Earlier this month, an Islamic State suicide bomber infiltrated St. Peter and St. Paul’s Coptic Church in Cairo and killed 25 worshipers—the deadliest such attack since a 2010 bombing in Alexandria and a reminder of the Egyptian state’s failure to protect the lives of its religious and ethnic minorities. But, writes Samuel Tadros, “it is [the Copts’] daily encounter with discrimination and persecution that poses the greatest threat to their future.” This threat springs from deep, willed ignorance on the part of Egyptian Muslims:

Copts necessarily know much about Islam through the education system, media, and their neighbors. The same cannot be said of most Egyptian Muslims and their knowledge of the Copts. The exclusion of Copts and their identity from the public square has made them alien creatures onto which wild fantasies are projected.

In a column last March, a Coptic journalist recounted being asked by a coworker where her future husband would spend their wedding night, given that a Christian woman is required to sleep with a priest on her wedding night, according to what she knew of the Copts. The question apparently had its roots in Mel Gibson’s film Braveheart, which depicts English lords having the right of the first night. The column unleashed a wave of confessions . . . Muslim readers admitting to this and other misconceptions they held about their fellow citizens: Coptic priests wear black because they are saddened that Islam rules Egypt; on New Year’s Eve, churches turn out their lights so that men and women can kiss; the late Pope Shenouda, the leader of the Copt church from 1971 to 2012, conceived of a plan to reconquer Egypt for Christianity by arranging for Coptic doctors to perform abortions on Muslim women.

These are not merely bigoted beliefs held by some, but pathologies with profound ramifications.

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.