Pope Francis wasnt so progressive, Harvard slow on Jew-hate and other commentary

“Apparently, Pope Francis’s return to the arms of his Creator could no longer be postponed,” observes National Review’s Jim Geraghty following the pontiff’s death Monday.His passing was “simultaneously expected and a surprise.” Indeed, “when you have an octogenarian pope, people are always going to fear that death is imminent.”Francis likely “will be widely remembered as a man whom the US media desperately wanted to be a progressive ‘Buddy Christ.’ ”Again and again, comments he made were “interpreted” as endorsements of lefty policies and “later walked back by the Vatican” as it “insisted the remarks had been misinterpreted or mistranslated.”In fact, “Francis was not nearly as progressive as his cheerleaders on the left wanted to believe he was.”“It’s said that timing is everything,” snarks J.T.Young at the Wall Street Journal about Harvard’s response to the suspension of federal funding by the Trump administration over its “failures to address antisemitism.”In side-stepping Harvard’s many incidents of Jew-hatred, President Alan Garber claimed “We do not take lightly our moral duty to fight antisemitism.”Yet it was only in January that Harvard settled two lawsuits accusing the school of tolerating just that.And while it took Harvard more than a year to address antisemitic incidents on campus, “it took only days for Harvard to decide it had a moral duty to reject the Trump administration’s conditions for billions of dollars in federal funding.”If only this fight had “inspired the same sense of urgency.”The United Kingdom’s “time-honored, liberty-enhancing principles are being supplanted by state authoritarianism,” warns Andrew Doyle at The Washington Post.In Britain, “police are making at least 12,000 arrests per year” based mostly on “offensive social media posts” — which is “profoundly troubling.”A “draconian” law in Scotland “empowers the state to prosecute citizens ...