On Tuesday, Georgetown University’s law school hosted a talk by the Palestinian poet and writer Mohammed El-Kurd, who has been condemned by the Anti-Defamation League and many other groups for his vitriolic statements about Jews and Israel. On Tuesday morning, the dean of students, Mitch Bailin, met with a group of Jewish students who urged the school to cancel the event. Bailin’s response, writes Nate Hochman, demonstrates that the school leadership is “terrified of a small but vocal minority of students.”

The Palestinian activist and writer Mohammed El-Kurd has claimed that Israelis “harvest organs of the martyred” and “feed their warriors our own”; glorified the second intifada; called it “psychotic” to call for Palestinians to be peaceful; and expressed his “hope” that “every one of” the Israeli settlers “dies in the most torturous & slow ways,” and “that they see their mothers suffering (not that these conscienceless pigs would care).”

According to multiple students in the meeting, and a transcript of recorded audio provided to National Review, Dean Bailin defended the event on free-speech grounds, saying: “When we have a student organization that is intending to host a speaker, one of the first principles that we have is that there is a lot of latitude. . . . We allow a huge amount of latitude even where speech is deeply offensive to some members of the community, some or even many.”

The school’s commitment to “a huge amount of latitude even where speech is deeply offensive to some members of the community” seems to have strengthened since January, when Georgetown Law suspended Ilya Shapiro for a tweet criticizing the Biden administration’s use of racial preferences in Supreme Court nominations on the heels of an activist-led backlash. (Shapiro’s indefinite suspension, “pending an investigation” into his tweet, is now in its thirteenth week). But Georgetown Law has yet to respond to an inquiry about whether “the school’s free-speech guidelines have changed” since the Shapiro episode.

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.