In November, after the Islamic State attack in Paris, the U.S. secretary of state distinguished it from the attack the previous January on the magazine Charlie Hebdo. The more recent one, he said, was “absolutely indiscriminate,” while the older one at least had a “rationale.” He pointedly omitted any reference to the murderous jihadist assault, two days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, on the kosher supermarket in Paris. And now, writes Elliott Abrams, Kerry has done it again, with an official statement on the anniversary of the earlier attacks that mentions the targeting of journalists and cartoonists but says nothing about the targeting of Jews:

Kerry’s magic here: he made the Jews disappear. Once again he refers only to Charlie Hebdo and “journalists around the world.”

But on January 9, one year ago, four hostages at the kosher grocery were killed. They had been shopping before the Sabbath began, on a Friday afternoon.

It should not be too much for our secretary of state to take notice of them, too: people who became victims because they were Jews. The Paris attacks in January 2015 were not attacks against journalists and others; they were attacks on journalists and on Jews who were killed because they were Jews. That Kerry continues to make them disappear is disgraceful.

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.