Washington, DC – Jamal Abdi, President of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), issued the following statement regarding the Biden Administration’s statements that Iran is supporting protests against U.S. policy in Gaza, its silence on revelations that Israel is engaging in influence operations targeting Americans, and its apparent inaction to counter either:
The Biden administration’s national security spokesperson John Kirby has made the extraordinary claim that the Iranian government is “funding some of this protest movement here in the United States.” This follows a statement from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines that indicated that the intelligence community has “observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.” Divorced from any tangible evidence regarding these claims, or enforcement action targeting these alleged actors, these claims risk being manipulated to crack down on the inalienable right of diverse Americans to protest the U.S. government’s fueling of the horrific war in Gaza.
The American people are not dupes who are easily fooled by propaganda from an Iranian government that has brutalized its people in the streets for demanding basic rights. Nor are they easily fooled by an Israeli government that tells us all of the innocent civilians, including Palestinian children who are being brutally starved and bombed every day amid the war in Gaza, are terrorists. Still, there appears to be some evidence that both these governments are engaged in covert influence operations aimed at shaping the opinions of the American public. Each of these campaigns is wrong and anti-democratic, and should be investigated fully and shared with the American public with the perpetrators held appropriately accountable.
Instead, what we seem to be seeing from the Biden administration is a willful effort to ignore the evidence of an Israeli disinformation campaign and back up, with scant evidence, Benjamin Netanyahu’s demonization of Americans who demand we stop funding the Israeli government. If that is the case, it is a shameful abuse of the power and prestige of the government against the people that put Joe Biden in office in the first place.
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