In 2009, a former Italian president told reporters that his country had made an agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and another terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine: the terrorists would limit attacks to Israeli and Jewish targets in exchange for public support for the Palestinian cause. On Friday, an Italian newspaper published reports supporting his account, and specifically showing that Rome declined to act on advance knowledge of the 1982 assault on a synagogue in which a two-year-old boy was killed and 34 people wounded. Fiamma Nirenstein writes:

The implication is that there had been a political agreement between the former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti and Palestinian organizations, which had requested that they be given a free hand against Jews and Israelis on Italian soil in exchange for a vow not to assault “innocent” Italians (i.e., non-Jews).

Though such a promise meant nothing, as Palestinian terrorists hadn’t taken into account the identity of “innocent” Italians during their attack on Rome’s Fiumicino airport in 1973 (killing 34); the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro; or the 1985 twin attacks on the Rome and Vienna airports (killing nineteen). Nevertheless, it was clear that Jewish blood was still a bargaining chip.

During the year of the attack on the synagogue, the PLO chief Yasir Arafat addressed the Italian Chamber of Deputies armed with a pistol. Andreotti, the godfather of the parliament’s pro-Arab policy, had allowed him to do so; and only Giovanni Spadolini of Italy’s Republican party opposed the event.

In those years . . . an absolutist and unctuous policy made the Palestinian world—with all its anti-Semitic ferocity, dishonesty, and human-rights violations—an untouchable sacred cow not only in the eyes of Italy, but throughout Western Europe. Fear, along with the need for Arab oil, were the basic reasons.

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.