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Iran Is Using Foreign Islamic Centers to Spread Terror and Hatred; the World Must Close Them
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting with a group of students in Tehran, Iran, Nov. 2, 2022. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Last month, Germany announced that it would deport Mohammed Mofatteh, the former director of Hamburg’s Shi’a Islamic Center, which local authorities had ordered shut down five weeks earlier for propagating extremism, and for its financial links to Hezbollah.
Mofatteh, according to German authorities, was getting direct orders from the Iranian Supreme Leader’s office about radical public messaging on the current war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.
Since it banned Hezbollah as a terrorist organization four years ago, Germany has closed six Iranian-linked Islamic Centers and deported some of their officials. In November 2022, Germany expelled the deputy director of the Hamburg Shi’a Islamic Center. In June 2024, the German government ordered the deportation of the director of a Berlin-based center.
Other countries should follow Germany’s approach.
After nearly four decades of virtually unhindered activity, Iranian-backed cultural centers and mosques have proliferated outside the Middle East. They have indoctrinated, radicalized, converted, and mobilized thousands of locals, who, unlike Mofatteh and his colleagues, cannot be deported.
Cases in point: Pro-Iranian centers exist in Italy, Spain, and South Africa. Their directors are, respectively, Italian-born, Spanish-born, and South African-born graduates of Al Mustafa. They peddle pro-Iran and pro-Hezbollah narratives through their centers’ activities.
The main bastions of Iran’s ideological influence beyond its borders are mosques and cultural centers, directly controlled by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, or linked to Al Mustafa International University, an ostensibly academic institution also under Khamenei’s direct control.
The US Department of the Treasury sanctioned Al Mustafa in 2020 for its role in Iran’s propaganda efforts, including support for the training and indoctrination of Shiite militias.
With a budget of more than $100 million a year, directly provided by the Office of the Supreme Leader, Al Mustafa has been able to train tens of thousands of emissaries, who are now deployed overseas to spread the word of Iran’s sponsored Axis of Resistance and recruit locals to the cause of Khomeini’s revolution. Establishing mosques and cultural centers is central to this elaborate, global effort to spread Iran’s revolutionary brand. These institutions pose as places of worship and cultural inquiry. In fact, they are propaganda tools in the ayatollahs’ war against the West.
Beyond Europe, the problem is even more acute. European governments can and should follow Germany’s example, since they rely on robust counter-terrorism legislation and designations of organizations like Hezbollah — albeit, in most cases, just the so-called military wing.
Countries in Latin America and Africa, on the other hand, do not have as strong a legal framework to take similar actions. But Iran’s propaganda networks are very active there.
According to the 2015 annual posture statement of the then-US Southern Command’s leader, General John F. Kelly, Iran had by then established more than 80 centers in the Western Hemisphere. That number has since grown. Moreover, a Middle East Forum 2018 report identified 17 Al Mustafa branches in Africa, alongside dozens of schools and other institutions affiliated with it, and thousands of students and graduates.
Al Mustafa’s propagation model relies on its graduates as force multipliers. Many return to their home countries to open and run new centers, while their alma mater supports their work from regional headquarters headed by Iranian officials. Al Mustafa, for example, has a regional headquarter, headed by its permanent representative, Seyed Mojtaba Hosseini Nejad, in Venezuela and a campus in Johannesburg, run by a South African cleric trained in Iran. Clergy from the various centers routinely meet and coordinate propaganda activities, while emissaries travel to and from Iran regularly.
There are sparse but notable exceptions to the laissez-faire approach of governments that host Iranian centers.
Last April, Brazilian immigration authorities detained Sheikh Ruben Edgardo (aka Suheil) Assaad, a key Iranian propaganda emissary, as he arrived in São Paulo, Brazil, from Doha, Qatar, to attend a Western Hemisphere gathering of Iran and Hezbollah clergy. Brazil’s federal authorities believe Assaad is linked to Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. On that basis, they put Assaad on the next plane to Doha and will no longer grant him entry into the country.
Yet, while Assaad may no longer visit Brazil, there remains a robust cohort of Al Mustafa-trained Shi’a clerics with local citizenship running centers across the region.
Assaad trained many of them, alongside his boss, sheikh Mohsen Rabbani, who is wanted by Argentina’s authorities and Interpol due to his role in the bombing of the AMIA Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires that was destroyed by a suicide car bomb in 1994, leaving 85 people dead and more than 200 wounded.
The problem is even more acute now.
Since October 7, 2023 — when Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis, triggering a new conflict in the region on behalf of its proxy, Iran — Tehran and its proxies have been leveraging their networks overseas, including their cultural and religious centers, to carry out terror attacks, while whipping up a frenzy of anti-Israel hatred in the public sphere.
Last November, Brazilian authorities foiled a Hezbollah plot to target Jewish institutions in Brasilia, the country’s capital. The point man in the plot, a Hezbollah member with both Syrian and Brazilian citizenships who sought to recruit Brazilian nationals with a criminal background, was instrumental in the recent establishment of an Iranian cultural center in Brasilia and was closely connected to both a prominent Shi’a Brazilian convert and key Iran propagandist, and to a Shi’a cleric who works in a São Paulo Shi’a mosque affiliated with Hezbollah.
In August, a Tajikistan national and graduate of Al Mustafa was arrested in Central Asia, where he was allegedly plotting terror attacks. Other plots have also just emerged in France and Germany, where local Iranian proxies followed a similar modus operandi and sought to recruit criminals to carry out terror attacks.
At this critical juncture, governments must do more: Minimizing the risk of terror attacks requires not only foiling active plots but also nipping in the bud efforts to radicalize and incite captive audiences.
Closing these centers, as Germany did; denying entry to Iranian clerical emissaries, as Brazil did; and monitoring the content of sermons and the dissemination of literature and proselytizing material by Iran-affiliated centers, are all urgently required steps that must be undertaken elsewhere by governments to protect their citizens from Iranian-backed terror.
Western governments have routinely undertaken similar actions in the past, when the threat from Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State was most acute. There is no reason they should not do the same with Iran, its proxies, and the elaborate web of cultural and religious institutions they use to spread Iran’s radical extremism.
Wouldn’t it be better to preempt the next attack, rather than have a government’s leaders commit themselves to renewed vigilance while standing in the smoldering ruins of an Iranian-backed strike?
Emanuele Ottolenghi is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington DC-based non-partisan research institution focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow him on X @eottolenghi
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No Harvard Students Punished for Anti-Israel Encampments, US Congress Says in New Report
Anti-Zionist Harvard students taking part in a sit-in organized by a student group which favors the Islamist terror group Hamas. Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Nov. 16, 2023. Photo: Brian Snyder via Reuters Connect
Harvard University disciplined virtually no one who was accused of perpetrating antisemitic harassment or participating in a “Gaza Solidarity” encampment last academic year, the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce alleged on Thursday.
As evidence supporting its claims, the committee cited documents obtained during its ongoing investigation of Harvard University, which was prompted by a succession of antisemitic incidents in the weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel as well as allegations of antisemitism going back years. According to the committee, “not one of the 68 Harvard students referred for discipline conduct related to the encampment is suspended, and the vast majority is in good standing.”
Neither, it continued, were any of the students who chanted antisemitic slogans on campus property punished. Essentially slapped on the wrist, they were “admonished,” a verbal measure which, Harvard acknowledges, is not recorded in their records as a disciplinary sanction.
“Harvard failed, end of story. These administrators failed their Jewish students and faculty, they failed to make it clear that antisemitism will not be tolerated, and in this case, Harvard may have failed to fulfill its legal responsibilities to protect students from a hostile environment,” US Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who chairs the committee, said in a statement on Thursday. “The only thing administrators accomplished is appeasing radical students who have almost certainly returned to campus emboldened and ready to repeat the spring semester’s chaos. Harvard must change course immediately.”
The Algemeiner has previously reported that Harvard University was amnestying students charged with violating school rules which proscribe unauthorized demonstrations and disruptions of university business. During summer, it “downgraded” disciplinary sanctions it levied against several pro-Hamas protesters it punished for illegally occupying Harvard Yard and roiling the campus for nearly five weeks.
For a time Harvard University talked tough about its intention to restore order and dismantle a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” — a collection of tents on campus in which demonstrators lived and from which they refused to leave unless Harvard agreed to boycott and divest from Israel — creating an impression that no one would go unpunished.
In a public statement, interim president Alan Garber denounced their actions for forcing the rescheduling of exams and disrupting the academics of students who continued doing their homework and studying for final exams, responsibilities the protesters seemingly abdicated by participating in the demonstration.
Harvard then began suspending the protesters following their rejection of a deal to leave the encampment, according to The Harvard Crimson. Before then, Garber vowed that any student who continued to occupy the section of campus would be placed on “involuntary leave,” a measure that effectively disenrolls the students from school and bars them from campus until the university decides whether they are allowed back. The disciplinary measures were levied one day after members of Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP) created a sign featuring an antisemitic caricature of Garber as Satan, and accused him of duplicity.
During Harvard’s commencement ceremonies in May, reports emerged that some students had been banned from graduation and receiving their diplomas.
However, Harvard and HOOP always maintained that some protesters would be allowed to appeal their punishments, per an agreement the two parties reached, but it was not clear that the end result would amount to a victory for the protesters and an embarrassment to the university. Indeed, after the suspensions were lifted, HOOP proceeded to mock what they described as their administrators’ lack of resolve. Unrepentant, they celebrated the revocation of the suspensions on social media and, in addition to suggesting that they will disrupt the campus again, called their movement an “intifada,” alluding to two prolonged periods of Palestinian terrorism during which hundreds of Israeli Jews were murdered.
“Harvard walks back on probations and reverses suspensions of pro-Palestine students after massive pressure,” the group said. “After sustained student and faculty organizing, Harvard has caved in, showing that the student intifada will always prevail … This reversal is a bare minimum. We call on our community to demand no less than Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea. Grounded in the rights of return and resistance. We will not rest until divestment from the Israeli regime is met.”
The past year has been described by experts as a low point in the history of Harvard University, America’s oldest and, arguably, most important institution of higher education. Since the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas across southern Israel, the school has been accused of fostering a culture of racial grievance and antisemitism, while important donors have suspended funding for programs. In just the past nine months, its first Black president, Claudine Gay, resigned in disgrace after being outed as a serial plagiarist; Harvard faculty shared an antisemitic cartoon on social media; and its protesters were filmed surrounding a Jewish student and shouting “Shame!” into his ears.
According to the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Harvard has repeatedly misrepresented its handling of the explosion of hate and rule breaking, launching a campaign of deceit and spin to cover up what ultimately became the biggest scandal in higher education.
A report generated by the committee as part of a wider investigation of the school claimed that the university formed an Antisemitism Advisory Group (AAG) largely for show and did not consult its members when Jewish students were subject to verbal abuse and harassment, a time, its members felt, when its counsel was most needed. The advisory group went on to recommend nearly a dozen measures for addressing the problem and offered other guidance, the report said, but it was excluded from high-level discussions which preceded, for example, the December congressional testimony of former president Claudine Gay — a hearing convened to discuss antisemitism at Harvard.
So frustrated were a “majority” of AAG members with being an accessory to what the committee described as a guilefully crafted public relations facade that they threatened to resign from it.
Currently, the university is fighting a lawsuit which accuses it of ignoring antisemitic discrimination. The case survived an effort by Harvard’s lawyers to dismiss it on the grounds that the students who brought it “lack standing.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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If Eric Adams Steps Down, New York City’s Next Acting Mayor Will Be an Anti-Israel Critic
New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Photo: Screenshot
The next acting mayor of New York City might be a left-wing activist and staunch critic of the Jewish state.
US prosecutors charged New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday with soliciting illegal campaign contributions from foreign nationals and bribery. Adams’s potential departure from office could prove consequential for New York City’s estimated 960,000 Jewish residents, representing roughly 10 percent of the Big Apple’s population, and supporters of Israel living in the city.
If Adams resigns as a result of the federal charges against him, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams is widely expected to step into the mayoral role as his replacement. A review of Wiliams’s social media history reveals a pattern of denigrating Israel, raising questions over whether the public advocate would defend the city’s Jewish community.
Williams has condemned Israel’s defensive military operations in Gaza as a “war crime” and criticized the US Congress for inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak in July.
“Aside from basic humanity, under accepted [international] Law Benjamin Netanyahu is quite literally, at this moment, engaged in [international] war crimes/human rights violations,” Williams posted on X/Twitter at the time. “Instead of Congress trying to stop it, they gave a platform.”
Williams issued a statement on Oct. 11 of last year, four days after the Hamas terror group’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, lamenteing the terrorist attacks on the Jewish state before calling on Jerusalem not to retaliate and shifting attention to alleged “oppression” of Palestinians.
“We can, we have to be able to, at once grieve the hundreds of innocent lives taken in Israel, and oppose the escalating violence of retaliation, the endless war, the systemic violence and oppression of Palestinians too often ignored, excused, or condoned,” Williams wrote.
On Oct. 14, one week after Hamas’s brutal slaughter of roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel, Williams condemned “shameful” New York elected officials that “won’t even mention [Palestine] or [Gaza].”
Five days later, less than two weeks after the largest single-day mass-murder of Jews since the Holocaust, Williams called for an immediate “ceasefire” between the Jewish state and the terrorist group. Israel had not yet launched its military offensive in neighboring Hamas-ruled Gaza to dismantle the terror group’s military capabilities and free the 251 hostages kidnapped from southern Israel on Oct. 7. He also drew an equivalency between Israel’s military operations to the Hamas atrocities.
“The moral compass of our leaders shows stunning irregularities,” Williams wrote on Instagram.
“On point in condemning horrendous attacks on Israel and demanding hostages be returned,” he added. “[Yet, failure] to recognize the [United Nation’s] description of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, let alone support de-escalation and ceasefire.”
On Oct. 24, Williams declared Gaza a “humanitarian crisis” and added that “all of us who rightly condemned Oct 7 on Israel should be rightly demanding a [ceasefire] now and before any ground invasion.”
Israel began striking Hamas targets after repelling the Oct. 7 invasion but did not launch a ground offensive into Gaza until Oct. 27.
In February, Williams appeared at a press conference conducted by the “NYC 4 Ceasefire” coalition to demand an end to Israel’s military operations in Gaza. During the event, participants referred to the Gaza war as a “genocide” and honored Palestinian “martyrs.”
“We have gathered here today to show city-wide support for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and end to the genocide in Palestine,” said Jawanza Williams, organizing director of left-wing activist group VOCALNY.
Williams harbors ties to the vehemently anti-Israel Democratic Socialists of America group (DSA). In a 2018 interview with the left-wing media outlet Jacobin, Williams said, “I have no problem saying I’m a Democratic Socialist.”
Williams has solicited an endorsement from the group while running for office in New York City. DSA has routinely praised Hamas’s so-called “armed struggle” against Israel. The group issued an explicit endorsement of Hamas, stating that the terrorist organization is a cornerstone in the “resistance” against the “Zionist project.” DSA has also accused Israel of committing “genocide” and praised the Hezbollah terrorist group for attempting to pummel the Jewish state with missiles.
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