It looks to us as if President Biden’s senior Mideast adviser, Amos Hochstein, missed a scoop on his visit to Lebanon. Intent on solving a land dispute, he traveled to the border area in south Lebanon known as Hezbollah-land. We doubt he visited the town of Yaroun. Too bad. A little nosing around could have helped federal agents who increasingly suspect the terror attack against Salman Rushdie last year in America may have originated there. 

A Semafor scoop on Friday cites a district attorney in the rural town of Chautauqua, New York, Jason Schmidt, as saying that an investigation into the August 12, 2022, attack on the author has been widened to include “potential international involvement.” It’s an important scoop, because the man suspected of stabbing Mr. Rushdie numerous times, Hadi Matar, had long been described as a “lone wolf.”

Now, Mr. Schmidt says that as his office is finalizing a case against the 25-year-old New Jerseyan, the federal government is investigating possible connections to global terrorist groups. Why such a probe got no serious response to begin with is beyond us. After Mr. Rushdie published “The Satanic Verses,” after all, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s founding father, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued his infamous 1989 fatwa against the author.

The Iranian regime’s top terrorist arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, certainly hasn’t shied from assassination attempts on American soil. Its top cat’s paw, Hezbollah, has committed terrorist acts around the world, from Argentina to Europe. The theory that Mr. Matar was merely a disgruntled young man acting by himself should have been weighed against the possibility that the IRGC or Hezbollah helped him fulfill the ayatollah’s order.

As Semafor’s Jay Solomon notes, Matar was at the time of the attack carrying a fake driver’s license “that had the name of a senior Hezbollah military commander.” As he has also spent time in southern Lebanon, officials now are “trying to ascertain if he was trained or radicalized by the Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah,” Mr. Solomon writes.  And then there is the matter of Mr. Matar’s mother, Silvana Fardos. 

She told the New York Times that after a 2018 visit to his father’s Lebanese home town, her son returned as “a changed man — reclusive and increasingly focused on his role as a follower of Islam.” The Times quoted neighbors and acquaintances who said Mr. Matar was a “cliche of the loner,” a man “always by himself,” and a failed wannabe-boxer. The “lone wolf” profile, however, is incomplete.

The Lebanese town he visited, Yaroun, on Israel’s border, is controlled by Hezbollah. Was he there simply to visit his father, or was he also trained to attack a perceived heretic? The former narrative seems much more convenient for the Biden administration than that of an emissary of a regime Washington is desperately attempting to appease. This instinct for appeasement has become ever more clear.

Iranian agents attempt to assassinate American regime opponents like Masih Alinejad at her Brooklyn home. They threaten a former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, a former national security adviser, John Bolton, and a former Iran point-man, Brian Hook. These details are reported in the back pages, if at all, while Mr. Biden’s emissaries seek “understandings” that would enrich the regime and temporarily delay its nuclearization. 

Which brings us back to Mr. Hochstein. Two years ago he negotiated a change to the Israeli-Lebanese maritime border, which, following Hezbollah threats against Israel, transferred a lucrative Mediterranean gas field to Beirut’s control. Now Hezbollah’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, again threatens war, this time over a land dispute with Israel. “It is time for me to hear from the other side,” is how Mr. Hochstein explained his visit to Hezbollah-land.

What needs to be said here is that appeasing terrorists at Israel’s expense is a bad idea. Doing so with an organization that may have been involved in an assassination attack at home is worse. President Biden has displayed his instinct for appeasement over and over again, most disastrously in his determination to surrender Afghanistan. All his acts of appeasement, though, add up and will end up endangering the home front.