That the United Nations is institutionally hostile to the Jewish state is hardly news. Nor should it be surprising that a commission of inquiry established in the wake of the 2021 Gaza war by the UN Human Rights Council—one of the organization’s worst offenders in this regard—has devoted itself single-mindedly to compiling ill-founded accusations against Israel. But it is somewhat unexpected that a member of the commission, Miloon Kothari, declared forthrightly in an interview that he doubts whether Israel should be allowed into the United National at all, and then expressed his frustration at “social media controlled largely by . . . the Jewish lobby.” Anne Bayefsky, moreover, points to part of the interview that has received less attention:

Kothari revealed in his interview that the inquiry intends to act “well beyond just our reports,” and to that end, is now lobbying members of Congress. He made the startling admission that “we’ve had some communications even with congresspeople and senators in the United States” and that commission members were also planning to come to the United States for “about two weeks” to visit campuses and hold public meetings.

Lobbying is not in the inquiry’s UN mandate. . . . Moreover, UN commissions of inquiry on country-specific issues, like this one, are not allowed to waltz into the United States and conduct a lobbying and indoctrination tour.

But Washington has the means to retaliate, and Bayefsky urges it to:

• revoke any permission provided to members of the inquiry to travel anywhere outside the immediate vicinity of UN Headquarters and condition their entry into the United States on acting in conformity with their mandate and the UN Charter;

• withhold American taxpayer dollars from being used to support the inquiry and encourage allies to do the same;

• insist that the UN secretary-general issue a robust condemnation, and develop a plan for much stronger repercussions for relationships with the United Nations if the inquiry remains intact.

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.