In 2016, Allyn Gibson, a member of the family that owns an off-campus bakery and convenience store, followed and tried to stop a student from nearby Oberlin College with a fake ID who had shoplifted two bottles of wine. The student, joined by two others, proceeded to beat Gibson severely until the police arrived and arrested all three. As the students were black, charges of racism—belied by all available evidence—immediately surfaced on campus against both the police and the bakery. School administrators then incited a mob of students against the business—founded by the Gibson family in 1895—and ceased the college’s own purchases of its products, encouraging others to do the same.

Abraham Socher, a professor emeritus at Oberlin, takes a careful look at the entire shameful saga—which recently resulted in a court’s ordering the school to pay Gibson’s Bakery over $30 million—and the appalling conduct of Oberlin’s administrators in this and other instances:

In court, Dean of Students and Vice-President Meredith Raimondo and other key players in the Oberlin administration were shown to have actively supported two days of student protests against Gibson’s after the arrests, and to have cursed and derided the Gibson family and its supporters in emails and texts—“idiots” was among the milder epithets. [Later on], the director of Oberlin’s Multicultural Resource Center and interim assistant dean of students, Antoinette Myers, texted her supervisor, Dean Raimondo, . . . “I hope we rain fire and brimstone on that store.”

By the time Myers sent that text, one could say that the fire and brimstone were already underway. They began when a few hundred students gathered in front of the store the day after the initial incident to demonstrate:

The protest did not take place on campus, but Dean Raimondo was on hand. Indeed, emails show her calling a staff meeting to prepare for it early that morning. Raimondo and the college maintain that she was merely there to “support” the students in the value-neutral sense of that word. However, accounts of her actions at the rally by several witnesses do not paint the picture of a neutral bureaucrat-observer. . . . Jason Hawk, editor of the Oberlin News-Tribune. . . . testified that he saw her addressing the crowd with a bullhorn to tell them there was free pizza and soda for them provided by the college in the Music Conservatory building across the street.

Socher goes on to connect this episode to a previous scandal, involving an African American assistant professor named Joy Karega, whose habit of advertising grotesque and fanciful anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on her Facebook page was exposed just when a radical black student group was demanding that she be instantly granted tenure:

Meredith Raimondo had been appointed vice-president and dean of students in the midst of the Karega controversy with the specific mandate to “address campus climate, including . . . items identified as high-priority” by [the same student group]. When the Gibson’s protests began, Karega’s fate was still officially undecided. But, as Raimondo must have known, and the students did not, the board of trustees was going to announce her dismissal in just a few days. There was thus something fortuitous in the distraction provided by this new crisis. . . . Indeed, as it turned out, the response to Karega’s final dismissal the following week was surprisingly muted. Oberlin, one might conjecture, is Machiavellian in that which is politically correct.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”