From Cartoons to Missiles: The Islamic Republic’s War on Jews
In one of the more grotesque fusions of antisemitism and artificial intelligence, the official website of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei this week published an AI-generated cartoon depicting Jews and Israeli soldiers as rats fleeing Iranian missiles. The vermin scurry across a U.S. flag-draped vessel—visual shorthand for the Islamic Republic’s belief that both Zionism and America are part of the same Jewish-controlled machine.
The cartoon’s caption quotes directly from Khamenei’s speech the day prior, in which he bragged that Iran’s missile attacks had supposedly humiliated Israel and forced it to beg for U.S. intervention:
“If [Israel] hadn’t bowed down, if it hadn’t collapsed to the ground, if it didn’t need help, if it were capable of defending itself, it wouldn’t have resorted to the United States like that. Turning to the United States means it realized it could not handle the Islamic Republic.”
In the same speech, Khamenei referred to Israel as a “cancer” and “America’s rabid dog”—terms lifted directly from the rhetorical lexicon of fascism.
This wasn’t fringe propaganda from an anonymous blog. It was official messaging from the head of state of a United Nations member—one that routinely broadcasts calls to “uproot the Jews” on national television.
From Tehran to Berlin: A Global Antisemitic Network
Iran’s state propaganda often blends Islamic revolutionary motifs with imagery and tropes lifted from far-right European antisemitism. This is no coincidence.
Ahmed Huber, photographed in his home in 2002 after he was placed on the UN terror list.
In the early 2000s, the Islamic Republic developed relationships with European and American white nationalists and Holocaust deniers. One of the key intermediaries was Ahmed Huber, a Swiss far-right ideologue and Hitler admirer who converted to Islam and helped build bridges between Nazi sympathizers and Islamists. Huber was a prominent figure in organizing early pro-Iran propaganda in Europe and was a vocal supporter of Iran’s Holocaust cartoon contest. His goal? A “global alliance” between neo-Nazis and jihadists against Zionism and “Anglo-American imperialism.”
May 2006- David Duke, foreground left, a former leader of the U.S. white supremacist group,the Ku Klux Klan, and former state representative in Louisiana, listens to a speech during a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran, Iran. Next to Duke, Mohammad Ali Ramin, was appointed deputy culture minister for media affairs under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who called the Holocaust a "myth."
Another admirer of the Iranian regime is David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard and professional antisemite. Duke has praised the Islamic Republic’s stance on “Zionist control” of the media and banking systems. He has described Iran as “one of the last truly free nations” standing up to “Jewish power.” Tehran’s press agencies—particularly Press TV—have eagerly amplified Duke’s views over the years, giving him a platform denied to him in the West.
https://x.com/jacksonhinklle/status/1935244398826025079
More recently, this unholy alliance has found younger, more social-media-savvy faces—like Jackson Hinkle, a self-declared “patriotic socialist” and rabid regime apologist whose rants on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) are routinely amplified by Iranian state media. Hinkle, who has denied the legitimacy of Iranian protests and praised the regime’s military “resistance,” plays the useful idiot abroad, laundering Tehran’s propaganda into leftist discourse in the West. His collaborations with Iranian platforms fit a pattern: American fringe influencers, propped up by foreign regimes, speaking the regime’s script under the guise of “anti-imperialism.”
Genocide, Set to Music
After last month’s 12-day war with Israel—which saw hundreds of Iranian military personnel, nuclear scientists, and civilians killed in retaliatory strikes—Iranian state TV doubled down on its genocidal incitement. On July 2, they aired a song featuring the lyrics:
“Behind Ali, obedient to the Leader’s command, we are all proud soldiers; we will uproot the Jews with power.”
This wasn’t aired on some obscure online stream. It was broadcast nationally, proudly, on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) network. The same network that broadcasts children's puppet shows about killing Jews and regularly features clerics denying the Holocaust.
A Legacy of Hate, Wrapped in Culture
Iran has long used "cultural" channels to spread antisemitism. The Saint Mary TV mini-series aired in 2001 portrayed Jews at the time of Jesus’s birth as morally diseased and conspiratorial. In 2005, then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched the International Holocaust Cartoon Contest, a vile competition that continues to this day with the full backing of state institutions like the Islamic Culture and Relations Organization.
In 2023, the IRGC-affiliated Imam Hossein University began offering scholarships to students willing to write “research” proving the “Jewish control” of Western civilization—a program indistinguishable from the pseudoscientific racial theories of 1930s Germany.
The Jewish Community in Iran: A Hostage, Not a Showcase
Despite the regime’s rhetoric, Iran still maintains a Jewish population of 8,000–10,000—descendants of an ancient community dating back to the Babylonian exile. But they are used as political window dressing. Their leaders are forced to denounce Israel publicly and march in regime parades. Their synagogues are monitored, their speech censored, their loyalty constantly policed.
When confronted with accusations of antisemitism, regime officials point to Iranian Jews as a deflection tactic—just as Soviet propagandists once trotted out Jewish communists to dismiss charges of antisemitic purges.
But cartoons, speeches, songs, and missiles don’t lie.
State Antisemitism Is Not Rhetoric—It’s Strategy
The Islamic Republic’s antisemitism is not an aberration or excess. It is a core pillar of its ideology and foreign policy. It manifests not only in hate speech but in terrorist attacks—from Hezbollah’s 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires to plots against Jewish targets in Bulgaria, Georgia, and beyond.
The convergence of far-right antisemites such as Duke and Huber, along with leftist influencers like Hinkle, under Tehran's banner is a deliberate strategy. It’s a strategy—an ideological horseshoe—where the far-left and far-right meet in paranoid hatred of Jews and Western liberalism.
What begins as a cartoon or a chant ends with missiles and mass graves.