Last week, BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen conducted an interview with Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas. What ensued was an exercise in propaganda, not only licensed but amplified by the interviewer himself. Alan Johnson writes:

Bowen . . . allowed Meshal, an anti-Semitic terrorist who has exulted in the killing of Jews as Jews, to preen and pose, without challenge, before a global audience—with the full imprimatur of a respectful BBC—as a heroic Palestinian democrat, a moderate man, a peacemaker, and a reluctant liberator in the glorious tradition of Nelson Mandela and George Washington.

Bowen even allowed an incitement to go unchallenged. “Netanyahu likes to shed blood,” spat Meshal—an old image about Jews-with-power that has a certain, ahem, history. Bowen didn’t blink. . . . Bowen [also] allowed Meshal to claim that Hamas was not Islamist. . . .

Bowen didn’t just leave Hamas spin unchallenged. He actually spun for Hamas himself. “Mr. Meshal said he and the group had agreed to accept the boundaries which existed before the 1967 Middle East war as the basis for those of a future Palestinian state,” wrote Bowen. But that is just not true. It is, to be frank, Hamas propaganda.

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.