Iran is Funding the Pro-Hamas Protests

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

Who is funding the pro-Hamas riots in major cities? The state sponsors of Hamas in Tehran.

After failing to mention it in previous briefings, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines finally issued a press release admitting that “Iranian government actors have sought to opportunistically take advantage of ongoing protests regarding the war in Gaza” by “posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.”

Haines, a veteran of the Obama and Biden administrations, then went out of her way to defend participants in the pro-Hamas movement even though they are working with America’s enemies.

“I know Americans who participate in protests are, in good faith, expressing their views on the conflict in Gaza,” she argued. “Americans who are being targeted by this Iranian campaign may not be aware that they are interacting with or receiving support from a foreign government.”

That problem could be easily addressed if Haines revealed the names that the Iranian campaign operates under and which pro-Hamas groups or individuals are benefiting from the money.

Especially since doing business with the Iranian government is illegal without special exemptions. If Americans are taking money from the Iranian government, they’re committing a crime. And if they don’t know the source of the money, shouldn’t the U.S. government warn them that they’re unintentionally breaking the law? So why is Haines still keeping quiet?

Iran’s support for the pro-Hamas movement is no secret. The terrorist regime in Tehran has declared its support for the terror riots and even sanctioned’ the Chief of the University of Florida Police Department and other law enforcement personnel for interfering with the terrorists.

“Dear university students in the United States of America, you are standing on the right side of history. You have now formed a branch of the Resistance Front,” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had declared, openly taking credit for the pro-Hamas movement.

The term “Resistance Front” is used to refer to Iran’s international network of terrorist groups including Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and others. (Iran doesn’t officially list Al Qaeda as part of this network, which does include other Sunni Muslim Brotherhood groups like Hamas, but the current leader of Al Qaeda is based out of Tehran.) By naming the Hamas protesters as part of the “Resistance Front”, Iran was including them alongside Hamas and Hezbollah, whose flags have been waved at the riots, as one of the terror fronts that it funds and controls.

During a terrorist conference, IRGC Chief Commander Hossein Salami, a leader of Iran’s international terrorist network, boasted that “the resistance is so grand, beautiful, and captivating that its attractions have penetrated even into the universities of the US.”

Iranian universities organized solidarity protests praising the Hamas encampments complete with chants of ‘Death to America!’ ‘Death to Israel!’ and ‘Death to the Jewish oppressors!’

An Iranian university offered free tuition for students protesting in support of Islamic terrorism.

Kayhan, a major Iranian regime newspaper, wrote that “every student from Harvard, MIT, Boston, Columbia, Emerson, Texas, and so forth has become an Iranian student” and celebrated, “this is what we call exporting the Islamic Revolution!”

Foad Izadi, a professor at Tehran University who is listed as affiliated with the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, boasted that the Hamas supporters on college campuses were “our people”.

“If tensions between America and Iran rise tomorrow or the day after, these are the peoples who will have to take to the streets to support Iran,” he told an interviewer. “Personally, I think that the potential to repeat in the U.S. what Iran did in Lebanon is much higher. Our Hizbullah-style groups in America are much larger than what we have in Lebanon.”

The Iranian regime has done everything possible to take responsibility for the Hamas riots. After months of it, the Biden administration has tentatively gotten around to admitting the obvious.

Why is the Biden administration covering up Iran’s role in the Hamas campus riots?

The protesters and rioters are almost universally members of the administration’s leftist political base. And the administration has gone to great lengths to defend them. Like Haines, Biden and Kamala both praised the Hamas rioters as being motivated by the best possible intentions.

The Hamas rioters “are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza,” Kamala recently told The Nation: an extremist magazine whose writers have championed the riots and denied Hamas atrocities. Kamala sounded like Iran’s Khamenei.

And the Biden administration has played a major role in enriching the Iranian regime.

Iran has benefited from tens of billions in sanctions relief. That money allowed it to build up allied terror groups like Hamas in Israel, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. The US Navy has been battling the Houthis for months on the high seas because of those billions.

The dozens of Americans killed in Israel by Hamas and others who may die in a war with Hezbollah can be attributed to the Biden administration’s extensive sanctions relief to Iran.

And it’s likely that the sanctions relief also freed up money used to interfere in our election.

In her Senate testimony, Haines implied that Iran was interfering in the coming elections. We already know that Iran interfered on behalf of the Democrats in the 2020 election.

The IRGC had previously engaged in a “cyber-enabled disinformation and threat campaign designed to influence the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election” through a false flag operation by Iranian operatives pretending to be conservatives sending emails to “tens of thousands of registered voters” in Florida that threatened them “with physical injury if they did not change their party affiliation and vote for President Trump.”

The Iranian operatives organizing and funding Hamas riots in America may be the same ones trying to swing the 2024 presidential election to the Biden-Harris ticket.

That’s why the Biden administration doesn’t want to talk about them.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.