Iran's Plan to Assassinate the World's Jewish Leaders

As a deterrent to an attack by Israel to destroy its nuclear program, the Islamic Republic claims it will kill Jews all over the globe.

Feb 25, 2023

man wearing black coat and hat — Photo by Laura Siegal on Unsplash

Click here to check out the first 30 Installments - Volume I - in this series on Antisemitism and Culture. The top 5 most important pieces from this first wave:

This is the 17th installment in Volume II, intended as another 30 pieces exploring the many manifestations of Jew Hatred and the issues surrounding it in America and globally. See the previous articles in this new collection below.

These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.

So it’s been far too long since my last entry (February 12) in this series - a result of driving across the country last week and juggling much more than usual Algemeiner editing and JNS freelance article writing this week. I had an especially quirky one published on Thursday - “Insect named for Hitler draws criticism from organizational, academic circles” - and just submitted another yesterday afternoon about a pro-Israel campus event that took place on Tuesday at Duke. I’ve further got more green-lit articles to keep me busy through the weekend and into next week.

So now I’ve got an absurdly large group of open tabs for stories that I wanted to write about and will start with the one I find most disturbing.

(Editor's Note: 48. He has 48 tabs open right now. -SS)

On February 16, the Jewish Chronicle published a story so horrifying it made me stop in my tracks: “Iran ‘mapping’ Jews in diaspora for kill squads.” Here’s the introduction:

Iran has been “mapping” the Jewish diaspora for an assassination campaign that will be triggered if Israel attacks its nuclear facilities, a Jewish woman who met Ayatollah Khamenei has told the JC.
The chilling plan, disclosed at a high-level meeting in Tehran, involved identifying key Jewish figures and determining “how to strike and where”.
The hit squads would be deployed if Israel ever attacked Iran, she was told, so “the diaspora would have a very nasty surprise”.
The revenge plot was revealed to Catherine Perez-Shakdam, one of the few Westerners to be granted an audience with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Read the whole article.

This week an official in the UK confirmed the plot:

“Between 2020 and 2022, Iran tried to collect intelligence on Israeli and U.K.-based Jewish individuals,” said Tugendhat before the House of Commons. “We believe this information was a preparation for future lethal operations.”

Just try and imagine this happening for a moment. Israel strikes Iran in some way or another to disable or sabotage the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions. And the regime retaliates by dispatching its spies to murder a few dozen rabbis and Jewish lay leaders around the world. What would the impact of that be on the Jewish community and the world at large? A part of me suspects that might be enough to provoke a new “coalition of the willing” to overthrow the mullahs oppressing the Persian people. It would not be a terrorist act at the magnitude of 9/11 but the response to it might be similar: a known terrorist threat would finally be dealt with and eliminated, no matter the cost in blood and treasure.

Here’s a thought experiment to consider: is Iran fundamentally different than Al-Qaeda in its totalitarian, theocratic, and terrorist aims? Why is the former thought by many to just be another “state” which our nation should consider make “deals” with?

Radio Free Europe wrote this in 2019, my emphases added:

Iran remains "the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism," funding international terrorist groups and engaging in "its own terrorist plotting" around the globe, particularly in Europe, a new report by the U.S. State Department says.

The Country Reports on Terrorism 2018, released on November 1, says Iran has spent nearly $1 billion dollars annually to "support terrorist groups that serve as its proxies and expand its malign influence across the globe."

It cited the Lebanese Shi'ite movement Hizballah and the Palestinian Islamist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

"The Iranian threat is not confined to the Middle East -- it's truly global," Nathan Sales, the department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, told a news briefing in Washington.

Al Qaeda wasn’t spending a billion dollars a year on terrorism. Was the only reason the United States went after them because Americans broadly were forced to care by the overwhelming atrocity of 9/11? A rhetorical question, of course. What if Americans had the moral clarity to understand that we should have aggressively gone after Osama bin Laden before he committed an act of mass terrorism?

This whole thing reminds me of an interesting point from some of the students who I interviewed about their Israel-UAE trip a few weeks ago. After hearing about their trip I picked their brains a bit to get a better feel for the anti-Israel situation on their campuses. Was it really severe? Mild? Varied over the years as new students cycled through? And one of the points made was very telling: the amount of anti-Israel activism and outright antisemitism on campus was often directly tied to how enflamed the situation was in the Middle East. If the Israelis and Palestinians were engaged in a large scale conflict then that would bleed over onto the college campuses.

Many Americans may want to just focus on “domestic issues,” talking about unemployment levels, inflation, gas prices, and protecting children from *gasp* drag queens.

We see this in the number of Americans whining about the broadly bi-partisan support for providing Ukraine with military support against Vladimir Putin’s genocidal imperial invasion of conquest. They think that what happens in Ukraine and Russia doesn’t affect them at all, so why should we be spending billions of our tax dollars on it? Who cares if Putin conquers some country that too many Americans couldn’t even find on a map?

And I always respond the same way: it is entirely in America’s interests to ensure that authoritarian regimes cannot conquer their free neighbors. Why? Because if we allow Putin to take Ukraine it will signal to all the other world’s terrorist states that they can do that too and the United States will do nothing to stop them. It will totally destabilize the globe, obliterating the global economy we all rely on for our cheap goods and services that make our lives so convenient.

You still want to be able to buy lots of absurdly inexpensive plastic crap at Wal-Mart, shipped over from China? Well that isn’t going to be able to happen anymore if China switches from focusing on participating in the global economy to making war on its neighbors because it thinks it can get away with it.

As one who has spent over a decade as a foreign policy-centered writer-activist I am so tired of having to endlessly explain this. Isolationism is the creed of the ignorant and naive, blind to the reality of the malevolence all around the world and the delicate nature of the global peace that we have.

However, if Iran threatening to assassinate Jewish leaders across the planet doesn’t wake up the far right MAGA neo-isolationists - and it won’t - here’s something else that might. There’s somebody else the Mullahs want to take out, published today at The Algemeiner, my emphases added again:

Iran has developed a cruise missile with a range of 1,650 km (1,025 miles) a top Revolutionary Guards commander said on Friday, in a move likely to raise Western concerns after Russia’s use of Iranian drones in the Ukraine war.
Separately, Amirali Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace force, also spoke of Iran’s often repeated threat to avenge the US killing of a top Iranian commander, saying “We are looking to kill (former US President Donald) Trump.”
…
“God willing, we are looking to kill Trump. (Former Secretary of State Mike) Pompeo… and military commanders who issued the order (to kill Soleimani) should be killed,” Hajizadeh said in the television interview.
Iranian leaders have often vowed to avenge Soleimani in strong terms.

Question: how many hardcore “America First” MAGA-obsessed motherfuckers who exclaim how much they don’t care about foreign affairs and just want America to focus on its own internal interests, would all of a sudden become the most hawkish of warmongers if Iran murdered their god-king?

Winston Churchill comes to mind, unfortunately, in a sentiment as true today as it was in his life:

Iran's Plan to Assassinate the World's Jewish Leaders

As a deterrent to an attack by Israel to destroy its nuclear program, the Islamic Republic claims it will kill Jews all over the globe.

“You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.”

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