In 2013, Kassem Eid was present in one of the civilian areas subjected to sarin-gas attacks by Bashar al-Assad. After fleeing the country, Eid wrote a memoir of what he witnessed during the civil war, and tried to call the U.S. government’s attention to the atrocities being committed. He even met with then-UN Ambassador Samantha Power and hoped that she would bring his plea for help to the president. Based on Power’s recent defenses of President Obama’s failure to act at that time, Eid is now convinced of her duplicitousness:

I first met then-Ambassador Samantha Power at the U.S.-UN Mission on April 14, 2014. That was two months after I fled Syria and less than a year after I survived Assad’s sarin-gas attack. When I met Ambassador Power, she told me that she was trying hard to persuade President Obama to act decisively against the Assad regime and that she was ashamed of Obama’s inaction. She then told me about her personal experience as a journalist and activist while she was covering the Yugoslav wars and the genocide in Bosnia.

I was touched by what I perceived to be Ambassador Power’s sincerity and personal experience that led her to write A Problem from Hell, which explained how politicians lie in order to avoid intervening to stop genocide. . . . In [the book], Power explains how the U.S. administration tried to cover up the genocide in Bosnia by instead labeling it a “civil war.” Yet she and President Obama escaped responsibility for the documented and proven war crimes committed in Syria. . . . If Power was telling the truth, she should have resigned; [after all], she chided diplomats at the State Department for not resigning during the genocide in Bosnia.

The Assad regime taught us in schools that there was no Holocaust and hid the truth of the crematoriums and the concentration camps where millions of Jews were brutally killed. But the Obama administration also refused to act on—or reveal—direct eyewitness testimony it received of the crematorium in Saydnaya Prison in Syria, where an estimated 100,000 people were brutally killed and then burned to ashes to hide the truth. I’d begged the U.S. administration during my meetings at the State Department back in 2014 to investigate the Saydnaya Prison and Qasioun mountain because my fellow activists in those areas had repeatedly told me since 2012 how they smelled the awful stench of burning flesh.

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.