A new investigation from the Simon Wiesenthal Center

30 years

of Iranian information warfare against the United States, built between 1996 and 2026 — and untouched by the 2026 strikes.

The war that has no ceasefire

A new investigation maps how Iran turned antisemitism into a precision instrument aimed at American society — who built it, how it works, and what it will take to stop it.

Volume One — the first in a series on how hostile states wage war from within

What the report proves

  1. The infrastructure is structural, not digital.

    It rests on human relationships and institutions that the internet amplifies but did not create. Disrupting its digital symptoms without addressing its offline foundations will not stop it.

  2. Antisemitism is the operation’s load-bearing structure.

    Not an incidental feature. Any response that treats it only as a civil-rights concern, rather than as a national-security vulnerability, addresses a symptom rather than the cause.

  3. Platform architecture is a structural enabler.

    American social media rewards engagement regardless of origin or accuracy, moderates reactively rather than proactively, and sits behind a liability shield that removes the incentive to act.

  4. The convergence of far left and far right was engineered.

    The alignment of the far left and far right around a shared set of enemies is not an organic accident of polarization. It was deliberately engineered, and the conference circuit was its laboratory.

  5. Existing countermeasures have not degraded Iran’s overall capacity.

    Sanctions, indictments and platform bans have disrupted individual operations. The network is too redundant and too deeply embedded in legitimate discourse to be defeated by removing one node at a time.

1996
The first official Tehran visit that begins the network this report traces.
340+
Influencers, media outlets, organizations and affiliated entities analyzed for this report.
2019
The U.S. Treasury designation confirming the conferences as an IRGC recruitment platform.
5
Findings, each developed in full in the report’s six chapters.

From the executive summary

In 2026, the United States and Iran went to war. But that is not the only war between these adversaries, and perhaps not the one that matters most. The other is older, quieter, and has no ceasefire: an information war Iran has waged against the United States since the 1990s, a sustained campaign aimed at dividing American society and turning its citizens against one another and the state. The first war is fought with weapons. The second is fought with narratives, and the central narrative is antisemitism.

The West has misread that second war from the start. Iran’s antisemitism looks, from the outside, like the reflexive bigotry of a hostile regime, a matter for civil-rights monitors and interfaith panels. That reading is wrong. Iran’s antisemitism is not a sentiment, but a method, a precision instrument aimed at the United States, refined over three decades, and designed to turn the country’s own citizens into carriers of a foreign state’s narratives. It runs through conference halls and film festivals, through news outlets and a constellation of websites that pose as independent journalism, through hackers and fake personas and the open-editing pages of Wikipedia. It has reached tens of millions of Americans, subtly shifting what they accept as fact.

This report documents that campaign: who built it, how it works, why it succeeds, and what it will take to stop it.

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What you’ll learn

Six questions the report was written to settle. Also inside: an annotated guide to every person and organization named, the full map of the network, and a thirty-year timeline.

  1. Why would a government choose antisemitism as its weapon? Because it is the one story that unites the far left, the far right and the religious fringe against a single enemy. Nothing else does that.
  2. Who did Iran recruit inside America — and what did they get back? Named people, documented meetings, three decades of relationships. Almost none of it built online.
  3. How does a story nobody wrote reach millions of Americans by morning? The route barely varies. The report traces it step by step, from an anonymous channel to a mainstream feed.
  4. Why haven’t the platforms stopped it? Their design rewards engagement regardless of where it came from — and the law gives them very little reason to act.
  5. What changed after October 7? The distance between the fringe and the mainstream closed. Claims that once lived in the darkest corners now surface on widely watched programs.
  6. What would actually stop this? Specific, named actions for Congress, the technology platforms, enforcement agencies, journalists and communities.

Ready for the whole thing?

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Iran’s antisemitism is not a sentiment, but a method, a precision instrument aimed at the United States.
The War for Western Minds Volume One, Executive Summary

Who produced this report

The War for Western Minds: The Iran Report is published by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. It is the first in a projected series examining how hostile states wage war on Western societies from within.

None of this is a call to police legitimate criticism of any government, including Israel’s. The report is precise on this point throughout. The distinction between political speech and a foreign influence operation lies not in the opinion expressed but in the coordinated, deceptive, state-directed machinery behind it.

  • Built on U.S. government designations, indictments and Treasury advisories
  • Court filings, congressional records and peer-reviewed academic work
  • Technical threat-intelligence reporting from major cybersecurity firms
  • More than 340 influencers, media outlets, organizations and affiliated entities analyzed
  • Every factual assertion documented in the report’s footnotes

The War for Western Minds

Ready for the whole thing?

Every chapter, the annotated key-actor reference, the influence map, the timeline and the full source apparatus are published in the online edition.

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