This week, J Street—the American “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobbying group—held its annual conference, which featured among its speakers the Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas. In his address, Abbas emphasized the importance of revoking the 1987 Anti-Terrorism Act, which designates the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), of which he is the chairman, as a terrorist group. The blogger who writes under the name Elder of Ziyon sees no reason to change the law:

One of the proofs of the PLO’s terrorist nature [cited in the act’s text] is its 1968 charter, which says (among other things) that “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine, thus it is an overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase.” The 1968 PLO charter . . . is still in force. It is shown on PLO websites today without any caveat or indication that it has been superseded.

An analysis by Heba Baydoun [on the Arabic-language Palestinian news website] Maan last year looked at this exact question and concluded that the supposed vote to change the charter held in front of Bill Clinton in 1998 was all a show and had no legal force. . . . If you look at the list of official meetings of [of the PLO’s governing] council, it isn’t listed—it happened between the 21st (1996) and 22nd (2009) meetings. . . . Unlike official meetings, there was no opening session, no count of a quorum; many of the attendees who “voted” were not members of the council. . . . It was political theatre to fool the U.S. into thinking that the charter was changed. The show-of-hands vote was purely symbolic.

Moreover, if the charter had been amended and the offending terrorist sections removed, where is the new charter? It has never been published. Because it doesn’t exist.

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.