The recent murder of Alberto Nisman, who was investigating the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, has brought renewed attention to Iran’s activities in South America. As Toby Dershowitz writes, those activities are hardly a matter of the past alone:

On January 8, an explosive device was found adjacent to the new embassy of Israel [in Montevideo, Uruguay]. And, some six weeks earlier, a suspicious suitcase was found near the former Israeli embassy there. The Uruguayan foreign ministry reportedly summoned Tehran’s ambassador, asking him why an Iranian diplomat, reported to be Ahmed Sabatgold, was seen parked in the vicinity of the suspicious suitcase. . . .

Sabatgold reportedly was a well-known Holocaust denier and often spoke out against Jews, according to Uruguayan media reports. They say Sabatgold had been instructing a group of Muslim converts who operated within the framework of the radical Unidad Popular party. . . .

Clearly, Nisman’s investigation was far from over. It continued to shed light on Iran’s long reach into Latin America. Recent plots in Montevideo indicate that Iran’s activities in the hemisphere appear to continue unabated to this day.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.