A group of Asian-American students are currently suing Harvard University for discrimination, claiming that the school has an unpublicized cap on the number of Asian Americans it will accept in any given year. Yet despite its commitment to political activism—including a boycott of Israel—the Association for Asian-American Studies (AAAS), has no intention of supporting the suit. Jonathan Marks comments:

Consider the AAAS’s 2018 conference theme: “Solidarity and Resistance: Toward Asian-American Commitment to Fierce Alliances.” As the organization’s president, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials explains, that theme flows out of the history of Asian-American Studies—a field brought to life by “student activists and faculty protestors” in the 1960s. But the left-wing politics that led the AAAS to endorse the boycott of Israel and to disregard anti-Semitism within the boycott movement also blinds its adherents to some forms of discrimination against Asian Americans.

Janelle Wong, a professor of American Studies and Asian-American Studies took to the Chronicle of Higher Education last week to complain about the situation at Harvard, which is being sued over its affirmative-action policies. . . . Professor Wong’s complaint is that, well, Asian-Americans are complaining. First, Wong argues, Asian-Americans are a much higher percentage of the student body at places like Harvard and Yale than they are of the U.S. population. . . .

In 1922, Harvard’s president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, sought to institute a Jewish quota. He had discovered that a major cause of anti-Semitism is the presence of Jews. . . . At the time, though, Jews constituted over 20 percent of Harvard’s student body and only around 3.5 percent of the U.S. population. According to Wong’s logic, they had nothing to complain about. Lowell didn’t get the quota he wanted, but new standards did put downward pressure on the troublingly high Jewish population in universities. . . .

How often does one see a person of the left, usually eager to make the leap from disparity to discrimination, mount a vociferous attack on those who acknowledge what appears to be an obvious case of discrimination? Jews see that sort of thing often, and many have stuck with the left nonetheless. Let’s hope Asian-Americans prove less inclined to shrug and let it pass.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.