There is a direct pipeline from Iran’s IRGC commanders to a student’s association, the Islamic Students Association of Britain, with the most extremist terrorist propaganda and direct exhortations for violence being piped in. It sounds pretty shocking and even worse, it was left to the Jewish Chronicle to reveal this disturbing and new development. The Times and the Independent have run articles on this but I have yet to find anything on the BBC and Guardian.
According to the JC :
Recordings obtained by this newspaper reveal that one commander, Saeed Ghasemi, told British students that the Holocaust was “fake”, boasted of training al-Qaeda terrorists, and urged his audience to join “the beautiful list of soldiers” who would fight and kill Jews in a coming apocalyptic war.
Another, Hossein Yekta, claimed Jews “created homosexuality” and urged his audience to “raise the flag of the Islamic revolution, Islam and martyrdom”. Students should see themselves as “holy warriors”, he said, promising that the “era of the Jews” would soon be at an end.
Talks by many of the IRGC’s most notorious leaders were livestreamed to tens of thousands of people by this student organisation which has a presence in British universities according to the Times, as well as a network of branches across the UK. Its facebook page has since gone private and it is not clear to me if it is an affiliate of FOSIS, the Federation of student Islamic Societies.
The disclosures by the JC have seen a swift response from politicians across the political divide, as well as former intelligence chief, Sir Richard Dearlove, who led calls to proscribe the IRGC to outlaw its propaganda activities. “The case for strong preventive action seems clear-cut,” he said. The Foreign Office seems resistant to these calls.
Labour to its credit has vowed to proscribe the IRGC as well as groups like the Wagner group from Russia.
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said if her party won power, it would introduce legislation to ban dangerous, state-sponsored organisations, which would include the IRGC and Russia’s Wagner group.
Cooper said existing anti-terrorism legislation “didn’t fit” the dangers posed by emerging “hostile-state threats”.
The West Yorkshire MP said Labour in government would “swiftly” set up parallel laws known as a ‘Contest for State Threats’.
The Home Secretary is concerned that Iran is the UK’s biggest national security threat amid intelligence reports that organised crime gangs are being recruited to attack and murder opponents of the regime in the UK. It is a shame that Iranian dissident TV channel Iran International was forced to stop broadcasting from its UK base after Scotland Yard warned it could not protect staff.
Iranian dissidents are not the only ones afraid. The Union of Jewish Students’ president, Edward Isaacs pleaded for the safety of Jewish students as they return to campus in a fortnight. Why should they bear the burden of wondering which of their fellow students are being radicalised by IRGC terrorists? What is so difficult about proscribing the IRGC and making it criminal for these students to organise and disseminate terror propaganda?
