On Tuesday, the Treasury Department announced that it is placing sanctions on three high-level al-Qaeda operatives based in the Islamic Republic. This is just one more piece of evidence, writes Benjamin Weingarten, that Tehran, in addition to sponsoring Hizballah and various other Shiite terrorist groups, is also a key supporter of Sunni groups like al-Qaeda:

It strains credulity to believe that a closed Shiite nation like Iran, often competing against Sunni forces, would be unaware of al-Qaeda officers within its borders. And in this case we have clear evidence that it was comfortable with al-Qaeda operating on its soil because Iranian authorities were negotiating with [one of the three sanctioned individuals]. . . . Another element of this story is . . . [the] ample compelling evidence indicating Iranian support for the 9/11 attack. . . .

Foreign policy necessarily involves dealing with hostile regimes, and sometimes making common cause with them in order to advance greater interests. But there is little to indicate that as concerns the global jihadist threat, comprising state and non-state actors, . . . each with competing but often overlapping interests and motivations, America has the faintest clue as to how best to proceed in its national interest.

With great regularity we appear to be on every side of every conflict, evincing a lack of clarity about ourselves and our enemies. The jihadists are playing a game of “Heads I win, tails you lose.” They know what they want and are doing everything in their power to achieve it. Does America?

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.