Anti-Semitism at Harvard? Not since the days of President Lowell, you’d have thought. Not so, says the university’s new president, Lawrence Summers. Mr. Summers began the school year with a talk at Memorial Church, where according to a report in the Harvard Crimson by David Gellis, he said that certain developments on campus in the past year were “anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.” Among them he named a drive by some professors to have Harvard stop investing in Israel and sell existing investments in companies that do business there. He also cited plans by the Harvard Islamic Society to donate money to the Holy Land Foundation, which the U.S. government has called a front that funnels money to the Hamas terrorist organization. Mr. Summers, according to the Crimson’s report, said, “In my lifetime, anti-Semitism has been remote from my experience.…But today, I am less complacent.” He said that he has long been wary of those who raise the specter of anti-Semitism in response to any disagreement over Israel. But, the Crimson reported, he said such views “seem rather less alarmist in the world of today than they did a year ago.”

We share Mr. Summers’ wariness at crying anti-Semitism. But Saudi government dailies are running columns by senior figures claiming that “rabbis craftily hunt anyone walking alone, [tempting] him to enter their house of worship. Then they take his blood to use for baked goods for their holidays, as part of their ritual.” (A full translation is at Memri.org.) Israel is being asked to give up land to which it holds a historic and legal claim, in exchange for nothing other than the same time-worn and now demonstrably false promises to slow — not to cease but to slow — the murder of Jewish civilians. More of those Jewish civilians were murdered yesterday on a bus in Tel Aviv. Pictures of the bombing are on page one of today’s Sun. In this environment, it’s refreshingly welcome that Harvard’s president has the courage to tell the truth about what lurks behind the actions of Israel’s enemies in America.