Daniel Mael, a student at Brandeis University, recently found himself threatened with disciplinary action for reporting on another student’s tweets celebrating the murder of two New York City police officers. Two years earlier, he was charged with “bullying” for having written an article taking issue with critics of Israel. His experience, writes Abraham H. Miller, is symptomatic of the decline of free speech in American universities:

Before the creation of so-called speech and decency codes, a campus dean would have advised [Mael’s “victim”] to engage Mael in a public exchange, beginning, perhaps, with the student newspaper. Today, however, universities have become hypersensitive about students’ feelings. . . . To ensure students never experience the discomfort of having their ideas openly challenged, universities have instituted speech and decency codes. . . .

The codes require the establishment of an entire bureaucracy to monitor and enforce them. As prison guards need prisoners, the bureaucracy needs violators. To create a steady population of violators, the bar for offenses has to be continually lowered; new violations have to be created, and sometimes victims have to be sought out and taught they are victims.

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.