On Friday night, the Egyptian-born religious leader and terrorist mastermind Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh, died in an American prison. Andrew C. McCarthy, who led the prosecution of the sheikh for planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, reflects on his blood-soaked career:

Before there was an al-Qaeda or an Islamic State, there was the Blind Sheikh, known to his worldwide following as “the emir of jihad.” And he bears much of the responsibility—he would think of it as the credit—for what followed him. Indeed, Osama bin Laden credited Sheikh Abdel Rahman with the fatwa that approved the 9/11 jihadist attacks in which nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered. . . .

Abdel Rahman was [deeply influenced by such contemporaries as] the Shiite jihadist icon, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Notwithstanding their theological differences, Abdel Rahman, [a Sunni], perceived in Khomeini the possibilities of Islamic revolution and the exploitation of what he saw as American weakness—particularly by Hizballah, Khomeini’s forward jihadist militia that, among other atrocities, killed 241 U.S. Marines in their Beirut barracks in 1983. . . .

Abdel Rahman also revered Sayyid Qutb, his fellow Egyptian and a Muslim Brotherhood hero long imprisoned and eventually executed by the hated Nasser regime. . . . Qutb . . . infused his teaching with visceral anti-Semitism, portraying the Jew as the instantiation of all that is anti-Islamic and treacherous. Abdel Rahman drank deeply from this noxious well. [Indeed, he] became most notorious for issuing the fatwa relied upon by the jihadists who murdered the Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat at a military parade in 1981—for the unforgivable offense of making peace with Israel. . . .

[Abdel Rahman’s] acolytes included Sayyid Nosair, Mohamed Salameh, Mahmud Abuhalima, and Nidal Ayyad—to name just a few. . . . In 1990, Nosair murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane, the controversial founder of the Jewish Defense League, at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. On February 26, 1993, Salameh, Abuhalima, and Ayyad, along with Ramzi Yousef, carried out the bombing of the World Trade Center—a plot long in the making, much of which was planned during visits to Nosair at Attica prison in upstate New York.

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.