While the West is losing its moral compass, Israel alone takes a stand to fight against evil, writes Giulio Meotti:

The West is atoning uninterruptedly, infected by the idea that evil can come only from its own ranks, while the rest of the world is motivated by sympathy, kindness, and purity. . . . Europe stopped fighting [for its values] a long time ago. . . . Writers and intellectuals are mute, as if they have lost the ability to say the truth.

There is only one nation on earth fighting evil and giving a meaning to the word “civilization”—not good manners, but a hierarchy of values. That nation is the Jewish state of Israel. This is one of the last bastions of humanity. You see this not only in Israel’s willingness to fight just wars against people who bring only destruction and pain in this world. You see it in Israel through the intensity of its people’s devotion to a higher meaning. Only Israel today offers some hope for mankind, something that can enable us to maintain faith in human values under an unprecedented moral collapse.

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.