Iran’s revolutionary guard, coming soon to universities?

According to an article by National Review, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders are speaking at colleges abroad. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

If your son or daughter told you that a terrorist organisation just gave a lecture at their college, would you believe them? Far from a hypothetical scenario, this question confronted parents of students at British universities after a recent expośe revealed that eight Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leaders spoke at multiple UK campuses since 2020 in talks arranged by an Islamic student association.

According to the Jewish Chronicle, IRGC leaders spread antisemitic propaganda, which we have come to expect from the Iranian government.

They said that the Holocaust was fake, that Jews “created homosexuality,” and that the “era of the Jews” would soon end. Speakers also urged audiences “to join ‘the beautiful list of soldiers’ who would fight and kill Jews in a coming apocalyptic war.”

Though an ocean separates the UK from the US, it’s only a matter of time before the IRGC reaches American campuses as well, albeit likely through a computer screen. In fact, members of Iranian-backed US-designated terror organisations, as well as the regime itself, already enjoy open, effectively unfettered access to American youth across the country through local student groups and university departments, which host the organisations under the protections provided by “free expression” and “academic pursuit.” If

this long-simmering phenomenon is not confronted by US authorities soon, America’s next generation of leaders could be radicalised by terror proxies of one of its staunchest opponents on the world stage.

A prime example of this trend comes courtesy of Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical youth organisation with chapters around the US. It recruited two inflammatory figures to speak at events: Khader Adnan, the now-deceased spokesperson of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and Rasmea Odeh, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who was convicted for killing two Israeli students in a supermarket bombing in 1969.

On two occasions, in 2020 and 2021, a publicly funded San Francisco State University (SFSU) department attempted to host a convicted PFLP airplane hijacker for an online conference. Thankfully, multiple tech platforms stopped the event from taking place, but only after SFSU leadership refused calls to block it.

The same SFSU department organised a hybrid event in Lebanon in September 2022, where the department’s director spoke on panels with a co-founder of the PFLP and Sami al-Arian, a former professor from Florida who was convicted for assisting PIJ and deported to Türkiye.

It’s not just Iran-backed terrorist groups that are moulding the minds of susceptible young Americans. So is the regime itself, as seen in 2020, when two online “sister events,” live-streamed out of Gaza and Tehran and watched by student groups across the West, featured particularly notable speakers: PIJ leader Ziyad al-Nakhalah, Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of the Iranian parliament.

The Islamic Republic’s influence on campus extends to faculty as well. In a watchdog report in 2023, United Against a Nuclear Iran revealed that five American universities are working on “technical research” with Iranian entities sanctioned by the US.

Relatedly, the Alavi Foundation, a New York–based charity purportedly controlled by the Iranian government, installed pro-regime professors and curricula at 41 American universities as of 2017.

A professor at Oberlin College and formerly Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations is said to be among diplomats who “played a critical role in denying and disseminating misinformation about the prison massacres of 1988, as part of a global cover-up of the mass killings orchestrated by the Iranian authorities.” The professor has also called for Israel’s destruction and defended terrorism.

It is profoundly disturbing that these actors feel comfortable enough to openly associate with illegal entities and actively broadcast terrorist propaganda into the hearts and minds of young Americans with little fear of repercussions.

Disseminating terrorist content is illegal in all other contexts, whether in-person gatherings, the distribution of terrorist paraphernalia, or the posting of such content online — so why do the guardrails disappear when it comes to how, or by whom, our future leaders are influenced?

University administrators can’t be trusted to address the problem. If the US hopes to mitigate this phenomenon in any way, American officials must understand that it is insufficient to simply designate a terrorist organisation as such and then hope it magically disappears from American public life. The above examples demonstrate as much.

Supplemental measures must be put in place to actively stymie these groups’ ability to exploit the freedoms offered by academic establishments in pursuit of their foreign agendas, whether it’s Palestinian terror groups or potentially the IRGC and representatives of the Iranian government.

Although the executive branch is primed to deal with such matters, the chances of any tangible steps being implemented by the Biden administration are slim as it desperately slogs ever closer to another disastrous nuclear deal with Iran. This leaves Congress as likely the only federal body that can thwart Iran’s infiltration into US campuses.

In August 2022, the Washington Free Beacon reported that the Republican Study Committee (RSC) said that it would initiate an oversight investigation into universities to root out pro-Iranian propaganda.

As of August 2023, no further update has been given. It isn’t even clear if the investigation was launched, and, unfortunately, Iranian influence at the university level does not appear to be addressed in any of the six bills recently introduced by the RSC. (A committee spokesperson did not respond to queries about the matter.)

America’s elected representatives should heed the cautionary tale now unfolding in Britain and introduce legislation to prevent the IRGC and other Iran-backed elements from infiltrating the university system.

Freedom of expression and the open exchange of ideas doesn’t mean that one of America’s chief geopolitical adversaries, which also happens to be the leading state sponsor of terrorism worldwide, should be served America’s youth on a silver platter for indoctrination into radicalism and terror.