Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei visits the Iranian centrifuges in Tehran, Iran, June 11, 2023. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

Iran has covertly accelerated activities to construct nuclear weapons despite publicly declaring that its nuclear program is for peaceful, civilian purposes, a coalition of Iranian opposition groups revealed on Thursday.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which seeks to overthrow the country’s Islamist regime, held a press conference in Washington, DC in which it disclosed what it described as new findings about the Iranian nuclear program.

“The Iranian regime is covertly working on the weaponization aspect of its nuclear project to build a warhead, effectively obstructing verification through deceit,” said Soona Samsami, a representative for NCRI in the US.

According to NCRI, the regime has ramped up activity in the Center for Research and Expansion of Technologies on Explosions and Impact (METFAZ), which is part of the country’s bomb-making operation, the Organization for Advanced Defense Research (SPND). The dissident group contends that the regime has intensified research on manufacturing devices to enable nuclear detonation. 

Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director of the NCRI’s US Office, detailed the group’s findings, which it said were based on extensive research and reports from dissident networks inside Iran.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), presenting new revelations about Iran’s nuclear program in Washington, DC on Dec. 19, 2024. Photo: Provided by NCRI

METFAZ carries out its nuclear enrichment efforts through a shell company called Arvin Kimia Abzaar, which is under the control of Iran’s Ministry of Defense and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an internationally designated terrorist organization, according to NCRI. Arvin Kimia Abzaar, which was established in 2018, publicly claims that its actions are done for the legitimate purpose of expanding Iran’s “oil industry.”

Despite the company’s public declarations, however, NCRI says that the company’s “key personnel” work for the Iranian regime in the field of nuclear advancement. Two members of the company — Saeed Bori and Akbar Motallebizadeh — held major roles in the SPND Organization and worked on nuclear weapons production for Iran. Borji has maintained a role in the IRGC since 1980 and has held important positions in METFAZ. Moreover, Borji has allegedly been instructed on how to build nuclear detonators.

The company has conducted operations in the Sanjarian area, a zone in east Tehran, since April and named the area of its facilities the “Meshkat Complex,” according to NCRI.

The dissident group said that Iran “demonstrates the lowest level of transparency in building a nuclear bomb (compared to other aspect of its nuclear program) and is rapidly advancing toward bomb production” and that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, should “absolutely” visit Tehran to inspect the site. 

Samsami claimed that “appeasement” efforts toward Iran have been a total failure and that the regime’s leaders have “exploited this window of time to advance its nuclear program and move closer to acquiring nuclear weapons.” The NCRI representative argued that the Iranian regime needs to be held “accountable” for its actions.

Though Samsami did not give specific advice for the incoming Trump administration, he urged the next White House to adopt an unabashedly adversarial posture against Iran. 

Once US President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House next month, his administration is widely expected to re-implement sanctions on Iran and adopt a “maximum pressure campaign” against the regime.

The sanctions levied on Iran under the first Trump administration crippled the regime’s economy and led its foreign exchange reserves to plummet. Trump and his Republican supporters in the US Congress have criticized the Biden administration for renewing billions of dollars in US sanctions waivers, which had the effect of unlocking frozen funds and allowing the country to access previously inaccessible hard currency.

Many argue that the Biden administration’s decision to reverse some sanctions on Iran allowed the regime to increase funding to terrorist groups. During campaign speeches, Trump has repeatedly argued that the current White House’s approach to Iran allowed the regime to inject resources into the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, which perpetrated the invasion of and massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.

Samsami argued that Iranian leaders have been “severely weakened” in the aftermath of the fall of long-time ally Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime earlier this month. With some of its proxies weakened across the Middle East — including Hamas and Hezbollah, both of which had been fighting Israel for over a year — many observers have questioned whether Iran may dash toward a nuclear weapon as a means of self-preservation.

“The only long-term solution to prevent the world’s most dangerous regime from obtaining the world’s most dangerous weapon is its overthrow by the people and the organized resistance — a goal that is more attainable now than ever before,” Samsami said.

Iran has claimed that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes rather than building weapons. However, the IAEA reported earlier this month Iran had greatly accelerated uranium enrichment to close to weapons grade at its Fordow site dug into a mountain. The UK, France, and Germany said in a statement this week that there is no “credible civilian justification” for Iran’s recent nuclear activity, arguing it “gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons.”

In April, a senior IRGC commander suggested that the Iranian regime could reassess its position on nuclear weapons. 

Israel has accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, a charge echoed by lawmakers in many allied nations. Leaders in Middle Eastern countries have also expressed concern about Tehran covertly trying to build nuclear weapons.

The post Iran Covertly Ramping Up Nuclear ‘Weaponization’ Work, Dissident Group Reveals first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

The Endowment Justice Collective, a coalition of organizations at Rutgers University, held a “die in,” Piscataway, New Jersey, March 19, 2024. Photo: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect

Faculty unions at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey have passed a resolution calling for the adoption of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

According to an announcement issued by the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) 58 percent of faculty “voted” yes to divest from corporations linked to Israel and suspend all programs with Tel Aviv University, while 38 percent “voted no.” A similar resolution was approved by the university’s chapter of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), an affiliate of the AFL-CIO which represents adjunct professors, with 62 percent voting yes.

“Our unions have many fights ahead of us,” said a joint statement issued by the two groups last Friday. “We will need to work together to resist the Rutgers administration’s ongoing attempts to undermine our contract victories. We will face the consequences at Rutgers of the incoming Trump administration’s looming assault on all of higher education.”

It continued, “In confronting the challenges that 2025 will bring, we will be stronger if we are united across union, rank, department, school, and campus — as were during our victorious strike in 2023. Together we fight! Together we win!”

Launched in 2005, the BDS campaign opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state. It seeks to isolate the country with economic, political, and cultural boycotts. Official guidelines issued for the campaign’s academic boycott state that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end,” and delineate specific restrictions that its adherents should abide by — for instance, denying letters of recommendation to students applying to study abroad in Israel.

The unions’ passing a resolution which calls for BDS comes amid new scrutiny of the role faculty — specifically the group Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) — have played in fostering campus unrest, extremism, and antisemitism — a problem which drew fresh attention this week when it was announced that Columbia University is allowing a professor who cheered Hamas’s atrocities against Israelis last Oct. 7 to teach a course on Zionism. At Rutgers, for example, this month’s resolution was heavily promoted by FJP, which accused the university of supporting genocide in over a dozen social media posts it published to promote it.

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, FJP is a faculty spinoff of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group with numerous links to Islamist terror organizations, FJP chapters have been opening on colleges since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, its members, which include faculty employed by the most elite US colleges, have fostered campus unrest, circulated antisemitic cartoons, and advocated severing ties with Israeli companies and institutions of higher education.

According to a study by the campus antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, titled “Academic Extremism: How a Faculty Network Fuels Campus Unrest,” its presence throughout academia is insidious.

Using data analysis, AMCHA was able to establish a correlation between a school’s hosting an FJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the study found that the presence of FJP on a college campus increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death — as happened at Rutgers University in November 2024, when freshman Matthew Skorny, 19, called for the murder of a fraternity member he identified as an Israeli, saying on the popular social media forum YikYak, “To all the pro-Palestinian ralliers [sic] … Go kill him.”

FJP also “prolonged” the duration of “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” protests on college campuses, in which students occupied a section of campus illegally and refused to leave unless administrators capitulated to demands for a boycott of Israel. The study added that such demonstrations lasted over four and a half times longer where FJP faculty were free to influence and provide logistic and material support to students. Professors at FJP schools also spent 9.5 more days protesting than those at non-FJP schools.

“So much attention has been focused on, for example, Students for Justice in Palestine, the encampments, and all of the unrest. The primary face of that has been students and student groups, and they’ve occupied the attention of administrators, member of Congress, and the public, but if you look more deeply — behind closed classroom doors, at departmental events, and statements, or the activity of groups like [FJP], you find an even more important predictor and determinative factor precipitating antisemitism,” AMCHA executive director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner recently during an interview in which she discussed the latest research on faculty antisemitism.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Rutgers Faculty Call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Against Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Oct. 14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Antisemitism is surging in higher education, but universities have chosen to protect their brands rather than fight the targeting of Jewish and pro-Israel members of their campus communities, according to a new report by US House Republicans.

Six House committees and Republican leadership helped to compile the joint staff report, which was released on Thursday amid crisis levels of antisemitic activity in American higher education, a trend which has seen pro-Hamas students harass their Jewish peers, extremists pen manifestos calling for revolutionary violence, and an unprecedented politicization of the university by faculty for the purpose of spreading anti-Zionist and anti-Western beliefs. To make matters worse, according to the House report, university officials could seldom be counted on to preserve order and protect Jewish students.

“The committee found that so-called university leaders deliberately chose to withhold support from Jewish communities on campus, demonstrating a refusal to address the hostile environments at their institutions,” the report said. “Jewish students, faculty, and staff often felt abandoned by administrators’ passive and muted responses to the explosion of antisemitic hate on campus. The committee’s investigation found that these failures to act were not mere oversights but intentional decisions.”

Part of their failure was messaging, the report explained. Harvard University, for example, declined to condemn the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s atrocities during its invasion of Israel last Oct. 7 — a massacre that, amid the ensuing war in Gaza, has unleashed an ongoing surge of global antisemitism that has seen antisemitic incidents spike to record levels in the US and other countries over the past year.

Meanwhile, the report also noted other cases, including when Columbia University allowed the proliferation of stories about a “chemical attack” involving Jewish students discharging “fart spray,” a fictitious incident which resulted in those students being suspended for as long 18 months while no one accused of antisemitic conduct received a comparable punishment.

Some schools, such as the University of Pennsylvania, pantomimed corrective action to disruptive behavior, assuring the public that it took rules violations, including the commandeering of campus property with “Gaza Solidarity Encampments,” seriously — but it punished very few students for misconduct and those it did were given slaps on the wrist, according to critics.

Egregious conduct which prompted civil litigation evaded disciplinary action, the report continued, explaining that nearly 100 students who participated in an encampment which barred Jewish students from accessing sections of campus at the University of California, Los Angeles “signed resolution agreements allowing them to escape disciplinary consequences” and “none were disciplined.”

Harvard University, despite talking tough during the peak of the spring encampments, ultimately amnestied everyone involved in the unrest, overturning suspensions and reducing probationary periods to the extent that they meant nothing.

Moreover, the report added, university leaders were contemptuous of public officials who investigated campus antisemitism and discussed their wish that the Democratic Party would win a majority in the US Congress, an outcome they hoped would quell any further inquiries into the matter.

“Rather than treat the antisemitic hate plaguing their campuses as a serious problem, they handled it as a public relations issue,” the report said. “Penn [University of Pennsylvania] administrators [tried] to orchestrate media coverage depicting members of Congress as ‘bullying and grandstanding’ and Columbia Board of Trustees leaders dismissing congressional oversight on campus antisemitism as ‘capital hill [sic] nonsense.’”

Nothing short of a revolution of the current habits and ideas which constitute the current higher education regime can prevent similar episodes of unrest from occurring in the future, the report concluded. Colleges need equal enforcement of civil rights laws to protect Jewish students from discrimination, and they should “forcefully reject antisemitism.” They should also, it added, reform aspects of the campus culture which do not appear immediately connected to the issue of antisemitism.

Fostering “viewpoint diversity,” for example, could prevent echo chambers of ideological zeal which justify hatred and violence as a means of overcoming one’s political opponents, the report found. It also said that “academic rigor,” undermined by years of dissolving educational standards for political purposes, would guard against the reduction of complex social issues into the sloganeering of “scholar activism,” in which faculty turn the classroom into a soapbox.

In lieu of so momentous a change, the report encouraged the executive branch of the US government, which is awaiting the arrival of a new administration headed by President-elect Donald Trump, to enforce colleges’ applying of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to incidents of antisemitism and punish those that do not by, for example, freezing their access to federal funds.

Congress has its role as well, the report continued, recommending that the legislative body combat foreign influence in higher education and withhold public funds from colleges which adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

“On Oct. 8, the world saw that antisemitic hatred was alive and well at American institutions of so-called’‘higher’ education. As a result, the reputation of many of these schools has been in free fall,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, said in a statement accompanying the report. “Stopping that free fall comes down to one word: accountability. We need accountability because without it, we cannot guarantee that Jewish students have the safe learning environment they deserve.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post ‘We Need Accountability’: US House Report Condemns Universities’ Response to Rising Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.