On January 8, the Islamic Republic’s military fired two missiles at a Ukrainian airliner over Iranian airspace, killing everyone aboard. On Tuesday, the Canadian government released an official report on the incident, which caused the deaths of 55 of its citizens. The report makes repeated calls for “accountability,” but Terry Glavin doubts that those responsible will ever be held accountable.

The Iranian government, from the moment Flight PS752 . . . tumbled from the skies above Tehran in a ball of flame, until today, has been lying through its teeth about what happened.

For three full days following the event, the regime’s various official mouthpieces insisted that something must have gone wrong with the plane, that they had no idea what had happened, and only admitted to shooting down the plane when it became absolutely impossible to deny. And they’ve been covering up evidence and withholding evidence ever since. But what should anyone expect in the way of “accountability” from Khomeinist Iran?

Iranian airspace was left open and Iran’s skies were alive with civilian flights throughout the time that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was lobbing rockets at U.S. targets in Iraq in retaliation for Washington’s drone strike on the IRGC major-general Qassem Suleimani, commander of the IRGC’s terror-exporting Quds Force.

A recorded conversation between a Canadian victim’s relative and the Iranian senior investigator, Hassan Rezaeifar—a conversation that might be best described as a threatening phone call from the regime—contains what can only be understood as Rezaeifar’s candid admission that Iranian airspace was deliberately left open to conceal the IRGC’s retaliatory missile strikes on American targets. This would place the victims aboard Flight PS752 in the role of human shields. This was no human error.

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.