Surprise, Surprise: Iran Has Been Funding the Anti-Israel Protests

S ure, maybe the anti-Israel demonstrators who have spent the last nine months disrupting parades, blocking bridges and thoroughfares, imperiling air traffic, and laying violent siege to the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters have a few ideas “I absolutely reject,” Kamala Harris recently conceded. But they “are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. I understand the emotion behind it.”

That sympathy for the protesters’ motives if not their means has been a feature of the Biden administration’s schizophrenic approach to the challenge presented by pro-Hamas demonstrations for months. But if Harris understands the “emotion behind” the anti-Israel convulsions on America’s streets and college campuses, she doesn’t seem to understand the money behind them. Fortunately, America’s intelligence community does. And according to it, the movement to which the Biden administration has wasted so much political capital genuflecting is funded, at least in part, by Iran.

A release published Tuesday by the director of the Office of National Intelligence (ODNI), Avril Haines, disclosed the conclusion shared by Western intelligence officials that “actors tied to Iran’s government” are “providing financial support to protesters” aligned against the administration’s policy of supporting Israel’s defensive war in the Gaza Strip. Iranian agents are alleged to have posed “as activists online” and sought to “encourage protests.” While Haines declined to indict every individual participant in these demonstrations, much less the act of protest itself, she wrote that “it is also important to warn of foreign actors who seek to exploit our debate for their own purposes.” After all, activists at the grassroots level “may not be aware that they are interacting with or receiving support from a foreign government.”

Probably not, but that charity should not be extended to the president, the vice president, or the members of the administration who uncovered and exposed this intelligence. Regardless of how long intelligence officials were aware of the material connections between Iran and the demonstrations — and they surely knew before ODNI’s press release, given the sensitivity of its discovery — it is intuitive that Iran would seek to support outside interests agitating on behalf of its own proxy forces. And yet, fueled by existential apprehension over the polls and surrounded by too-online staffers with a soft spot for far-Left radicalism in whatever form it takes, the Biden White House aggressively pandered to this meager, deeply unpopular constituency.

Since October 7, Biden has sought to repair the rift with the activist left that his White House’s backing for Israel opened up by threatening to sanction the Israel Defense Forces, withholding critical ordnance from Jerusalem, withdrawing U.S.-backed diplomatic support for Israel at the United Nations, accusing Israel of attempting to “provoke Hezbollah” to “create a pretext for war,” and expending vast sums on a failed engineering project, the sole purpose of which was to shame Israel for supposedly failing to disburse sufficient aid to Gazan civilians. The belligerency of the anti-Israel demonstrators inspired these self-defeating policies as much as any Democratic constituency in must-win Michigan.

It wasn’t until late April that the administration began to confront the outright antisemitism on routine display at these events. But prior to that turn, the White House did its best to avoid confrontation with the radicals — even going so far as to maintain a wide berth from most campus commencements. Previously, the Biden administration reflexively coupled condemnations of antisemitic harassment with a perfunctory nod toward the supposed crisis of Islamophobia. That caution cannot be attributed to the president’s staffers alone. “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” Biden told reporters at an Earth Day event. “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” We could surmise that the impulse to establish moral equivalencies between Israel and its tormentors, the protesters and the targets of their harassment, was a sop to anti-Israel activists. Now we know that it also advanced the interests of America’s enemies.

The Biden administration and its allies should not evade culpability for even unwittingly aiding a hostile foreign power. No such allowances were provided to Republicans, prominent officeholders and rank-and-file voters alike, for allegedly promoting the Kremlin’s interests. In the wake of the 2016 election, congressional Democrats embarked on an effort to implicate Republican voters as unwitting dupes who helped Moscow steal a presidential election . . . with memes. “Buff Bernie,” “Killery Rotten Clinton,” and an image of Satan and Jesus arm wrestling over the fate of the Republic were seriously alleged to have altered the course of American history.

“What we’re talking about is a major foreign power with the sophistication and ability to involve themselves in a presidential election and sow conflict and discontent all over this country,” the late senator Dianne Feinstein mourned to the approval of her side of the aisle. Democrats were correct that Russian information and intelligence operations designed to penetrate “media organizations, lobbying firms, political parties, and governments” represented a threat. They were even justified to note that the political objective Moscow sought was the election of Trump. But the frenzy that ensued around that revelation contrasts unfavorably with the utter disinterest ODNI’s discovery has produced.

Today, the White House wants credit for what Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre touted as its ongoing efforts to expose “Iran and any other foreign actor that seeks to conduct these influence activities.” But the operation Haines revealed suggests that the president’s party has been influenced by and even amended U.S. foreign policy in deference to a movement that was, to one degree or another, supported by an avowed enemy of the United States with American blood on its hands. That is a scandal. Perhaps we’ll have to wait until November 6 before the press recognizes it as one.