Iran using ‘asymmetric warfare’ to spread Jew-hatred in US to sow division, report says

(Oct. 16, 2026 / JNS)

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.

Iran recognizes the vastly superior U.S. military might, so it engages in “asymmetric warfare” to turn “instruments of cultural and informational warfare against the West,” according to the report.

The Iranian regime spreads Jew-hatred to unite the fringes of the far-Right, far-Left and black and Christian nationalists, the report says.

“Jews are a convenient scapegoat,” Vlad Khaykin, head of North American advocacy at the center, 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 has developed a network by holding conferences with guests, including from anti-Israel group Codepink and Nation of Islam and Holocaust deniers, according to the report.

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

“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 told JNS.

“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 portrays itself as a progressive, anti-Zionist news service that tends to promulgate Iranian regime-aligned narratives.

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 the ways that Iranian conferences have “institutionalized and internationalized” the allegation.

“There was a conference in Tehran called ‘On the Brink’ that was focused on police brutality and racism in U.S. policing,” Khaykin told JNS. “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 told JNS. “It helped to put a kosher stamp of approval and run cover for this antisemitic idea.”

The allegations have since been adapted into narratives that the Israel Defense Forces has trained U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to “brutalize communities of color, to brutalize migrants,” according to Khaykin.

“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 told JNS.

“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 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 discusses the ways that the Iranian regime has developed a social media influencer network to launder its propaganda and has engaged in Wikipedia-editing campaigns to spread the propaganda through the site’s open-sourced editing model.

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

Khaykin believes that lawmakers should revisit Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally protects social media companies from being held liable for content on their respective platforms.

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