Expressions of sympathy for Palestinians, and concomitant condemnations of Israel, are a standard part of the rhetoric of the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, who recently gave a pathos-laden speech about witnessing the raising of the Palestinian flag at the UN. Yet, writes Burak Bekdil, the Palestinian Authority has consistently declined to return the favor:

The colors of the Palestinian flag are pan-Arab colors. . . . Before being the Palestinian flag, it was the flag of the short-lived Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan. [It and other, similar Arab] flags draw their inspiration from [those used during] the Arab revolt . . . against Davutoglu’s beloved Ottoman empire. . . .

Similarly, Davutoglu’s [warm sentiments toward] Mahmoud Abbas do not sound as if they are shared by the Palestinian leadership. Abbas’s Christmas message, which went unnoticed in Turkey, contained references to the Armenian genocide (still largely a taboo topic in Turkey) that would have caused a small political earthquake in Turkey. . .

Without caring much about whether the Palestinians love the Turks, the Turks keep on loving to love the Palestinians. Political Islam has its many prerequisites. If one of them is unconditionally to hate Israel and the Jews, the other is an unconditional devotion to the “Palestinian cause.” Turkey’s leaders successfully fulfill both prerequisites.

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.