In 2014, over 100,000 Gazan children attended summer camps run by the terror organization. These camps, in the words of one high-ranking Hamas official, “are designed to prepare a generation that carries the Quran and the rifle.” Riley Clafton describes what that entails:

This summer, Muhammad Nofal’s ten-year-old son will be participating in all of the typical Gaza summer-camp activities: scouting, beach games, media lessons, military training sessions, and introductory programs on this year’s theme, the “Jerusalem intifada.” Other campers will spend their summer like twelve-year-old Musaab, learning to crawl beneath barbed wire and wield assault rifles in simulated attacks on Israeli military outposts.

Worse still are the camps run by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. True, there are other options, but they are problematic as well:

Summer camps organized by the UN Relief Works Association (UNRWA) offer a popular alternative to those of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. . . . Hundreds of thousands of young Palestinians turn out to participate in such activities as swimming, painting, pottery, theater, dance, sports, lessons on life skills, and museum excursions.

[Although] UNRWA does not provide military training, the organization implicitly contributes to incitement, and its summer camps are no exception. . . . [T]he staff teaches young Palestinians that “Jews are the wolf” and “with God’s help and our own strength we will wage war. And with education and jihad we will return to our homes!”

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.