While Egypt’s President Sisi has fought Islamic State, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood in both word and deed, he has also shown himself to be a brutal and repressive ruler. Elliott Abrams contends that Sisi’s behavior cannot be excused by his opposition to jihadism, and is also counterproductive:

Realism demands that we speak out [against Sisi’s behavior] for two reasons. First, the people Sisi is repressing are . . . the democrats, liberals, secular citizens, and moderates—the very base for future progress for [Egyptian] society. It is simply untrue that the repression is only targeting Muslim Brotherhood members, jihadists, extremists, and terrorists.

Second, what Sisi is doing will not work. The combination of corruption, lack of economic progress, and repression means that Egypt will remain unstable. For example, Sisi has made no gains against jihadists in the Sinai, in part because of the government’s conduct there, and Islamic State (IS) appears to be stronger there now than it was a couple of years ago. Filling the prisons with everyone who speaks out against repression or who criticizes the government will not stop IS.

In essence the United States is back where we began, supporting a repressive regime in the supposed interest of stability. That’s what we did with Mubarak, for the most part, until almost the day he fell. The only differences are that Sisi is more repressive than Mubarak, and that because of IS the stakes are higher today.

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.