While the accusation leveled by Saudi Arabia and its allies that Qatar plays an especially pernicious role in the Middle East is justified, Riyadh does its own part to encourage terrorism both regionally and globally. The Saudis, unlike Qatar, do not shelter or bankroll Hamas and other Muslim Brotherhood organizations, and they do not have anything like Qatar’s Al Jazeera, which propagandizes the overthrow of existing governments by Islamists. Nor does Saudi Arabia have anything akin to Iran’s global terror network. But, Tom Wilson argues, the kingdom encourages jihadism in a different sort of way:

[F]or many years now, . . . a set of beliefs has been advanced from Saudi Arabia that is, by any standard, extremist. The Wahhabi-Salafist belief system is one of religious supremacism, in which the very notion of man-made law, let alone democratic government, is derided.

These beliefs create a worldview that is illiberal, intolerant, and hostile to the West and promote a mindset that makes adherents far more susceptible to the rhetoric of violent Islamist groups and preachers. [Thus] there has been a relentless flow into [European] countries of funding for the promotion of intolerance and the incitement of hatred.

Through the provision of generous scholarships and stipends, a generation of Muslim religious figures traveled from Western countries to Saudi Arabia to be trained in the Wahhabi ideology at institutions like the Islamic University of Medina. Among its alumni is Abu Usamah at-Thahabi, who has preached in British mosques, promoting holy war and the killing of gay men and apostates. Similarly, Sheikh Abdullah el-Faisal, who attended Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, has advocated the extermination of unbelievers. . . .

The distribution of extremist texts and literature has been another way that Wahhabi attitudes have spread in Muslim communities in Britain and Europe. . . . Particularly alarming was a 2010 report by the BBC that some 5,000 children in Britain were being taught from the official Saudi school curriculum, with textbooks that showed how to chop off the hands of thieves. These books are so extreme that in 2014 they were adopted as school textbooks by Islamic State.

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.