On August 15, Israeli police arrested Raed Salah, the head of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, which is the largest Islamist organization operating within the pre-1967 borders. Salah played a significant role in inciting the most recent violence on the Temple Mount, as Reuven Berko explains:

[Salah] controls an enormous funding empire that pays mercenaries (the men of the Murabitun and the women of the Muribitat) to riot on the Temple Mount, in Jaffa, and at other sites depending on their rate and his orders.

The massive amounts of cash being pumped into the Islamic Movement, as well as its twin sister Hamas, come from global Islamic charities and, indirectly, from Turkey and Qatar. The Northern Branch is an exact copy of its fellow terrorist organizations, all of which have roots in the global Muslim Brotherhood movement: al-Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Islamic State, and [so forth]. . . .

[Israeli] discussion about Salah’s activity as an inciter and a motivator of terrorist acts is reminiscent of the debates among . . . researchers . . . when Hamas was in its infancy. Many made the mistake of thinking that the ideology, which focused on “talk,” was separate from the actions, which focused on killing. Even today, the West is incapable of comprehending that dawa (proselytizing) is not ideological propaganda, study of the Quran and the hadith, or religious and historical enrichment as the murderous Islamic Movement claims, but rather a system of recruitment and motivation that uses “legitimate” Islamic messages to drive the Islamist terrorist machine.

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.