On Wednesday, the House of Representatives advanced a resolution to end American support for the Saudi-led war against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. A similar resolution is making its way through the Senate. To Evelyn Gordon, this effort is wrongheaded on both strategic and moral grounds:

On the strategic side, let’s start with the fact that [the Houthis,] an organization whose official slogan is “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam” isn’t one Americans should want ruling anything, much less a country whose location enables it to dominate a strategic waterway vital to the global oil industry. And without the Saudi-led coalition, the Houthis would long since have taken over Yemen. In other countries, like Syria and Lebanon, Iranian military and financial aid has repeatedly enabled its proxies to overwhelm the opposition; that this hasn’t yet happened in Yemen is only because there, unlike in Syria and Lebanon, the Saudi coalition has provided its local allies with substantial assistance, including airstrikes.

Second, empowering allies is always better than empowering enemies. Granted, Saudi Arabia is a highly imperfect ally, but it is at least nominally in America’s camp. Iran, by contrast, has been America’s avowed enemy since 1979, and its proxies have been responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of American deaths in Lebanon and Iraq. . . .

Still, how can America possibly support a coalition that’s committing gross human-rights violations in Yemen? The answer is easy: horrible as Riyadh’s behavior is, the Houthis are worse. Thus, by ending support for the Saudi coalition, America would empower an even greater evil.

A perfect example is the issue of child soldiers. The New York Times ran a front-page story last month accusing the Saudis of using Sudanese child soldiers in Yemen. Though it didn’t provide many hard numbers, it implied that there could well be several thousand such soldiers. This is incontrovertibly bad. But what the Times carefully concealed from its readers is that the Saudis’ use of child soldiers pales in comparison to the Houthis’. . . . The Houthis openly admit to employing a whopping 18,000 child soldiers. Moreover, while the Saudis are taking boys aged fourteen to seventeen, the Houthis are using children as young as ten. And while the Saudis are recruiting their impoverished volunteers, . . . the Houthis . . . kidnap children outright. . . . [N]ational policy-makers’ job is to gather accurate information and then, if there are no good options, choose the lesser evil. In Yemen, the lesser evil is clearly backing the Saudi coalition.

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.