Turkey’s recently reelected President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as part of his efforts to establish himself as a global leader for Islamists and for Muslims more generally, has for years sought to exercise more influence among Palestinians. To do so, he has planted Turkish terrorist organizations in Jerusalem, as Pinḥas Inbari writes:

Turkey’s method of influence in eastern Jerusalem can be seen from several Turkish government organizations posing as NGOs (non-governmental organizations), which serve, according to several disturbing testimonies, as fronts for the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH). . . . The IHH is an NGO that purports to provide humanitarian aid. However, according to the former head of the counterterrorism department in Turkey, Ahmet Sait Yayla, it is a terror organization that collaborates with Islamic State . . . .

IHH was founded during the war in Kosovo, and its activities are spread among all the places that were once under the rule of the Ottoman empire, or where the Ottomans aspired to rule. These include the Turkish-speaking nations in the former Soviet Union and Russia today. . . .

The IHH’s concealed collaboration with the large Turkish NGO TIKA is particularly worrying, because it may mean that terrorist cells are lurking behind the scenes of the cultural, social, and economic activities.. . .

One of the [other] ways Turkey is advancing its position in Jerusalem is through religious tourism. Organized groups of tourists, which, according to Israeli sources are composed of unemployed Turkish people who participate in this project in return for payment, come to Jerusalem. The purpose of their trip is not to enjoy the city’s sites, but to demonstrate a Turkish presence on the Temple Mount.

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.