The man who held four worshippers hostage in the synagogue in Colleyville, Texas was not a member of America’s large and diverse Muslim population, but a British subject who came to the U.S. to carry out an attack. And as Ed Husain notes, radical and violent understandings of Islam have a great deal of influence in the United Kingdom. Looking back through Islamic history, from Mohammad himself to the 17th-century Muslim emperor who built the Taj Mahal, Husain draws a contrast between a legacy of tolerance, respect for learning, and cultivation of the arts and what is preached in many British mosques today:

Britain’s first purpose-built mosque, erected in 1899 in [the London suburb of] Woking, was spearheaded and commissioned by Dr. Gottlieb Leitner, a Hungarian Jew. The female ruler of the Indian state of Bhopal, Shah Jahan Begum, after whom the mosque was later named, began financing the project in 1880. William Isaac Chambers, an English Christian gentleman, designed the mosque with the architectural flamboyance of earlier Mughal buildings in Delhi. Still standing in Surrey, the mosque was a gathering place for Muslims, and often their Jewish and Christian friends, for decades.

[Today], radical Islamist activists have a grip on more than 30 madrasas across the country. Each madrasa produces hundreds of imams for future leadership positions. I visited such institutions in Blackburn, [the hometown of the Colleyville hostage-taker], London, Bury, and Dewsbury. . . . [Their] radical, puritanical clericalism is on the rise across Great Britain.

What is more, these cleric-heavy ghettos, dominated by activists, are developing a loyalty to their increasingly radicalized community that is in opposition to any loyalty towards the country in which they live. They imagine “the Muslim community” and seek to represent it as a single, confrontational political bloc. For this reason, they find it hard to condemn causes of terrorism; . . . Palestine matters more than Preston or Peterborough. Loyalty to the nation-state is heresy. The hardline clerics and activists are busy bullying and silencing the individual Muslim citizen who aspires to healthy and patriotic civil participation.

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.