Last week’s congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism has generated mainstream attention on the corruption of the universities in general, and the fact that they are increasingly becoming breeding grounds for hatred of Jews. Yet, Heather Mac Donald fears that both universities and those who want to save them will draw the wrong conclusions, and simply call for administrators to suppress anti-Israel speech with the same zeal with which they persecute “microaggressions” and forbidden opinions. She writes:

The presidents’ refusal to declare hypothetical calls for the genocide of Jews punishable conduct has been portrayed as the greatest scandal of the hearing. It was not. The real scandal was the presidents’ duplicity in citing a “commitment to free expression” as the reason why they needed to give “wide berth to . . . views that are objectionable,” as [Harvard’s president Claudine] Gay put it.

It was those fantastically counterfactual assertions of loyalty to academic freedom that should have doomed [the University of Pennsylvania’s now-ousted Liz] Magill and the other two presidents. On any common understanding of truthfulness, their claims to protect “objectionable” views were flagrantly contrary to the facts. Having been exposed as hypocrites, dissemblers, and enforcers of politically correct thinking, they should all be fired as unfit to lead institutions ostensibly dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the transmission of knowledge.

Ironically, however, it was their one correct stance during the entire hearing debacle that put them in peril. . . . Speech should be protected unless it crosses the line into direct threats to individuals or incitement to imminent violence. Student parroting of Islamist slogans does not meet those tests.

Of course, even the presidents’ explanation for why they tolerate the pro-Hamas demonstrations is likely a lie. The real reason for their equivocation is fear of the campus left—or, in the case of the diversity bureaucrats who often took the lead in responding to the terror attacks, agreement with the campus left that anti-Israel terrorism is merely a matter of Palestinian self-defense.

Robert Clark explains why the resumption of hostilities is both just and necessary:

These latest Israeli strikes come after weeks of consistent Palestinian provocation; they have repeatedly broken the terms of the cease-fire which they claimed they were so desperate for. There have been numerous [unsuccessful] bus bombings near Tel Aviv and Palestinian-instigated clashes in the West Bank. Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in captivity.

In fact, Hamas and their Palestinian supporters . . . have always known that they can sit back, parade dead Israeli hostages live on social media, and receive hundreds of their own convicted terrorists and murderers back in return. They believed they could get away with the October 7 pogrom.

One hopes Hamas’s leaders will get the message. Meanwhile, many inside and outside Israel seem to believe that, by resuming the fighting, Jerusalem has given up on rescuing the remaining hostages. But, writes Ron Ben-Yishai, this assertion misunderstands the goals of the present campaign. “Experience within the IDF and Israeli intelligence,” Ben-Yishai writes, “has shown that such pressure is the most effective way to push Hamas toward flexibility.” He outlines two other aims:

The second objective was to signal to Hamas that Israel is not only targeting its military wing—the terror army that was the focus of previous phases of the war up until the last cease-fire—but also its governance structure. This was demonstrated by the targeted elimination of five senior officials from Hamas’s political and civilian administration. . . . The strikes also served as a message to mediators, particularly Egypt, that Israel opposes Hamas remaining in any governing or military capacity in post-war Gaza.

The third objective was to create intense military pressure, coordinated with the U.S., on all remaining elements of the Shiite “axis of resistance,” including Yemen’s Houthis, Hamas, and Iran.