Regard a Moscow conspiracy theory as a palate cleanser for your 2024 spookfest.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Here are two things that actually happened in our world.
In 2020, veterans of the U.S. intelligence establishment, including three former CIA chiefs and 48 others, deliberately lied about Russia being behind the Hunter Biden laptop.
At the time, Vladimir Putin, in his one statement on the matter, didn’t mention or recriminate over the U.S. false attribution to Russia. He did, however, echo a Biden campaign talking point that Hunter had done nothing wrong.
Flash forward. The closest thing to a Putin doppelganger, Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russia’s national security council, on April 3 equally falsely claimed the U.S. was behind the terrorist attack 12 days earlier on a Moscow concert hall.
In subsequent days, Russian investigators further adumbrated that the Ukrainian company Hunter worked for, Burisma, was suspected of financing the attack. The accusation was then repeated by Russia’s envoy to the U.N.
Possible (I would say likely) message from Russia’s president to Joe Biden: Don’t forget, I behaved conveniently vis a vis Hunter and Burisma last time you ran for the White House.
On April 18, using yet another diplomatic channel to get the signal out, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman specifically addressed the Burisma claim by name-checking Mr. Putin and his recommendation to wait for the investigation to be completed.
Don’t imagine the U.S. State Department fails to pick up on such messages. Picking up on such messages is its job.
Of course, both the U.S. laptop lie and the Russian lie about U.S. involvement in the Moscow attack are ridiculous. Contrary to the U.S. retired officials, the laptop had none of the “classic earmarks” of a Russian intelligence operations, in terms of means, motive and opportunity. The lesson of the two episodes, however, is a valuable one. We are likely on the cusp of a deluge of such claims in 2024.
In truth, Americans by now should be inured. The widely touted intelligence finding that Russia sought to elect Mr. Trump in 2016? It was the product of a handpicked interagency team led by Obama CIA Director John Brennan. Handpicking is what you do to assure a predetermined conclusion. If new reporting is correct, the prevailing agency view at the time was actually that Mr. Putin preferred Hillary Clinton as the predictable partner.
Ditto the assertion by Obama National Intelligence Director James Clapper that the 2016 Electoral College outcome was so close (77,000 votes in three states), that Russia must have pushed Mr. Trump over the top. This is a deliberate distortion. Mr. Clapper, of all people, knows the allegations of unsavory Trump-Russia ties that filled hours of airtime would have cost Mr. Trump many more votes than any Russian Facebook diddlings could possibly have gained him.
Until further notice, do not automatically trust U.S. intelligence claims.
Indeed, if Mr. Putin is such a capable meddler (he’s not), it follows that he intended to aid Mrs. Clinton by tarring Mr. Trump as the Kremlin favorite.
This at least is consistent with the testimony of the Obama intelligence team on March 20, 2017, that Russia’s “loudness”—its seeming desire to call attention to its meddling—was intentional.
It’s consistent with the findings of the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society that Russia’s real success was getting Americans to exaggerate Russia’s success.
It’s consistent with Trump critic and former national security aide Fiona Hill’s claim in the New York Times that while Russian diplomats falsely denied meddling in the 2016 race, they quite accurately noted that it was U.S. partisans who made mountains out of molehills.
The first person I heard suggest Putin trolls were getting aboard the Trump bandwagon was me, in August 2015, noting the curious tone of certain online comments (which of course is not proof).
I would have been an ignoramus not to know Russian intelligence is active on social media. The Internet Research Agency of the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, first of all, was a money-making operation. Mr. Trump was a click magnet. But neither Mr. Putin nor our intelligence officials kid themselves on a key point: Contributing to the torrent of anonymous social media memes is not one-millionth as effective as official disinformation spoken by credible sources and transmitted via the mainstream media. The idea of Mr. Trump, especially, engaging in complicated coordinated action, when he can change the media diet of the whole planet just by issuing a tweet, is impossibly jejune.
The lesson as the sheer volume of such throwaway disinformation likely reaches diluvian proportions this year? It’s the same lesson I drew for you in 2020 when the U.S. intelligence veterans issued their false statement on the Hunter laptop. That lesson in full: “I am sorry to say to some of my readers: If you’re so dumb as to lose all critical judgment every time you hear the word ‘Russians,’ somebody will take advantage of it.”
From all signs, you’re going to need this advice as the 2024 election heats up.
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A Chance for Congress to Stave Off Tyranny
The Insurrection Act is an invitation to presidential abuse. It needs reform now.
By William A. Galston
Before the end of the year, congressional Democrats and Republicans should come together to reform the Insurrection Act, which gives the president overbroad authority to deploy the U.S. military for domestic purposes.
Although called the Insurrection Act, it isn’t a single piece of legislation; rather, it is an amalgamation of related statutes that Congress enacted between the 1790s and 1870s. Congress has amended the legislation repeatedly, most notably in 1871 to empower the president to deal with Southern resistance to Reconstruction.
The act has three main provisions. The first, and least objectionable, gives the U.S. president the power to deploy troops if a state legislature requests federal support to quell an insurrection in the state, or the governor “if the legislature cannot be convened.” Although a president and closely allied governor could possibly collude to misuse this power, requiring the state to initiate the request limits the president’s authority.
Not so for the second and third sections, which greatly expanded the president’s authority to deploy troops, even without a state’s request or against its wishes. The second provision authorizes the president to call out the National Guard or regular military forces “whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, makes it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”
Similarly, the third key provision gives the president power to “take such measures he considers necessary” to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy” if it meets certain specifications.
This expansive language provides no role for the states or Congress. In Martin v. Mott (1827), the Supreme Court found no basis for judicial intervention either. As the court put it, the authority to deploy troops under the Insurrection Act “belongs exclusively to the President, and . . . his decision is conclusive upon all other persons.”
The central purpose of the Constitution is to prevent the excessive concentration of power in the hands of any single person or institution. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” By this standard, the Insurrection Act opens the door to tyranny.
We’ve been lucky that no president so far has abused this power. But our constitutional order doesn’t assume that our leaders will be virtuous. Indeed, it uses institutions and laws to hedge against the possibility that they won’t. Because the Insurrection Act ignores this possibility, Congress must reform it before our luck runs out.
A bipartisan panel convened by the American Law Institute has developed a blueprint for reform. Its recommendations include replacing antiquated language that lacks clear meaning in modern law, clarifying the conditions under which the president can invoke the act, imposing consultation and reporting requirements on the president, and establishing time limits.
The panel says a reformed Insurrection Act should “require the president to consult, prior to the deployment of troops, with the governor of any state into which troops will be deployed,” “require the president to make findings on the need to invoke the Insurrection Act, and to report these findings to Congress, along with a summary of consultations with state authorities, within 24 hours of deployment,” and “establish a time limit on the president’s authority to deploy troops.” The panel recommends a limit of no more than 30 days unless Congress explicitly authorizes an extension.
Some may argue that these reforms would still leave too much power in the president’s hands. But we shouldn’t forget that Congress had good reasons for creating the act, and it has at times proved a useful tool. If the president hadn’t been able to use military force without the consent of a state’s governor, President Dwight Eisenhower couldn’t have enforced school integration in Little Rock, Ark., against the vehement objections of Gov. Orval Faubus. Nor could Lyndon Johnson have done so in 1965 to protect civil-rights activists marching from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. Consultation and reporting requirements are as far as reforms can go without giving governors a veto over federal power.
The panel succeeded at striking a reasonable balance between justified presidential power and necessary restraints on that power. Now legislators should come together across party lines to turn the proposals into law.
This isn’t Mission Impossible. Even in our hyperpolarized times, passing bipartisan legislation is feasible, as we saw in 2022 with the reform of the Electoral Count Act and last week with the authorization of aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The reform of the Insurrection Act is within reach—if Congress gets to work right away.
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America’s New Mob Rule
As on today’s college campuses, the left increasingly resorts to fomenting disorder to get its way.
By The Editorial Board
The anti-Israel—and often anti-Semitic—protests sweeping college campuses these days are an old story with a new cause. That story is the increasing resort by America’s political left to protests in the streets as a form of intimidation and rule by the mob. When Americans on the political right do this, it’s called a threat to democracy.
For readers of a certain age, today’s protests at Columbia and other campuses echo 1968 and opposition to the Vietnam war. The kids even took over the same building at Columbia, Hamilton Hall. But the mass-protest method has become the political default for progressives when they lose the policy debate in Congress, the White House, the courts, or other institutions. They keep going to the barricades because it often gets them what they want.
The clearest example was the post-George Floyd riots of 2020. The left used that murder to trigger, and then condone, riots in numerous cities against what they claimed was widespread police abuse. Looting and vandalism were justified as social-justice rage.
Fearful of these protests, Democratic mayors and city councils around the country slashed police funding, eliminated cash bail, and stopped enforcing many crimes. Vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris tweeted support for a bail fund for protesters who were arrested in Minnesota. The Democratic convention in 2020 failed to condemn the rioting.
One result was an urban crime spree that broke out across the country, and cities from Philadelphia to San Francisco are still trying to recover. But in that election year the mob created the impression of disorder that probably hurt Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election. Political mission accomplished.
Post-Vietnam, a watershed of this mob method was the assault by the organized left against the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in 1999. The riots put the “antiglobalization” movement on the political map and, anticipating the protests, the Clinton Administration issued an executive order to include environmental reviews in trade deals.
The so-called “occupy” protests in 2011 included encampments in public places in numerous cities, including lower Manhattan. The goal was to focus on income inequality, and Democrats were again loath to push back and slow to clear public spaces. The “occupiers” succeeded in changing the debate inside the Democratic Party in favor of much higher taxes and income redistribution.
Now, in this election year, the student protesters are trying to change American Middle East policy. They may not know much about the region, its history, or even that Hamas’s charter calls for annihilating Jews. But they are swept up in the anti-colonialist, anti-Western, anti-American themes that now dominate so much university instruction. They are the intellectual children of Frantz Fanon.
They are also changing the political debate inside the Democratic Party. President Biden has shifted from the strong pro-Israel stand he took immediately after the Oct. 7 massacre. He now opposes the destruction of Hamas in its Rafah redoubt in Gaza. And he is publicly critical of Israel’s coalition wartime government. This accommodation will encourage the protesters to continue even once college exams are over and students return home. As in 1968, the Chicago convention will be a target.
All of this bodes ill for the country’s political future, not least if Mr. Trump wins in November. The protests are likely to be widespread and perhaps violent if the election is close. Democrats and the press keep warning about a repeat of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which was a disgrace and for which hundreds have been rightly punished. But the political left is more organized for mass protests and more likely to take to the streets.
Today’s campus eruptions may be aimed at U.S. policy in the Middle East, but they are a symptom of a larger trend toward street protest and law-breaking to achieve political goals. Political and other leaders have a duty to call this out and enforce public order, whether the violators are on the left or right.
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A Tale of Three Universities
Northwestern appeases its protesters. Florida enforces its rules. Columbia is a mess.
By The Editorial Board
A governance divide is emerging on college campuses, and the anti-Israel protests are putting it on stark display.
On Monday Northwestern University said it reached an “agreement” with the leaders of its anti-Israel encampment, which has sprawled across the campus lawn and onto Sheridan Road. In exchange for removing the tents, Northwestern will fund two visiting Palestinian faculty members for at least two years, scholarships for five Palestinian undergraduates and a safe space for Middle Eastern and North African Muslim students.
That’s not negotiation; it’s successful blackmail. Students for Justice in Palestine will encourage more of the same from protesters on other campuses if university leaders won’t enforce their own rules.
The University of Florida took a different approach. In a statement Monday evening, the school said protesters who engaged in prohibited activities would face a trespassing order and an “interim” suspension from the university. “This is not complicated,” a spokesman said. “The University of Florida is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children—they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences.”
That’s appropriate, and it’s also a life lesson. Florida’s message shows respect for a liberal education environment and students who attend college to learn something. Appeasement does the opposite.
At Columbia, meanwhile, President Minouche Shafik tried to negotiate with protesters to coax them to dismantle their Little Gaza, but students escalated instead. After faculty objected to New York police arrests of student protesters, Ms. Shafik said she wouldn’t invite law enforcement back on campus. On Monday night protesters rewarded her forbearance by breaking a window, taking over Hamilton Hall, and hanging an “Intifada” banner.
The university building was occupied by what one protest leader called an “autonomous subgroup” of Columbia Apartheid Divest, which has been organizing the anti-Israel demonstrations. Ms. Shafik had all but surrendered the campus. The Ivy League school has been barely serving students who pay more than $88,000 to attend, let alone making Jewish students feel safe.
Where is Columbia’s board of trustees? Missing in public action. They appointed Ms. Shafik, and they are the ultimate custodians of the institution. Don’t take the job if all you want is a resume stuffer and admission for your children. See the names of the board’s co-chairs and vice chairs nearby.
On Tuesday the school finally lost patience and invited in New York police to clear the encampment, climb into Hamilton Hall via a street-side window to dodge a blockade, and arrest the occupiers. The school said in a statement that “we believe that the group that broke into and occupied the building is led by individuals who are not affiliated with the University.” This is what happens when you let a dangerous situation fester so it can be exploited by professional leftists.
A spokesman said Tuesday Columbia will begin expelling students who didn’t leave Hamilton Hall, and it’s about time if the school really means it. Suspension isn’t enough for students who are harassing others, breaking rules or disrupting study on campus. Maybe Columbia can invite someone from Florida to show them how it’s done.
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The ‘Outside Agitators’ of Campus Protests
Police say some of the protesters at Columbia were chaos professionals.
By The Editorial Board
Universities across the U.S. are finally inviting police to clear out protesters violating school rules, but that’s not the end of this story. Recent days have shown that the protests aren’t merely bursts of student moral concern about Gaza. They’re often guided by professional leftist groups exploiting students to foment chaos and intimidate President Biden.
Wednesday, the New York Police Department peacefully extricated protesters who had barricaded themselves into Hamilton Hall at Columbia University as well as those at the City College of New York. Nearly 300 were arrested. More than 30 protesters have been arrested at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 35 at Cal State, 72 at Arizona State and 100 at Washington University in St. Louis.
Schools are doing the right thing when they call the police to reestablish order over unruly mobs. A robust free-speech policy doesn’t conflict with requiring students to follow campus policies or face consequences for actions that threaten Jewish classmates.
The key is having lines that are clear from the beginning and then enforcing them. In a letter this week, University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos wrote that free expression is a “core animating value,” and the school will act to protect “even expression of viewpoints that some find deeply offensive.” But a line is drawn against expression that “blocks the learning or expression of others” or “disrupts the functioning or safety of the University.”
Clear principles are critical because the protests aren’t likely to end soon. Protest networks are building and looking forward to a summer of love heading into the Democratic convention in Chicago in August. Organized leftist groups are now promoting and sometimes leading the protests as they did at Columbia, according to the NYPD and the school.
New York Mayor Eric Adams explained that the Columbia conflagration was fomented by “outside agitators” who have neither the students’ nor the university’s best interests at heart. “There were individuals on the campus who should not have been there,” the mayor said, noting that those who took over Hamilton Hall were “led by individuals not affiliated with the university,” some of whom were “professionals.”
Videos show protesters using tactics that aren’t known by your average English major. Video from UCLA shows protesters surrounding a Jewish girl knocked unconscious by other protesters. This is what happens when school presidents and other leaders let protests persist and grow. They are infiltrated by today’s professional class of left-wing chaos agents.
The pattern will continue until those in authority put it down, and the schools’ disciplinary process is more important here than any trespassing charges against students. Those joining the mob on the quad may cover their faces with keffiyehs to hide their identity from potential employers, but violating rules after a warning warrants expulsion, not merely slap-on-the-wrist suspensions.
White House Spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre has said that antisemitism on campus is unacceptable, but where is President Biden? His moral equivocation on Israel has the protesters thinking they can change his policies. The protests are a running campaign ad for Donald Trump.
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Biden Fails the Campus Protest Test
His fear of taking on the crazy left poses a real threat to his re-election chances.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Joe Biden has an unfailing ability to make a bad political situation worse. He’s doing it again with campus upheaval, potentially elevating the issue into an intraparty war and a re-election threat.
A coddled coterie of malcontents—initially centered at elite universities—spent April taking over buildings, shutting down classes, and hurling anti-Semitic slurs in the name of “pro-Palestinian” activism. Politically, the obvious response was always simple. Neither the masked mob, nor their cause, is remotely popular.
A CAPS/Harris survey finds 80% of Americans side with Israel against Hamas. Pollster Mark Penn told the Hill that figure has “not budged” since campus protests began. Seventy-eight percent say Hamas must be removed from running Gaza; 67% say Israel is trying to avoid casualties; a majority in every group 35 and up says a cease-fire should happen only after Hamas has released hostages and been removed from power. Few Americans feel a connection to indulged college students directing invectives at Jews and erecting “intifada halls.”
Most politicians got it and quickly condemned the agitators and the hate speech. Republicans and Donald Trump got it. Even many Democrats got it, including governors and mayors who’ve assisted in clearing encampments. But Mr. Biden? He initially felt obliged to pair his condemnation of antisemitism with a condemnation of “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians,” whatever that means. As the violence escalated, Mr. Biden finally, briefly and hastily on Thursday condemned the campus “chaos,” yet notably refused to make the moral case for his support of Israel and its war against terrorists—the policies sparking mob chants of “Genocide Joe has got to go.”
The muddled message flows from Mr. Biden’s fear of taking on his party’s small, loud and influential crazy left. That includes New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who bewailed police action at Columbia University as a “nightmare in the making,” and Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has doubled down on support of demonstrating students and accused the Jewish state of “ethnic cleansing.”
Mr. Biden usually has strength in numbers from a party that routinely genuflects to the left. This time, a healthy portion of Democrats were quick to sense the political danger of siding with petulant agitators, some of whom openly endorse Hamas. Mr. Biden’s continued failure to take a strong side has left each of them to forge his own path, encouraging what is now open warfare in his party and stoking the mob, while leaving him with a muddied position that earns him credit from no one.
Online, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (R., Fla.) recently took a shot at Mr. Sanders for being “quiet” on antisemitism, drawing an angry Twitter rebuke from AOC. Twenty-one congressional Democrats—including former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer—this week sent a letter demanding Columbia disband its encampment, which is a “breeding ground for anti-Semitic attacks.” The obvious question: Why only 21? New York Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday forcefully backed his police, who had cleared campuses. He called out the “outside agitators” working to “radicalize young people” and labeled “despicable” those who would replace American flags with Palestinian ones. He faced liberal jeers and catcalls.
The buzz is no longer about threats to Speaker Mike Johnson. Mr. Biden has instead given Republicans a rare issue on which to unite. That included the House passage on Wednesday, 320-91, of a bill that defines anti-Semitism for the purpose of Education Department decisions on university funding. The bill was introduced by Republican Mike Lawler and had 15 Democratic co-sponsors. The headlines are now about the 70 Democrats who voted no (along with 21 Republicans).
Evidence is mounting that campuses have been targeted by professional mob agitators, who sense White House weakness and are already gearing up to descend on Democrats’ Chicago convention in August. This recalls the party’s 1968 convention, the violence of which cemented a view of a lawless country under Democratic rule and aided Richard Nixon’s election victory. Mr. Biden used the 2020 George Floyd protests to great effect against Mr. Trump—both egging them on and reveling in the White House’s inability to restore order. Now who owns the chaos?
That’s the biggest threat brought on by Mr. Biden’s failure to defend his own policies forcefully. The president desperately wants the youth vote, but his tiptoeing is costing him the support of millions of Americans who are already disgusted by the wokeism of higher education, soaring tuition bills, and Mr. Biden’s student-loan gifts. Many have children or grandchildren at college who are being robbed of classes, finals and, potentially, graduation ceremonies.
Mr. Biden’s repeated failures to take a stand against his left’s worst instincts are directly related to his current abysmal approval ratings. It isn’t quite too late for him to step up as a leader, but it soon may be.
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Rules for Campus Radicals, 2024
A website reveals the planning and strategy behind the current college mayhem.
By The Editorial Board
The recent anti-Israel protests are often portrayed as a spontaneous uprising of student indignation against the Gaza war. But we’re learning that behind the young idealists is an organized movement of leftists who want to spread disorder and whose candid strategy is to defy school administrators and police to achieve their radical goals.
A window on this movement is CrimethInc.com, a website that has become a hub for anarchists, Antifa activists and radical leftists. In recent weeks it has published anonymous reports from around the country drawing lessons from various campus protests. They reveal the method behind the mayhem—and a plan to use violence and break the law.
“It’s clear that in order for this crisis to develop further, student occupations should take buildings whenever possible,” says an analysis of events at Cal Poly Humboldt. “We can wield the most power by occupying the spaces where classes are held and administrators have offices.”
A post-mortem on protests at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign notes that “encampment is escalation. Putting tents up on campus is against almost every campus policy. Refusing to take them down means refusing to listen to a ‘lawful command.’” In other words, breaking school policy and law isn’t an accident; it’s the point of the exercise.
“The basic premise of the encampment is already an escalation that the cops will meet with force,” the memo adds, so “organizers should not concern themselves with de-escalation or ‘remaining peaceful.’”
The Illinois memo advises students to “be prepared to escalate your actions in order to continue making it more expensive—whether materially, financially, or socially” for administrators “to remain complicit than to divest” their endowments from Israel.
This suggests the futility of negotiating with most protesters. University of Illinois administrators described in a campus-safety memo how police “officers made the decision to deescalate the situation and stepped back to reduce the risk of injury to themselves or the demonstrators” after protesters used “pieces of lumber as well as other physical tools and objects to push the officers back.”
The occupiers took this as a sign of “regime” retreat and a signal to escalate the protests. The CrimethInc analysis lauds these protesters for being “prepared to push and de-arrest as needed.” And it offers specific advice on useful tools for radicals: “Plywood, insulation board, lumber, scrap wood, metal sheeting, garbage cans, and water barrels can all be used as raw materials, and some can even be sourced from campus dumpsters.”
An analysis of the protests at Cal Poly Humboldt says “the pro-Palestinian movement must be a movement against the police.” One lesson from “the George Floyd Uprising” is that “it is best to come to all demonstrations with goggles, gas masks, laser pointers, and shields. You never know what a casual sleepover might become.” A dispatch from the University of Texas at Austin encourages protestors to “surround” and “force out the police.”
These protest guides reveal that universities are attracting professional demonstrators. “One experienced participant” at the Columbia protests describes looking fondly at the young students with “that manic, electric, slightly dazed look that I associate with participating for the first time in some sort of revolutionary upheaval.” It brought back memories of “our first protests and occupations” including “Occupy Wall Street, the George Floyd Rebellion.”
Ah, there’s nothing like the memory of your first time at the barricades.
The goal of these pros is to spread their knowledge to recruit and train another generation. As one memo puts it: The University of Illinois “encampment taught us: if you build it, they will defend it, they will learn from it, they will grow from it.” New York police say nearly half of the protesters arrested at Columbia and City College campuses weren’t students.
These radicals are also hiding behind students. The Columbia report praises “a new cross-pollination between campus life and protest activity,” saying that “to the extent to which the administration cannot distinguish between the student body as a whole and the protesters, everyone involved is safer.”
Everyone, that is, except students who want to attend class to get their degree, Jewish students, administrators, police and anyone who doesn’t yield to the mob.
All of this shows that the spreading protest movement isn’t a political accident. It’s part of a larger strategy of spreading disorder to force colleges and U.S. policy to bend to the left’s will and demands. As events this week at Columbia and UCLA show, trying to appease this law-breaking will encourage more of it.
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The Grim Arithmetic of a Just War
Gettysburg, Hiroshima, Gaza—great numbers of people must die before a conflict can be resolved.
By Lance Morrow
I was born in September 1939, the month Hitler marched into Poland. My earliest memories are of World War II. America’s men—including several of my uncles, all incredibly young—were called up and sent overseas. The home front had a wistful innocence, touched with fear. An emptiness. The long suspense.
Hiroshima broke the spell. I remember images of a mushroom cloud—something entirely new in the world—on the front pages of the Washington Post and the Evening Star. That terrible flash brought the end of the war. As the years passed, mixed feelings would settle in, the moral fallout.
Out of Europe emerged other images that lodged deep in the mind. These were scenes from the grainy, flickering films of the concentration camps, in which bulldozers pushed skeletal corpses into mass graves and the living dead in filthy striped pajamas hung on the wire, their eyes dark and staring and filled with unknowable horror. That was the American child’s first sight of evil.
Antisemitism, I thought, would have been impossible after that—or anyway far less likely in the world, in America. I believed that for years.
A child couldn’t begin to grasp the meanings of either Hiroshima or Auschwitz. But he felt their power, their primordial significance. As the years passed, he would think about them. He kept changing his mind about whether, morally speaking, Hiroshima and Auschwitz were to be considered opposites or, in their terrible consequences, twins.
He knew that Auschwitz and the rest of Hitler’s Final Solution were evil, beyond doubt or discussion: the ne plus ultra of evil, beneath which human wrong could not conceivably descend. Hiroshima was different. It involved the infliction of great death on innocent noncombatants. But was it, for that reason, a great evil? The paradox: Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki saved millions of American and Japanese lives that would have been lost if the U.S. had been obliged to invade the home islands. The journalist Evan Thomas, in his recent book “Road to Surrender,” has shown—decisively, I think—that the atomic bombs were necessary, because nothing less would have persuaded the fanatical Japanese high command to surrender.
Are we to think of Hiroshima, then, as a sort of good evil, an oxymoron? A necessary evil? A defensible evil?
It took two years for Abraham Lincoln to find Ulysses Grant, a commanding general who would fight despite the deaths he knew must come: who could “face the arithmetic” and accept the hard necessity of great death before the issue could be decided and the Union saved.
What’s the arithmetic in Gaza? Is the Israeli invasion in response to the Oct. 7 massacres a necessary evil? Or just an evil?
Arithmetic is bitter in that part of the world. In the Black September of 1970, Jordan’s King Hussein saved his Hashemite kingdom from Palestinian fedayeen by killing 25,000 of them. That was Yasser Arafat’s count; some said the figure was lower. In the 1980s, the Iran-Iraq war produced one million or two million casualties even as, nearby in Syria, Hafez al-Assad responded to a 1982 Muslim Brotherhood uprising by reducing much of the city of Hama to Carthaginian rubble. In three weeks, he killed tens of thousands of his own people. One account stated that Assad’s forces “combed the wreckage of the city for survivors, torturing and executing suspected members of the resistance.” Thomas Friedman of the New York Times coined the phrase “Hama Rules.” Assad’s son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, employs his father’s tactics against rebel enclaves, using nerve agents and chlorine, destroying hospitals, schools and markets.
Hamas operates by Hama Rules. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators don’t tell us how Israel should respond when assaulted thus. A cease-fire now wouldn’t be enough, in this view—if Israel had any decency, it would vanish from the face of the earth. Next morning, the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea would revert to the fig tree and the olive grove and the plashing of fountains: to the prelapsarian, pre-1948 never land of all-Palestinian Palestine. And all would be well. From the river to the sea, the land would be, in the Nazis’ wistful term, judenrein—cleansed of Jews.
In Gaza the cost in innocent Palestinian lives is high. The arithmetic is bitter indeed. But the grown-up world, if it still exists, must face it. Decent people grieve for the innocent Palestinians. They are victims of Hamas, of its evil leadership and deeds.
Demonstrators who call for the extinction of Israel and even for the killing of Jews are, at the very least, guilty of inexcusable naiveté about evil, terrorism and the darkness that, as experience teaches, may easily descend. They haven’t the knowledge of history or sense of tragedy to understand how horror—surreal and satanic—will suddenly evolve. It could happen here. Some of these people wish it would happen here. They promise that Oct. 7 will be repeated a thousand times.
That day, with its gleeful mutilations, its rampages, its rapes and beheadings, its baby-killing—such evil needs crushing, just as slavery needed crushing at Gettysburg, which was the turning point of the American Civil War. In three days, 50,000 men were killed or wounded there. Later, William Tecumseh Sherman’s march through the Southern heartland was more than a touch Carthaginian. A just war, no less than an unjust one, may involve tragic arithmetic.
Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism.”
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Why Won’t Biden Enforce Sanctions Against Iranian Oil?
His reversal of Trump’s policy has fed the Islamic Republic’s campaign of terror against the U.S.
By Brian Hook
Iran’s oil exports hit a six-year high last month. In a normal country, this wouldn’t be news. But the Islamic Republic isn’t a normal country.
The regime in Tehran is a violent theocracy under U.S. and international sanctions. President Trump reimposed energy sanctions on Iran in 2018 when he left the Iran nuclear deal. These sanctions remain in effect, but the Biden administration is failing to enforce them, which has created a financial windfall for Iranian terrorism.
Iran’s oil revenue underwrites a war machine that is tearing apart the Middle East. Oil proceeds finance militias in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain and Yemen. They target and kill American citizens. In January, Iranian proxies killed three American soldiers stationed in Jordan. Hezbollah receives $700 million a year from Tehran. Iran’s oil supported the Hamas death squads that carried out the Oct. 7 massacre. Among the 1,200 people murdered in Israel, at least 32 were American citizens.
The regime’s oil revenue also funds its nuclear program and missile arsenal. Its destructive capabilities were displayed last month when Iran fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel. This was the most recent oil-financed operation to destabilize the region; it won’t be the last.
It’s no coincidence that as Iran’s oil revenues soar, the Middle East is set further aflame. Many in the region say Iran is directly and indirectly responsible for the violence. They see Iran and its proxies on the march, emboldened and flush with money. The mullahs are willing to take new risks, as Israel faces threats on many fronts. With a “ring of fire” strategy, Tehran and its proxies aim to encircle Israel.
If the Biden administration is even trying to deter Iran, it is using the wrong tools. There have been meetings, payoffs and side deals—all with the goal of reaching an accommodation with Tehran. Even now, with the Middle East on the verge of a full-scale war, Mr. Biden is asking Iran to come back to the negotiating table to restart talks on a nuclear deal. Reportedly, he would lift economic sanctions in return.
Iran is now exporting an average of 1.56 million barrels a day of crude oil, most of it to China. This is a financial bonanza for Tehran, netting the regime up to $35 billion annually. That’s more than $100 billion in revenue since Mr. Biden took office in January 2021. Buoyed by these exports, Iran’s pace of economic growth surpassed that of the U.S. in 2023; the International Monetary Fund expects that to happen again in 2024.
The U.S. can reverse this trend. The Trump administration successfully reduced Iran’s exports, which fell from a 2018 high of 2.5 million barrels a day to a low of 70,000 in April 2020. This denied Tehran access to as much as $50 billion in annual revenue. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and I monitored the sanctions’ efficacy daily. Teams from across the federal government worked to track Iran’s illicit oil transfers and disrupt them in every region. Countries took notice, heeded our warnings, and found alternative energy sources.
As Iran’s exports nose-dived, we asked our Gulf partners to offset the loss of Iranian oil by increasing their production. The average annual price of Brent crude went down between 2018 and 2019. We balanced national security and economic objectives in a tight energy market. Today, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries has even more spare oil capacity. That gives Mr. Biden ample room to enforce the oil sanctions vigorously.
Skeptics have said our sanctions had little effect. That would be news to Iran’s then-President Hassan Rouhani, who complained in late 2019 that U.S. sanctions cost the regime as much as $200 billion. That year, Iran cut its military spending by 28%. Iran-backed militias across the Middle East told reporters that Tehran’s handouts had dried up.
Deterring Iran helped stabilize the Middle East between 2017 and 2021. During those years, we supported our friends and weakened our enemies, including Iran, financially and militarily. The Abraham Accords illustrate how bold initiatives for peace can flourish with the right Iran policy. Our Arab partners, along with Israel, welcomed maximum pressure on the Islamic Republic.
Now, as Iran’s coffers fill up again, that prospect of a new, peaceful Middle East is slipping away. Instead of reshaping the region for the better, America is back to playing by house rules. Mr. Biden has mismanaged deterrence, and compounded matters with a frenetic and aimless diplomacy in the region that is long on dialogue and short on results. If he doesn’t change course and impose hard costs on Iran, Iran’s aggression will expand apace.
Mr. Biden has the tools and authority at his disposal to undermine Iran’s projection of power. If he won’t do it, then Congress should force his hand. Restoring deterrence starts with enforcing the existing sanctions with the goal of zero oil exports for the top financier of terrorism in the Middle East.
Mr. Hook was director of the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department, 2017-18, and served as U.S. special representative for Iran, 2018-20.
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