The numbers attending the weekly demonstrations at the fence separating Gaza from Israel have declined from one Friday to the next, although over this past weekend the protests turned increasingly violent. Despite the likelihood that Israel will be able to restore order, writes Ben-Dror Yemini, Hamas has nevertheless managed to score a propaganda victory with the aid of the world’s media, which blithely continue to distort what is happening:

No one has placed cameras on the U.S.-Mexico border, although 412 infiltrators or migrants were killed there in 2017, and 498 in 2016, including children. But the border between Israel and Gaza, as well as the points of friction in Hebron, seem to have the highest number of cameras in the world.

Something [besides wounded Palestinians, however,] was caught on camera: many of the kites flown toward Israel were marked with a swastika, in addition to carrying explosives. . . . It’s not just the Hamas Covenant or the calls for Israel’s destruction, chanted by some of the protestors [that should be troubling to neutral parties]. It’s also the kites carrying the Nazi symbol. . . .

We shouldn’t make generalizations. It’s not that all of the Strip’s residents identify with the Nazi ideology. But Hamas and its supporters, and likely many of the protestors as well, carry a message of annihilation and anti-Semitism. The moderate ones settle for [merely] spreading the message of Israel’s destruction. . . .

[But] the global media, almost without exception, have ignored the protestors’ message. The swastikas didn’t appear in the New York Times or in Le Monde. [For its part,] the Guardian published a letter by three members of the [Israeli] Breaking the Silence organization, accusing the IDF of instructing snipers to shoot to kill unarmed demonstrators. They’re lying; there are no such orders. They didn’t bother, of course, to write a single word about the responsibility of Hamas and its supporters. On the contrary, they wrote that “harming innocent people in Gaza is part of what is needed to maintain the regime of occupation.” If former soldiers publish a letter which leads to the conclusion that IDF soldiers are murderers, how can we complain about those newspapers’ editorials?

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.