When, last month, the Trump administration announced that it was considering adding the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—the Iranian political paramilitary force—to the State Department’s official list of foreign terrorist organizations, it was warned that doing so would unnecessarily provoke the Islamic Republic. Mark Dubowitz and Ray Takeyh disagree. (Free registration required.)

From the IRGC’s inception in 1979, terrorism has been its defining feature. The 125,000-strong force has always been commanded by reactionary religious ideologues. During the 1980s, the IRGC conducted vicious campaigns against all forms of [internal] dissent as well as against ethnic minorities, especially the Kurds and the Baluchis. . . . In 1999, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei unleashed the IRGC to crush student protests, a move that President Hassan Rouhani, then the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, had passionately supported. . . .

Yet it has been the IRGC’s terrorism abroad that has garnered the most attention. In the early 1980s, it combined various Lebanese Shiite groups to form Hizballah, which has become Iran’s most dependable and lethal proxy. At Iran’s behest, Hizballah bombed a U.S. Marine compound in Beirut in 1983, killing 238 U.S. service members. Since then, the IRGC has continuously trained and armed non-Iranian Shiite radicals, often dispatching them against Americans. The 1996 Khobar Tower bombing in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen American service members, was an Iranian-directed proxy attack. Since 2003, Iranian-supplied munitions and Iranian-trained paramilitary forces have lacerated U.S. troops in Iraq.

In 2011, the Revolutionary Guard conducted its first attack on U.S. soil by attempting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, at a popular restaurant in Washington, D.C. . . . In Syria, the IRGC has been instrumental in preserving the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. . . .

The Trump administration must understand that it cannot stabilize the Middle East without first weakening the IRGC. And to do that, it should go after the group’s financial empire. If the president continues to face opposition in having the organization designated as a foreign terrorist organization, he can use Executive Order 13224, signed by President Bush [in 2001], which gives the administration the authority to freeze the assets of individuals or groups that either carry out terrorist acts or are at risk of doing so.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.