In the wake of the terrorist attack last week in London, the British parliamentarian Michael Gove writes (free registration required):

In choosing their targets, terrorists are making a statement. Whether it’s the Christmas market in Berlin or the Jewish museum in Brussels, the site of an atrocity is never an accident. And the decision on Wednesday to attack Westminster, and in particular to target an unarmed police officer, was an assault on institutions and values that embody special virtues. . . .

Britain’s history may have its shameful episodes and our present state may be far from perfect, but parliamentary democracy is our greatest gift to the world. The principle that our conflicts should be settled by debate, that rules govern how we disagree, that opposition to the government is nevertheless always loyal, that all authority derives from the people and power is transferred peacefully whenever the people decree is a very special inheritance.

For terrorists and totalitarians, and especially for Islamist fundamentalists, our democracy is a blasphemy and a crime. Power for them derives from being a member of an elect, whether racial, religious, or ideological, rather than being elected and accountable to the people. Laws are matters of fiat, enforced by savagery, rather than by agreements which help cement civilization. That is why the most extreme Islamist organizations declare that the very act of voting is haram—unlawful, impious, and forbidden. And that is also why our democratic creed that every single voter, whatever his birth, background, or belief, is of equal value—is so precious.

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.