Iran is taking increasingly heavy casualties in Syria. A statement from the Revolutionary Guards announced on Saturday that thirteen of the corps’ élite forces were “martyred” in the escalating battle near Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, which has become the front line in the five-year civil war. Another twenty-one Iranians were wounded. It is, for Iran, the largest single casualty toll since the country intervened to rescue the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Almost 100 years ago, two European men were tasked with drawing up a new border map for the Middle East. Their names were Sir Mark Sykes and Francois George-Picot and their map was arbitrary and largely ignored the intricate politics of the area. To this day, power brokers in the region still blame what became known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement for fostering unrest in places like Iraq and Syria.

Mustafa Badreddine, a cocky Lebanese bomb maker and one of the architects of Islamic terrorism, was buried Friday. He was Hezbollah’s top military commander, and, along with his brother-in-law Imad Mughniyah, who died in 2008, masterminded one of the longest-running sprees of violence—bombings, hostage-takings, assassinations, and airplane hijackings—in the Middle East.

For all the wrenching emotion that Hiroshima evoked during my trip with John Paul, I believe the horror that occurred there has never haunted the world enough, and there seems to be little that either a Pope or a President can do or say to change that.

Hena Khan, the author of best-selling children’s books, thought Muhammad Ali’s funeral on Friday was going to be a turning point for American Muslims. “Ali spent his life trying to show the real Islam—battling Islamophobia even as he battled Parkinson’s disease. That’s what was highlighted after he died,” she told me this weekend. “It was nice to feel proud—and to see people saying ‘Allahu Akbar’ interpreted in a positive way.”

“We gather regularly as gay Muslims,” he told me, as he fasted during Ramadan. “At the beginning, we ask why God has cursed us with this identity. We leave saying we are blessed with this identity. Why? When you’re born into this world as a Muslim, you are given a set of personal struggles. It’s your jihad. It’s not a holy war. It’s a personal struggle to get closer to God. And what better way to get closer to God than through loving people?”

The Obama Administration has long been divided over what to do about Syria. The crisis produced one of the biggest differences between President Obama and Hillary Clinton, his first Secretary of State. The policy chasm has only deepened during the five years of conflict, which has now reportedly claimed almost half a million lives.

In October of 1940, when she was still in curls and called Lilibet within the family, Princess Elizabeth made her first national radio broadcast. It was designed to calm the fears of Britain’s children, as London was being pounded by German bombers for fifty-seven consecutive nights. She was fourteen. “We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well,” she said, on the BBC’s “Children’s Hour.” Seventy-five years later, amid the increasingly chaotic aftermath of the Brexit vote, Quee...