While Kurds have been leading the fight against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and in Turkey the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) has renewed its anti-government insurgency, the Kurds of Iran have remained largely quiescent for the past two decades, after being effectively and ruthlessly suppressed by the ayatollahs. In the past few months, however, the country’s three largest Kurdish groups have decided once again to engage in armed struggle against the regime. Jonathan Spyer and Benjamin Weinthal write:

[T]he Iranian Kurds’ return to militancy further complicates relations between Iran and the Kurdish autonomous area in northern Iraq. Iran supports the powerful Shiite militias in Iraq, who are engaged in a number of territorial disputes with the Iraqi Kurds. In addition, Iraqi Kurdish aspirations for independence stand in the way of the Iranian desire for a united, Shiite-dominated Iraq controlled by pro-Iranian elements. The beginnings of the Kurdish insurgency in Iran, emerging from across the border in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, only adds fuel to a combustible situation. . . .

[I]t would be wrong to expect major change in the status or situation of Iran’s Kurds in the immediate future. Nevertheless, the re-emergence of Kurdish insurgency in Iran is a significant development. Iran has proved a champion at exporting unrest and paramilitary activity to neighboring countries—see Lebanese Hizballah, the Shiite militias of Iraq, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and others. The revived Kurdish armed campaign is the first attempt in some time to bring the fires of regional instability—so ably stoked in a variety of arenas by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards—back across the borders into Iran itself.

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.