French judges, after a five-week trial, recently sentenced Abdelkader Merah to twenty years in prison for “criminal terrorist conspiracy.” The crimes in question were committed by Abdelkader’s brother Mohammed who, over the course of three separate incidents in 2012, murdered three French paratroopers as well as a rabbi and three Jewish schoolchildren. Reporting on the trial, Marc Weitzmann exposes the failures of the French authorities, who were able to connect the dots between the shootings of the paratroopers but ignored evidence that could have led them to Merah. “Because the victims were of Maghrébin [i.e., North African] origin,” Weitzmann explains, the central authorities “ordered [local police] to investigate neo-fascists instead.” After Mohammed Merah was killed by police, the director of French domestic intelligence publicly insisted that he was a “lone wolf,” ignoring the copious evidence of his connection to an Islamist terrorist network.

In a second article, Weitzmann delves into the dysfunction of the Merah family, where beatings, neglect, bigotry against Jews and “the French,” and Islamism were all common. He then turns to the families of the victims—two of whom were Muslims proudly serving in their country’s armed forces—and their “loneliness”:

As [the paratroopers’ family members] testified, it became clear . . . that they were utterly alone, alienated from the bizarre and murderous radicalism of their son’s killer, a radicalism that sprang from the communities to which they were said to belong by birth or faith, yet rejected by the official agents of French society as a whole in whose name their sons had fought and then been murdered. . . .

All of them—all of them—mentioned the same racist attitude from the cops who broke the news of the killings by addressing them first as suspects, due to their Arab names and their looks.

The other reason for that loneliness, and not the least, was the lack of Muslim support. Not one representative of the Muslim organizations in France came in solidarity to console the Muslim families of the Muslim victims. Not one attended the trial or made the slightest public gesture or utterance on their behalf.

The contrast with the Jewish families couldn’t have been more striking. The former head of the official Jewish community of Toulouse, Nicole Yardeni, made the trip with a whole delegation to hear Samuel Sandler, who lost his son and two grandsons in the massacre, [testify]. She came with Jonathan Chetrit, . . . who successfully improvised the sheltering and protection of the children in the Ozar Hatorah school during the shooting, and Sharon Benitah, now fifteen, who witnessed the death of her friend Myriam Monsonego. . . .

No, the Jews, who are so lonely today in French society, were not alone in the courtroom. But the Muslim families—these Muslims so much at the center of the national public debate today—were. No imam showed up in the courtroom. None of the left-wingers who are so eager to stand against “Islamophobia” and to point to the evils of racism and social discrimination wrote a single word of support to the Ibn Ziaten and Lagouen families.

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.