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A recent video clip about the Nakba and the militarization of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, put together by a left-wing student group, has led to a furious backlash by right-wing groups and politicians who claim the clip incites to violence against soldiers. One Knesset member has called for a criminal investigation, while other actors demanded that the student chapter of the socialist Hadash party, which created and published the video, be shut down.

makes several claims about the militarization of Hebrew University, including that many soldiers attend the university; that Palestinian students are being removed from campus dorms; and that Israeli snipers are stationed on the roofs of university buildings in order to take shots at protesters in neighboring Issawiya

a controversial army intelligence training program at the university that was launched last year, which grooms undergraduates for an extended stint in the IDF’s intelligence unit, and which has seen a sharp rise in the number of uniformed, armed students attending classes on campus.

Marking the sixtieth anniversary of the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, the National Security Archive is today posting recently declassified CIA documents on the United States' role in the controversial operation. American and British involvement in Mosaddeq's ouster has long been public knowledge, but today's posting includes what is believed to be the CIA's first formal acknowledgement that the agency helped to plan and execute the coup.

CIA materials posted today include working files from Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA officer on the ground in Iran during the coup. They provide new specifics as well as insights into the intelligence agency's actions before and after the operation

The issue is more than academic. Political partisans on all sides, including the Iranian government, regularly invoke the coup to argue whether Iran or foreign powers are primarily responsible for the country's historical trajectory, whether the United States can be trusted to respect Iran's sovereignty, or whether Washington needs to apologize for its prior interference before better relations can occur

officers from a military intelligence unit called Telem design much of the Arabic language curriculum

“The military are part and parcel of the education system. The goal of Arabic teaching is to educate the children to be useful components in the military system, to train them to become intelligence officers.”

Mendel said Arabic was taught “without sentiment”, an aim established in the state’s earliest years.“The fear was that, if students had a good relationship with the language and saw Arabs as potential friends, they might cross over to the other side and they would be of no use to the Israeli security system. That was the reason the field of Arabic studies was made free of Arabs.”

The Pentagon is spending more than $70 million over the next 18 months, and using teams of Special Forces, to train and equip Yemeni military, Interior Ministry and coast guard forces, more than doubling previous military aid levels.

Yemen could become Al Qaeda’s next operational and training hub, rivaling the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan where the organization’s top leaders operate.

Saudi Arabia, from which many Qaeda operatives had fled to Yemen

Well-known Iranian activist and journalist Roohollah Zam was captured Oct. 14 in Iraq and deported to Iran. The details surrounding his arrest and deportation have raised questions about the magnitude of Iran’s influence in Iraq. BBC Persian, Saudi-funded Alarabiya and many other Persian and Arabic media outlets reported that Zam had been captured by the Iraqi National Intelligence Service on an arriving flight from France at the Baghdad airport and immediately handed to Iranian agents, who sent him to Tehran the same day.

the Iraqi National Intelligence Service has been widely known for being independent from Tehran's influence in Iraq

Al-Monitor has learned from a senior adviser for the Iraqi National Security Council that Zam was actually arrested by Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, a pro-Iranian Shiite military faction in the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) and handed to the Iranians at the Baghdad airport. The source said the Iraqi National Security Council had been in contact with Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq and the Iranians about the arrest and had facilitated the operation for Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq. Zam, who has been critical of Iran in his journalistic works, was kept in the airplane until all the passengers had disembarked and then transferred to another airplane for transport to Tehran. It would appear that Persian and Arabic media were incorrect in attributing the Zam operation to the Iraqi National Intelligence Service instead of the Iraqi National Security Council.

A British woman responsible for a dramatic intelligence leak in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq has said she hopes a new film about her efforts will refocus attention on the flawed evidence that led to war.

Katharine Gun, a former employee of the United Kingdom intelligence agency GCHQ, believes that the film, called Official Secrets, could cause a reassessment of the partially-repaired reputations of the UK and US leaders behind the military action

She and some of the film's creators hope it will highlight once again that the invasion of Iraq was carried out on the false premise that the country had illegal weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). "There's no rehabilitating two leaders who have had to admit that the whole WMD thing was an absolute fabrication and a manipulation and a lie," director Gavin Hood told AFP. 

Iran is likely to seek out Russia and China to purchase advanced weapons systems such as tanks and fighter jets when a United Nations arms embargo against the country expires next year, a senior defense intelligence official said today, amid rising tensions in the Middle East. In a report released on Tuesday that unveils the Defense Department’s public assessment of Iran’s military capabilities, the Pentagon’s top intelligence agency expressed concern that “modern conventional capabilities” will be available to Tehran when the UN embargo expires in 2020, allowing the country to become “a more traditional military force.

An influx of Russian and Chinese weapons would provide a boost to Iran’s increasingly dated arsenal of fighter jets and armor that includes equipment that dates to the 1970s, which has forced Tehran to lean heavily on ballistic missiles. Once the embargo ends, Iran’s air force is likely to seek fourth-generation fighters such as the Russian Su-30

The US Defense Intelligence Agency's warning comes as the United States has taken increased steps to cut down on military tensions in the Gulf after the Pentagon blamed Iran for drone and cruise missile strikes on an Aramco refining facility in Abqaiq in September. Earlier this month, the Defense Department opened a center for maritime patrols in the Gulf in Bahrain, home of the US Fifth Fleet. The USS Abraham Lincoln transited the region on Nov. 19, the first time an aircraft carrier has come through the region in months.

The relationship is unique. Over the years, the United States has agreed to sell the UAE some of its most sophisticated and lethal military equipment, including MQ-9 aerial drones and advanced F-35 fighter jets, a privilege not bestowed on any other Arab country over concern about diminishing Israel’s qualitative military edge.Some of the influence operations described in the report are known to national security professionals, but such activities have flourished due to Washington’s unwillingness to reform foreign-influence laws or provide additional resources to the Department of Justice. Other activities more closely resemble espionage, people familiar with the report said.

The UAE has spent more than $154 million on lobbyists since 2016, according to Justice Department records. It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars more on donations to American universities and think tanks, many that produce policy papers with findings favorable to UAE interests.

Since 2012, it has been the third-biggest purchaser of U.S. weapons and built what many consider the most powerful military in the Arab world by cultivating close ties to the U.S. political, defense and military establishment.

The British government ran a secret “black propaganda” campaign for decades, targeting Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia with leaflets and reports from fake sources aimed at destabilising cold war enemies by encouraging racial tensions, sowing chaos, inciting violence and reinforcing anti-communist ideas, newly declassified documents have revealed.

The campaign also sought to mobilise Muslims against Moscow, promoting greater religious conservatism and radical ideas. To appear authentic, documents encouraged hatred of Israel.

The Information Research Department (IRD) was set up by the post-second world war Labour government to counter Soviet propaganda attacks on Britain. Its activities mirrored the CIA’s cold war propaganda operations and the extensive efforts of the USSR and its satellites.

In all, Overton found, the Pentagon provided more than 1.45 million firearms to various security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, including more than 978,000 assault rifles, 266,000 pistols and almost 112,000 machine guns. These transfers formed a collage of firearms of mixed vintage and type: Kalashnikov assault rifles left over from the Cold War; recently manufactured NATO-standard M16s and M4s from American factories; machine guns of Russian and Western lineage; and sniper rifles, shotguns and pistols of varied provenance and caliber, including a large order of Glock semiautomatic pistols, a type of weapon also regularly offered for sale online in Iraq. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Many of the recipients of these weapons became brave and important battlefield allies. But many more did not. Taken together, the weapons were part of a vast and sometimes minimally supervised flow of arms from a superpower to armies and militias often compromised by poor training, desertion, corruption and patterns of human rights abuses. Knowing what we know about many of these forces, it would have been remarkable for them to retain custody of many of their weapons. It is not surprising that they did not.

the Pentagon said it has records for fewer than half the number of firearms in the researchers’ count — about 700,000 in all

Overton’s analysis also does not account for many weapons issued by the American military to local forces by other means, including the reissue of captured weapons, which was a common and largely undocumented practice.

The regimes in North Korea and Iran perceive integration into an international community whose dominant power is the United States as a threat to their survival. Integration might yield short-term regime-sustaining economic benefits, but it carries the risk of regime-terminating political contagion.

Pyongyang and Tehran seized on NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya as evidence that Qaddafi had been duped by the West. Essentially, by taking down regimes in Iraq and Libya, Washington priced itself out of the security assurance market in Pyongyang and Tehran

the case for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear program rests on an assessment that the theocratic regime is undeterrable and apocalyptic. But that presumption runs contrary to National Intelligence Estimates, which have characterized the clerical regime’s decision-making as being “guided by a cost-benefit approach.” And U.S. intelligence analysts maintain that Iran has not yet decided to cross the threshold from a potential capability to an actual weapon