I'm John Batsu with my good colleague Benne Talibou, senior fellow for the foundation for the defense of democracy.

Not war fighting, certainly not existential threat, but the campus

anti-Semitism this springtime has been especially challenging for American

analysts because it's so at odds with the history of America.

Benham, the Mullis, these are not well-educated men and they live in an

apocalyptic bubble.

How is it that they're presenting the campus anti-Semitism to their own people on their propaganda?

Oh my goodness, the government of the Islamic Republic and its affiliated media

organizations have a long and rich history, I should remind the audience, of

magnifying any, any scale of protests inside the West.

In fact, they're much better about doing it than we should be about doing it

vis-à-vis them and using it as a vector to paint the society against the state

and to show the state as corrupted

incompetent. I will point the audience towards the Wall Street protests if they can

even remember that back in 2011 or 2012 I'm'm not mistaken, in New York City protests around Zokati Park, and I think

then Mayor Michael Bloomberg and then YPD dispersed vis-à-vis horses into that park.

This was wall-to-wall coverage in Iranian papers

and particularly ultra-hardline papers.

And this was seen as almost a manifestation

of one of Homaney, the founding father of the Islamic Republic, one of his comments about the decline of the others or of the east and the west because

Homain famously invited the leader of the Soviet Union to embrace Islam and when he didn't,

the Soviet Union collapse shortly thereafter, and then Homingia had similarly talked about the need

...