“Oct 7 2023”

Israel’s war teaches us what we should have done after September 11.

Rafah isn’t just the last stand for Hamas, but for an entire foreign policy establishment.

The desperate effort to keep Israeli soldiers from going into the last Gaza stronghold of the Islamic terrorist organization is about more than the sum of the geopolitical parts.

After nation building failed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and everywhere else it’s been tried, the radioactive ‘Palestinian’ nation building experiment from over 30 years ago is its last hope.

Protesters, particularly if they are students, have every right to demonstrate or otherwise express themselves on university campuses, even when the cause is idiotic or hateful, such as from the pro-Hamas left. But it is ludicrous to suggest that means students have an unlimited right to protest on any part of the campus they want, and in any form they choose. There is no right to camp on the quad, at least until — God help us — our activist Supreme Court says otherwise.

Universities should be bastions of truth, not politics

On both sides of America’s Palestine campus wars, you find people making historical parallels. The protestors present themselves as the heirs to the Vietnam peaceniks, proudly bearing what Noam Chomsky called “the responsibility of intellectuals” and comparing their own run-ins with the police to the Kent State massacre. Their opponents take a different view. “Will Columbia be remembered as Heidelberg?”, the chair of Yad Vashem went as far as to ask: does Columbia risk alienating its Jewish students and scholars for good, and declining in prestige as a result?

On to Berlin! There’s the battle cry, and rightly so. But our leaders are too busy editing delusional press releases, so history passes them by. Or rolls over them… and us.

In the National Post on May 13, Joe Roberts wrote, “The allies could never have won the Second World War by making clear they would stop short of Berlin.” He was drawing a historical analogy with Israel pressing into Rafah, seeking “complete and uncompromising” victory over Hamas. And while historical counterfactuals are as tricky as they are vital, we know all too well he was right.

The campus protests may be winding down, but don’t worry — now the really expensive and destructive phase begins: the litigation.

This warms my heart. But then, as a law professor, I’m basically in the business of selling law degrees.

The campus protesters, and to some degree the universities where they protested, seem to have thought that the law didn’t apply to their actions.