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 beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.