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How Much Support Is Iran Giving to Campus Protesters?

(National Review) Danielle Pletka and Stephen Ailinger - On July 9, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines assessed that the Iranian regime is "providing financial support to [American] protesters" against the war in Gaza. Haines's statement is a bleak warning about Iran's ability to manipulate American civil society and underscores the imperative to declassify intelligence about Iran's influence operations in the U.S. CIA director William Burns has written that "strategic declassification" of intelligence can "undercut rivals and rally allies." Defenders of the antisemitic outpourings on elite campuses last spring insisted that the protest movement was wholly "organic" in nature. Far from it. The protests quickly became antisemitic breeding grounds, backing U.S.-designated terror groups Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hizbullah, and parroting Iran's call for the elimination of the Jewish state. There's already ample evidence that campus protests have been orchestrated by an opaque network of well-funded "anti-Zionist" - read antisemitic - actors, many with ties to Arab states and terrorist organizations. There is also a long history of U.S.-based "pro-Palestine" nonprofits with ties to Iran-backed terrorist groups. If the intelligence community identifies individuals or nonprofit organizations that have received Iranian funding to support campus protests, the Department of Justice should follow with indictments. Danielle Pletka is a distinguished senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where Stephen Ailinger is a government-relations associate in foreign and defense policy.
2024-08-29 00:00:00
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