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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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Pro-Hamas Campus Groups Call for Toppling US Government, Killing Soldiers
A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a megaphone at Columbia University, on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, in New York City, US, Oct. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar
The National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) organization condemned the US bombing of nuclear facilities in the Islamic Republic of Iran over the weekend, threatening that the American government will be deposed.
The anti-government comments came one day after US President Donald Trump ordered the bombing of three key Iranian nuclear sites — Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz — where Western governments believe the Islamist regime was working to build nuclear weapons. Tehran has claimed its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes
“The empire will fall, from Gaza to Tehran,” NSJP said, writing on the Instagram social media platform. “The unprovoked attacks the US and the Zionist entity have launched against Iran prove only one thing: imperialism in the region will not stop at suffocating Palestine. From Iraq to Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and now Iran, the Empire [sic] demands constant expansion and destabilization.”
It added, “We must be clear: Nuclear development is neither a crime nor the reason for the US’ war against Iran. The US Empire cannot permit the continued existence of a country that dares to stand against Zionism and imperialism.”
On Monday, Asaf Romirowsky, a Middle East expert and the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), said that NSJP is mirroring an ideology that university professors have trafficked and taught to their students since the 1960s.
“Left-wing academics have loathed ‘American imperialism’ since the Vietnam War and used it to explain and more importantly justify violent ‘’iberation movements’ around the world. Both communist and Muslim revolutions and insurgencies have been applauded over the years by American academics and their European counterparts,” Romirowsky said. “Some of that has been transmitted to students disinterested in the details of Islamic theology (which underlie Iranian policy). Anti-imperialism situates the Palestinian cause firmly on the political left and glosses over its theological basis in Sunni theology — which is perfectly well expressed in the Hamas Charter and countless other Hamas statements.”
SJP splinter groups across higher education rallied to share NSJP’s post, as noted by the antisemitism watchdog group AMCHA Initiative on Monday. Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Florida reposted it to their Instagram stories, while an SJP group for graduate students of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) did so as well. At Columbia University, a group which calls itself “Unity Fields” posted a photograph of the coffins of fallen US soldiers, captioning it, “Soon, Inshallah,” which means “God willing” in Arabic.
Within Our Lifetime (WOL), another pro-Hamas group which directs campus activities, said, “From Iran to Palestine, from Lebanon to Syria to Yemen, it is our duty from within the belly of the beast to stand against the US empire and zionist [sic] entity’s barbaric, illegal genocidal aggression, and to stand by all those resisting the ongoing genocide in Gaza by any means necessary.”
The tight coordination of the group’s messaging demands a complete accounting of NSJP’s funding, according to Alex Joffe, a historian and editor of the BDS Monitor for SPME.
“The relationship between NSJP and other action-oriented groups, such as Within Our Lifetime and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, suggest nearly complete overlap in interests and even personnel. Most problematic are the relationships between these Muslim and communist vanguard groups and the nominally legitimate Democratic Socialists of America and Working Families Party,” he explained. “These overlaps and penetrations into broader politics leaves outstanding the question of who is directing whom. The instant pivoting of Communist Chinese Party-backed groups like Code Pink to support Iran points to the fact that they, like NSJP, are not grassroots movements but primarily tools for state actors, above all Qatar, China, Iran, Russia and North Korea.”
He continued, “The question of who funds NSJP is therefore more important than ever. With NSJP and other organizations threatening and engaging in domestic violence, the national security threats have increased and should be addressed by local and federal authorities.”
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, has publicly discussed its strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US.
“Divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said in September 2024. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
The tweet was the latest in a series of revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
On the same day the tweet was posted, Columbia University’s most strident pro-Hamas organization was reported to be distributing literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group’s movement to destroy Israel during the school’s convocation ceremony.
“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” said a pamphlet distributed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) spinoff, to incoming freshmen. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Other sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to an event which took place the previous December. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
Middle East experts have long suspected that foreign agents are conspiring with SJP chapters — and its spinoffs — in the US to convulse college campuses and lobby for the disintegration of the US-Israel relationship, an outcome that would benefit Middle Eastern powers such as Iran, whose leaders regularly call for the destruction of both the US and Israel.
In July 2024, then-US National Intelligence Director Avril Haines issued a statement outlining how Iran has encouraged and provided financial support to the anti-Israel campus protest movement and explaining that it is part of a larger plan to “undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.” Haines also confirmed that US intelligence agencies have “observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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UK to Ban Group Palestine Action Under Anti-Terrorism Laws
Police officers block a street as pro-Palestinian demonstrators gather in protest against Britain’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s plans to proscribe the “Palestine Action” group in the coming weeks, in London, Britain, June 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jaimi Joy
Britain said on Monday it would use anti-terrorism laws to ban the organization Palestine Action, making it a criminal offence to belong to the group after its activists damaged two UK military planes in protest at London’s support for Israel.
The proscription would put the pro-Palestinian group on a par with Hamas, al-Qaeda, or ISIS under British law, making it illegal for anyone to promote it or be a member. Those who breached the ban could face up to 14 years in jail.
Palestine Action has regularly targeted British sites connected to Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems as well as other companies in Britain linked to Israel since the start of the conflict in Gaza in 2023.
In its latest and most high-profile action, two of its members entered a Royal Air Force base in central England on Friday, spraying paint into the engines of the Voyager transport aircraft and further damaging them with crowbars.
“The disgraceful attack on Brize Norton … is the latest in a long history of unacceptable criminal damage committed by Palestine Action,” Home Secretary [interior minister] Yvette Cooper said in a written statement to parliament.
“The UK’s defense enterprise is vital to the nation’s national security and this government will not tolerate those that put that security at risk.”
She said the group‘s actions had become more aggressive and caused millions of pounds of damage.
Under British law, the Home Secretary can proscribe a group if it is believed it commits, encourages, or “is otherwise concerned in terrorism.” The banning order will be laid before parliament on June 30 and will come into effect if approved.
Palestine Action, which says Britain is an “active participant” in the conflict in Gaza because of military support it provides to Israel, called the ban “an unhinged reaction” which it would challenge, and accused Cooper of making a series of “categorically false claims.”
“The real crime here is not red paint being sprayed on these war planes,” it said in a statement.
Earlier on Monday, the group was forced to change the location of a planned protest after police banned it from staging a demonstration outside parliament, otherwise a popular location for protests in support of a range of causes.
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MAGA Commentators Clash Over Trump’s Choice to Bomb Iran
Tucker Carlson speaks on July 18, 2024, during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo: Jasper Colt-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect
US President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three of Iran’s key nuclear facilities over the weekend has divided his longtime supporters, with some prominent voices in the so-called Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement opposing the strikes and others standing with the administration’s military action.
Mark Levin, the longtime conservative talk radio host and vocal pro-Israel voice, called out US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) for her disagreement with the US strikes, known as Operation Midnight Hammer.
On Sunday, Greene wrote on X, “I don’t know anyone in America who has been the victim of a crime or killed by Iran, but I know many people who have been victims of crime committed by criminal illegal aliens or MURDERED by Cartel and Chinese fentanyl/drugs.” She warned that “Neocon warmongers beat their drums of war and act like Billy badasses going to war in countries most Americans have never seen and can’t find on a map, but never find the courage to go to war against the actual terrorists who actually do kill Americans, invade our land, and make BILLIONS doing it day after day, year after year.”
In response, Levin labeled Greene a “shameless nitwit” and asked, “How incredibly dumb is this Marjorie Taylor Green? She doesn’t know anyone in America who has been a victim of crime or killed by Iran? You mean the thousands of Americans, especially military personnel, killed and maimed by the Iranian terrorist regime?”
Levin aimed his ire at other leaders on both left and right who he christened “America’s Iranian nukes coalition.” He wrote that “if the radical Democrats and their Isolationist fake MAGA reprobates had their way, Iran would have nuclear weapons. This is the new gravely dangerous coalition of Marxists-Islamists-isolationists-grifters. They’re represented by the likes of Bernie Sanders- AOC-Schumer-Jeffries and Rand Paul-Massie-MTG- Qatarlson-Bannon. And they’re giving aid and comfort to a regime that has murdered directly and indirectly thousands of Americans. Never forget. They will forever be opposed and challenged by we, the people — America First loving patriots.”
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host-turned-podcaster, has faced recent accusations promoted by social media influencer Laura Loomer, alleging links to Qatar, claims which he denies, thus prompting Levin’s “Qatarlson” epithet. Carlson had clashed over Iran in a recent interview with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), reportedly watched by Trump.
Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart News CEO-turned-presidential adviser-turned America First podcaster, declared his disagreement with Trump’s invocation of America’s potential engagement toward regime change in a Truth Social post on Sunday.
“Is this because the ultimate goal is regime change?” Bannon asked. “And if that’s fine, Israelis, have at it. If you want regime change, go for it, baby. Just no participation by the United States government.”
The Daily Beast reported that according to anti-Trump biographer Michael Wolff, unnamed sources within the administration described how Trump had initially leaned toward the Carlson-Bannon isolationist position until shifting Friday under congressional Republicans’ influence toward seeing the value to his image of a successful strike. “The tenor of the phone calls was him saying, ‘I think I’m gonna look very good if I do this,’” Wolff said.
Further exposing the extent to which the Iran strikes have diverged from the last decade of the MAGA movement’s tilt toward isolationism, two of Trump’s former close allies who later parted ways with him and went on to criticize his actions have now voiced their support.
Former Vice President Mike Pence and former National Security Adviser John Bolton have both historically identified with former President Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” hawkish foreign policy philosophy. Each praised the bombings of Iran’s nuclear sites.
Pence said to Fox News on Sunday that even though “the president and I have had our differences,” he “couldn’t be more proud [sic] of President Trump’s decisive leadership in this moment or the extraordinary professionalism and courage of our armed forces that brought about this historic mission.”
On Sunday morning, the conservative magazine Washington Examiner published an article with the headline “Trump did the right thing in Iran” by Bolton, one of the conservative movement’s most steadfast and robust Iran hawks.
“It was long past time that Washington did more to aid Israel in defeating Iran and took direct action against Tehran’s nuclear proliferation efforts,” Bolton wrote. “There are undoubtedly additional measures now underway to protect American deployed forces and civilian personnel in the region against Iranian retaliation now that we have taken offensive military action. Similarly, we should continue bringing forward additional forces to bolster Israeli and Gulf Arab state defenses against Tehran military retaliation.”
Bolton warned that “peace and security in the Middle East are impossible while the ayatollahs rule in Tehran.” He urged that “overthrowing the current regime is a necessary, even if not a sufficient, condition to reach that goal. The sooner the better.”
Trump said after Saturday night’s strikes that the US was acting to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons but not seeking regime change. The next day, however, he seemed to entertain the idea. Writing on Truth Social, he posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
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