Wiesenthal Center report says Iran spread antisemitic narratives in the West for 30 years

Right · 1The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) published a report on Wednesday 14 October titled “The War on Western Minds: Iran's 30-Year Campaign to Divide the West.” 1 Right · 1It argues that Iran has used antisemitism as a weapon in an ideological “soft war” against the West, exploiting nationalism, religious narratives and anti-imperialism to spread anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric. 1 Right · 2According to the report, Iran cannot match US military power and so uses “asymmetric warfare,” turning “instruments of cultural and informational warfare against the West.” 2 1

Right · 1The report says Iran tailors its message to different audiences, including apocalyptic and Antichrist language for religious Christians and grievance-based appeals to Black communities, citing Louis Farrakhan's 1996 tour and a 2001 Tehran conference on racism. 1 Right · 2It says Iran built a media infrastructure to carry these ideas, including Press TV, launched in 2007, and what it calls alternative outlets such as MintPress News, which the SWC alleges relays Iranian narratives while presenting as an independent progressive outlet. 1 2 Right · 2The report links this ecosystem to real-world harm, pointing to the manifesto of Payton Gendron, who carried out the May 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooting and referenced a 2016 MintPress article. 1 2

Right · 1It says that by 2026 the operations included fake news sites mimicking American media, fabricated online personas, and manipulation of Wikipedia, and it cites Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center on an IRGC-linked hacking effort during the 2024 US presidential campaign. 1 Right · 1The SWC says it identified more than 340 influencers, outlets, organisations and affiliated entities forming an interconnected network, and names figures and groups including Aleksandr Dugin, Jackson Hinkle, Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone, CODEPINK, Jewish Voice for Peace and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. These are the SWC's allegations; the articles carry no responses from those named. 1 Right · 1The report describes a six-stage cycle in which legitimate humanitarian reports are stripped of caveats by alternative media, repackaged by commentators for left- and right-wing audiences, and turned into campus activism. 1

Right · 1Vlad Khaykin, the SWC's head of North American advocacy, told JNS that Jews are “a convenient scapegoat” in what he called a broader geopolitical play, and that Iran follows a Soviet-style approach of exploiting existing social divisions. 2 Right · 1Khaykin gave the example of a Tehran conference on police brutality that he said seeded the idea that Israelis train US police, a claim he said was later picked up by Jewish Voice for Peace in 2017 and adapted into claims about ICE. 2 Right · 2The report recommends mandatory coordinated-threat disclosure for platforms, mandatory labelling of AI-generated content, and a congressional review of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to remove immunity for content attributable to designated foreign adversaries or their proxies; Khaykin also urged lawmakers to revisit Section 230. 1 2