As European countries struggle to absorb the flood of migrants from the war-torn Middle East, Joel Golovensky asks why wealthy Arab countries aren’t opening their doors—and sees similarities with the same countries’ past refusal to absorb or settle Palestinian refugees:

While hundreds of millions of refugees all over the world have been successfully resettled and integrated into their new worlds, the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of these Palestinian refugees have been cynically kept hostages to hate and to the blind rejection of the reality their own leaders imposed. These same wealthy Arab states also renege on their pledges to support the Palestinian Authority operating budget, shifting yet another Arab obligation onto the shoulders of Europe and the U.S.

Why do world leaders not demand that these rich Arab states take care of their own brother Arabs and fellow Muslims? . . . Why are these Arab refugees, running from Arab hostility and Arab cruelty, a European responsibility?

It seems to me that this is a manifestation of raw racism. . . . It’s as if the world does not hold Arabs to accepted norms of human compassion, empathy, and moral obligation. It’s as if the world does not expect Muslim Arabs to care about their own brothers and sisters. No one dares mention their obligations and their naked repudiation of responsibility. Is the underlying premise that they are somehow different or inferior, or that their culture and code of conduct cannot be judged by Western standards? Do we implicitly discredit their culture and unthinkingly excuse them from humanitarian and international responsibility?

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.