Harvard University recently put the campus Christian group Harvard College Faith and Action on “administrative probation” for pressuring a student to resign from the group’s leadership because she is in a lesbian relationship. Andrew T. Walker comments:

Harvard has now taken to disciplining a Christian student group—and not some radical fringe group, but the largest Christian group on campus—for the group’s expectation that its student leadership follow Christian ethical teachings on sexuality. . . .

Gone ought to be any pretense that universities such as Harvard are in any sense interested in diversity or tolerance. Secular campuses that traffic in diversity, and who worship at the altar of intersectionality, while singling out Christians for holding to Christian doctrine and then penalizing them for it, [are guilty of bald-faced] hypocrisy. And in this case, hypocrisy is the tribute that liberalism pays to vice.

But even on the relative scale of liberal hypocrisy, Harvard is a special case: the school was founded explicitly on Protestant, even Puritan faith and is now penalizing a group for holding to religious convictions that would have been identical to its founders’ views. All in the name of enforcing doctrinaire liberal politics. The shift is so radical that while just a few decades ago it took some courage to be openly gay at Harvard, these days it takes a great deal of courage to be openly Christian.

Sadly, the spectacle at Harvard is hardly unique.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.