Last month, Kenneth Marcus, the recently appointed assistant secretary of education for civil rights, announced that his office plans to reopen an investigation into an incident in 2011 in which an anti-Israel organization allegedly charged an admission fee only to Jewish students. The Department of Education had closed its investigation into the affair in 2014, finding no wrongdoing. On Wednesday, the New York Times published a heavy-handed front-page story about Marcus’s decision, which confusingly accuses Marcus of supporting a “definition of anti-Semitism that  . . . explicitly defines Judaism as not only a religion but also an ethnic origin.” As Noah Rothman argues, the article exhibits a severely warped understanding of anti-Semitism, and of what it means to be pro-Palestinian:

[The article] contended that Marcus’s decision has paved the way for the Education Department to adopt a “hotly contested definition of anti-Semitism” that includes: denying Jews “the right to self-determination,” claiming that the state of Israel is a “racist endeavor,” and applying a double standard to Israel not “expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” [But this] is precisely the same definition used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [and] adopted almost in total by Barack Obama’s State Department.

[The Times’s author, Erica] Green, went so far as to say that this not-so-new definition for anti-Semitism has, according to Arab-American activists, declared “the Palestinian cause anti-Semitic.” So that is the Palestinian cause? Denying Jews the right to self-determination, calling the state of Israel itself a racist enterprise, and holding it to nakedly biased double standards? So much for the two-state solution.

Perhaps the biggest tell in the Times piece was its . . . inability to distinguish between pro-Palestinian activism and anti-Israel agitation. The complaint the Education Department is preparing to reinvestigate involves . . . an event hosted by the group Belief Awareness Knowledge and Action (BAKA). . . . Green did not dwell on the group, which allegedly discriminated against Jews and pro-Israeli activists. If she had, she’d have reported that, just a few weeks before this incident, BAKA staged another event on the Rutgers campus—a fundraiser for the organization USTOGAZA, which provided aid to the campaign of “flotillas” challenging an Israeli blockade of Gaza. USTOGAZA’s links to the Turkey-based organization Insani Yardim Vakfi, which has long been associated with support for Hamas-led terrorist activities, rendered the money raised in this event legally suspect. Eventually . . . even BAKA conceded the point. . . .

Some might attribute the Times’s neutral portrayal of groups that tacitly support violence and people like Omar Barghouti—an activist who “will never accept a Jewish state in Palestine” and has explicitly endorsed “armed resistance” against Jews, who he insists are “not a people”—to ignorance, as though that would neutralize the harm this dispatch might cause. But [the] benefit of the doubt only extends so far. Even the charitably inclined should have discovered its limits by now.

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.