Last week, the White House released the official report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) about the death of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who was suffocated and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Although the report begins with the assessment that “Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman approved an operation . . . to capture or kill” Khashoggi, Bobby Ghosh argues that it doesn’t provide much new evidence for this claim:

The ODNI report pronounces the prince guilty by association, but any case based on the four-page document would summarily be tossed out of court. This suggests American intelligence agencies have unearthed nothing in two years that their Turkish counterparts had not already revealed two weeks after the murder.

The lack of fresh evidence may explain the Biden administration’s failure to impose any direct punishment on Mohammad bin Salman, the kingdom’s de-facto ruler. Instead, it has imposed a travel ban on 76 other Saudis. . . . Additionally, the Treasury Department announced measures against a former deputy Saudi intelligence chief and members of the rapid-intervention force of the royal guard.

Biden-administration officials and surrogates will claim that MBS doesn’t get off scot-free, since he has formally been named and shamed by the U.S. government. But in truth, the asterisk against the prince’s name was placed not by President Biden but by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—ironically, an enthusiastic jailer of journalists.

Far from being made a pariah, Mohammad bin Salman remains the top dog in Riyadh—with Biden wagging a disapproving finger from the direction of Washington.

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.