On July 9, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines released a statement assessing that the Iranian regime is “providing financial support to [American] protesters” against the war in Gaza. The extensive network organizing the eruption of antisemitic and anti-American encampments across U.S. campuses is well documented. 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 United States. But will the Biden administration do it?
Before the fall semester begins, DNI Haines must be more specific about the extent of Iran’s covert operations. CIA director William Burns has drawn the roadmap, writing that “strategic declassification” of intelligence can “undercut rivals and rally allies.” Such declassification successfully derailed Russian president Vladimir Putin’s false-flag operations against Ukraine in 2022. And it’s high time that the Biden administration use just this strategy to ensure that American students understand they have become tools in the hands of one of the world’s most malign regimes.
Defenders of the antisemitic outpourings on elite campuses last spring insisted that the protest movement was wholly “organic” in nature. Far from it. Rather, the protests that emerged ostensibly to object to the war in Gaza quickly became antisemitic breeding grounds, backing U.S.-designated terror groups Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, and parroting Iran’s call for the elimination of the Jewish state. With the war in Gaza likely to continue into 2025, virulent Iran-backed antisemitism is primed to resurge once students are back on campus.
Pro-Palestinian protesters have already disrupted move-in day at Barnard College, and Columbia University Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) continues to actively organize demonstrations. The D.C.-area SJP chapter was involved in recruiting protesters against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, where demonstrators spray-painted “Hamas is coming” on a Union Station statue.
Even as the intelligence community and the FBI sound the alarm on Iran’s influence operations inside the United States, the Biden administration has downplayed the threat of Iranian financing. While President Biden has called out the antisemitism at campus protests, he admitted in his farewell speech at the Democratic National Convention, referring to anti-Israel demonstrations in the streets of Chicago, that he believes the protesters “have a point.” White House spokesman John Kirby, who acknowledged that Iran has been funding “some of the protest activity,” similarly maintained that “there’s a lot of organic concern.” If protests are, as they claim, truly “organic,” the Biden administration can authorize and build on strategic declassifications.
Certainly, many protesters are naïve students manipulated by a TikTok algorithm that disproportionally platforms pro-Palestinian content and inundates users’ feeds with antisemitic content. But neither Chinese TikTok nor Iranian financing constitutes an “organic” anti-Israel movement in the United States.
There’s already ample evidence that campus protests have been orchestrated by an opaque network of well-funded and coordinated “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. In light of these established facts, it is reasonable for Haines to be specific: Which U.S.-based organizations have received Iranian financing? Who are the Americans serving Iran’s intelligence services?
Pro-Palestinian organizations like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) are already on the defensive. CAIR, the same organization that suggested Israel was behind reporting that Iran had plotted to assassinate former President Trump, released a statement in response to the DNI, accusing her of empowering “anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim extremists.”
Congress is doing its best to force the intelligence community’s hand: A bipartisan group of 31 lawmakers led by Representative Josh Gottheimer (D., N.J.) sent a letter to Haines requesting a classified briefing on the Iranian threat. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees could go further and demand selective public disclosure of the classified intelligence related to Iranian financing of campus protests.
But strategic declassification should also be followed by action. 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.
There is still time to prepare the American public before the fall semester, and, thanks to Haines, we have the resources to do so. By declassifying select classified information, U.S. intelligence agencies can expose Tehran’s stoking the flames of antisemitism inside the U.S. and remind the American people that the protests coming soon to a university near you may well be funded by the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
Source » nationalreview