Last week, a man named Gary Conrad began harassing people at a Manhattan grocery store; he then pulled a knife on the police officers who had been called to the scene. When he didn’t respond to their order to put the knife down, the police shot and killed him. Had this happened in Israel, writes Judith Bergman, there would be outcry over the “disproportionate response”:

Conrad had displayed “aggressive and belligerent” behavior at a grocery store by “swearing” and he had threatened police with a knife. For that he was shot nine times. . . .

Had this taken place in Israel, and had this man not been called Gary Conrad, but Muhammad, and had he not been merely an inebriated loon but a terrorist out to slash Jews, international outrage would have poured forth in torrents from the front page of every single news outlet and the mouth of every opinion maker worth his salt. . . .

So far, [however], not a single news report has questioned the judgment of the NYPD. . . . Somehow . . . liberals’ hearts do not bleed for a fellow New Yorker like Gary Conrad. Why might that be? My guess is that liberals, much like everybody else, do not like it when knife-wielding men roam their neighborhoods. It is one thing to sit safely behind your screen thousands of miles away from the Middle East, but it is something else entirely to have someone waving a knife at your neighborhood store, whether that person is a terrorist or just a criminal.

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.