That claim collapses under even minimal scrutiny.
A recent peer-reviewed article published by a journal affiliated with Al-Mustafa International University provides a clear and well-documented example of how the Iranian state sponsors antisemitism under the guise of religious scholarship.
This is not an isolated incident. It is part of a structured, state-linked academic ecosystem that systematically produces and legitimizes anti-Jewish ideology.
In Fall 2023, the Quarterly Journal of Quranic Knowledge Studies, hosted by Al-Mustafa International University (MIU), published an article titled, “Characteristics of Jews in the Quran and Strategies for Confronting Zionism and Global Arrogance with an Emphasis on the Quranic Thoughts of Imam Khamenei.”
The article does several things that, taken together, remove any plausible claim of neutrality. It categorizes Jews as a collective possessing alleged negative traits like deceit, arrogance, covenant-breaking, hostility, and moral corruption. It treats these traits not as historical polemics or contested interpretations, but as enduring characteristics with modern relevance. It explicitly links these religious stereotypes to contemporary political conflict. It advocates “confrontation” strategies that include ideological warfare, mobilization, and military preparation, citing Quran 8:60. And It grounds its interpretive authority in the writings and speeches of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Its antisemitism and dehumanization of Jews is explicit:
Some inhabitants of this world, though outwardly human, are deemed worse than the vilest of creatures, as articulated in the Quran: “… They are like cattle; rather they are more astray. It is they who are the heedless”1 (Quran 7:179). This study aims to investigate the characteristics and behaviors of Jews as portrayed in the Quran, while formulating strategies for confrontation based on the Quranic verses...
This is not metaphorical, historical, or narrowly theological. It is contemporary, collective, and explicitly applied. This is Nazi-level antisemitism being produced and disseminated in Iranian universities today.
Al-Mustafa International University operates under the direct oversight of the Supreme Leader’s office, receives state funding, and has been sanctioned by the United States and Canada for its role in exporting Iran’s ideological agenda abroad.
More importantly, the article’s bibliography reveals that this worldview is not unique to MIU. Many of the cited works that similarly associate Jews—not Zionists—with inherent moral corruption originate from Iranian public universities overseen by the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology; from state-approved academic journals in Quranic and Islamic studies; from dissertations produced at government-funded institutions; and from publications authored or endorsed by Khamenei himself.
In other words, the article is embedded in a network of state-linked scholarship that repeatedly returns to the same themes: Jewish moral degeneracy, Jewish hostility, Jewish conspiratorial power, and the necessity of confrontation.
That is not anti-Zionism. That is antisemitism with footnotes.
There are very few Western scholars who study official, state-sponsored Iranian academic antisemitism. But this is not a small matter.
MIU’s explicit mission is international. It trains clerics, scholars, and educators from over 100 countries. Graduates go on to staff mosques, cultural centers, and academic institutions across the globe. When Western universities host Iranian academics without scrutiny, when journals cite Iranian Quranic scholarship as neutral, when governments engage in “academic dialogue” without examining content, they become unwitting participants in this mainstreaming of antisemitism.
Note that this paper, and several that were cited in it, were written in English, not Farsi. The intended audience is Western.
The Iranian regime’s claim that it opposes Zionism but not Jews is not merely false. It is a strategic lie designed to shield its official antisemitism from accountability.
When a state-funded university publishes peer-reviewed articles that portray Jews as inherently immoral and advocate confrontation grounded in religious obligation, the correct term is not “anti-Zionism.” It is state-sponsored antisemitism.
And, as in Nazi Germany, the universities are not an obstacle to this ideology, but its vanguard.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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