Yesterday, the New York Times published an opinion piece by the Iranian foreign minister. In it, Mohammad Javad Zarif declares Wahhabism a “death cult” responsible for most of the Muslim world’s problems and blames Saudi Arabia for spreading this “fanaticism.” All this, from a high official of the repressive Islamic-fundamentalist state that is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. Danielle Pletka writes:

Zarif is right. Wahhabism is indeed a danger to the world, a scourge of extremist ideology that successive Saudi regimes have inflicted upon the Muslim (and Christian and Jewish) world. . . . And Zarif is right that the Saudis have used their wealth to hire lobbyists and directly to buy friends in the United States and Europe, which has surely influenced policy in their favor. But then Zarif stops, and it is in his silence where we find the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and sheer Machiavellian predacity of the Tehran regime

Because, you see, Zarif is only concerned with Sunni terrorism, but Iran is the veritable godfather of modern terrorism. . . . And worse yet, unlike the Saudi government, which has actually begun to grapple with its problems and its legacy, Iran has merely doubled and tripled down on its terror model. But let’s review the bidding, shall we?

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, men and women may not consort; women must be veiled (though not with their faces covered). Iran has executed, on average, a person a day in 2016. . . . And forget about being a minority in Iran, where only 50 percent of the population is Persian. . . .

It was the Islamic Republic that created Hizballah and sponsored the groups that kidnapped and murdered Americans through Lebanon’s long civil war. It is the Islamic Republic that funds Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It is Iran that props up the murderous Assad regime—you know, the guys that have repeatedly gassed their own people. It is Iran that has assassinated its enemies the world over, and it is Iran’s own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (and its expeditionary Quds Force) that was responsible, during the Iraq war, for hundreds of U.S. servicemen dying.

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.