The American branch of the Qatar-sponsored news network has experienced a series of setbacks, including a spate of firings, a lawsuit by a disgruntled former employee, and allegations of endemic workplace sexism and (unsurprisingly) anti-Semitism. Oren Kessler and David A. Weinberg write about the network’s larger problem:

Al Jazeera Arabic—the flagship of the Al Jazeera conglomerate—has long served as a mouthpiece for Qatar’s Islamist-driven regional agenda. During last summer’s Gaza war, the channel’s coverage seemed taken from Hamas’s own playbook (an unsurprising fact given Qatari support for the terrorist group), describing all Palestinian casualties, whether civilians or militants, as “martyrs.” Similarly, an article from February about last year’s slaughter of worshippers with a gun and a meat cleaver in a Jerusalem synagogue described the killers as “martyrs.”

Al Jazeera is by far the most-watched channel in the Arab world, and Al Jazeera English (the network’s English-language channel for everywhere but America) is available in 140 countries, including every European market.

But the network has never quite found a market in America. It ranked a dismal 104 out of 106 among ad-supported cable channels and, in the first quarter of 2015, averaged only 35,000 viewers. . . . Americans, it seems, simply aren’t buying what Al Jazeera is selling.

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.