Burak Bekdil, a journalist who once wrote for a leading Turkish newspaper, recounts being harassed and hounded from his job after writing an article critical of Hamas:

[I]n the summer of 2014, . . . friends told me that my picture was on the front page of [Turkey’s] most militant Islamist newspaper, Yeni Akit—whose editors always find a seat aboard Erdogan’s private jet during his state visits abroad.

I was accused of undermining Turkey’s defense industry and promoting the Israeli weapons lobby. But my greatest sin was to argue: “The fact that there are no Israeli casualties [in the Gaza war thus far] does not mean Hamas does not want to kill; it just means Hamas, for the moment, cannot kill.” . . . [Shortly thereafter] a pro-government columnist, in [a] tweet, called me “the disgrace of humanity,” several others joined in a lynching campaign on social media. . . .

The campaign annoyed my editors and boss, but I was kept writing provided that I would not write on “explosive” subjects. . . . After a few attempts I stopped writing about the Arab-Israeli conflict [for Turkish publications]. . . . But things went from bad to worse in Turkey. . . . The increasingly difficult rules meant that my column could not contain any of the words “Jew, Israel, Israeli, Hamas, Hamas and terror, and Palestine.”

The last straw for Bekdil came in December, when he criticized President Erdogan and his editors, under direct pressure from the regime, fired him.

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.