Iran ‘asymmetric war’ spreads Jew-hatred in US

Iran has waged a 30-year campaign to weaken the West by using its propaganda networks to spread Jew-hatred and sow division, according to a new report from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Recognizing the vastly superior military might of the US, Iran engages in “asymmetric warfare,” turning “instruments of cultural and informational warfare against the West,” the report says.

The regime spreads Jew-hatred to unite fringe elements of the far right and far left, as well as black nationalists and Christian nationalists, according to the report.

“Jews are a convenient scapegoat,” Vlad Khaykin, the center’s head of North American advocacy, told JNS.

“We’ve been cast unwittingly into a drama that is much bigger than us,” he said. “We’ve been cast as the villains into a drama that isn’t really about us. It’s about a broader geopolitical play.”

Iran built its network in part by holding conferences whose guests included members of the anti-Israel group Codepink and the Nation of Islam, as well as Holocaust deniers, the report says.

After the events, participants began contributing to Iranian media outlets, appeared on the regime-run Press TV, worked together at “alternative-media outlets” and amplified regime propaganda, according to the report.

“Iran has built a media infrastructure to disseminate these ideas, and these narratives and conspiracy theories, and some of them are state-owned media that we know is directed by the Iranian regime, like Press TV,” Khaykin said.

“There’s a network of alternative media outlets that have been created in order to give the sense that this is credible reporting,” he said.

One such outlet, he said, is MintPress News, which presents itself as a progressive, anti-Zionist news service and tends to promote narratives aligned with the Iranian regime.

The report describes the Iranian propaganda claim that Israelis train police in the United States in the “racist and militarized tactics they employ against black communities,” and how Iranian conferences have “institutionalized and internationalized” that allegation.

“There was a conference in Tehran called ‘On the Brink’ that was focused on police brutality and racism in US policing,” Khaykin said. “A number of black activists and radicals and extremists were invited to that conference.”

“They were exposed to various kinds of presentations that had names like ‘Israel: The Harvard University of Police Brutality,’” he said. “They seeded this idea that it was the Zionists or the Israelis or the Jews that were responsible for racist policing in the United States.”

When participants went home, “they began to disseminate this through their various social, political, cultural, religious and other networks,” he said.

“In 2017, it was picked up by Jewish Voice for Peace, which gave it the air of Jewish legitimacy,” he said. “It helped to put a kosher stamp of approval and run cover for this antisemitic idea.”

The allegation has since been adapted into claims that the Israel Defense Forces trained US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to “brutalize communities of color, to brutalize migrants,” Khaykin said.

“The way that these disinformation narratives and strategies are developed — they’re intended to eventually take on a life of their own, to where they’re kind of viral propaganda, a self-perpetuating propaganda intended to turn the targets of the propaganda into its distributive system,” he said.

“It’s meant to create true believers who will then carry on the message,” he said. “That’s very much what we’ve seen here.”

According to Khaykin, the Iranian regime has followed the Soviet Union’s playbook in sowing disinformation, and it partners with Russia in doing so.

“The way that the Soviets did it, and the way that Iran continues to do its disinformation and influence campaigns, is actually to take extant grievances, social divisions, contentious issues and to exploit them in order to create division in society,” he said.

The report also describes how the regime has developed a network of social media influencers to launder its propaganda, and has run Wikipedia editing campaigns that exploit the site’s open editing model.

Iran’s disinformation campaigns have real-world consequences, Khaykin said. The white supremacist gunman who carried out a mass shooting at a Buffalo, NY, supermarket in May 2022 was influenced in part by reading MintPress News, he said.

Khaykin said lawmakers should revisit Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally shields social media companies from liability for content on their platforms.

“It provides wide latitude to these companies to operate without a lot of recourse,” he said. “We need them to actually care about the ways that their platforms are being used, being exploited.” —JNS