When Hassan Rouhani won the race this summer for a second term as the Islamic Republic’s president, no small number of Western observers saw his victory as a triumph for the country’s “moderates,” whom Rouhani supposedly leads, and for the nuclear deal, which was ostensibly intended to encourage “moderation” within the regime. But Rouhani, since taking office, has fulfilled none of the promises he made to more liberal Iranians, and if anything the “hardliners” in the government have grown stronger. Elliott Abrams takes as an example Rouhani’s unfulfilled promise—from his first presidential campaign, in 2013—to free Mehdi Karroubi, a seventy-nine-year-old dissident, from house arrest:

It does not really matter whether in his heart Rouhani wishes he could free Karroubi. What does matter is that once again Westerners hoping for change in Iran have deceived themselves; allowed themselves to believe that Iran’s closed, corrupt, and repressive theocracy was about to change; concluded that Rouhani was some sort of “moderate” despite the fact that human-rights conditions in Iran worsened during his first term in office; and continued to treat Rouhani, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, and others whom the regime uses to calm Westerners as if they were actors in an effort to liberalize Iran.

They are not. They are important parts of the repressive and brutal regime that rules the Islamic Republic. The real actors in the struggle to change Iran and free its people from tyranny are the people of Iran, not officials of the regime. As Misagh Parsa recounts in his fascinating book Democracy in Iran, the regime has been at war with the people since 1979—year in and year out, month after month. Iranians have no illusions about those who rule them. Neither should we. When a regime cannot release someone like Mehdi Karroubi from house arrest after six years, . . . we are reminded of the nature of the regime—and of its own understanding that Iranians will be rid at once of it if ever they have the chance.

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.