The head of a major Iranian university reportedly offered scholarships to students expelled from U.S. and European universities over anti-Israel protests broiling with antisemitism.
Mohammad Moazzeni, who runs Shiraz University in the Fars province, made the announcement at a gathering of students meant to show “solidarity” with anti-Israel agitators in the West on Wednesday.
Of the police response to the encampment demonstrations, he said, “[T]hey exert a lot of violence in order to contain this raging movement and have even threatened to expel the students from universities and hinder their employment in the future, and such autocratic methods show the decline of global arrogance,” according to Irainian state-owned outlet Press TV. “Students and even professors who have been expelled or threatened with expulsion can continue their studies at Shiraz University and I think that other universities in Shiraz as well as Fars Province are also prepared [to provide the conditions].”
He reportedly argued that what is happening in Gaza reveals the true nature of Western civilization and further supports the message of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Iranian state outlet reported.
Live images of the protests at the University of California, Los Angeles, where anti-Israel agitators clashed with police trying to clear a fortified encampment from campus on Thursday morning, were carried on Iranian state television, The Associated Press reported. Qatar’s pan-Arab Al Jazeera satellite network also carried live images of the police action, and live images from Los Angeles also played across Israeli television networks.
As Iran seemingly cheers the protests happening on American soil, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told foreign ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council during a meeting in Saudi Arabia earlier this week that the “conflict with Israel and Hamas” comes against the backdrop of “increasingly destabilizing actions by Iran and its proxies.”
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A man carries the flag of Iran inside an anti-Israel encampment set up at UC Irvine in Irvine, California, on Wednesday. (Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)
“This is the first meeting since Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israel, the first direct attack from Iran to Israel, with more than 300 projectiles, including over 100 ballistic missiles. This attack highlights the acute and growing threat from Iran, but also the imperative that we work together on integrated defense,” Blinken told partners in the Middle East. “This brazen attack also underscores the risks of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon and why we must continue to work together to make sure that that does not happen.”
Police advance on anti-Israel demonstrators in an encampment on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles on Thursday. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
At least 200 people were arrested at UCLA on Thursday, bringing the nationwide total of arrests to more than 2,000 at dozens of college campuses since police cleared an encampment at Columbia University in mid-April, according to a tally by the AP. Police methodically ripped apart the encampment’s barricade of plywood, pallets, metal fences and dumpsters, then pulled down dozens of canopies and tents.
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Demonstrations — often with antisemitic and even pro-terror slogans — have unfolded since the war started on Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian terrorists launched an unprecedented attack into southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people — mostly civilians — and abducting about 250 hostages. Israel says Hamas still holds around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others.
Protesters wave Palestinian and Iranian flags during a rally in Tehran on Sunday. (Hossein Beris/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, the war has driven around 80% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million from their homes, caused vast destruction in several towns and cities, and pushed northern Gaza to the brink of famine, according to the AP.
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Blinken said Wednesday there’s been “real, meaningful progress” in the flow of humanitarian aid to Palestinians and the U.S. military continued to construct a port off the coast of Gaza.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
