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Weinstein approached me ‘Jew to Jew’: Jodi Kantor opens up on the ‘She Said’ movie’s Jewish moments
(JTA) — When the New York Times journalist Jodi Kantor was reporting the 2017 Harvey Weinstein sexual assault story that earned her a Pulitzer prize, the powerful Hollywood producer and his team tried to influence her by using something they had in common: They are both Jewish.
“Weinstein put [Jewishness] on the table and seemed to expect that I was going to have some sort of tribal loyalty to him,” Kantor told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on a video call from the New York Times newsroom. “And that was just not going to be the case.”
Now, that exchange has been immortalized in “She Said,” a new film adaptation of the nonfiction book of the same name by Kantor and her collaborator Megan Twohey that details their investigation into Weinstein’s conduct, which helped launch the #MeToo movement.
The film, directed by Maria Schrader with stars Zoe Kazan as Kantor and Carey Mulligan as Twohey, is an understated thriller that has drawn comparisons to “All the President’s Men” — and multiple subtle but powerful Jewish-themed subplots reveal the way Kantor’s Jewishness arose during and at times intersected with the investigation.
In one scene, the Kantor character notes that a Jewish member of Weinstein’s team tried to appeal to her “Jew to Jew.” In another, Kantor shares a moving moment with Weinstein’s longtime accountant, the child of Holocaust survivors, as they discuss the importance of speaking up about wrongdoing.
Kantor, 47, grew up between New York and New Jersey, the first grandchild of Holocaust survivors — born “almost 30 years to the day after my grandparents were liberated,” she notes. She calls her grandmother Hana Kantor, a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor, her “lodestar.” Kantor — who doesn’t often speak publicly about her personal life, including her Jewish background, which involved some education in Jewish schools — led a segment for CBS in May 2021 on her grandmother and their relationship. Before her journalism career, she spent a year in Israel on a Dorot Fellowship, working with Israeli and Palestinian organizations. She’s now a “proud member” of a Reform synagogue in Brooklyn.
Kantor spoke with JTA about the film’s Jewish threads, the portrayal of the New York Times newsroom and what Zoe Kazan’s performance captures about journalism.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
JTA: How did you feel having Zoe Kazan, who is not Jewish, play you? Kazan has played some notably Jewish characters before, for example in the HBO miniseries “The Plot Against America.”
JK: I feel Zoe’s performance is so sensitive and so layered. What I really appreciate about her performance is that she captures so many of the emotions I was feeling under the surface in the investigation. You know, when you’re a reporter and especially a reporter handling that sensitive a story, it’s your responsibility to present a really smooth professional exterior to the world. At the end of the investigation, I had the job of reading Harvey Weinstein some of the allegations and really confronting him. And in dealing with the victims, I wanted to be a rock for them and it was my job to get them to believe in the investigation. And so on the one hand, you have that smooth, professional exterior, but then below that, of course you’re feeling all the feelings. You’re feeling the power of the material, you’re feeling the urgency of getting the story, you’re feeling the fear that Weinstein could hurt somebody else. You’re feeling the loss that these women are expressing, including over their careers. And so I think Zoe’s performance just communicates that so beautifully.
What Zoe says about the character is that there are elements of me, there are elements of herself, and then there are elements of pure invention because she’s an artist, and that’s what she does.
I think the screenplay gets at a small but significant line of Jewish sub-drama that ran through the investigation. It went like this: Harvey Weinstein and his representatives were constantly trying to approach me as a Jew. And they’ve done this more recently, as well. There have been times when Harvey Weinstein was trying to approach me “Jew to Jew,” like almost in a tone of “you and I are the same, we understand each other.” We found dossiers later that they had compiled on me and it was clear that they knew that I was the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and they tried to sort of deploy that. So speaking of keeping things under the surface, I privately thought that was offensive, that he was citing that. But your job as a reporter is to be completely professional. And I wasn’t looking to get into a fight with Weinstein. I just wanted to find out the truth and I actually wanted to be fair to the guy. Anyway, even as he was approaching me “Jew to Jew” in private, he was hiring Black Cube — sort of Israeli private intelligence agents — to try to dupe me. And they actually sent an agent to me, and she posed as a women’s rights advocate. And she was intimating that they were going to pay me a lot of money to appear at a conference in London. Luckily I shooed her away.
To some degree I can’t explain why private Israeli intelligence agents were hired to try to dupe the Hebrew speaking, yeshiva-educated, granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. But it’s not my job to explain that! It’s their job to explain why they did that.
Then the theme reappeared with Irwin Reiter, Weinstein’s accountant of 30 years, who kind of became the Deep Throat of the investigation. I quickly figured out that Irwin and I were from the same small world. He was the child of survivors, and had also spent his summers at bungalow colonies in the Catskills just down the road from mine. I don’t bring up the Holocaust a lot. It’s a sacred matter for me, and I didn’t do it lightly. But once I discovered that we did in fact have this really powerful connection in our backgrounds, I did gently sound it with him – I felt that was sincere and real. Because he was making such a critical decision: Weinstein’s accountant of 30 years is still working for the guy by day and he’s meeting with me at night. And I felt like I did need to go to that place with him, saying, “Okay, Irwin, we both know that there are people who talk and there are people who don’t. And we both grew up around that mix of people and what do we think is the difference? And also if you know if you have the chance to act and intervene in a bad situation, are you going to take it?”
We didn’t talk a lot about it, because I raised it and he didn’t want to fully engage. But I always felt like that was under the surface of our conversations, and he made a very brave decision to help us.
That was a very powerful scene in the film, and it felt like a turning point in the movie that kind of got at the ethical core of what was motivating your character. Was that a scene that was important to you personally to include in the film?
What Megan and I want people to know overall is that a small number of brave sources can make an extraordinary difference. When you really look at the number of people who gave us the essential information about Weinstein, it’s a small conference room’s worth of people. Most of them are incredibly brave women, some of whom are depicted, I think, quite beautifully in the film. But there was also Irwin, Weinstein’s accountant of all these years, among them. It’s Megan and my job to build people’s confidence in telling the truth. And as we become custodians of this story for the long term, one of the things we really want people to know is that a tiny group of brave sources, sometimes one source, can make a massive difference. Look at the impact that these people had all around the world.
Did you feel the film captured the New York Times newsroom? There’s a kind of great reverence to the toughness and professionalism in the newspaper business that really came through.
Megan and I are so grateful for the sincerity and professionalism with which the journalism is displayed. There are a lot of on screen depictions of journalists in which we’re depicted as manipulative or doing things for the wrong reasons or sleeping with our sources!
We [as journalists] feel incredible drama in what we do every day. And we’re so grateful to the filmmakers for finding it and sharing it with people. And I know the New York Times can look intimidating or remote as an institution. I hope people really consider this an invitation into the building and into our meetings, and into our way of working and our value system.
And we’re also proud that it’s a vision of a really female New York Times, which was not traditionally the case at this institution for a long time. This is a book and a movie about women as narrators.
“Harvey Weinstein and his representatives were constantly trying to approach me as a Jew,” Kantor said. (The New York Times)
There have been comparisons made between this movie and “All the President’s Men.” One of the striking differences is that those journalists are two male bachelors running around D.C. And this film has scenes of motherhood, of the Shabbat table, of making lunches. What was it like seeing your personal lives reflected on screen?
It’s really true that the Weinstein investigation was kind of born in the crucible of motherhood and Megan and my attempt to combine work with parenting. On the one hand, it’s the most everyday thing in the world, but on the other hand, you don’t see it actually portrayed on screen that much. We’re really honored by the way that throughout the film you see motherhood and work mixing, I think in a way that is so natural despite our obviously pretty stressful circumstances.
I started out alone on the Weinstein investigation, and I called Megan because movie stars were telling me their secrets but they were very reluctant to go on the record. So I had gone some way in persuading and engaging them, but I was looking to make the absolute strongest case for them. So I called Megan. We had both done years of reporting on women and children. Mine involved the workplace more and hers involved sex crimes more, which is part of why everything melded together so well eventually. I wanted to talk to her about what she had said to female victims in the past. But when I reached her, I could hear that something was wrong. And she had just had a baby, and I had had postpartum depression myself. So we talked about it and I gave her the name of my doctor, who I had seen. Then she got treatment. And she not only gave very good advice on that [initial] phone call, but she joined me in the investigation.
I think the theme is responsibility. Our relationship was forged in a sense of shared responsibility, primarily for the work – once we began to understand the truths about Weinstein, we couldn’t allow ourselves to fail. But also Megan was learning to shoulder the responsibility of being a parent, and I had two kids. And so we started this joint dialogue that was mostly about work, but also about motherhood. And I think throughout the film and throughout the real investigation, we felt those themes melding. It’s totally true that my daughter Tali was asking me about what I was doing. It’s very hard to keep secrets from your kid in a New York City apartment, even though I didn’t tell her everything. And Megan and I would go from discussing really critical matters with the investigation to talking about her daughter’s evolving nap schedule. It really felt like we had to get the story and get home to the kids.
And also, we were reporting on our own cohort. A lot of Weinstein victims were and are women in their 40s. And so even though we were very professional with this and we tried to be very professional with the sources, there was an aspect of looking in the mirror. For example, with Laura Madden, who was so brave about going on the record, it was conversations with her own teenage daughters that helped her make her decision.
We didn’t write about this in our book because it was hard to mix the motherhood stuff with this sort of serious reporter-detective story and all the important facts. And we didn’t want to talk about ourselves too much in the book. But the filmmakers captured something that I think is very true. It feels particular to us but also universal. When Zoe [Kazan] is pushing a stroller and taking a phone call at the same time, I suspect lots of people will identify with that. And what I also really like is the grace and dignity with which that’s portrayed.
It must have been surreal, seeing a Hollywood movie about your investigation of Hollywood.
I think part of the power of the film is that it returns the Weinstein investigation to the producer’s medium, but on vastly different terms, with the women in charge. Megan and I are particularly moved by the portrayals of Zelda Perkins, Laura Madden and Rowena Chiu — these former Weinstein assistants are in many ways at the core of the story. They’re everyday people who made the incredibly brave decision to help us, in spite of everything from breast cancer to legal barriers.
Working with the filmmakers was really interesting. They were really committed to the integrity of the story, and they asked a ton of questions, both large and small. Ranging from the really big things about the investigation to these tiny details. Like in the scene where we go to Gwyneth Paltrow’s house and Megan and I discover we’re practically wearing the same dress — those were the actual white dresses that we wore that day. We had to send them in an envelope to the costume department, and they copied the dresses in Zoe and Carey’s sizes and that’s what they’re wearing. There was a strand of extreme fidelity, but they needed some artistic license because it’s a movie. And the movie plays out in the key of emotion.
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Jewish exodus underway from Heritage Foundation’s antisemitism initiative over Tucker Carlson
The Heritage Foundation’s marquee effort to combat antisemitism, a coalition known as Project Esther, is rapidly losing members following the conservative think tank’s public defense of Tucker Carlson after he gave a friendly interview to the white nationalist and antisemitic provocateur Nick Fuentes.
At least seven individuals and organizations affiliated with Heritage’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, launched last year under the Project Esther banner, have resigned or threatened to do so, citing Heritage president Kevin Roberts’s decision to stand by Carlson and his description of the television personality’s critics as a “venomous coalition.”
The defections suggest that Project Esther — unveiled on the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack as a conservative “national strategy to counter antisemitism”— could be imploding.
Neither the co-chairs of the initiative nor the Heritage Foundation immediately responded to a request for comment about the resignations.
Conceived as a counterweight to the Biden administration’s 2023 antisemitism strategy, Heritage’s plan focused almost entirely on left-wing and pro-Palestinian activism, portraying what it called a “Hamas Support Network” as the chief driver of antisemitism in America.
From the outset, the project drew skepticism for not including most mainstream Jewish organizations and for downplaying antisemitism on the political right. That tension has now widened into a rupture.
The first public resignation from the task force came Sunday with an announcement from Mark Goldfeder, an Orthodox rabbi and the CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, that he was quitting in protest of Roberts’ defense of Carlson.
“Elevating him and then attacking those who object as somehow un-American or disloyal in a video replete with antisemitic tropes and dog whistles, no less, is not the protection of free speech. It is a moral collapse disguised as courage,” Goldfeder wrote in a letter posted to X.
On Monday, the New York Post reported on the resignation of David Bernstein, author of “Woke Antisemitism” and founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, who had served on the Heritage task force. Bernstein said Roberts’ language felt like “a real attack against Jewish political agency on the American scene.”
“The phrase ‘venomous coalition aligned against him [Carlson]’—that’s me and any Jewish person who cares about condemning antisemitism,” Bernstein said. “It allows you to justify almost anything said in the name of political conservatism, and that empties it of all meaning.”
There’s no public list of all Project Esther members, but several groups that are named on the initiative’s website told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that they had disaffiliated or were prepared to do so.
Lori Lowenthal Marcus, a lawyer with the Deborah Project, a legal group that fights antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, said she had resigned from all Heritage affiliations.
“The Heritage folks I’ve encountered on the Task Force have been uniformly terrific and sincere about fighting antisemitism,” she wrote. “But the edifice of Heritage is no longer one which I can trust. … I cannot be questioning the commitment of those who claim to be at my side.”
The Jewish Leadership Project, a conservative network co-founded by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser, said it is “evaluating our involvement” and will withdraw absent “a vigorous explanation that Judaism and Jews are inherently allies of Christians” and “a disconnect from Carlson immediately.”
The Coalition for Jewish Values, led by Rabbi Yaakov Menken, said it has already communicated its intent to resign if Roberts does not retract his remarks and sever ties with Carlson. “Today Heritage has chosen to vocally stand with an antisemite, call his Jewish critics a ‘venomous coalition,’ and slander organizations like CJV,” the group said. “Whether we continue is a ball that is at present in their court.”
Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, echoed that warning: “If [Roberts] doesn’t retract, apologize, and condemn Tucker Carlson… we at the ZOA will no longer be part of the Esther Project.”
And in a statement, Young Jewish Conservatives, another member group, said it was withdrawing its membership entirely. The group accused Carlson of “spewing antisemitism,” ridiculing Christian Zionists, and spreading propaganda for “enemies of the United States.” Roberts’s defense of him, YJC said, was “100% inconsistent with conservative values. … Anyone who aligns with Adolf Hitler must be unequivocally disavowed.”
The World Jewish Congress, an international federation representing Jewish communities and organizations in over 100 countries, remains listed as a participating organization on Project Esther’s website, despite its assertion that it has never been involved.
“WJC was not involved in the creation and is not involved in the implementation of Project Esther,” a spokesperson said.
Asked to respond, a Heritage spokesperson said in a statement, “The WJC was among those present at the launch stage of the task force, which informed the initial list of participants and is reflected on our website. We appreciate the engagement of those who contributed at all stages of this critical mission.”
When Project Esther debuted in 2024, Heritage hailed it as proof that the conservative movement takes antisemitism seriously. The 33-page blueprint called for purging “Hamas propaganda” from school curricula, firing “Hamas-aligned faculty” from U.S. universities, and pressuring social-media platforms to restrict antisemitic content. The goal, it said, was to make “Hamas Supporters” as socially toxic as the Ku Klux Klan or al-Qaida.
Yet the rollout was chaotic. Multiple groups Heritage named as participants — among them Christians United for Israel, the Hudson Institute, the Atlantic Council, and the Republican Jewish Coalition — denied any involvement.
Heritage officials responded by saying they had “invited” numerous Jewish organizations but purposely limited their inclusion. “More of my concern was really with the non-Jewish groups,” James Carafano, Heritage’s senior counselor and a leader of the antisemitism task force, told Jewish Insider. “Quite honestly, if [Jewish groups] were being effective, we wouldn’t have the problem that we have.”
Carafano told Jewish Insider he did not believe antisemitism was a problem on the American right. “White supremacists are not my problem,” he said. “They are not part of being conservative.”
Carafano declined to comment for this story.
Those comments, along with remarks from Luke Moon, executive director of the Christian-Zionist Philos Project, reveal how Heritage’s internal debates foreshadowed today’s crisis. Moon last year disclosed that task force members had discussed whether to call out Carlson and conservative commentator Candace Owens, who has also trafficked in antisemitic tropes, but decided against it.
“We had a long conversation several times about whether or not to, or how much energy do we spend going after, like, Tucker and Candace Owens, or do we really focus on where the majority are right now, at least, which is these folks on campus, [Students for Justice in Palestine] and stuff,” Moon told Jewish Insider last year.
He did not respond to a request for comment about recent events.
That decision now looms large as critics accuse Heritage of adopting a “no enemies to the right” ethos.
Robert’s statement drew swift rebukes from Republican senators Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell, as well as from Ben Shapiro, Mike Huckabee, and others who denounced Carlson’s platforming of Fuentes.
“I disagree with and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer, either,” Roberts said.
Roberts later issued a follow-up post condemning Fuentes’s antisemitism but stopped short of retracting his praise for Carlson.
Shapiro pushed back on Roberts’ characterization. “It is not cancellation to draw moral lines between viewpoints,” Shapiro said in an episode of his podcast Monday. “In fact, we used to call that one of the key aspects of conservatism.”
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Mamdani Remains Favorite on Eve of New York City Mayoral Election Despite Struggling With Jewish Voters
Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, delivers remarks while campaigning at the Hanson Place Seventh-Day Adventist Church in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, US, Nov. 1, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ryan Murphy
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani remains the favorite heading into Election Day on Tuesday, polling indicates, despite the Democratic nominee facing huge vulnerabilities among Jewish voters amid concerns over antisemitism and far-left policies outside the mainstream.
Most polling over the past month of the race has shown Mamdani ahead of his chief rival — former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary earlier this year — by 10 to 18 percentage points, with Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa trailing in third place. One outlier was an Emerson College poll released last week showing Mamdani in the lead by 25 points.
However, a new bombshell survey from AtlasIntel published on Monday showed Cuomo within striking distance, trailing Mamdani by just five points, 44 percent to 39 percent. The survey — which came a day after the same polling outfit had Cuomo trailing Mamdani by six points, indicating an upward trend for the former governor — also found that Cuomo would beat Mamdani 50 percent to 44 percent in a hypothetical two-way race.
Mamdani is currently struggling to win over Jewish New Yorkers, according to several polls, including one from Quinnipiac last week showing only 16 percent of the Jewish vote going to the Democratic nominee compared to 60 percent for Cuomo. A striking 75 percent of Jewish voters said they hold an “unfavorable” opinion of Mamdani, echoing similar findings from other surveys in recent months, such as a Sienna College poll from August.
New York City has the highest Jewish population of any area outside of Israel, giving the Jewish vote in the largest US city significant weight. The lack of support for Mamdani is especially telling given the Jewish community’s typical overwhelming support for Democrats in New York.
Despite his apparent failure to galvanize the Jewish vote ahead of the election, Mamdani has signaled that he will fight on behalf of the city’s Jews if elected mayor.
In a new Jewish Telegraphic Agency interview, Mamdani struck a conciliatory tone, acknowledging Jewish concerns about his candidacy. “I don’t begrudge folks who are skeptical of me,” he said. “I hope to prove that I am someone to build a relationship with, not one to fear.”
The statement marked a notable shift in tone for the outspoken progressive, who has faced criticism for past comments describing Israel as an “apartheid state” and for his refusal to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist aligned with the left flank of the party, has long been an anti-Israel activist who has supported boycott campaigns targeting Israeli-linked institutions and frequently joined rallies condemning Israeli military actions targeting Hamas terrorists in Gaza. While he insists that his positions are aimed at achieving what he calls “equal rights” in Israel, many Jewish groups have accused Mamdani of engaging in antisemitic tropes.
Mamdani sparked outrage over the summer after he repeatedly refused to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” a phrase widely interpreted as a call to harm Jews and Israelis worldwide.
“I fear living in a city, and a nation, where anti-Zionist rhetoric is normalized and contagious,” Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, a prominent Jewish voice at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, said during Shabbat services on Friday night. “Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism.”
She cited Mamdani’s reluctance to label Hamas, which calls for the murder of Jews and destruction of Israel, a terrorist group and his 2023 remark, which surfaced this past week, erroneously saying the New York City Police Department (NYPD) had learned aggressive policing tactics from the Israeli military.
“We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces],” Mamdani said.
A CNN analysis of his electoral strategy noted that Mamdani’s relationship with Jewish voters “remains fraught.” Polling data suggests that while he performs reasonably well among younger progressive Jews, support among Orthodox and traditional Jewish blocs, particularly in Brooklyn and Queens, remains minimal.
Jewish voters will likely only harden their opposition amid reports that Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the UK Labour Party who has long been accused of antisemitism, was working the phones on Sunday for Mamdani at a Democratic Socialists of America fundraiser.
Cuomo quickly seized on the development, accusing Mamdani of promoting extremism into New York’s politics.
“Having Jeremy Corbyn — someone whose party was found to have committed unlawful acts of discrimination against Jewish people under his leadership – phone-banking for @ZohranKMamdani says everything you need to know,” Cuomo posted on social media. “NY doesn’t need politics of moral compromise. We need leadership that rejects antisemitism, extremism, and division in every form and in every corner.”
Mamdani, for his part, has repeatedly tried to reassure voters that he would advocate for Jewish New Yorkers, reiterating that “antisemitism has no place in this city” and vowing to expand funding for the protection of houses of worship if elected. Yet, for many Jewish voters, his reassurances have not been enough.
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Iran’s Influence in France Surges Amid Gaza War, Targeting Institutions and Public Discourse, Report Finds
“From Gaza to Paris, Resistance!” A sign on display at a pro-Hamas demonstration in France. Photo: Reuters/Fiora Garenzi
The Iranian regime has long worked to infiltrate French society, leveraging political networks, media, and social platforms to expand its influence and stoke unrest, with its operations intensifying since the start of the war in Gaza, according to a new report.
The French think tank France2050 has released a new study revealing how Iran has spent years working to undermine the stability of France, using influence operations and other means to shape politics and the media in a bid to sow chaos and destabilize the government.
Presented to the French Parliament and Ministry of the Interior, the report details the networks the Islamist regime in Tehran has established since 1979, urging lawmakers to create a formal commission of inquiry with full investigative powers to fully expose the scope of the infiltration.
According to Gilles Platret, mayor of Chalon-sur-Saône in eastern France and lead author of the study, Tehran has successfully extended its ideological and political influence not only across the Middle East through its proxies (Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shiite militias in Iraq, and pro-Bashar al-Assad forces in Syria), but also into Western societies.
“[Iranian] infiltration has acted as a poison, slowly seeping into French society for nearly 50 years; drop by drop, it spreads, exerts influence, and corrodes,” Platret writes in the report, noting that Iran’s operations in France are now more powerful than ever.
Since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, French institutions, media outlets, far-left political parties, major universities, intellectuals, and student bodies have all become targets of Iranian interference, the newly released study found.
“Is it not legitimate to question the explosion of Palestinian flags in public spaces, now seen at most demonstrations, waved even during riots and attacks against French institutions and law enforcement — when Iran has long made the Palestinian cause the spearhead of its effort to win over the Western far left and ultra-left?” Platret says.
“Indeed, since the war last June, the Palestinian flag is increasingly seen alongside the Iranian flag itself,” he continues, referring to the war in Gaza.
Palestinian flags fly over French town halls as municipalities defy a government ban ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s planned recognition of a Palestinian state. Photo: Screenshot
According to the 85-page report, Tehran relies on its Paris embassy, European Union lobbyists, and operatives funded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iranian intelligence to operate deep within French territory, pursuing its objectives through covert operations.
“How much longer will France, in the name of supposedly higher diplomatic interests, continue to close its eyes to what is being plotted on its soil — something that threatens its sovereignty and security more each day?” Platret says.
The study also explains that Iran’s growing influence in France serves a dual purpose: to pressure the country on the Iranian nuclear issue, pushing it to influence Israel, and to sow “chaos without war” within French democratic institutions, in line with the “global jihad” strategy enshrined in its constitution.
One of the report’s key findings is that Iran’s extensive political connections and diplomatic network are among the regime’s most important tools, allowing it to expand its influence and shape public discourse within France.
For example, the relationships of certain French political leaders or movements with the Iranian Embassy in Paris, so-called “reformists” in Iran, or Middle Eastern figures linked to Tehran “create clear risks of directing public debate in ways that favor Iranian interests,” the study says.
Beyond its diplomatic network, the report highlights that Iranian intelligence services are actively operating in France, increasingly using social networks as a tool for manipulation.
According to Middle East expert Frédéric Encel, Iran’s strategy is driven by a form of Shiite expansionism that remains central to the regime, with its inherent violence an inseparable aspect of its nature.
In pursuit of these objectives, Encel explains that the regime relies on propaganda, infiltration, and physical elimination.
“Everything must submit to the imperative of global jihad, even the very text of the Qur’an, whose interpretation is constantly twisted … to merge the religious with the political, in service of an ideological project for which France has become a stage,” the study says.
For years, Iran has orchestrated terrorist attacks across the globe, engaged in hostage-taking, and even political assassinations, with its efforts intensifying since the start of the war in Gaza, using the conflict to provoke civil unrest and mask ongoing terrorist operations.
In July, France, Britain, the US, and 11 other allies issued a joint statement condemning a rise in Iranian assassination and kidnapping plots in the West
Inside Iran, the regime is responsible for severe human rights violations, routinely repressing dissent and using extreme violence against opponents, peaceful protesters, and independent voices.