Twenty years ago Saturday, President Clinton signed the International Religious Freedom Act into law. The act created the position of an ambassador for the promotion of religious liberty and established a United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Elliott Abrams, who chaired the commission in 2000 and 2001, comments on the act’s legacy:

[T]he act has not eliminated religious persecution around the globe. China’s vast repression of Christians, Uighur Muslims, and Tibetan Buddhists, or Iran’s fierce persecution of the Baha’i, are terrible proof of that. But the act did institutionalize reporting on violations of religious freedom; the State Department now issues annual reports on religious freedom, and its religious-freedom office under the ambassador-at-large has perhaps two dozen staff. . . . [The act] certainly elevated attention given to this critical issue, and largely killed the bizarre claim that trying to protect religious freedom was somehow constitutionally suspect [as an erosion of the barrier between church and state].

And the commission, which has its own staff independent of the State Department, established a voice that need not balance various U.S. foreign-policy goals and has the sole duty to tell the truth about violations of religious freedom. . . .

Much legislation is soon forgotten, or wrong-headed, or parochial in intention and effect. The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 was true to our nation’s history and our deepest beliefs, and continues to remind all who serve in our government that protecting and advancing “the first freedom” must be a goal of our foreign policy.

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.