Warren Kinsella: How Iran stage-manages anti-Israel campaigns in the West
For decades, Iran has sought to influence — or destabilize — Western politics. That is well known. As the years went by, however, not as many knew how successful Iran had become in its anti-Western campaign. Iran has invested considerable resources stage-managing protests in democratic nations, intelligence agencies say. And it has paid many dividends.
After October 7, more media started to take note. “The Iranian regime is funneling money and its influence into anti-Israel college campus protests across the U.S., often through buzzily named organizations — and many who join the protests don’t realize who is really behind them,” wrote Isabel Vincent in the New York Post in August 2024. She went on to quote the director of Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch project: “For decades, the Iranian regime has worked closely with far-left, far-right and Islamist groups across Europe and North America. . . . Following the October 7th attacks, Tehran has poured money and logistical support into anti-Israel and pro-terror rallies, encampments and civil disorder.
“We’ve uncovered evidence . . . where the Iranian regime appears to operate mosques, activist and student groups that are deeply involved in pro-terror demonstrations, alongside Hamas-aligned groups,” the Middle East Forum said.
As noted, Iran’s involvement in promoting extremism and terrorism in the West — or simply stirring up trouble — was not new. As the CIA stated in 2018 in a partially declassified analysis about “radical cooperation” between Iran, Libya, and Syria, these countries were “hostile to Israel’s existence” and working “to encourage the emergence of revolutionary, anti-Western” groups around the planet. Of the three, the CIA’s prescient analysts wrote, “Iran is the most implacable foe and will remain the most effective and dangerous state sponsor of terrorism over the next few years.” Iran’s activities ranged from small-scale operations to ones on a global scale.
For example, in the years prior to the October 7 massacre, members of a fringe orthodox Jewish sect called Neturei Karta — which numbers in the low thousands and opposes the State of Israel — have been front and centre at protests across North America and Europe. They wear obvious religious garb, and are often caught by the television cameras. Iran has a long and documented history of supporting the sect. Most recently, Neturei Karta members acted as spokespeople on Iranian state television during the summer 2024 university encampments.
More recently in 2024, Canadian investigative journalist Nagar Mojahedi — who, along with her family, has received multiple threats from the Iranian regime — revealed that Iran had funded protests on the McGill University campus. Mojahedi reported on scores of fake online accounts that were “coming from Iranians inside Iran linked to the regime and [the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)], fuelling the campus protests at McGill.” It was “a massive, funded, coordinated and organized” effort by Iran designed to influence public opinion and government policy, Mojahedi stated. In all, more than 500,000 posts were traced to Iran. All were designed to cause further unrest at the storied Canadian university, she reported.
There are multiple examples of Iranian agitation on a much larger scale, however. Cotton Sandstorm, for example, is the code name for an infamous Iranian Revolutionary Guard cyberwarfare group that uses fake accounts online, such as Jewish Peace Advocate, to spread anti-West and anti-Israel propaganda. Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence team discovered the existence of the fake accounts in early 2024.
Said the Microsoft Threat Analysis team, “As the Israel-Hamas war broke out on October 7, 2023, Iran immediately surged support to Hamas with its now well-honed technique of combining targeted hacks with influence operations amplified on social media, what we refer to as cyber-enabled influence operations. Iran’s operations were initially reactionary and opportunistic. By late October, nearly all of Iran’s influence and major cyber actors focused on Israel in an increasingly targeted, coordinated, and destructive manner, making for a seemingly boundless ‘all-hands-on-deck’ campaign against Israel. Unlike some of Iran’s past cyberattacks, all of its destructive cyberattacks against Israel in this war — real or fabricated — were complemented with online influence operations.”
Microsoft’s cybersecurity experts added: “[Iran’s] influence operations grew increasingly sophisticated and inauthentic, deploying networks of social media ‘sockpuppets’ as the war progressed. Throughout the war these influence operations have sought to intimidate Israelis while criticizing the Israeli government’s handling of hostages and military operations to polarize and ultimately destabilize Israel. Eventually, Iran turned its cyberattacks and influence operations against Israel’s political allies and economic partners to undermine support to Israel’s military operations. We expect the threat posed by Iran’s cyber and influence operations will grow as the conflict persists, particularly amid the rising potential for a widening war. Increased brazenness of Iranian and Iran-affiliated actors coupled with burgeoning collaboration among them portends a growing threat ahead of the U.S. elections in November.”
Around the same time, in late 2024, Meta — the company that owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — shut down a sophisticated Iranian influence operation run by the dictatorship’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard. Meta’s Threat Disruption Center revealed that Iran, aided and abetted by Hezbollah, was running multiple fake accounts across Meta’s platforms as well as on TikTok, X, and others. An IRGC-controlled front company had been flagged by Israeli cyber intelligence as the source of threats, via emails and texts, against Israeli athletes at the Paris Olympics. Iran had also fabricated a website purporting to be The Jerusalem Post and was using artificial intelligence to push out fake narratives about Israel. Iran-supported Hezbollah, they said, also created fake sites and even purchased thousands of dollars of advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Hezbollah’s propaganda, which originated with its media outlet in Lebanon, promoted stories suggesting that Israeli society was breaking up and that the Jewish state was experiencing food shortages.
Several examples of Iran’s involvement — in the protests, in the attacks, in the campaigns of intimidation and discord — became more widely known in early 2024. But few of the Iran-affiliated operations were as big, or as successful, as the global shut-down effort that took place on April 15, 2024.
Indications that something big would be happening that day had leaked out just a few weeks earlier. And immediately after the April 15 protests, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, also openly encouraged the global anti-Israel protests. Khamenei, the Grand Ayatollah of Iran and previously the country’s president, posted in English on X alongside videos of Western student protestors: “See what is happening in the world. In Western countries, in England and France, and in states across the U.S. itself, people are coming out in huge numbers to chant slogans against Israel and America. U.S. and Israel’s reputation has been ruined. They truly have no solution.”
Notwithstanding Khamenei’s rhetoric, the Iranian supreme leader was killed in the opening hours of the Iranian war. On Feb. 28, as Khamenei and other senior Iranian leaders met in a fortified compound in Tehran, the Shia cleric was dispatched in a stunning strike by Israel’s Air Force. His propaganda campaign against Jews, the Jewish state and the West survives him, however.
In June 2024, as the student encampments were spreading across North America and Europe, Iranian proxy Hezbollah also confirmed that support was flowing to Western students. Hezbollah legislator Mohammad Raad appeared on Russia Today and said, “I believe we should rely on the ability of Arabs and Muslims to invest in the changes we are witnessing, specifically the Western students in the demonstrations in the West. There are Arab students who are demonstrating in the West, and this is something we can understand. But the Western students who are demonstrating in support of Palestine — we rely on our ability to invest in this positive activity into the future. . . . We should invest in the students.
“We need to enter the heart of Western societies.”
From THE HIDDEN HAND: The Information War and the Rise of Anti-Semitic Propaganda by Warren Kinsella, to be published April 22 by Signal Books/McClelland & Stewart, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada. © Warren Kinsella, 2026. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our newsletters here.