Iran Builds Its Own Online ISIS in America

Daniel Greenfield August 21, 2022 

The stabbing of author Salman Rushdie by a Lebanese Shiite Muslim from New Jersey may be the culmination of efforts by Iran to imitate Al Qaeda and ISIS by building its own online terror network to carry out attacks inside the United States of America. The latest reports indicate that Hadi Matar, Rushdie's attacker, had been in touch with members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The recent indictment of a member of the IRGC regime terror network for soliciting the assassination of former National Security Advisor John Bolton provided a window into how Iran has targeted former Trump administration members.

The IRGC operative struck up a relationship with an Iranian-American on social media by initially offering $10,000 for photos of Bolton. This is a familiar form of espionage tradecraft in which a foreign spy solicits an American to perform a seemingly harmless and legal act, often involving photography, such as taking photos of individuals or cars, that is then revealed to be espionage committed at the behest of a foreign power. The patsy is then told that he has a choice between committing more serious crimes or being turned in to the FBI as a spy.

The Russians and the Chinese routinely operated this way (which also helps account for the large number of Chinese spies in America, as their citizens coming to this country are compelled to sign papers agreeing to cooperate with their intelligence services that becomes a source of leverage and blackmail), and it now appears that Iran has picked up the same trick.

The IRGC operative promised that Iran would pay $250,000 for hitting Bolton with a car. Indicating that the Iranians had already had their own surveillance operation that they did not want to compromise, the IRGC claimed that Bolton often took walks alone in the park.

The indictment and the Rushdie stabbing cast light on some mysterious incidents including an Iranian woman from Berkeley who catfished an American on a dating site, met up with him at a Henderson, Nevada hotel room, and then stabbed him in the neck as, “revenge against U.S. troops for the killing of Qasem Soleimani". The death of the IRGC terror leader has been the pretext for assorted terror plots against military personnel and Trump administration members.

The media dismissed the March stabbing as oddball behavior. Media accounts suggested that the stabber was mentally ill. But Henderson is close to Nellis Air Force Base which hosts the MQ-9 Reaper: the same model that was used to take out Soleimani. The attack appeared to be a systematic effort to target a U.S. Air Force drone pilot, lure him to a hotel room, blindfold him, and then kill him. It was a terror plan that only looks ridiculous because it failed.

This is certainly not the first time that Iran has tried to pay for assassinations in the United States. A decade ago, IRGC operatives planned to kill the Saudi ambassador with a bomb at Cafe Milano, a prestigious D.C. resteurant patronized by senators, by employing an Iranian used car salesman from Texas in a plot that was arranged through meetings in Mexico.

A decade later, the internet eliminates any need for international travel. Iran’s terror operatives can solicit Shiite Muslims in this country to commit terror attacks for them with no risk.

At least to the IRGC.

The failure of Al Qaeda terror plots after 9/11 amid the invasion of Afghanistan led the terror group to abandon its founding premise of serving as “The Base” and to crowdsource terrorism through the internet. Myspace was created a few months before the invasion of Iraq. A year later, Facebook emerged. Terror 2.0 took longer to arrive than Web 2.0, but it was close.

The vast majority of Al Qaeda and ISIS terror attacks no longer required the expensive and dangerous travel and training arrangements that had undone so many previous operations. Most of the crowdsourced terror attacks failed when Jihadists contacted ISIS and Al Qaeda only to connect with the FBI, but a few, in Boston, San Bernardino, New York and Orlando succeeded spectacularly. The same crowdsourcing momentum that had made Uber and Airbnb into billion dollar companies also made Jihad risk-free and cheap for terrorist organizations. The perpetrators were dubbed “lone wolves”, but are really the Uber drivers of the Jihad.

Iran has been slow to get into the game. Shiite Muslims are a minority and the IRGC has relied on subsidiary terror groups like Hezbollah, the PMU’s in Iraq, or for that matter Sunni Islamists like Al Qaeda and Hamas, to do its dirty work. America, unlike Europe, still doesn’t have extensive terror networks beyond those of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. And Hezbollah utilizes its networks as a money train for smuggling drugs and cigarettes. The Lebanese Shiite Jihadist network may be conducting some of the surveillance, but it doesn’t want to threaten its cash flow from America that also buys it some independence from Iran.

Online crowdsourcing frees Iran from the need to risk the more profitable terror networks. There is evidence that the Islamic terror state is soliciting Iranians and Shiite Muslims in the United States over social media to do its dirty work while offering them sizable sums of money. It’s unknown whether the Rushdie attack came off this way, but the perpetrator’s social media was filled with Iranian Jihadist propaganda. That would have made him a likely recruitment target.

If Iran is working to duplicate its own version of the Al Qaeda and ISIS online training and recruitment system, the threat to Americans could be much more serious than the stabbing of one dissident writer in New York or a man catfished on a date in Nevada. The Islamic regime’s ideal scenario for nuclear weapons would be to detonate them with plausible deniability.

Iranian operatives have carried out direct assassinations of political dissidents in Europe, but have been cautious about putting boots on the ground inside the United States. Despite our weakness and their bluster, Iran still fears and respects us more than Europe. As America gets weaker and our society becomes more fractured, that may not last. For now, Tehran would prefer to carry out attacks by cultivating disposable foreign assets. And once such a capability exists and has been sufficiently tested, it could be used for mass casualty terrorist attacks.

Even nuclear ones.

The Biden administration is rushing to cut a deal with Iran that will legitimize its nuclear weapons program even as the IRGC continues to plot terror attacks in the United States. Obama’s “breakthrough” proposal to detach a nuclear deal from terrorism left us negotiating in bad faith with a regime that made no secret of its determination to kill Americans.

Crowdsourcing Jihad creates further distance between the state sponsors and funders of terrorism, the perpetrators and their victims. The Pulse massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings were traceable to individuals, and then only distantly to the Islamic terror groups providing information and training, and hardly at all to the governments behind them.

Iran would like to replicate this model knowing that America’s morale is much weaker than its military and intel capabilities, and that if there is enough plausible deniability, we will do nothing about even the worst kinds of attacks like September 11. Just ask Qatar and the Saudis.

The gradual uptick in Iran-linked domestic terrorism is a warning that Iran’s efforts to create its own cadre of Shiite ‘lone wolves’ over the internet may be working. And that worse may come.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles.   Thank you for reading.

Iranian Terror Group Protected by Biden Aided Him in 2020 Election

Daniel Greenfield December 12, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

In 2007, Joe Biden became one of only 22 senators to vote against designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization. The IRGC is Iran’s central terror hub, organizing, funding, and training terrorists around the region and the world.

Including terrorists who murdered Americans.

Biden was so proud of his IRGC vote that he used it to attack Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for being insufficiently pro-Iran, and then brought it up during the Democrat debate.

After Senator Mike Gravel defended two of the IRGC’s terror groups, Hamas and Hezbollah, contending, “these people are fighting for their rights”, Biden joined in with colleague, claiming that the “moment that declaration was made, every one of our friends, from Iraq to Pakistan, felt they had to distance themselves from us because it appears to be a war on Islam.”

The IRGC clearly appreciated Biden’s support and tried to pay it forward in the 2020 election.

Unlike most election interference news, the DOJ’s latest announcement has received very little media coverage because the interference was coming out of Iran and was helping Biden.

An indictment charged two Iranians over a "cyber-enabled disinformation and threat campaign designed to influence the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election."

Many conservatives already knew that Iranian hackers had tried to pass themselves off as members of the Proud Boys in a false flag operation designed to increase Democrat turnout and generate an election backlash to President Trump. One example of the Iranian campaign involved sending emails to "tens of thousands of registered voters" that threatened them "with physical injury if they did not change their party affiliation and vote for President Trump."

The importance of the indictment though is that it shows the campaign came from the IRGC.

The DOJ statement only notes that the hackers had “worked as contractors for an Iran-based company formerly known as Eeleyanet Gostar, and now known as Emennet Pasargad”. The official sanctions designation at the Treasury Department however explains why the company keeps changing names. “Emennet was previously designated under its former name, Net Peygard Samavat Company” for its work with the “Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Electronic Warfare and Cyber Defense Organization (IRGC-EWCD). The company rebranded itself to evade U.S. sanctions and continue its disruptive cyber operations against the United States.”

The false flag operation was actually being conducted by Iran’s terrorist cyberwarfare corps who had been previously tied to various cyberattacks, including ransomware. Unlike these more obvious financial schemes, there was nothing financial for the IRGC’s hackers to gain from impersonating Trump supporters. This was a deliberate effort by Iran to defeat President Trump.

The organization in question had already been caught trying to “implant malware on the computer systems of current and former U.S. counterintelligence agents.”

There was little question that the Shiite Islamic terror regime in Tehran wanted Biden.

Two days after the election, President Rouhani of Iran blasted President Trump as a "person in the White House who brutally intensified sanctions", but expressed hope that "the next American administration will surrender to the Iranian nation."

It did indeed.

The Biden administration lifted the terror designation on the IRGC’s Houthi terrorists in Yemen. The Shiite terrorist group, whose motto also includes, “Death to America”, has since gone on to attack the U.S. embassy in Yemen and take local staff as hostages. This comes after Biden pulled anti-missile batteries out of several countries targeted by Iran: including Saudi Arabia.

This is unsurprising behavior from Biden, who, when addressing the American Iranian Council, had argued, "We cannot simply dismiss Iran's security concerns.”

Since taking office, the Biden administration has allowed the Tehran terrorists to benefit from billions of dollars in sanctions relief. A regime paper boasted that $4 billion had been freed “without much negotiation”. The administration is currently floating an “interim nuclear deal” that would provide even more sanctions relief to Iran. And that’s even before the real negotiations.

The IRGC’s investment in Iran has already paid billions in dividends. It expects billions more.

While Democrats and the media used the Steele Dossier hoax to falsely claim that President Trump was in bed with Russia, Biden has extensive and deeply troubling ties to Iran.

After September 11, Biden proposed, "Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran." While the check never materialized, the Obama-Biden administration would send billions, not millions, to the Islamic terror state.

Before then, Biden prepped for a presidential run by doing a tour of Iran lobby groups.

At a 2003 Senate hearing, Biden suggested that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons because it felt “isolated”, and that its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction had nothing to do with Islam.

During the 2008 election, Biden wanted to reopen a US diplomatic presence in Tehran. He proposed cutting off Radio Liberty broadcasts that provided a voice for Iranian dissidents. And behind the scenes,he tapped into the Iran Lobby’s fundraising apparatus, raising tens of thousands, which, by the 2020 election had turned into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Right before the election, Biden released his list of fundraising bundlers. In an exclusive story, Front Page Magazine’s investigation revealed that they included Jamal Abdi, the executive director of NIAC Action. The National Iranian American Council (NIAC), often described as the Iran Lobby, claimed its members had run phone banks and donated $385,000 to Biden.

NIAC Action had endorsed Biden and declared, “our long, national nightmare is almost over. AP has called the race for Joe Biden”.

Biden's pick for Secretary of State, Tony Blinken was, like his future boss, an opponent of designating the IRGC a terrorist group, cautioning, “If there's a formal designation as a terrorist organization, I think there is going to be blowback."

The IRGC got its dream team in Washington D.C. and now it’s taking advantage of it.

Biden had denied the IRGC’s terrorist operations arguing that, “the vote to declare the Qods Force and the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization was not a view that could be established without question.” It’s not a coincidence that the same terrorist group he had intervened to protect helped his campaign in the 2020 election with a false flag operation.

The same media that pushed the Russiagate hoax has shown no interest in Biden’s ties to Iran, the impact of those ties on his pro-Iran policies, or the IRGC attempts to help his campaign. But as Biden continues to reward Iran, we should be prepared for more IRGC election interference.

There’s too many billions at stake for Iran not to try to keep Biden in the White House.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.