Douglas Murray comments on the current climate at universities, where student protestors use aggressive and sometimes violent methods to silence speakers, and an individual’s opinions can be dismissed on the basis of his “privilege”:

For years, American and Canadian students have played around with a new form of morality in education. It is based not on a traditional concept of searching for truth or investigating and analyzing ideas, but rather on the concept that the veracity of an opinion can be discerned by the person uttering it. In this way, a considerable number of people have apparently decided that a variety of “privileges” exist that make some speakers vital to listen to and others unnecessary, unless they agree to mouth a set of pre-ordained platitudes. This concept, coupled with the idea that minorities require special protection from speech, has now finally delivered the moral breakdown that was always waiting for it. . . .

When you consistently break down a society along racial and sectarian lines for short-term political and personal gain, there is bound to be a group that must in the end lose out. That group may just turn out to be a minority as well.

Sure enough, [recently] some pamphlets turned up on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Like so many leaflets before them, these talked about the scourge of “privilege.” And who did these pamphlets identify as the people with the most privilege? Why, the Jews, of course. Or, as the pamphlets put it, “Ending white privilege . . . starts with ending Jewish privilege.”

As with the Occupy Wall Street movement a few years ago, which also ended up with anti-Semitism at its core, who could seriously not have seen that this would be where all this would end? At present, the people who preach tolerance in the United States and Canada are turning out to be the least tolerant. And the people who complain of discrimination turn out to be opening the door to practitioners of the oldest discrimination of all.

Robert Satloff has some harsh words for the U.S. government in this regard, words I take especially seriously because Satloff is someone inclined to political moderation. Why, he asks, have American diplomats failed to achieve anything in their endless rounds of talks in Doha and Cairo? Because

there is simply not enough pressure on Hamas to change course, accept a deal, and release the remaining October 7 hostages, stuck in nightmarish captivity. . . . In this environment, why should Hamas change course?

Publicly, the U.S. should bite the bullet and urge Israel to complete the main battle operations in Gaza—i.e., the Rafah operation—as swiftly and efficiently as possible. We should be assertively assisting with the humanitarian side of this.

Satloff had more to say about the hostages, especially the five American ones, in a speech he gave recently:

I am ashamed—ashamed of how we have allowed the story of the hostages to get lost in the noise of the war that followed their capture; ashamed of how we have permitted their release to be a bargaining chip in some larger political negotiation; ashamed of how we have failed to give them the respect and dignity and our wholehearted demand for Red Cross access and care and medicine that is our normal, usual demand for hostages.

If they were taken by Boko Haram, everyone would know their name. If they were taken by the Taliban, everyone would tie a yellow ribbon around a tree for them. If they were taken by Islamic State, kids would learn about them in school.

It is repugnant to see their freedom as just one item on the bargaining table with Hamas, as though they were chattel. These are Americans—and they deserve to be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.