Last week, Turkey sent substantial ground forces into Syria, ostensibly with the aim of doing battle against Islamic State (IS)—thus earning praise from Joseph Biden, who also made a point of calling for Kurdish withdrawal from areas where Turkey plans to attack the terrorist group. The news, on its face, allays longstanding concerns that Istanbul has been apathetic to IS and has perhaps even helped it. In fact, writes Christopher Caldwell, President Erdogan’s goals haven’t changed—as Biden himself surely knows:

Turkey’s strategic objective is not to “crush” IS. It is to crush the most effective part of the anti-IS coalition: the Syrian-Kurdish Democratic Union party and People’s Protection Units. . . .

Turkey [has so far] cleared out the IS-held town of Jarabulus, on its border. Had it not done so, the Kurds would have. . . . The anti-IS part of the Turkish operation was over before it started. . . .

Supporting Turkey’s desire for the neutralization [of Kurdish forces] is a quo for which one can only assume America is somehow getting a quid. Perhaps it involves the European refugee crisis, which Turkey is helping to stem, but at an ever-mounting price. Apparently that price is nobody’s business but the Turks’.

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.