Soon the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear two cases involving European charities that funnel donations to jihadist groups. The Biden administration has submitted a brief urging the justices to allow the lower-court rulings to stand, but Mike Pompeo urges them to do the opposite:

In these two new cases, the petitioners—54 American families who have been victims of foreign terrorism—have fought for sixteen years to reach a jury. . . . In the first case, a British bank reported suspicions of terrorist financing to UK regulators, who took no action, thus permitting the bank to continue providing financial services even after the charity in question was designated by the U.S. Treasury Department as a terrorist front. In the second, a French bank held accounts for CBSP, a French charity that the U.S. government found collected large sums that “it then transfers to sub-organizations of Hamas.”

Implicit in the Biden administration’s brief to the Supremes is that our courts should defer to other countries’ judgments instead of our own. This would set a horrendous precedent. Are we also to rely on such judgments made by the governments of Russia or China?

Terrorism derives a part of its power by encasing itself within a hall of mirrors. This complicates our reactions, which are difficult enough without [this] attempt to remove a core element of our countervailing response—the attainment of civil remedies against those who knowingly facilitate terrorism. This will cost precious lives.

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.