When Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who hoped to play a leading role in the post-Saddam Hussein order, died earlier this week. Some took the occasion to blame him once more for the failures of the Iraq war, which he had enthusiastically advocated. Sharing personal reflections, Ira Stoll argues that these accusations are, at the very least, overblown:

Educated at MIT and at the University of Chicago, Chalabi yearned to bring to the Middle East the freedom, democracy, and rule of law that he enjoyed as a student in America. . . . A Shiite Muslim, Chalabi was remarkably comfortable with American Jews. . . . I first met Chalabi in the mid-1990s as the Washington correspondent of the Forward, a Jewish newspaper. A series of memorable lunches and dinners at London and New York ensued. Chalabi’s personal example disproved the claim from some extremists on the right that all Arabs or all Muslims were violent haters of Jews, of Israel, or of America. . . .

To me, Chalabi was Iraq’s Samuel Adams, its revolutionary leader who inspired, agitated, persuaded, and persevered in the face of overwhelming odds and when others lost hope.

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.