“The idea, the idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this, is just unheard of. It’s not appropriate.” Thus said President Biden on Saturday, after a gunman shot former president Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally. As political truisms go, this one is up there with “the children are our future,” a statement so obvious that it makes you wonder why anyone would bother. (Though it’s also empirically dubious: It’s “unheard of”?)
But Biden’s insistence that his administration will tolerate no political violence deserves further exploration in a different context, given a statement released last week by his Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines. “In recent weeks,” it read, “Iranian government actors have sought to opportunistically take advantage of ongoing protests regarding the war in Gaza, using a playbook we’ve seen other actors use over the years. We have observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.”
A lone, disgruntled shooter is one thing; an orchestrated, nationwide campaign of unrest, which was partly paid for and organized by another nation and which has sometimes devolved to violence, is another. And it hardly takes a professional spy to realize what must be done when an enemy country is discovered to have agitated for uprisings on America’s campuses and in our streets: arrests, deportations, sanctions, and other defensive measures must follow.
The Biden administration would be wise to adopt the more assertive stance against political violence set by the president on Saturday. Up to now, that has not been the case. For example, Haines and her colleagues went out of their way to note that, though the Iranians are clearly involved in the anti-Jewish violence that has become a staple of so much of American urban and collegiate life these past eight months, many of those participating in anti-Israeli demonstrations did so of their own accord, with nonviolent intentions, and without any knowledge of Iranian involvement. “I want to be clear that I know Americans who participate in protests are, in good faith, expressing their views on the conflict in Gaza,” Haines said in her statement. “This intelligence does not indicate otherwise.”
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was quick to emphasize the same message. “Americans across the political spectrum, acting in good faith, have sought to express their own independent views on the conflict in Gaza,” she said shortly after Haines’s statement was released. And Biden’s National Security spokesman, John Kirby, echoed the same line when a reporter asked him to describe Iran’s tactics:
I want to start by being very clear that we respect the right of peaceful protest, and we recognize that there’s a lot of passionate feelings about the war in Gaza. Many, many Americans are going out into the streets and making their opinions known, and we respect that. That’s what a democracy is all about, and I want to make it clear that we recognize those are genuine protests.
How many of the masked mobs, though, are paid agents provocateurs, and how many are ordinary Americans with passionate political views? Are the former manipulating the latter? And, if so, what steps has the government taken to curb this operation to turn public discourse violent?
Neither Haines nor Kirby nor Jean-Pierre addressed these questions. But clearly, the federal government isn’t doing enough. The only notable case of the government forthrightly addressing Iranian influence comes to us courtesy of Kaveh Afrasiabi, an Iranian-born U.S. permanent resident and a professor of political science. A frequent contributor to the New York Times and a prominent voice supporting the Iranian regime in the American media, Afrasiabi was arrested in January 2021 and admitted to being paid by diplomats at the Iranian mission to the United Nations. Still, he pleaded not guilty, saying the money didn’t violate any laws and didn’t influence his views; he was “an agent of peace committed to US-Iran reconciliation and peace and dialogue.” His writing, he added, had nothing to do with the cash he had received but was informed exclusively by his “moral responsibility as an intellectual.”
The Biden administration seemed convinced: in September of last year, Afrasiabi was fully pardoned, reportedly as part of a prisoner swap deal with Iran that also unfroze $6 billion in Iranian oil revenues. Rather than deport Afrasiabi, the pardon merely stipulated that he “shall not commit any additional crime against the United States.”
Given Washington’s subdued response to Iranian influence operations, it’s unsurprising that local government would follow suit and embrace a do-nothing approach. In New York, for example, 46 individuals were charged with trespassing after storming Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall in April, occupying the building and holding at least one employee hostage. Again, one needn’t be George Smiley to surmise that at least some of those charged with dramatically escalating the situation on campus—from a tent encampment to taking over university property—might be drawn from those paid foreign operatives Haines warned about.
The logic, however, failed to impress Manhattan’s district attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office swiftly dismissed cases against 31 of the 46 marauders, citing lack of evidence. The argument enraged law enforcement officials and Jewish community officials, both claiming that the dismissals came too swiftly to suggest any real prosecutorial intention.
The same attitude trickled down to the universities most affected by the violence. Granted, it is not the responsibility of any institution of higher learning to concern itself with matters of national security, but one would think that a university committed to the free and unfettered exchange of ideas would enforce a code of conduct that punishes those who actively sabotage it, especially by means of violence and intimidation. Don’t tell that to Columbia, though: the university conducted its own so-called inquiry into the riots on its campus, which included several instances of outright violence against Jewish students. After what Jeremy Liss, an “interim hearing officer” at Columbia, described as a “thorough investigation,” the university was “unable to identify specific individual respondents. As a result, we will be closing this case.”
Did the university even try to take the case seriously? Thankfully, we can answer that by consulting Google. Six days before Columbia made its announcement, Bloomberg reported that the university had hired the New York law firm Debevoise & Plimpton “to investigate student misconduct complaints stemming from recent pro-Palestine protests on campus.” The firm, the report revealed, dispatched “a group of mostly junior Debevoise lawyers” to “conduct interviews.” Liss was one of them and was assigned a Columbia-provided email address. The “thorough investigation” he and his colleagues conducted took less time than the average HMO would need to scrutinize a health-insurance claim.
Columbia isn’t alone in trying to sweep allegations under the rug. Earlier this year, the chairwoman of the U.S. House Education and the Workforce Committee, North Carolina representative Virginia Foxx, threatened to subpoena Northwestern University’s president Michael Schill and Board of Trustees chair Peter J. Barris for what she called “the deficiency of Northwestern University’s response to antisemitism on its campus.” Foxx is now demanding that Northwestern comply with a list of requests, including documents detailing its conduct during the anti-Jewish riots on its campus and the names of students and faculty members who participated in the “alleged antisemitic incidents.” She may want to send a similar note to Harvard. Earlier this month, the Harvard College Administrative Board reversed suspensions and probations against students already found guilty of terrorizing Jewish collegiates on campus.
Survey the landscape of political violence in America, then, in the summer of 2024. We have a foreign enemy that has funded and organized campaigns that have resulted in violence against American citizens on American soil. We have an administration that acknowledges these attacks but needs to do more to stop them. We have local officials seeking to give the perpetrators a pass. And we have elite institutions that, while affected by the violence, rush to excuse it and to protect the worst offenders.
President Biden is right to call out political violence. His administration acknowledges Iran’s role in provoking it. Now he needs to do something about it.
Photo by Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images