Next month, the Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas can be expected to attend Christmas-eve services at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and the Western media can be expected to air footage of him there while reporters comment on the alleged plight of Palestinian Christians living under Israeli occupation. These reporters can also be counted on to ignore the mistreatment of Christians by the PA; Bassam Tawil points to the recent death of a sixty-three-year-old woman named Terez Ta’amneh as illustrative:

Ta’amneh, a Christian woman from the town of Bet Jala, near Bethlehem, . . . died when PA police officers raided her home to arrest her son, Yusef, for unpaid debts. The story of Ta’amneh [could] cause serious damage to the PA’s propaganda machine, which is preoccupied with blaming Israel for the fact that a large number of Christians have left the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the past few decades.

The police officers, [Ta’amneh’s] daughter Marian said, attacked her brother and began beating him in front of their mother. “My mother told them that Yusef suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure. She begged them to stop beating him. In response, the commander . . . pointed a pistol at my brother’s head and threatened to open fire. He told my mother: we have orders to open fire at him.” According to Marian, her mother panicked and collapsed, dying instantly.

So far as Abbas is concerned, it is business as usual. The cries of the Christian family in Bet Jala seem entirely lost on him. Next month, he and his senior officials will arrive in Bethlehem and again talk about the harmony and brotherly relations between Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land. . . . What he seeks is to continue ensuring the success of the Palestinian lie that Christians are fleeing because of Israel.

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.