On August 12, a crowd of over 1,000 people assembled to bid farewell to Rasmea Odeh, who participated in the 1969 bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket that killed two college students. Odeh, then a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was arrested and sentenced to prison, but later released as part of a prisoner exchange. She is now being expelled from the U.S. for lying about her terrorist past on her immigration documents. Jonathan Greenberg describes the gathering, which featured the radical writer Angela Davis as its keynote speaker:

[Odeh’s] supporters on Saturday included dozens of progressive advocacy groups and anti-Israel organizations that sponsored the event, such as Code Pink, Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Black Lives Matter.

The convicted terrorist received well-wishers like the bride at a wedding and paused to meet children like a celebrity. Have your kid’s picture taken with a killer! . . . The room was generally young, energetic, . . . diverse, and united around a narrative that included a common enemy: Israel. . . .

[In a speech, one of Odeh’s attorneys], Michael Deutsch, . . . said that her “militancy” had been an inspiration to him. At first, it seemed that word choice might have been a Freudian slip, but as he spoke, it became clear it wasn’t. Deutsch was the first speaker of the night openly—if carefully— to cast terrorism as morally acceptable. He was proud, he said, to . . . “put forward the idea that Palestinians have the international-law right [sic] to struggle against a brutal, illegal occupation by any means necessary.” The crowd cheered. . . .

In the near future, Odeh will be deported from the U.S. The [people present] at this event consider this one grave injustice among many perpetrated against them by a government—and society—that hates them. They are awash in victimhood and antipathy for the broader society in which they live.

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.