The current crisis on college campuses, as Mosaic readers know, has been a long time in coming. In a 1997 speech marking Holocaust Memorial Day, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to predict it, as Rabbi Meir Soloveichik observes:

Scalia stressed that it was not enough to remember the Holocaust. Rather, he said, one must mark the sort of society in which it occurred: “The one message I want to convey today is that you will have missed the most frightening aspect of it all, if you do not appreciate that it happened in one of the most educated, most progressive, most cultured countries in the world.” The Germany of the early 20th century, he noted, “was a world leader in most fields of art, science, and intellect.” Its universities were some of the most celebrated on earth. Yet this did not prevent Nazism from suffusing society; in fact, German education and Nazism went hand in hand. . . .

American parents, Scalia reflected, place so much value today on what is taught in academic institutions, yet the opportunities afforded there, he argued, are “of only secondary importance—to our children, and to the society that their generation will create.” The Holocaust, Scalia argued, is a reminder of the importance of imparting moral wisdom above all else, and it is this, he was implicitly saying, that parents must bear in mind as they ponder the intellectual future of their progeny.

The goal of stopping something like the Holocaust from happening again, Scalia went on, “can be achieved only by acknowledging, and passing on to our children, the existence of absolute, uncompromisable standards of human conduct. Mankind has traditionally derived such standards from religion; and the West has derived them from and through the Jews.”

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.