The recent string of terror attacks in Egypt suggests that President Sisi’s extended crackdown has had little success, and that the jihadists are growing stronger. Elliott Abrams comments on the implications for Egypt, and for Israel:

The Egyptian army has given no evidence that it knows how to combat the terrorists effectively. [And] the terrorists are getting better at it. Last year they appeared as a ragtag bunch holding Kalashnikovs. . . . Now they have attacked several targets in one day in a well-coordinated movement, they wear uniforms, and they have more advanced equipment such as anti-tank missiles. This is the Islamic State [as] we have come to know [it] in Iraq.

There are [also] connections between the terrorists in Sinai and Hamas in Gaza. There are accusations that Hamas has done some training of these jihadists in Sinai, has provided them with funds, and has given medical treatment to wounded jihadists in Gaza hospitals.

Israelis know that developments in Sinai will present threats to Israel sooner rather than later. One must hope that in addition to protecting their border, the Israelis are giving the Egyptians some advice on counter-terror strategies. President Sisi’s overall strategy is a blunt one: repression. It is not going to work—in Sinai or anywhere in Egypt. This is partly because the targets of repression are not only the terrorists but any critics of the government. The government of Egypt now has about 40,000 political prisoners, and it is crushing all political activity—moderate, secular, liberal, democratic as well as extremist. That’s a formula for instability in the medium and perhaps even short term.

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.