Last week, a British court reversed a government decision to strip a woman of her citizenship on the grounds that she had joined Islamic State (IS). The decision throws into question one of London’s main strategies for dealing with those who have joined the terrorist group. Charlie Peters writes:

Those [Britons who went to Syria and Iraq to join IS and then] slipped through the net and made it back home have faced mandatory deradicalization programs, or—in the most extreme cases—constant surveillance. But this costly, ineffective strategy has prioritized the rights and freedoms of returning jihadists over the safety of innocent people. And the approach is now likely to face another test, as the 425 or so IS fighters and spouses who have returned are expected to be joined by their former twisted comrades, who have had their hopes of freedom in Britain bolstered by [the] recent high court ruling.

Optimism is certainly growing among those who have found themselves in limbo in detention camps after the collapse of IS. After their passports were canceled by Western governments, many of these former fighters have promoted the idea that they have repented their views and are ready to return to a peaceful life back home.

The testimony of soldier-turned-filmmaker Alan Duncan, who has released a documentary, What About Justice For Us?, calls into question the wisdom of allowing [these] Westerners to come home. Duncan spoke to a Norwegian IS spouse, who smirked while claiming that Yazidi women “weren’t sex slaves, they are slaves that you are allowed to have sex with.’” She also claimed that Islamic State brides had returned to smoking and other practices they dropped when they joined the terror group so that Westerners would not be suspicious of them.

Duncan [also] said he met a British-Bangladeshi woman in the al-Hol [detention camp in Syria] who stopped him as he was leaving the Western section. She told him that she believed in the caliphate, but in the meantime she was going to return to Britain and prepare for the next steps.

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.