The nominally pro-Israel lobbying group J Street recently claimed that on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, 84 percent of American Jews favor Obama over Netanyahu. However, writes Ben Cohen, the statistic is a mendacious distortion of the actual data—one that says something about the group and its mission:

After being called out [over its claim], J Street trotted out a three-month poll it conducted in which 84 percent of respondents said they would support a deal that would prevent Iran from weaponizing its nuclear program. Frankly, so would I—but that is not the deal that Obama is negotiating, and to claim that people who genuinely don’t want to see an Iranian nuclear weapon are supporting the president over Israel’s prime minister, even as he makes concession after concession to the mullahs, is an outright, willful lie. . . .

Now look at where this dangerous nonsense leads us. A significant number of Democrats are threatening to boycott Netanyahu’s forthcoming speech on Iran to Congress, thereby allowing themselves to be co-opted by the anti-Semites of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Europe is bewildered and scared; after all, the French, British, and German leaders have clearly identified both Islamism and anti-Semitism as civilizational threats, and now the American president is telling them otherwise. Dissidents and democracy activists fighting Islamism in the Arab and wider Islamic worlds have been abandoned, after being told, in effect, that they don’t know what they’re talking about. And resentment toward America’s current leadership continues to grow among its allies: not just the Israelis, but the conservative Arab states like Saudi Arabia, too.

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.