RUTHFULLY YOURS

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria—Boko Haram insurgents launched coordinated assaults on a Nigerian military base and villages close to this regional capital on Monday, a brazen operation that left at least 20 people dead just weeks after the government confirmed it was in talks with a breakaway faction of the extremist group.

The dawn raids—which saw insurgents deploy suicide bombers, mortars and truck-mounted machine guns—sparked a protracted battle with Nigerian soldiers at a military base on the edge of Maiduguri, an army spokesman said. Local officials, still tallying the dead and injured Monday afternoon, said the jihadists were attempting to infiltrate the city.

The attack left at least 20 people dead and 63 injured, according to Kashim Shettima, the governor of surrounding Borno State. “We will continue to intensify our efforts to safeguard lives and properties,” Mr. Shettima said. “Terrorists bask in the oxygen of publicity, they are aiming at soft targets and senselessly opening fire on innocent citizens, but we will stop them.”

The brazen operation came after Nigeria’s government revealed it was in peace talks with a Boko Haram breakaway faction allied with the Islamic State terror group and led by a mysterious young commander called Abu Musab al-Barnawi. CONTINUE AT SITE

More evidence is emerging about last month’s chemical attack in Salisbury, England. A British government lab has determined that only a state actor could have produced the military-grade nerve agent used in the attempted assassination of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

This is a crucial thread tying Russia to the attack, not that you’d know it from the media and political chatter. Russia’s defenders have seized on the statement by Gary Aitkenhead, head of the Porton Down military lab, that “we have not identified the precise source” of the chemical. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn mocked Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson for saying last month that the lab had confirmed the chemical was Russian. Diane Abbott, one of Mr. Corbyn’s deputies in Parliament, claimed Labour’s “more thoughtful approach” to Salisbury had been vindicated.

That spin is at best disingenuous. Although the molecules don’t have “Made in Russia” stamps on them, Porton Down has confirmed the chemical is Novichok, which is known to be produced in Russia and nowhere else. The lab says it required “extremely sophisticated methods to create, something only in the capabilities of a state actor,” as Mr. Aitkenhead told Sky News. He was clear that his conclusion is only one piece of evidence to be evaluated.

This finding bolsters Prime Minister Theresa May’s case that Vladimir Putin’s government is responsible for the first use of a chemical weapon on European soil since World War II. Other evidence includes intelligence that Russia has experimented with chemical agents for assassinations and previously targeted former Russian agents—including Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with radioactive polonium in London in 2006.

Mr. Putin would love nothing better than for Western politicians to fall into the rabbit hole of playing molecular “CSI” while ignoring other evidence of Russian culpability. That’s one reason the Kremlin has staged such histrionics at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the Hague, calling for a special session this week to discuss Salisbury and demanding a joint Russian-British investigation to distract from the group’s work on the case.

Voters should be asking why politicians such as Mr. Corbyn are so eager to apologize for Mr. Putin. The war of words over the Porton Down analysis comes at an especially sensitive time, since Britain is debating additional responses to the attack.

Financial sanctions belong at the top of the list. A parliamentary committee is looking at ways to limit Russian financial activity in Britain, perhaps blocking Russian government bond sales in London. Home Secretary Amber Rudd has said her office may re-evaluate some of the hundreds of visas issued to Russians under a program that allows anyone to move to Britain—with a path to eventual citizenship—in return for a £2 million investment in risk-free U.K. government bonds.

Any financial sanctions will be politically difficult to pass given the profits British banks, law firms, investment advisories and others earn serving wealthy Russians. And to truly bite, sanctions against individuals linked to Mr. Putin’s government would require international coordination. That coordination already is difficult in a European Union where pro-Kremlin states such as Greece and Hungary enjoy vetoes on EU foreign policy. False confusion about facts such as the Porton Down conclusions gives political cover to Mr. Putin’s enablers.

Mrs. May has won important diplomatic victories by patiently presenting evidence to allies and, as far as possible, to the public. One result was a show of solidarity from French, German and U.S. leaders. Another was last month’s mass expulsion of Russian spies from Western countries. The best way to keep up the pressure on Mr. Putin is to continue treating the Salisbury attack as the strategic threat it was, rather than as a plot in a “Law & Order” episode.

Britain’s next prime minister might well be an anti-Semite. No one can say for certain whether Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism is a sincerely held prejudice or merely a matter of electoral calculation: there are now more than ten times as many Muslims in Britain as Jews, and it therefore makes electoral sense to appeal more to Muslims than to Jews. But either way, his failure to condemn anti-Semitism in his own party, his penchant for consorting in friendly fashion with extremist anti-Zionists of genocidal instincts, and his defense of a mural depicting lupine Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of naked minorities are cause for anxiety among British Jews unknown since the rise—and thankfully swift fall—of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British fascists in the 1930s.

In all the commentary about Corbyn’s anti-Semitism, real or feigned, no one seems to have noticed that anti-Semitism is perfectly logical for someone of Corbyn’s cast of mind. It has often been said that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools; it would be more accurate to say that socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals (at least in modern conditions). Anti-Semitism and socialism proceed along the same lines, using the same kind of presuppositions and evidence.

A few years ago, a survey appeared breaking down household wealth in Britain by religious affiliation, and Jews came first. For someone as suspicious of and hostile to wealth and the wealthy as Corbyn, whose fundamental economic idea is that money is the product of exploitation, and that equality of outcome is desirable, attainable, and just, it is only natural to suppose that both wealthy individuals and groups must have been up to no good, grabbing by illicit means a larger slice of the economic cake than is theirs, according to his own conception of justice. It is therefore perfectly reasonable, or at least in keeping, for him to be anti-Semitic: he hates none more than the independently successful.