On Sunday, keffiyeh-clad protesters greeted incoming students at Columbia with a sign reading, “Honor our martyrs” and chants of “We don’t want two states, we want ’48.” At Cornell University on Monday, the first day of classes, anti-Israel groups got right to work smashing doors and graffitiing buildings, while on other campuses plans are underway to boycott Jewish professors. In this context it is worth considering the director of national intelligence Avril Haines’s announcement last month that Iran is “providing financial support to protesters.”

Jason M. Brodsky takes a closer look at what this means:

Iran has . . . built an extensive online disinformation apparatus that is used both to amplify content promoting its anti-American and anti-Israel worldview and aggravate political and social tensions in democratic societies. . . . For example, the [Iranian-intelligence-run] cybergroup Cotton Sandstorm ran an X account branded “Jewish Peace Advocate,” according to Microsoft Threat Intelligence. [Iranian intelligence] also runs a series of cyberwarfare teams in support of Hamas.

Iran’s supreme leader, for his part, clearly sees an opportunity to exploit protests in the West, dubbing them in July “a unique phenomenon in contemporary history.”

Danielle Pletka and Stephen Ailinger examine how the U.S. can respond to this foreign-influence campaign:

The CIA director William Burns has drawn the roadmap, writing that “strategic declassification” of intelligence can “undercut rivals and rally allies.” Such declassification successfully derailed the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s false-flag operations against Ukraine in 2022. And it’s high time that the Biden administration use just this strategy to ensure that American students understand they have become tools in the hands of one of the world’s most malign regimes.

But strategic declassification should also be followed by action. If the intelligence community identifies individuals or nonprofit organizations that have received Iranian funding to support campus protests, the Department of Justice should follow with indictments.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].