Last spring, the UN Human Right Council—where representatives of the world’s most brutal tyrannies gather to pass resolutions condemning the Jewish state—approved a new commission of inquiry to report on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Having secured funding from the General Assembly, the commission recently selected its members. Anne Bayefsky reports:

The identities of the inquisitors are Navi Pillay of South Africa, Miloon Kothari of India, and Chris Sidoti of Australia. . . . The three were appointed in July by then-council president Nazhat Shameem, a Muslim lawyer from Fiji. . . . The inquiry’s founding resolution was crafted at the behest of Islamic states and what the United Nations calls the “State of Palestine.” It spells out a number of fantastically broad tasks connected by one overarching goal: to turn the Jewish state into a global pariah.

The flagship enterprise of Pillay’s tenure was resurrecting the UN’s anti-Semitic hate-fest held in Durban in 2001 and reaffirming the slander of the racist Jewish state. Since then, she’s been preaching, “help end decades of Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people, . . . recognized as apartheid.”

Fellow inquiry member Kothari has . . . already reported on “the practice of ethnic cleansing and expulsion of land-based people and communities, as has historically been the case in Palestine.” And the root cause: the affront of Jews living in the Jewish homeland. Or in his words, “Israel’s long record of . . . implantation of settlers prior to and since its establishment as a state.”

To add to these assaults on language and moral reason is the third member, Chris Sidoti, whose record of advising the Palestinian Authority goes back to Yasir Arafat’s day.

To Peter Berkowitz, the rot in American institutions of higher learning exposed by Tuesday’s hearings resembles a disease that in its early stages was easy to cure but difficult to diagnose, and now is so advanced that it is easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. Recent analyses of these problems have now at last made it to the pages of the New York Times but are, he writes, “tardy by several decades,” and their suggested remedies woefully inadequate:

They fail to identify the chief problem. They ignore the principal obstacles to reform. They propose reforms that provide the equivalent of band-aids for gaping wounds and shattered limbs. And they overlook the mainstream media’s complicity in largely ignoring, downplaying, or dismissing repeated warnings extending back a quarter century and more—largely, but not exclusively, from conservatives—that our universities undermine the public interest by attacking free speech, eviscerating due process, and hollowing out and politicizing the curriculum.

The remedy, Berkowitz argues, would be turning universities into places that cultivate, encourage, and teach freedom of thought and speech. But doing so seems unlikely:

Having undermined respect for others and the art of listening by presiding over—or silently acquiescing in—the curtailment of dissenting speech for more than a generation, the current crop of administrators and professors seems ill-suited to fashion and implement free-speech training. Moreover, free speech is best learned not by didactic lectures and seminars but by practicing it in the reasoned consideration of competing ideas with those capable of challenging one’s assumptions and arguments. But where are the professors who can lead such conversations? Which faculty members remain capable of understanding their side of the argument because they understand the other side?