Behind the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS) are a number of organizations connected to terrorism. Existing counterterror laws, as well as recent anti-BDS laws that have been passed by several American states and European countries, can thus be used to shut down these groups’ bank accounts, or prevent them from using services like PayPal. Benjamin Weinthal and Asaf Romirowsky explain:

[M]any BDS organizations are entwined with states and other entities that advance hate groups and terrorism at large. The Dallas-based bank Comerica said in May that it closed the account of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) due to a “business decision.” [But most likely] Texas’s Governor Greg Abbott’s ratification of an anti-BDS law in early May set the stage for the shutdown of the anti-Israel organization’s account. . . . As the Harvard jurist Alan Dershowitz [noted], IADL “was founded as a Communist front and supported financially by the Soviet Union. It is anti-democratic to its core and supportive of terrorism and repression.” . . .

The IADL is part and parcel of a dangerous, growing BDS cottage industry in the West. . . . The interplay between terrorism finance and BDS is perhaps best illustrated by BDS South Africa—the so-called “mothership” of the anti-Israel campaign. In 2015, Farid Esack—an Islamic theologian and head of BDS South Africa—held a series of fund-raisers with Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who participated in the 1969 hijacking of a TWA jet. The United States and the EU have classified the PFLP as a terrorist organization. . . .

The neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer has [also] long been a supporter of BDS. And the German neo-Nazi party Der Dritte Weg (The Third Way) raises funds for its BDS activities using PayPal. Members of the Der Dritte Weg can be seen on the website at the Hizballah propaganda museum in Mleeta, Lebanon.

Both legal tools and public pressure, write Weinthal and Ramirowsky, can and should be used to make it difficult for these groups to keep doing business.

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.