Earlier this month, Beirut announced that it intends to default on billions of dollars in foreign-currency bonds. It is now seeking Western assistance for its burgeoning financial crisis, which will no doubt be worsened by the coronavirus. Tony Badran and Jonathan Schanzer contend that such relief would be a gift to Hizballah:

The Lebanese system is built on graft. Its political class is corrupt beyond redemption. And at the center of it all is the Iran-backed terrorist group Hizballah.

In February, the government, [dominated] by Hizballah and its allies, asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for technical assistance . . . to restructure the Lebanese banking sector, which holds a sizable chunk of the debt. . . . Yet the government so far has rejected the IMF’s conditions for assistance. This obstinacy stems mainly (though not only) from Hizballah. As Hizballah’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, put it, . . . “Lebanon must not fall under anybody’s trusteeship or hand over its financial and economic administration” to outside parties. To put it another way, if Lebanon opens the books, the IMF would see how Hizballah’s illicit finance has infected the entire economy.

Hizballah’s illicit finance . . . accounts for a significant source of foreign currency for the Lebanese economy. . . . Since [2011], U.S. sanctions have increasingly constrained Hezbollah’s ability to launder money through Lebanon’s banks, leading to a precipitous drop in the flow of foreign currency. The terrorist group initially tried to keep a lid on the crisis by pumping dollars from its reserves into the market while doing its best to continue paying employees across all of its operations, military or otherwise.

Offering Lebanon help with COVID-19 testing kits and other medical gear is one thing. But a bailout without structural reform will mean perpetuating Lebanon’s corrupt system, on which Hizballah’s criminal enterprise depends. Underwriting pro-Iranian political orders is not in the U.S. interest.

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.