With its neighbor Yemen enmeshed in a bloody civil war that has drawn in other nearby countries, with the regional troublemaker Iran situated just across the narrow Gulf of Oman, and with another neighbor, Saudi Arabia, facing a host of problems, the gulf nation has remained, in Daniel Pipes’s words, “an oasis of calm.” There have been no terror attacks, and not a single Omani has joined Islamic State. Pipes tries to explain this “most surprising country in the Middle East”:

Islam has three main branches: Sunni (about 90 percent of all Muslims), Shiite (about 9 percent), and Ibadi (about 0.2 percent). Oman has the only Ibadi-majority population in the world. Being a tiny minority in the larger Muslim context, rulers of Oman historically kept away from Middle Eastern issues. Part of the country was isolated mountainous desert terrain, part was focused on the seas, especially on India and on East Africa. . . . This unique remoteness from Middle Eastern problems, whether it be the Arab-Israeli conflict or Iranian expansionism, remains in place. . . .

A benevolent dictator, [Oman’s ruler] Sultan Qaboos bin Said dominates the country in ways alien to a Westerner. He serves simultaneously as prime minister and as minister of defense, foreign affairs, and finance, as well as supreme commander of the armed forces and police. . . . The Arab insurgency that began in 2011 reached Oman but, as in the case of most of the monarchies, was easily handled with some extra spending. . . .

As a democrat, I rue absolute monarchies. As a Middle East analyst, however, I acknowledge that monarchies govern far better than the region’s alternatives, mainly ideologues and military officers.

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.