The Iranian regime appears to believe that student protesters share its goals. Indeed, why shouldn’t they?
Let’s be clear: The font from which instability in the Middle East flows today is Iran.
Iran had a role in the deadly work to which its proxies in Hamas committed themselves on October 7. “Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault,” the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. Iran has funded, supported, and directed the attacks on Western maritime and naval assets by another of its proxies, the Houthi terrorist sect in Yemen. Iran directed the network of Shiite militants under its command in Syria and Iraq to execute drone and missile strikes on U.S. positions throughout the region, culminating in the deaths of three American service personnel and the wounding of scores more.
Iran is the primary malefactor — the chaos agent threatening American strategic interests and drawing American blood. Observers of the region’s post-10/7 conflicts who recognize this dynamic have long intimation that the naïve Westerners glutting college campuses and harassing law-abiding civilians in the streets who blame Israel for defending itself against this onslaught are abetting, inadvertently or otherwise, Iran’s campaign of terror. This week, Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei came right out and said just that.
“Dear university students in the United States of America, this message is an expression of our empathy and solidarity with you,” Khamenei wrote in an open letter to America’s restive college youth. “As the page of history is turning, you are standing on the right side of it.”
Khamenei informally drafted these students into “a branch of the Resistance Front,” whose mission is to pressure the government into abandoning its permanent interests overseas. He brands the state of Israel an artificial construct attributable to the “capitalist Zionist network,” which “imported several thousand terrorists” into the Levant who then “formed a government in the usurped land of Palestine and called it Israel.”
“The global Zionist elite — who owns most US and European media corporations or influences them through funding and bribery,” the head of the world’s most reflexively antisemitic regime continued, as true to form as ever, “has labeled this courageous, humane resistance movement as ‘terrorism.’”
It’s not just the embittered students to whom Khamenei expressed his gratitude. “The support and solidarity of your professors is a significant and consequential development,” he wrote. On that, the ayatollah and his Western detractors would heartily agree. “This can offer some measure of comfort in the face of your government’s police brutality and the pressures it is exerting on you.”
“My advice to you is to become familiar with the Quran,” Khamenei closed. This could be interpreted as a friendly exhortation or a threat, depending on what you believe the scale of the theocratic regime’s ambitions to be.
If the Ayatollah’s letter is, as some have suggested, a clever ploy designed to delegitimize the anti-Israel protesters — whose methods include menacing the visibly Jewish, disrupting holiday celebrations and commemorations, and blocking major ports and thoroughfares — it seems the demonstrators don’t need Iran’s help. But it’s unlikely that the Iranian regime is playing multi-level chess here. The theocrats in Tehran have always been forthcoming in their support for terrorism and subversion. They do not disguise their goals: the destruction of the “Zionist entity,” the displacement and murder of its civilians, and, ultimately, “death to America.” The Iranian regime appears to believe that the student protesters share these goals. Indeed, why shouldn’t they?