Mick Hartley

From David Rose in the Jewish Chronicle:

Senior commanders from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) are using a London-based student organisation to pipe extremist antisemitic propaganda and calls for violence into British universities.

The speakers, some of whom who are sanctioned by Britain for human rights abuses, have played key roles in crushing of dissent in Iran.

This is the first time that IRGC commanders have been seen to play a direct role in disseminating regime propaganda in the UK.

The JC has identified eight IRGC leaders who have addressed UK student audiences since early 2020.

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.

The disclosures sparked renewed demands from leading MPs and security experts for the government to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist group, making organising similar talks a criminal offence. The move has been resisted by the Foreign Office.

The talks, which were live streamed from Iran and viewed by tens of thousands of people, were arranged by the Islamic Students Association of Britain, which has a network of branches across the country.

Surprisingly perhaps, while the Foreign Office under James Cleverly is staring at its feet, the Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has pledged to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist group under a Labour government. Is this all part of Keir Starmer's determination to put the Corbyn years firmly in the rear-view mirror of the new-look Labour Party?