to sentence offenders to death by stoning for crimes including adultery and gay sex.

Travel companies are responding by boycotting Brunei-owned hotels, and the Bererly Hills city council voted unanimously to divest. Who wants to be the first to impose sanctions?

THIS IS SERIOUSLY GETTING UGLY: Boko Haram commits another mass abduction of girls in Nigeria.

YUPPIE, GET YOUR GUN: Harking back to the partisans of World War II, young Ukrainians train for irregular combat against the Russians.

RECOMMENDED READING: My old friend and award-winning author Scott William Carter has published ten books, and he really outdid himself with his neo-noir novel Ghost Detective. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t like it. Somebody in Hollywood should snap up the film option.

It’s on sale this week for just 2.99.

WELCOME TO JIHAD CITY, SYRIA: The Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (Syria) is so supremely awful that even Al Qaeda condemns it.

AFTER A FIFTY YEAR HIATUS, Malaria returns to Venezuela.

MY ROAD TRIP BOOK Where the West Ends—which takes place in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, from Bosnia and Kosovo to Ukraine and Georgia—is on sale for just 2.99.

VLADIMIR PUTIN signs a law that bans swearing in Russian arts and media. (Igniting a civil war next door in a fit on pique is okay, though.)