In February, South African authorities arrested two Lebanese civilians for attempting to purchase equipment for manufacturing drones, which they planned to send to Hizballah. In previous years, Iran-backed terrorists were arrested for planning attacks on Western and Israeli targets in Kenya, a Hizballah armory was discovered in Nigeria, and American officials identified an extensive Hizballah money-laundering effort in West Africa. Yet these are only small parts of Tehran’s massive effort to establish a foothold in Africa through charitable organizations, Muslim educational institutions, efforts to convert Sunni Muslims to Shiism, and attempts to gain the loyalty of African Shiites to Iran’s supreme leader. Hassan Dai writes:

To win the hearts and minds of African Muslims, the Iranian regime and its institutions organize conferences, conduct religious and political events, work with local partners, and run more than 100 Islamic centers, schools, seminaries, and mosques in more than 30 African countries with thousands of students, clerics and missionaries. In addition, Tehran has offered financial and economic incentives to African governments and used two of its charities, the Iranian Red Crescent and the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee, to provide a wide range of free social and health services in several African countries. . . .

These and other organizations disseminate Tehran’s fundamentalist ideology and generate grassroots support for its foreign policy, its position in the Islamic world, and its quest to dominate the Middle East. They also provide the regime with a recruiting pool for the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force and other Iranian institutions responsible for terrorism or military activities abroad. . . .

Tehran’s persistent export of its brand of Shiite Islamism to Africa poses a real threat to peace on the continent, not least since this ideology promotes the narrative that Islam is still at war with the West as the continuation of its millenarian struggle for world domination. In this context, Israel is depicted as a cancerous Western implant at the heart of the Islamic world that must be eradicated. Thousands of African clerics trained in the Iranian-owned seminaries promote this anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and anti-Israel animosity.

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.