In a casual conversation with a fellow student, Alfred MacDonald—then a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Texas at San Antonio—stated that he doesn’t “think highly of Islam” since, as a bisexual, he “could be legally put to death in about a dozen countries that use Islam for their legal system.” The other party to the conversation reported him for his comments, and MacDonald soon found himself summoned to the offices of the departmental chairwoman, Eve Browning, who then chastised him for his remarks. Describing the episode, Bruce Bawer writes:

Browning, after being told by MacDonald what he had said to his fellow student about Islam, asked him, “Do you understand how someone would find that offensive?” Note well: Browning didn’t mean that the Islamic death penalty for gay people is offensive; she had nothing to say about that. What she meant was that mentioning the penalty is offensive. . . .

She then threatened to refer MacDonald to the university’s “Behavior Intervention Team,” which, she explained, is “trained in talking to people about what’s appropriate or what isn’t,” or to “the student conduct board,” which had the power to recommend his dismissal from the university. . . . For her, apparently, this wasn’t a question of ethics or logic; it was a matter of shutting up and obeying the rules. Period. “I’m not out to persuade you,” she admitted. “I’m just out to read you the riot act, basically.”

Eve Browning is . . . far from alone in taking the view—or, at least, acting as if she takes the view—that the execution of gay people in countries that are governed in accordance with sharia law is less offensive than mentioning those executions.

Fortunately, more and more gay people are awakening to the fact that the left, academic and otherwise, does not have their back. When it comes to supposedly downtrodden groups, the left has a distinctive pecking order. Especially now that same-sex marriage is legal in the U.S., gays are no longer seen as being particularly oppressed—especially not gay white males, who thanks to their whiteness and maleness are increasingly viewed as members of the oppressor class, not the oppressed. Muslims, on the contrary, are at the very top of the victim-group heap—and, perversely, every time another act of murderous jihad is committed in the name of Allah, Muslims’ victim status seems to grow.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”