Thanks to some nasty comments President Trump made about her last week, the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar has received a fair amount of sympathy from the press, while her autobiography garnered an enthusiastic review in the New York Times. But Omar is used to fawning treatment not only from the news media but also from the world of entertainment, having appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone and the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. One hears less about her use of crude stereotypes about Jews, her apologetics for Iran, or her support for the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS)—or of the enthusiastic accolades she has won from such fellow anti-Semites as David Duke. Jonathan Tobin comments:

[Omar’s recent] New York Times Magazine interview demonstrates both her narcissism and the way she is allowed to get away with talking down to those she has subjected to hate. In it she claims to understand anti-Semitism better than her Jewish critics because her [supposed subjection] to Islamophobia have made her observations about prejudice particularly insightful.

The same theme permeates . . . many of her other public comments in the last two years: she defines herself as a victim of prejudice, saying those who try to call her to account for her threats to “burn down” American institutions are therefore anti-black, anti-Muslim, and anti-female. It’s a brilliant strategy that has so far worked perfectly. Omar has crossed so many red lines in less than one term in office, combining anti-Semitism with support for far-left causes. Yet she has become a mainstream-media favorite and idol of her party’s activist base.

In an era in which victimhood remains the coin of the realm, few have as much currency as Omar, who continues to pose as an oppressed, persecuted minority while becoming a national figure who can count on much of the chattering classes and, even more important, pop-culture influencers to applaud her.

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.