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How Jewish leaders tried — and failed — to keep a Farrakhan follower off a Florida city council
(JTA) – When Brother John Muhammad emerged this fall as the leading candidate for a vacant city council seat in St. Petersburg, Florida, local Jews were distressed.
Muhammad is well known in the city as the president of a local neighborhood association and as a frequent advocate for minority groups. But Jewish leaders learned that he was also a follower of Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has a long history of antisemitism, and that he had made comments dismissing concerns about Farrakhan’s record.
Jewish leaders tried to stave off Muhammad’s appointment, pushing for more extensive vetting of the seven candidates and, in the case of the local Holocaust museum, actively lobbying against him. But the council confirmed him in a 4-3 vote, leaving local Jews frustrated — before they considered ways to make the situation a learning experience for their city.
“When I see a situation like this, it screams ‘opportunity’ to me,” Michael Igel, chair of the Florida Holocaust Museum, located in St. Petersburg, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The saga playing out in St. Petersburg, Florida’s fifth-largest city, unfolded during the same period that a handful of Black celebrities, including Kanye West and Kyrie Irving, first became enmeshed in controversy over their own antisemitic comments and social media posts. The coincidence meant a dicey environment for broaching a conversation about the antisemitism of the Nation of Islam, whose rhetoric disparaging Jews overlaps with that of Hebrew Israelites, the ideology that Irving promoted by sharing a link to an antisemitic film.
It also turned St. Petersburg into a window for understanding how ties forged between Jewish groups and others can be tested.
Local Jewish leaders initially sought to stop Muhammad from gaining the city council seat, which was vacated after its previous holder resigned following redistricting and accusations she no longer lived in her district. They learned about Muhammad’s city council application only a week before the council’s vote, leaving them with little time to mobilize. The information came from a political rival of Muhammad, former mayoral candidate Vince Nowicki, who shared information about Muhammad’s Nation of Islam affiliation with local Jewish groups.
Nowicki also shared a comment Muhammad had made about Jews in a 2016 video in which Muhammad interviewed local Black LGBTQ activists. In the video titled “A Conversation About Growing Up Black And LGBT,” which JTA viewed, Muhammad said, “Minister Farrakhan got accused of being antisemitic for a long time because he pointed out and made some corrections about the activity of Jews. And anybody who says anything critical of the Jewish community is labeled as being antisemitic. Good, bad, right or wrong, it doesn’t matter what you say. If you criticize them that’s what you are.”
He continued, saying, “And I’m finding that it happens when you are critical of the gay community, when you say anything critical or anything that doesn’t align with that ideology, now all of a sudden you’re homophobic.” Muhammad’s comments about gay people received some light but friendly pushback from his interview guests.
Muhammad did not reply to multiple requests for comment by JTA, including to questions emailed to him at his request. He said during a public meeting ahead of the council vote that he thought scrutiny of him by Jewish groups had been unfair.
To Jewish leaders, the comments in the video coupled with Muhammad’s Nation of Islam affiliation were clear signs that he should not be appointed to the city council.
“I would sure hope that being antisemitic would be a red line, that you could not be a candidate,” said Rabbi Philip Weintraub of Congregation B’nai Israel, a Conservative synagogue in the city.
Jewish leaders began to take action, issuing statements and launching a letter-writing campaign to the council. They felt so much urgency that some even conducted business on Simchat Torah, a Jewish holiday when Jewish organizations typically pause their activities in accordance with Jewish law.
As a nonprofit, the local federation was constrained in how it could weigh in. Since it could not endorse or oppose specific candidates, it instead pushed for every candidate to be “properly vetted” and informed council members about Muhammad’s affiliations and past comments, according to Maxine Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Florida’s Gulf Coast. She said the efforts did not have their intended effect.
“I don’t think anybody said, ‘Well, who is this Farrakhan, what does he stand for?’” Kaufman said. “I don’t think enough was done, personally.”
The entrance to the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Nov. 27, 2016. (Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The Florida Holocaust Museum took another approach, circulating information about Muhammad to the wider community, along with a statement opposing the candidacy of anyone who would support Farrakhan’s antisemitism. Their goal, Igel said, was to educate the community about the severity of these views.
“There’s nothing else to talk about when somebody is supporting Louis Farrakhan,” Igel told JTA. “Particularly when you are seeking a position representative of a city, particularly one like St. Petersburg that is so known for its inclusivity and its openness.”
Igel praised some members of the city council who asked Muhammad pointed questions about his views at the vote, giving him the opportunity to refute Farrakhan’s comments about Jews. One council member who voted against Muhammad, Lisset Hanewicz, said her stepfather is Jewish and read Farrakhan’s past antisemitic statements into the record, saying, “I think people need to understand why a certain part of this community is upset.”
Igel acknowledged that getting involved in a city council appointment was an unusual move for a Holocaust museum. He said museum leaders had held a meeting beforehand to determine how to proceed but made a decision fairly quickly to weigh in.
“In this case, we don’t consider this to be a matter of politics,” Igel said. “This is a matter of morality. And this is what we teach.” If the candidate had been a white supremacist, Igel said, “that person would have been disqualified out of the gate.”
The Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center, two hate watchdogs, define the Nation of Islam as a group that propagates antisemitism and other forms of bigotry, not a religion. Founded in 1930 by Wallace Fard Muhammad, the Black nationalist group is not the same as traditional Islam and is rejected by most Muslim clerics; it entered mainstream prominence in the 1960s after civil rights leader Malcolm X and boxer Muhammad Ali publicly joined the movement. (Both later left the group, with Malcolm X publicly denouncing its leadership; he was assassinated shortly after, and two Nation of Islam members who were wrongfully convicted of his murder recently received a large settlement from New York City.)
The Nation of Islam entered its current era after Farrakhan took over the group in 1977. Now 89, he has used his platform to issue a steady stream of antisemitism, including calling Jews “wicked” and the “synagogue of Satan,” saying they have “wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government,” and calling Hitler “a very great man.” Only a few years ago, the Women’s March progressive activist collective was nearly derailed over some of its founders’ associations with Farrakhan.
It is rare, but not unheard of, for public officials to have current or former associations with the Nation of Islam. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a practicing Muslim, was dogged by accusations that he had formerly been a member of the group when he first ran for Congress in 2006; he apologized for his past associations with the group. Trayon White, a Washington, D.C. council member and onetime mayoral candidate who has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, has donated to the group in the past. Former President George W. Bush once praised the group, and a photograph showing Barack Obama in the same room as Farrakhan was fodder for Obama’s critics during his presidential run.
Muhammad, who is referred to on the city council website as John Muhammad and whose legal name is John C. Malone, declined to condemn Farrakhan at the city council meeting.
“I am not willing to denounce the leader of my faith no more than a Catholic would be willing to denounce their pope,” he said.
Muhammad’s reaction to questions about Farrakhan particularly concerned the federation and other local Jewish groups. Kaufman told JTA she didn’t know whether Muhammad himself is antisemitic, but she said his refusal to disavow Farrakhan was alarming.
“I do have issue with his reverence of someone who is blatantly antisemitic, and he won’t disavow him, he won’t reject him,” she said, echoing the the federation’s official statement on the vote.
At the meeting, Muhammad did say that he had reached out to the Florida Holocaust Museum but had not heard back — and that he thought the museum’s criticism of him was unfair.
“What I found when we reached out to have dialogue with the Holocaust Museum director, they did not want to talk to me,” he said. “They wanted to evaluate and disqualify me based on the association that I have as an individual. I don’t think that that’s just.”
Muhammad also defended his record with Jews by claiming that they were among the “diversity of those who support me.” He added, “And if you look at those who oppose me, they’re coming from one particular group.”
Since the vote, a local Black newspaper condemned the scrutiny on Muhammad, calling it a “perusal into his faith practice.”
Igel said the museum had no record that Muhammad had reached out but encouraged him to come and learn more about the Holocaust and the nature of antisemitism. Stuart Berger, head of the local Jewish Community Relations Council, acknowledged at the city council meeting that Muhammad “has made himself available to us” at the federation, but that none of the federation staff “had been in direct contact with him.”
The federation’s involvement in Muhammad’s case became its own issue at the council vote, when the candidate referenced an email Berger had written to the county commissioner. In the email, Berger wrote that Muhammad’s vetting process had been “good enough for me!”
While Muhammad took the email as proof that the federation believed him to be fit for office, Berger and Kaufman maintain that it meant nothing of the sort. Berger had not been speaking on behalf of the federation, they say, and had not intended for his email to be shared publicly.
Now that Muhammad is on the council, attention has turned to building relationships with him. Kaufman has been meeting with individual city council members, and hopes to eventually meet with Muhammad himself. She also aims to have the federation make a presentation to the council about the dangers of antisemitism and push them to make a statement about it.
She doesn’t think it’s complicated. “I think hate’s hate,” she said. “Many different colors.”
Weintraub’s congregation is celebrating its 100th anniversary in March, and one of its congregants, Eric Lynn, is also involved in politics: he was the Democratic nominee for Florida’s 13th Congressional district in the midterms but lost his race to Republican Anna Paulina Luna, who said she was raised as a Messianic Jew and campaigned with far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Weintraub himself is a member of an interfaith ministerial dialogue group with Black churches and says he’s “a professional optimist” when it comes to managing conflict between different communities. He sent JTA an episode of the public radio podcast “Hidden Brain” about how to keep conflict from spiraling, saying it “describes what I’ve tried to do.”
Since Muhammad was appointed, Weintraub has met with him; the pair had what Weintraub described as “a pleasant conversation.” The two talked about parenting and “shared traumas,” he said. They did not discuss Muhammad’s comments supporting Farrakhan, but the rabbi couldn’t help but think about him.
“I thought I was a termite, according to Farrakhan,” Weintraub said. In contrast, Muhammad “said I was a person, so that was nice.”
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The post How Jewish leaders tried — and failed — to keep a Farrakhan follower off a Florida city council appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Inside the ancient Christian theology driving modern antisemitism
Christian influencers like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are rallying their followers against Israel — and Jews. And to do so, they’re also weaponizing a centuries-old concept that underlies many strains of Christianity.
It’s called supersessionism, and it’s the idea that Jesus’ existence supersedes all commands, laws and beliefs that came before it. Christians often say that Jesus’ death “fulfilled” God’s commandments, meaning that everything God said to Jews in the Hebrew Bible, all of the covenantal promises and laws, are obsolete.
These views on Israel, and their theological interpretation, collide with a Christian Zionist movement that deeply supports Israel for its own scriptural reasons, believing that Jews must return to Israel to fulfill a prophecy and herald Jesus’ own return.
Yet supersessionism has become a theme in Christian opposition to Israel. We hear it in the words of Carrie Prejean Boller, a recent Catholic convert and a now-former member of the Religious Liberty Commission, a Trump administration council on religious protections. After she used a panel on fighting antisemitism as a platform to declare that her religious convictions prevented her from supporting Israel — and was removed from the commission as a consequence — she doubled down. “The Catholic Church is the True Israel,” Prejean Boller declared in a post on X. “Christians are the spiritual Semites. We are the new people of God.”
Candace Owens, a Christian podcaster who often refers to Judaism as Satanist; avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes; and right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson have all similarly said that their Christianity prevents them from supporting Israel because Jesus has obviated the need for a holy land. “As Jesus says plainly in the Gospels, I am the Temple. I am the Temple now,” said Carlson in a recent video, explaining his religious opposition to Israel.
These supersessionist Christian influencers have expressed support for Gaza and criticized Israel on political and moral grounds; that part is not religious. But they have also insisted that they must oppose Israel from a religious perspective, because its very existence goes against their belief that Jesus has taken the biblical place of Israel.
In their hands, supersessionism fuels not only opposition to Israel, but explicit antisemitism — Prejean Boller has said that she is incapable of being antisemitic because, she argued, since Catholics are the true Semites, she would have to be discriminating against herself. Owens repeatedly refers to Judaism as the “synagogue of Satan,” an age-old accusation that in rejecting Jesus, Jews have rejected God and become evil.
This ancient and controversial piece of theological history is increasingly becoming a bludgeon against Israel, and Jews more broadly.
The roots of supersessionism
In the supersessionist understanding of Christianity, now, Jesus’ followers — Christians — are the chosen people of God, overriding and replacing the Jews in covenant with God.
Scholar Susanna Heschel has referred to supersessionism as a form of colonization. “Christianity colonized Judaism theologically,” she writes in an essay on supersessionism in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, arguing that the newer religion usurped its central theological concepts while “denying the continued validity of those ideas for Judaism.”
The reasons supersessionism emerged as a dominant belief in Christianity are rooted in a complicated history. Christianity arose from Judaism, and Jesus was a Jew. So early Christians put a lot of work into differentiating themselves and their new religion from Jews and Judaism.
“Paul, you know, he did not want Christians to adopt Judaism,” Marcia Kupfer, an independent scholar who researches and writes about supersessionism, particularly in medieval art, told me over the phone. “It would mean that they are turning to the law when they should be just putting their faith in Jesus.”
Much of that differentiation involved rejecting the continued validity of Judaism. While Christians do consider the Hebrew Bible to be part of their holy texts, there’s a reason they refer to it as the “Old Testament” — because, now, it is obsolete, making anyone who continues to follow its teachings in some way backward and no longer in active relationship with God.
“It is this problem of having, in a way, consumed Judaism,” Kupfer said. “It’s part of their Bible. But it has to be preparatory, prophetic, some anticipatory stage to something more complete and true. More spiritual. So it’s at the same time taken over and rejected.”
Who believes in supersessionism?
Today, it can be tough to definitively say what movement thinks what, due, in large part, to the stratospheric rise of Christians who consider themselves non-denominational — and to the linguistics around supersessionism, which some consider to be a negative term, even as others embrace it.
“It often doesn’t get talked about as supersessionism,” said Matthew D. Taylor, a theologian and visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University. “I don’t know too many Christians who will come out and say: ‘I’m a supersessionist.’”
But, in general, the more doctrinally focused the church — Catholicism, Orthodox, Calvinism — the more likely it is to have historically preached supersessionism; the more experiential churches, such as the non-denominational charismatic movement, are less attached to the ideology and often lean toward endorsing Israel.
Among the sects that have historically preached supersessionism, however, the ideology has been a topic of hot debate since the Holocaust. In recent years, these churches — especially the Catholic church — have made moves to reject the ideology, due to supersessionism’s antisemitic undertones.
Rev. Russell McDougall, director of ecumenical and interreligious affairs at the United States Council of Catholic Bishops, told the Forward that “the church has repudiated” supersessionism “quite clearly,” and admonished Catholic influencers like Owens, Prejean Boller and Fuentes in a letter from the USCCB. He pointed to a 2015 Church document titled “The Gifts and Calling of God Are Irrevocable,” released on the 50th anniversary of another groundbreaking document about Jews, Nostra Aetate.
Nostra Aetate, a portion of the revolutionizing Catholic council known as Vatican II, is lauded for improving church views on Jews. It rejects the belief that the Jewish people bear responsibility for Jesus’ death, and also affirms Christianity’s roots in Judaism. But, while Nostra Aetate sought to improve Catholic respect for Judaism, it still affirms some supersessionist ideas. “Although the Church is the new people of God,” it says, “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.” Jews, in other words, are not hated by God — still, Christians have replaced them as God’s favored children.
The 2015 treatise grapples with this issue at far greater length. It admits that rejecting supersessionism undermines the central beliefs of the Church. “The theory that there may be two different paths to salvation, the Jewish path without Christ and the path with the Christ,” the document says, “would in fact endanger the foundations of Christian faith.” How to excise supersessionism without undermining the church, it concludes, “remains an unfathomable divine mystery.”
The idea that salvation is given by God exclusively through Jesus is so central to church teachings that rejecting supersessionism poses clear contradictions — which is perhaps why modern Christian influencers are returning to it.
The Christian movements that do not preach supersessionism — the charismatic non-denominational movements, Pentecostal Christians, and fundamentalist evangelicals such as Mike Huckabee, the current U.S. ambassador to Israel — don’t resolve the contradictions either.
Many Christian Zionists focus, in part, on a line in Genesis, 12:3, in which God says that those who love Israel will be blessed and those who oppose it will be cursed; Ted Cruz cited this verse to Tucker Carlson in explaining his support for Israel. Others reference prophetic books in the Bible that point to God’s promises around Israel. But they do not necessarily engage with other lines in the New Testament that imply support for supersessionism.
“They’re reading the Bible in a very helter-skelter way,” said Taylor of the charismatics.
Why does any of this matter?
While supersessionism is core to Christian theology, it might seem like a niche debate best left to pastors and rabbis. But, looking at statements from Carlson, Prejean Boller and others, it’s clear that it informs and justifies their politics regarding Israel and Jews at large — even though it has officially been rejected by many churches.
“They’re in many ways rebelling against the past 60 years of Catholic theology, and trying to hearken back to something that they view as more authentic,” said Taylor of the influencers. “So I think that the supersessionist piece is signaling something significant because it’s part of the broader distaste for some of the modernizing shifts within Roman Catholicism.”
Supersessionist beliefs have, for years, driven antisemitism. It is woven into centuries of artistic and cultural portrayals of Jews as backwards, lesser or even Satanic, based on the idea that Jewish practice is defunct and has rejected God. Synagoga, a symbolic representation of Judaism throughout medieval art, is often depicted as blind. The theological precept has also driven attempts to evangelize and convert Jews for centuries, something Christians might not understand as antisemitism but which many Jews see as an attempt to erase Judaism.
Many, many church leaders — Catholic and otherwise — support Israel. Christian Zionists like Huckabee or John Hagee, a preacher who runs the Christian Zionist advocacy group Christians United For Israel, are a major force in the U.S. Some of these groups lean even philosemitic, appropriating Jewish rituals such as blowing the shofar or wearing a tallit into their Christianity. (This is also seen by many Jews as a form of supersessionism and cultural appropriation.)
Still, a growing number of Christians are embracing antisemitism in the name of supersessionism. This theology undergirds the increasingly common argument that some antisemitic beliefs are a fundamental part of Christianity — and therefore that asking Christians to fight antisemitism infringes on their freedom of religion.
Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene refused to vote for the Antisemitism Awareness Act, saying it would restrict Christian beliefs. Prejean Boller, in the Religious Liberty Commission hearing on antisemitism that resulted in her removal, accused the Jews on the panel of calling all Catholics antisemites. Since then, she has repeatedly rejected accusations of antisemitism and said that they are infringing on her own religious liberty.
This debate — whether or not Christianity embraces or rejects Jews, and how either choice operates theologically — has become a core conflict in American Christianity, and among the right wing in the U.S.
“I think Israel has become a kind of battleground between these folks with the more interventionist kind of Christian Zionist,” said Taylor, “versus this more kind of isolationist, Catholic and Calvinist, supersessionist and antisemitic coalition.”
But even the more philosemitic side isn’t really embracing Jews for their own sake or on their own terms. Though politicians like Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz cite scripture to justify their support for Israel, it’s an uneasy alliance rooted in Christianity, not Judaism.
For these Christian Zionists, Jews operate as a way to access and experience a form of Christianity that feels ancient and authentic — think Paula White-Cain, Trump’s former spiritual advisor, being wrapped in a Torah by a messianic Jewish “rabbi,” an act of supposed Judaism that no Jew would ever do. For many of them, support for Israel springs out of a scriptural hope for the end times, and the need to gather Jews in Israel to trigger the apocalypse.
“On the American far right, this bifurcation into philosemitism and antisemitism are not opposites,” said Taylor. Instead, he said, they’re “two sides of the same coin — they’re often instrumentalizing Jews for Christian purposes.”
The post Inside the ancient Christian theology driving modern antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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We were instant friends. Then came the Israel question.
There’s one thing these days Jewish publications of all stripes seem to agree about: The Jewish future — geographically, politically, spiritually — is Florida. An article last month in the conservative magazine Tablet pondered whether Miami was “the new Jerusalem,” and left-wing quarterly Jewish Currents made the Sunshine State the theme of an entire 2024 issue.
As a Jewish journalist, inveterate spring breaker and friend of a Florida man with a couch for me to crash on, I wanted to see for myself. So last week, with paid time off burning a hole in my swim trunks, I took my talents to South Beach … and spent essentially no time in the Jewish community at all. (Though I did DoorDash banana bread from Zak The Baker.) But just as Jonah could not outrun his destiny, the Jewish future inevitably found me anyway. This happens when you like talking to random people at bars.
I had spent much of the night getting to know an ebullient pair of strangers, Will and Deanna. (Names changed here.) They are best friends and roommates, two Dallas-born transplants chasing careers in fashion design. Both are gay, and neither is Jewish. But we found common ground when Will told me he is religious. As I told Will, I’ve reported extensively on the experiences of queer Orthodox Jews for the Forward (“a really cool Jewish newspaper”). I spoke of the challenges they face, their resilience and their breakthroughs, and Will spoke about bringing his queerness to his faith.
There was something he needed to ask me, though: Had I been reporting on Jewish people where I’m from, or — he ventured nervously — “Israeli Jews”? I told Will I mostly write about American Jews, but that this Jewish issue transcended borders.
Then the real purpose of the question came out. He volunteered his sense of horror about Gaza and related his shock about the circumstances of Israel’s establishment. What he believed about the history was unclear — it was loud in there, and I couldn’t quite make out his claims — but I could tell: I was being tested.
Yes, this did feel like the Jewish future: one in which any conversation about Judaism will become one about Israel or — and this is how I read the question — your Israeli politics. A future in which Jews everywhere, upon identifying themselves as Jews, are asked (or held) to account for Israel’s actions. And, frankly, a future where it is harder for Jews to make friends with non-Jews.
In another context, or a different mood, I might have been put off by the turn our conversation had taken and quit the interaction. But I liked these two old souls. I said to Will that what has happened in Gaza was terrible; as a journalist, I keep my politics close, but this was sticking to facts. And I saved the looming debate over Israeli history for another time. The three of us went back to enjoying the music and yapping about our dreams and nightmares, and when the lights finally came on at the bar, they invited me to meet them for brunch the next day. I said yes.
Part of me wanted to bring Israel up the next day, but at brunch I couldn’t find a place for it. Yet I found there were lots of opportunities to discuss Judaism. I told them about my grandmother’s recent passing, the dignity of Jewish burial rites and the intensity of shiva. We told stories, laughed, got closer: I learned that Deanna had lived in her car when she first moved to Miami, and Will showed pictures of himself in drag. When the food arrived, this fledgling trio held hands and said something like grace.
A couple hours later, we laid down towels on South Beach. Deanna stayed on the shore as Will and I waded waist-deep into the water. Here was my chance to say something about “Israeli Jews,” or invite him to ask me anything he wanted to know about Israel. But what crossed my mind in the ocean was a mitzvah I often contemplate at the beach. “In Judaism,” I explained, “there’s this practice of ritual immersion…” We never did circle back to Israel.
Florida (particularly South Florida) has come to represent the Jewish future because its Jewish community is ethnically diverse and teeming with young people. (It’s also deeply pro-Israel.) Other features seem predictive of everywhere else: Chabad reigns supreme and religious schools are heavily subsidized. The state is also a kind of extremist incubator — see gubernatorial candidate James Fishback; Florida International University’s antisemitic conservative group chat; or the Miami nightclub that played Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” for conservative influencers — with Jews a prime subject of obsession.
Meanwhile, American Jews should expect to field uncomfortable questions from strangers about Israel and Gaza for the foreseeable future. It might not be fair, but reality rarely is. All we control — besides the weather, media and global financial system, of course — is our reaction.
The post We were instant friends. Then came the Israel question. appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran Urges Citizens to Spy on One Another as US-Israeli Strikes Cripple Regime
Smoke rises following an explosion, after Israel and the US launched strikes on Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 3, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Amid relentless US and Israeli airstrikes that have decimated Iran’s military capabilities and key energy facilities, Iran has called on citizens to report on each other in a new push to crush domestic dissent, as talks of a possible ceasefire remain uncertain.
On Thursday, the semi-official Fars News Agency, which is affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), called on all Iranian citizens to help “identify those who have turned their backs on the homeland and threaten national security,” warning that “the country is facing external threats and internal betrayals.”
“Iranians will not allow this betrayal to be forgotten,” Fars wrote in a post on X, linking to a website called “Our Memory” to offer a platform for citizens to snoop and inform on each other.
“The efforts of ‘Our Memory’ also carry a clear message to those who might be contemplating betrayal or collaboration with the country’s enemies: The society is vigilant and awake, and actions that pose a threat to national security will be identified and exposed,” Fars posted.
The regime’s latest propaganda campaign of intimidation comes as Israel’s offensive increasingly focuses on dismantling Iran’s internal repression systems, aiming to create a leadership vacuum and logistical breakdown that could hinder Tehran’s ability to respond if mass protests erupt again.
Even amid Israel’s major battlefield advances, however, a senior Israeli security official said Wednesday that Iran still retains the ability to launch missiles at its current rate for the next several weeks, according to Israel’s N12 media outlet.
“Iran can maintain its current rate of missile fire for weeks,” the Israeli official reportedly said in a closed-door briefing. “It has sufficient launchers and reinforced squads to sustain and stagger the attacks over time.”
On Thursday, US President Donald Trump announced he was extending, “at the request of the Iranian government,” the deadline to strike the country’s energy grid by 10 days, as Washington works to bring a possible ceasefire deal to the table.
Should diplomatic efforts falter, the Pentagon and US Central Command are reportedly preparing military plans for a “finishing blow” on Iran, potentially involving some level of ground forces and massive airstrikes.
According to multiple media reports, Washington is considering several options against Iran, including invading or blockading Kharg Island, the country’s main oil export hub, or even seizing Arak Island to secure control over the Strait of Hormuz, a critical passage through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply flows.
Other potential measures include taking Abu Musa and two close islands near the western entrance of the strait or blockading or seizing ships exporting Iranian oil on the eastern side, threatening a vital route for global energy shipments.
Since the start of the war last month, combined US and Israeli strikes have dropped more than 25,000 munitions on targets in Iran, with nearly 15,000 of those carried out by the Israeli Air Force alone, according to updated Israeli intelligence data.
“These numbers are large and significant by any measure,” a senior Israeli military officer told the Hebrew-language news site Walla.
“We are concentrating strikes on the regime’s centers of gravity in Tehran, Isfahan, and other key sites. Iran may be a large country, but hitting the very heart of its infrastructure has a profound strategic impact,” he continued.
He also said the operation, which began with “leadership decapitation” and quickly shifted to paralyzing surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missile arrays, has effectively reduced Iran’s missile firing to low single- or double-digit daily levels, far below its plan of over 100 launches per day.
So far, Israel has destroyed more than 200 launchers, even as mobile units hidden in deep tunnels continue to pose serious obstacles, which are being bombed and blocked since missiles cannot always reach their depths.
Israeli forces have also systematically targeted Iran’s weapons manufacturing, attacking over 1,000 sites to degrade production, development, and research capabilities.
According to a Reuters report, US intelligence can only confirm the destruction of about a third of Iran’s missile arsenal, while another third has likely been damaged, destroyed, or buried in underground bunkers, with a similar situation affecting the regime’s drone capabilities.
While most of Iran’s missiles have been destroyed or rendered inaccessible, Tehran still may retain a significant stockpile and, as of now, could potentially recover some buried or damaged missiles after the current fighting ends.
As the war continues to escalate, Israel has shifted its strategy, with its Air Force last week striking a major natural gas processing facility in southwestern Iran — a move that damaged roughly 40 percent of the country’s gas production capacity.
Facing a gas shortage, the Iranian government was reportedly forced to prioritize fuel for electricity production, sharply cutting civilian fuel allocations and causing major disruptions to transportation and deliveries to Turkey.
“This is just a sample of our ability to crush Iran’s energy backbone,” an Israeli security official told N12.
With the US also threatening strikes on key Iranian energy infrastructure, the Islamist regime is now facing pressure to consider a ceasefire agreement to bring the war to a close.
“The Iranians are in panic,” the Israeli official said. “They understand that further damage [to its energy facilities] will make governing the country impossible.”
In one of the latest blows to the regime, the Israeli Air Force on Friday attacked the heavy water reactor in Arak, central Iran, after Israeli intelligence detected repeated attempts to restore the site — a facility considered key for producing plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Israeli officials also confirmed an attack on Iran’s only facility in Yazd that processes raw materials into starting components for uranium enrichment, as well as multiple steel plants in a major blow to an already devastated Iranain economy.
After these attacks, the IRGC threatened to target six steel plants in retaliation, including sites in Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait.