During the war against Islamic State, Iran-backed militias fought alongside the Iraqi army, while also terrorizing Iraqi Sunnis. Now these militias—known as the Popular Mobilization Units—have sought to integrate themselves into the country’s security forces while remaining loyal to Tehran. Yoni Ben Menachem comments on the new Iraqi prime minister’s continued failure to rein them in:

On June 25, 2020, Iraqi forces raided the Baghdad headquarters of the Hizballah Brigades, a militia loyal to Iran, and arrested fourteen operatives on suspicion of planning and carrying out rocket attacks on U.S. targets in Iraq, including on the American embassy in Baghdad and Iraqi army bases where U.S. troops are stationed. The raid also captured a workshop manufacturing . . . rockets.

The raid was ordered by Iraq’s Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi. . . . However, shortly after the raid, pro-Iranian militia members . . . began issuing threats, . . . and the fourteen [militants] arrested in the raid were swiftly released. As soon as they were freed, they went to the center of Baghdad to celebrate, where they trampled images of Prime Minister Kadhimi and set fire to Israeli and U.S. flags.

The obvious conclusion is that the release of the Hizballah Brigades operatives and the surrender of Prime Minister Kadhimi to the Popular Mobilization Units’ pressure indicate that the pro-Iranian militias can effectively veto any political decision they do not approve of. Kadhimi’s capitulation is [a] political mistake that [will] be very difficult to correct.

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.