Donald Trump’s speech in the Saudi capital on Sunday was expected to be a definitive statement on the problem of Islamist terror and American relations with the Muslim world more broadly. While finding much to praise in the address, Elliott Abrams also finds much lacking:

Twice President Trump called Islamist terrorism and extremism an “ideology,” suggesting that he understands it to be a belief system. But he appeared to be arguing that military action alone would defeat it. It won’t: Islamist extremism is a terrible and dangerous idea, and it will not be defeated by military action alone. We need other, better ideas to battle against extremist ideas. To put it another way, Trump’s military approach would work if terrorists had dropped out of the sky like creatures in some action movie about the invasion of earth. But terrorists don’t descend upon us like that: they actually emerge from the societies whose leaders he was addressing.

Why? That is the great question that Trump buried. Why in the last several decades do Muslim societies produce brutal terrorist murderers? . . .

Trump also, though with reason, stayed completely away from the embarrassing fact that Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi Islam is at least a gateway drug for extremism. All around the world, Saudi money is being used to suppress indigenous forms of Islam. Saudi preachers, mosques, and schools teach that local and moderate versions of Islam are impure and must be replaced by the only true version: the Saudi Wahhabi version. But that version of Islam treats unbelievers with contempt and often hatred, oppresses women, and opposes democracy. It would have been impolite and in fact nasty for Trump to say this in public as a guest in Saudi Arabia, but one wonders what he said privately. . . .

Combating extremist ideology must start at home for the Saudis, and it is to be hoped that Trump told them so in his private sessions. Trump did use the word “reform” in his speech, and the word “justice,” but his main message about Muslim societies that are giving rise to terrorists was that we would not raise this question. He said: “We are not here to lecture—we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship. Instead, we are here to offer partnership based on shared interests and values.” What are those values? Equality for women? He did not say so with clarity. Liberty? Not mentioned. Religious freedom for non-Muslims? Hinted but not stated.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.