During the past year, write Eitan Fischberger and Yosef Kuperwasser, both Tehran and Ankara have expanded their efforts to bring their views of the world to U.S. audiences—and these views tend to be anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic, anti-American, and deeply influenced by Islamism:

On June 18, the Center for Islam & Global Affairs (CIGA), housed at Turkey’s Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University, launched its second international conference on Palestine. This hate-filled extravaganza lasted for five days and featured lectures by Western professors and anti-Israel activists from around the world. . . . The host of the event was Sami Al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida who pleaded guilty in 2006 to assisting the U.S.-designated terror organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He was subsequently deported to Turkey.

Perhaps most worrying, however, is that eleven American professors spoke at the conference, nine of whom teach at public universities. . . . Some of these professors are highly influential among students, such as Lubna Qutami of UCLA, who founded the terror-supporting student organization Palestinian Youth Movement, and Rabab Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University, who attempted to host the convicted airplane hijacker Leila Khaled at an event for students.

If there is one takeaway from all this, it’s that there is a contingent of supposed peace activists, academics, and student groups that serve as an ideological backdoor for radical Middle Eastern extremism into the United States. . . . Iran, which has essentially adopted “Death to America” as its unofficial slogan since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, is all too eager to capitalize on this trend—as is Turkey, whose relationship with the U.S. has become increasingly adversarial over the last decade.

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.