In 2006, Harvard’s faculty passed a no-confidence motion, leading its then-president Larry Summers to step down. Summers had found himself in trouble after violating various tenets of political correctness. Ruth R. Wisse, then a professor at the school, recalls that Summers, in addition to his primary transgressions, had also given a speech condemning the movement to boycott Israel. Revisiting the controversy in light of Havard’s more recent troubles, she writes:

At the next faculty meeting, Lorand Matory, professor of anthropology and Afro-American studies and himself African American, accused Summers of using his presidential authority to stifle free expression by casting “criticism of Israel” as anti-Semitism. He was backed up by colleagues in an ambush so well prepared that though the press was excluded from faculty meetings, the next day’s Boston Globe featured Matory’s charge on its front page. It had gone international by the following August when Judith Butler, gender-studies scholar and one of the original BDS petitioners at Berkeley, published an attack on Summers in the London Review of Books titled, “No, it’s not anti-Semitic.” She called his remarks personally hurtful to her, with “a chilling effect on political discourse.” The president’s rare courage in challenging anti-Semites was slandered as an attack on free speech, just as Israel was pilloried when it successfully practiced self-defense.

I was mocked at the time for saying that anti-Semitism was one of the catalysts in Summers’s ouster, but no one would doubt its prominence in the fate of President Gay.

The American activist left had lacked a proper ideological target since the Vietnam War. . . . There came Palestinian students in the form of the victimized Arabs to give grievance coalitions the most familiar of all targets in this intriguing new guise. Anti-Semitism trumps all other ideologies in being entirely anti, a wholly negative campaign against a people with no incentive to counterattack those from whom it seeks acceptance. It sprouted like weed.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.