Start revoking visas: Iran’s leaders count on students sent to America to be their cheerleaders

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/may/29/start-revoking-visas-irans-leaders-count-on-studen/

My recent opinion piece in The Washington Times on antisemitic protests missed a big player in plain sight: Iran. They send tens of thousands of their students to our universities. Tehran is counting on them to be cheerleaders, at the least, for jihads against Israel and the United States. The FBI has warned that we could be looking at something far worse.

Case in point: Foad Izadi, professor of American studies at Tehran University, got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Houston and a doctorate from Louisiana State University. He took victory laps after pro-Hamas campus protests legitimized efforts to wipe Israel off the map.

The student radicals who organized anti-Jewish scream-fests “are our people,” the professor said in an April interview on Ofogh TV in Iran. “If tensions between America and Iran rise tomorrow or the day after, these are the people who will have to take to the streets to support Iran.”

“We like what we see, but it should not end with this,” Mr. Izadi said of university protests, adding a chilling claim: “Our Hezbollah-style groups in America are much larger than what we have in Lebanon. America is the Great Satan and our enemy.”

There’s nothing new about Iranian nationals studying here. According to the Academic Credentials Evaluation Institute, about 51,000 of them were in the U.S. on student visas at the time of Iran’s 1979 revolution. When militants took 66 U.S. Embassy staff hostage, President Jimmy Carter ordered an immigration crackdown, with interviews and deportation for Iranian students who had overstayed their visas or were no longer in school.

What a difference 35 years made: In 2014, President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department issued an order called General License G, explicitly authorizing universities to welcome Iranian exchange students and give them scholarships. The students no longer had to apply for permission in every case. This limited the amount of information the federal government had ahead of time about who was headed here and why, despite Iran being one of only four countries on America’s list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” (The others are Cuba, North Korea and Syria.)

Iranians need permission from their government before they apply for an American student visa. It’s foolish to ignore the possibility that protests at Columbia, Harvard and elsewhere were aided or launched as part of an intelligence operation conceived in Iran. We may be seeing a reboot of the kind of Soviet trickery that embedded spies in symphony orchestras and ballet companies on “goodwill” tours of the United States.

Last October, just after Hamas attacked Israel, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that “we cannot and do not discount the possibility that Hamas or other foreign terrorist organizations could exploit the conflict to call on their supporters to conduct attacks on our own soil.” Those supporters appear to include an Iranian caught sneaking into Texas last year in the trunk of a smuggler’s car.

If anyone in the Biden administration sees Iranian students as a threat to the United States, they’re not saying it out loud. They’re also not talking about a surge of Iranians entering the U.S. illegally. The Border Patrol apprehended just 16 in 2007. Fox News reports that the two years ending last October saw an annual average of 330 at the southern border.

Remember that the 9/11 attacks required just 19 people. Last October, we apprehended four Iranians at the border, including two with ties to terrorism. Another one was caught sneaking in from Canada in December. How many are unvetted here while on student visas?

All of this is maddening. And it doesn’t account for those who got away. Democrats and Republicans argue about how to respond, while we apparently can’t do a thing about stopping Iranians from walking into Arizona or upstate New York.

Congress can’t revoke Iranian student visas, but the White House can. We’d probably sweep out some of the pro-Hamas campus organizers without even knowing it. Maybe a pledge to renew Mr. Carter’s full-court press, and to void Mr. Obama’s General License G, would be a winning political move. Think of it as a virtual wall to stop future potential sleeper cells. I think I know of a presidential candidate who would love the idea.

Rick Berman is president of RBB Strategies.