Two students, Maryam Marey and Amar Halak, began the march by calling on their elected representatives to support a ceasefire in Gaza. Then they marched toward a nearby municipal park and led a group of around 40 high schoolers, college students, and other adults in chants. “No more hiding, no more fear. Genocide is crystal clear,” they yelled. “Stop the killing, stop the slaughter. Gaza has no food or water.”

They encountered a single counterprotester at the park, an elderly man carrying a handwritten sign: “Free the hostages. Stop killing and hating Jews. Stop sacrificing your own people.” Two local politicians, township council member Hillary Goldberg and former council member Keith Kaplan, stood across the street silently filming the high schoolers. A pair of women stood with them, also filming and smirking. The group refused to speak with The Intercept.

The demonstration was just the latest student-led protest against decisions the Teaneck town council made last October, when it voted for a resolution in support of Israel and against one expressing sympathy with Palestinian and Israeli civilians. Marey had stood outside the council meeting and watched her mother, Reem Fakhry, lead chants of “Free Palestine.”

The war had come home, so to speak. Israel’s siege of Gaza was no longer a violent tragedy happening to Muslims in another land, but something that leaders in Teaneck actively supported — and something that the best friends could fight back against personally.

“She realized that our town had taken this unilateral, one-sided stance where they decided that our town was basically part of Israel, without looking at the fact that we were part of this town as well,” Fakhry, Marey’s mom, said of her daughter. Halak told The Intercept that the town council resolution “was really unfair and it dehumanized the Palestinians who are under siege.”

The girls organized a teach-in and walkout at their high school in November. It led to an unexpected flood of backlash from the town’s adults, including elected officials; a deluge of violent threats; a campaign organized by a new pro-Israel, Jewish lobbying group; and intervention by the federal government.

Members of the town council were key instigators — and they found a willing audience in a sitting member of Congress. Within hours of the November protest, council member Karen Orgen emailed videos of it to nearly two dozen people, among them Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., according to emails The Intercept obtained under the New Jersey public records law. Gottheimer did not respond to that thread, but three hours later, fellow council member Goldberg wrote an email thanking him and other officials for their “hard work.” Soon after, Gottheimer issued a statement condemning the Teaneck school district’s “decision allowing an antisemitic, anti-Israel protest during school hours.”

Gottheimer has become fixated with Teaneck’s high schoolers. At his urging, the U.S. Department of Education opened a civil rights probe into discrimination at Teaneck High. After the school district announced that it would partner with two Jewish and Muslim civil rights organizations — the Anti-Defamation League and the Council on American Islamic Relations, respectively — Gottheimer publicly accused the Muslim organization of glorifying terrorism and demanded Teaneck cut ties with it. CAIR’s New Jersey chapter denounced Gottheimer’s “defamatory attacks” in a written statement.

In response to The Intercept’s questions, Goldberg simply wrote in an email, “Release the Hostages.” Gottheimer, Orgen, and Kaplan did not respond to requests for comment.

While many members of Congress have gone to bat against protesters on college campuses, Gottheimer’s nemeses here are teenage high schoolers.

Across the country, students protesting against the war in Gaza have been met with intense scrutiny from older politicians, who often accuse the youth dissenters of antisemitism. Gottheimer, considered the most conservative Democrat in Congress, is well-poised to take up the issue. He has made attacks on the left and hawkish pro-Israel politics part of his personal brand.

His decision to intervene in Teaneck, however, is somewhat unusual. While many members of Congress have gone to bat against protesters on college campuses — even holding hearings on the issue — Gottheimer’s nemeses here are teenage high schoolers. Yet the girls who sparked Teaneck’s protest movement are unbowed: a reminder that anti-Palestinian repression has failed to intimidate the younger generation.

“It is just another level to the disappointment I feel with our representatives,” Marey told The Intercept. “It’s just disappointing that these are the people that we not only have to live and work with, but these are the people who run everything we do.”

“Support From Outsiders”

All politics are local, and local politics are weird. Over the last few months in Teaneck, government meetings about the high school controversy have devolved into chaos. Local officials have thrown around insults like “Jihadi Jane” and “pencil dick,” while betraying deep anxieties about Jews’ and Muslims’ place in a rapidly changing community.

Teaneck officials have repeatedly blamed outside agitators for pro-Palestinian activism in the town, focusing specifically on people from Paterson, a working-class city with a large Palestinian American community 15 minutes away.

At a November town council meeting, Bergen County Jewish Action Committee executive council member Yigal Gross accused local Muslims of repaying the hospitality of their Jewish neighbors by “bussing in dozens of protesters from Paterson who would shatter that harmony.”

Protesters from Paterson eventually did come to Teaneck en masse, during a statewide car rally for Palestine on December 31. Mayor Michael Pagan quickly tried to cast the protest as the work of outside agitators. “Most of those participating in Teaneck are not Teaneck residents,” Pagan said in a statement. “I am appalled by the attempts to harass and intimidate our residents over the policies of the Israeli government.”

Supporters of Palestinian rights balked at the mayor’s remarks. “Have you considered that the Muslim community feels so isolated in this town that they may seek comfort and support from outsiders?” said Teaneck resident Shorook Awadallah during a January 23 town council meeting.

Teaneck sits in New Jersey’s Fifth Congressional District, which is about 8 percent Jewish, according to the Jewish Electorate Institute. There is a growing population of immigrants from Muslim-majority nations; around 5 percent of households in the district speak Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, or Persian at home, according to U.S. census data. They join Muslims who have been in the area for decades, including a deeply rooted Black Muslim community.

“A lot of people who had negative things to say about it were people who didn’t have kids within the district.”

That demographic change comes into especially sharp focus within the school system. The Teaneck High student body is only about 12 percent white, while the town itself is 41 percent white. The divide is not just about social class. Jason Shames, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, recently estimated that 99 percent of Jewish families in Teaneck do not participate in the public school for religious reasons. Instead, they homeschool or send their children to religious academies.

And at least some of the backlash to the protests has come from outside the public school system. Emma Horowitz, president of the Bergen County Jewish Action Committee, a newly formed lobbying group that led part of the campaign against the students, is a teacher at the private Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School. (Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment.) Marey, the student organizer, said that “a lot of people who had negative things to say about it were people who didn’t have kids within the district,” echoing a feeling expressed by other public school parents and students. 

Teaneck’s Jewish community is itself divided over Israeli politics. Local musician Rich Siegel, who is Jewish, recently went viral after he made a speech to the township council criticizing a local synagogue for hosting a real estate fair that deals in West Bank property.

In some ways, Teaneck’s ongoing turmoil is a repeat of controversies that roiled the town in 2021, when the town council planned to hold a flag-raising ceremony to celebrate Israel’s independence day and show solidarity with Jews who “have been targeted merely for support of the State of Israel.” The planned ceremony coincided with an Israeli assault on Gaza. Though the town canceled the ceremony due to backlash from both non-Jewish and Jewish residents, the New Jersey chapter of American Muslims for Palestine, a national advocacy organization, nonetheless invited supporters to protest outside Teaneck’s town hall.

“It’s actually organic. Residents of Teaneck felt they were always intimidated, they weren’t allowed to speak up for Palestine, so we have people to back them up, to empower them,” Wassim Kanaan, head of the New Jersey chapter of American Muslims for Palestine, told The Intercept at the time.

While American and Israeli press portrayed the protest as a campaign targeting a Jewish town — the work of “militia-like pro-Palestinian gangs,” in the words of the Jerusalem Post — it was a small, low-profile affair. Several dozen people, some of them parents pushing strollers, gathered outside town hall to hear mournful speeches about the war. Siegel, the musician, was one of the organizers.

A few weeks later, Teaneck hosted the Bergen County Unite for Israel Parade. Allie Orgen, daughter of council member Karen Orgen, told the Jewish Standard that she had been inspired to organize it after attending the Jerusalem Day flag march, an annual Israeli nationalist rally in Jerusalem that has often descended into nationalist hooliganism and anti-Palestinian violence. “I want to move the [Jerusalem Day] parade to Teaneck,” she said.

An estimated 2,000 people from around New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut marched down Teaneck’s streets with Israeli flags. The Standard described the event as a “protest,”“parade,” and “party” all in one. Musicians performed pro-Israel songs at a local park. Gottheimer addressed the crowd, saying that “anyone who says Israel is a terrorist state, or an apartheid state, that’s antisemitism.”

A few months later, in October 2021, a 23-year-old Teaneck resident chased a woman and child through a pediatrician’s office with a hammer while reportedly yelling, “They tried to turn me trans” and “Are you Jewish?” Police, who said that the attacker showed signs of mental illness, charged him with several crimes, and he spent six months in jail.

Gottheimer was not satisfied. Immediately after the attack, he questioned why the perpetrator was not charged with a hate crime. A year later, he brought the House Homeland Security Committee to the town for a “field hearing” on domestic extremism, condemning the “gruesome” incident, and asking officials about the threat of far-right militants such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Front.

The member of Congress also took the opportunity to spread conspiracy theories about Arab human rights supporters. From his podium in the Teaneck town hall, Gottheimer denounced Rutgers University, a public university in New Jersey, for hosting an event with Democracy for the Arab World Now, a group founded by slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Gottheimer called Khashoggi’s group antisemitic and baselessly accused it of harboring “ties to Al Qaeda and Hamas networks,” an accusation he had previously made during a December 2021 speech on the Rutgers campus.

A Coordinated Campaign

All of these controversies paled in comparison to the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s war on Gaza that followed. The violence, more intense than any previous episode of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, sent shockwaves through Teaneck. Many residents have Israeli friends and family. Council member Mark Schwartz and Deputy Mayor Elie Katz were in Israel during the attack. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett lived in Teaneck as a child.

Other residents are closely connected to Palestinian society. Fakhry is one of them. A self-described “Jersey girl” who speaks with a distinct New Jersey accent, she was born in Egypt but moved to the state when she was 6 months old. Fakhry later worked as a schoolteacher near Paterson; many of her students were Palestinian Americans with roots in Gaza.

The fracas in Teaneck started with a statement that school superintendent Andre Spencer issued mourning violence in the Middle East, which was met with a petition demanding that Spencer take a clear pro-Israel stance instead.

“In seeking to be inoffensive due to the diverse population in your district, you have inadvertently encouraged terror and those who support it, while alienating its victims and their loved ones,” the petition read. “Further, failing to acknowledge the threats that Jews continue to face from terrorism — even here in Teaneck — is a slap in the face to its Jewish population.”

The petition cited a rumor that Hamas was organizing a “worldwide Day of Jihad” on October 13. No antisemitic terrorism happened in America on that day, but a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy was fatally stabbed to death in Chicago by his landlord, who had reportedly been agitated by right-wing talk radio discussing the “Day of Jihad.”

On October 17, the town council debated its own resolutions about the war. The plaza outside town hall, where residents were waiting for a chance to speak during the council meeting, hosted two opposing demonstrations with Israeli and Palestinian flags. By the end of it, the council unanimously voted for a resolution to stand with Israel while tabling the “unity resolution” that mentioned both Israelis and Palestinians.

A day later, Teaneck’s school board meeting devolved into an argument over the same issues. Kaplan, the former council member, accused the school of fostering “a value-free zone where torture and rape are relative.” School Board Vice President Victoria Fisher told Kaplan that he needed to understand the “ground rules” of the meeting, and the board cut off his mic.

FIRE, a civil libertarian organization, wrote a letter arguing that Kaplan’s free speech rights had been violated. When Kaplan texted the letter to Fisher, she responded, “lose my number pencil dick,” according to a screenshot shared by FIRE. At the next school board meeting, Kaplan filmed himself complaining about Fisher’s “absolutely out of line” comment. “Oh, pencil dick,” responded Fisher, who stared directly into the camera and smirked.

While the adults squabbled, Marey and Halak decided to organize a student protest for Palestinian rights. “They’re the dynamic duo. They don’t do anything alone,” Fakhry said. In late November, the girls made an Instagram post urging students not to “stay silent during a genocide.” They wrote that anyone interested in joining their “walk out for Palestine” could text them for more details.

Marey and Halak’s private Instagram post — with their phone numbers attached — circulated on social media. They would receive a deluge of death threats and other menacing messages for months to come. “Kill the children of Gaza. Fuck them up. N*****,” a gravelly voice said in a voicemail message to Halak from a Lakewood, New Jersey, phone number in February, according to a recording posted by the Instagram page Teaneck for Palestine.

“I know these are adults on the other end of the phone. For a grown adult to take time out of the day to send me threats is pathetic,” Marey told the Bergen Record, a local newspaper.

Pro-Israel activists also organized a more serious campaign against the high school girls through the Jewish Link, a Teaneck-based newspaper. The newspaper’s official WhatsApp channel sent out a message to followers with a link that would automatically compose a letter to local officials asking them to take “the strongest possible disciplinary measures against any member of Teaneck High School who engages in this dangerous and hateful event.”

That same message, with the link and the Jewish Link footer intact, was later posted to a public Facebook group for Jewish parents in a neighboring county. Jewish Link digital editor Channa Fischer did not respond to a request for comment, and instead banned The Intercept’s reporter from the WhatsApp group. The Facebook post was also taken down.

On the night of November 26, the emails rolled into local officials’ inboxes, public records show. The first email came from Horowitz, president of the Bergen County Jewish Action Committee, which was created that month and appears to focus on Teaneck’s school system. Thousands of identical messages followed, many of them sent from outside New Jersey. “I am writing to you out of concern for the safety of our students and teachers at Teaneck High School,” a person from Los Angeles wrote, following the script.

On November 28, the school district sent a letter to parents stating that students were within their First Amendment rights to protest, and outside protesters would not be allowed onto campus. Several local rabbis quickly issued a statement calling the protest a form of “blood libel,” a medieval antisemitic conspiracy theory, because it accused Israel of genocide.

That night, the Bergen County Jewish Action Committee held a rally outside of town hall, featuring three Jewish students who said that they felt intimidated. Goldberg, the town council member, also spoke. “The Teaneck High School I see today is not the castle on the hill that I remember,” she said. Goldberg accused “out-of-town protesters” of “calling for our deaths,” and urged the school to ban the walkout.

Shames, of the Jewish Federation, made it clear that he was opposed to almost any expression of Palestinian identity by the high schoolers. He told ABC News that “to wear a keffiyeh, to be able to chant, to bring Palestinian flags is in and of itself a hate, bias, and intimidation act against the Jewish community.”

Tracking the Teens

The walkout went forward as planned on November 29. Organizers, including Marey and Halak, kicked it off with an hourlong teach-in within the school building, explaining to students why they were protesting and what their slogans meant. Then the protesters left the school, met up with adult supporters, and continued marching toward town hall. Along the way, they encountered a large crowd of pro-Israel counterprotesters. Police kept the two crowds separate.

“There were people on the other side of the fence to counterprotest against us, and it was like the middle of the school day on a random Wednesday,” Marey recalled, a little exasperated. “It’s the work week. I didn’t expect people to take time out of their days to just come and yell at a bunch of high school kids.”

Members of the township council were watching closely. Orgen, the council member, emailed videos of the rally to 23 recipients, including Gottheimer. One video showed protesters chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” For Palestine advocates like Marey, the rallying cry represents a desire “a free Palestine for everyone,” no matter their religion. Yet the phrase has become a political lightning rod in recent months; Israel supporters, from the halls of Congress to Teaneck, claim that it is a veiled call for violence against Jews.

“How are the Jewish ‘scholars’ supposed to look into the eyes of their peers and teachers their students [sic] who were chanting this genocidal phrase?” Orgen’s colleague Goldberg wrote back. “This phrase denies the right of Israel to exist, the eradication of a Jewish homeland, is in the Hamas charter!”

Orgen also shared a video of Rick Whilby, a tow truck driver and former city council candidate from the neighboring town of Englewood, making a speech at the protest about Israel’s role in militarizing American police. Whilby, who is Black, said that “the white race has a propensity for violence. They can kill their way out of anything, but they’re not going to be able to kill their way out of this.”

Whilby has a history of antisemitic public statements. At an Englewood City Council meeting in October, he yelled, “You need to go back to Germany, Europe, Belgium, wherever the fuck you’re from … the Jews are in exile!” At Teaneck’s December school board meeting, Whilby spoke of Jewish-owned slave plantations and cited biblical verses about the “synagogue of Satan.” The school board ejected Whilby and shut down the meeting. “We cannot hold a civil dialogue,” sighed Sebastian Rodriguez, who was board president at the time.

Whilby insisted to The Intercept that he “absolutely” makes a distinction between Jews and Zionists. While mingling with protesters during the February protest, Whilby approached Yisroel Dovid Weiss, spokesperson for Neturei Karta, a fundamentalist Jewish group that opposes Zionism on religious grounds. Whilby praised Neturei Karta for doing the “right thing” in the face of opposition, then proceeded to claim that he was being harassed by “sodomites” because his enemies had added him to the gay dating app Grindr. He had to explain to a nonplussed Weiss what Grindr was.

Kaplan, meanwhile, broke off from the group of council members and continued filming the marching high schoolers from an alley. A few weeks earlier, during a council meeting, Kaplan had made a racist comment about Palestine solidarity protesters. “These days, we’ve got Jihadi Janes walking around town as if intifada is a cool thing to do. No! It’s about murdering people, you sick bastards,” he said in January, to gasps from the crowd. Pagan, the mayor, shut off Kaplan’s video link, citing advice from the municipal attorney.

Standing in the alley, Kaplan did not exercise such bravado. He stood silently after an Intercept reporter approached him and requested an interview. A nearby man with a camera began to berate Kaplan for “filming high schoolers.” Kaplan silently retreated further into the alley, poking his phone out.

Several days later, Gottheimer’s office announced that he would be coming to Teaneck for a public breakfast at Poppy’s Bagels, a beloved local bakery, on February 20. Deputy Mayor Katz and council members Orgen and Schwartz were also slated to attend. But when pro-Palestinian activists announced a counterprotest, Gottheimer postponed the breakfast, claiming that the venue was too small to host everyone who signed up.

Intimidation Tactics

The controversies in Teaneck seemed almost tailor-made to suck Gottheimer in. He has a history of awkward, defensive, and sometimes downright weird interactions with the public, including in Teaneck.

In 2017, Gottheimer showed up to a fundraiser at a bar in Paterson, a city with many Arab Americans and other people of color, donning a bulletproof vest with an armed guard at his side. In 2019, the congressman had a public meltdown when he saw an elderly citizen-journalist taking notes at a Teaneck town hall event that was supposed to be closed to the press. Two years later, Gottheimer falsely accused a heckler from Teaneck of yelling an antisemitic slur at him. The protester turned out to be Jewish herself. After the October 7 attacks, Gottheimer reportedly said that Muslim Americans should feel “guilty.”

When the Teaneck High unrest began, Gottheimer made it clear from the outset that he was paying close attention — and putting his hand on the scale.

“The First Amendment, which I believe deeply in, allows for free speech. It does not allow for people to intimidate and instill fear in others, and prevent their free speech, and their right to an education, whether that’s in Teaneck, or whether that’s at Rutgers, or whether that’s at Penn or Harvard or Columbia,” Gottheimer told the Jewish Link podcast on December 5. “I have filed Title VI letter violations on many colleges, written to many colleges. I’ve been very aggressive on that front. I will continue to be.”

Gottheimer’s “very aggressive” complaint letters seem to have paid off. On January 5, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it was investigating Teaneck’s school district under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits racial and ethnic discrimination. Although the department declined to comment on the cause of the investigation, pro-Israel activists relished their apparent victory.

“Jewish Federation is very pleased that the Department of Education is taking these incidents seriously,” Naomi Knopf, chief impact officer at the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, told the Jerusalem Post. “The rights of Jewish students matter just as much as everyone else’s, and it’s our job and the federal government’s job to make sure that all students have access to a safe educational environment.”

Muslims in Teaneck feel like this talk of stamping out intimidation is, ironically, an intimidation tactic. The specter of federal investigations and outside involvement is frightening to an immigrant-heavy community, Fakhry said. “I see a lot of bark, and I see no bite,” she added, claiming that Muslim Americans often “don’t think about how the law works, and how the law works for them as well.”

Asked directly about the Title VI investigation, Fakhry simply stated, “We have our own lawsuits.” She declined to elaborate, citing advice from lawyers.

In December, CAIR New Jersey sent a letter to Teaneck school district officials about “ongoing concerns regarding the overall mistreatment and differential treatment of Muslim students in your school,” according to public records obtained by The Intercept. The letter detailed the physical bullying of a Muslim student and criticized “the complete irresponsibility of the school’s response to the situation as well as the recent student-led walkout.” The organization did not respond to a request for comment.

Others in the community have pointed out that the government’s priorities are all wrong.

“I’m just shocked that we had teenagers in this town receive anonymous death threats and that was apparently less of an issue than people engaged in an act of peaceful protest,” prominent local Jewish activist Adam Weissman said during a January 9 town council meeting. “This town made a choice to engage in this debate, to engage in international politics, by making a statement of support for Israel.”

The post Rep. Josh Gottheimer Goes to War Against High Schoolers Protesting for Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

So it came as a surprise when the U.S. government blocked Shirazi-affiliated, London-based news websites in a crackdown on Iran’s “malign influence.”

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice seized and censored 33 websites as part of a retaliatory action on the grounds that they violate U.S. sanctions on Iran. Some of the websites belonged to Iranian propaganda networks. Others were Shiite Muslim religious outlets that appeared to have nothing to do with — or were even at odds with — the Iranian regime.

One of the websites, a London-based Bahraini diaspora network, had been a refuge for exiles fleeing repression.

“Well-meaning efforts to address disinformation campaigns or terrorist propaganda have these serious human rights impacts, because they capture too much.”

“We’ve seen this for years, where well-meaning efforts to address disinformation campaigns or terrorist propaganda have these serious human rights impacts, because they capture too much,” said David Greene, civil liberties director and senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technological civil rights organization.

The crackdown is a test case for American control over the internet, as the U.S. government flexed its muscles over the information sphere in a way few states could. The choice of targets also raises questions about whether there are enough guardrails over this newfound power — and whether U.S. officials can separate their political struggle with the Islamic Republic of Iran from an ideological struggle against Shia Islam.

“At the same time the Saudis are trying to claim the Sunni beliefs and religion in their name, Iran is trying to do the same thing with Shia beliefs,” said Mustafa Akhwand, director of the Washington-based organization Shia Rights Watch, who said he has been in touch with the U.S. government about issues relating to adherents of the Islamic sect. “I have told the administration many times, you are not doing a favor for yourselves. … Shia are trying to disaffiliate themselves from Iran, and you are doing everything you can to tell the Iranians, ‘These are yours.’”

Critics of the moves worried that a lack of transparency around the website seizures cloaked cases of mistaken identity and other errors. In the case of one of the Shirazi movement’s channels, Al Anwar TV, Akhwand believes that the U.S. government may have been trying to close al-Anwar 2, a pro-Iranian station that was set up to compete with the Shirazi-aligned network. Al-Anwar 2’s website is still online.

“Making a mistake like that is showing that the administration — or whoever put [al-Anwar] in — did not do their homework at all,” Akhwand said.

(Al Anwar TV did not respond to a request or comment. The departments of Commerce, which assisted in the U.S. decision, and Justice did not respond to a request for comment. The State Department told reporters on Tuesday that it had nothing to say and again declined to comment in an email to The Intercept and Responsible Statecraft.)

Advocates for free speech and democracy in the region also said the seizures of media websites raised thorny issues about freedom of speech in the U.S. and could set dangerous precedents for governments abroad.

“The people who are in this country” — the U.S. — “who want to receive information from them, their willing readers, do have rights to receive that information,” according to Greene. He adds that his “greatest concern” is the impact the decision will have on civil liberties in other countries.

“What the U.S. does with respect to freedom of speech has implications around the world, because we hold ourselves out — mostly rightfully so — as the gold standard for freedom of speech,” Greene said. “What this tells other governments, both democratic governments and nondemocratic governments — the message it sends to them about how they can shut down, censor, seize foreign news services is really concerning.”

Former Iranian journalist Omid Memarian agrees.

“Iran is one of the most repressive countries when it comes to freedom of speech, and has a long history of banning papers, and jamming satellite channels,” said Memarian, now communications director for the advocacy group Democracy in the Arab World Now. “But for the U.S. to use the same tactics to deal with its enemies, it strengthens hardliners’ propaganda narrative that the U.S. uses values like freedom of speech for political purposes.”

“Shiaphobia”

The Justice Department claims that the censored Shiite websites were “operated by” Iran’s state-run Islamic Radio and Television Union, like many “components of the government of Iran … disguised as news organizations or media outlets.”

The Islamic Radio and Television Union does list the media websites as members. But it’s not clear what membership entails, other than a willingness to apply and an agreement to post only Islamically acceptable content. One of the censored stations, in a statement to Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept, denied it had any affiliation with the union.

Some of the censored sites, like PressTV and al-Alam, are state-run media. Others, though, are a far cry from Iranian propaganda.

Several of the censored sites are part of religious movements at odds with the Iranian government —longstanding and public confessional rifts in Shia Islam over the role of religious authority in civil government. While revolutionary clerics in Iran created a theocratic republic, many other eminent Shiite jurists — some of whom had sites affiliated with their movements seized — follow a more traditional path of “quietism,” or a belief that clerics should not hold direct political power.

Karbala TV, for example, a channel affiliated with Iraq’s Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a revered cleric who opposed theocracy after the U.S. invasion in 2003, was censored. Sistani has occasionally clashed with the U.S. vision for Iraq but has been viewed as a stabilizing force and even at times an American ally.

Other channels that were censored, such as the Shirazi movement’s al-Anwar TV and Ahlulbayt TV, belonged to schools of thought that supported the Islamic revolution in Iran, but have since its inception found themselves increasingly at odds with the government, often because of esoteric disagreements over how Islamic rule should function.

“These stations are all religious stations and are not part of the Iranian media,” said Ali AlAhmed, a Saudi American media expert who said he briefly advised al-Anwar TV. “The Shirazi movement can be described as anti-Iranian state. This is well known and is not private information.”

“The Shirazi movement can be described as anti-Iranian state. This is well known and is not private information.”

Shirazi comes from a long line of prominent clerics, and his family has been at odds with the Iranian government over issues of religious authority since the early years of the Islamic revolution. Iranian authorities in turn labeled the dissident ayatollah a “cult” leader and British “mercenary” who aims to stir up Sunni-Shiite discord.

The Shirazi movement’s most famous disciple in the West is the cleric Mohamad Tawhidi, who calls himself the “imam of peace.” Tawhidi once hosted a Shirazi-aligned television show, but is now a frequent commentator about Islam on right-wing Western media.

In the case of Sistani, the Iraqi cleric, the U.S. government recently claimed that one organ of his movement did not have ties to Iran. A few weeks ago, a U.S.-funded television station accused al-Khoei Foundation, a charity run by Sistani’s followers, of being a front for Iranian terrorism. Facing backlash, the U.S. State Department disavowed the story and affirmed that al-Khoei Foundation is a “well-regarded international charitable and educational organization.”

“In the minds of many in the U.S. federal government ‘Shi’a’ equals ‘Iranian state,’ even if you are clearly at odds with the Iranian state and its religious structures,” said AlAhmed. “This has cost so many Shia lives and allowed for Shiaphobia to fester across the American government, media, academia and other places.”

Shia Muslims are a majority in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan. They are a small minority in the Muslim world overall and have often been the victims of violent attacks, including the recent massacre at a girl’s school in Afghanistan.

Some of the censored websites belonged to Shia-led political movements that appeared to have little to do with Iran.

One of the websites that was seized, LuaLua TV, is a Bahraini opposition channel founded by exiles in London fleeing their country’s post-2011 crackdown. Bahrain’s government — which is engaged in a campaign of torture and repression against peaceful dissidents — has long attempted to censor LuaLua TV for its critical coverage.

The station said in a statement that the censorship “represents a confiscation of press freedom, a prosecution of opinion, and an assassination of free speech.” It called the U.S. move “a victory for the oppressive, tyrannical regimes over the repressed peoples whose rights are violated.”

Lualua TV told Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept that the channel has no connections to Iran’s Islamic Radio and Television Union, and that officials with the station had received no advanced warning or other communication from the U.S. about the seizure. “The USA claim of lualua being associated with Iran or any Iranian union is completely baseless and false,” Lualua TV said in its statement. “We believe seizing the website of the only independent Bahraini TV Channel ‘Lualua’ is not only disappointing but it is clearly a violation to the freedom of press, a soft and calm assassination of the freedom of speech especially that we face true shut down over all kinds of freedoms in Bahrain.”

Jalal Fairooz, an exiled former Bahraini member of parliament, said he is “surprised” to see LuaLua TV censored.

“The people of Bahrain have only this source for spreading their grievances with unfair treatment by the government,” he said. “The Bahraini regime is an ally of the United States. Is that enough to shut down the voice of the Bahraini people?”

Yet another one of the seized websites was al-Forat News, owned by Iraq’s Hikma movement. The movement broke off from a pro-Iranian political party in 2017 and has been pushing to curb the power of Iranian-backed militias in Iraq ever since.

“Al-Forat is a TV channel owned by a political leader FRIENDLY to the United States,” political risk analyst Kirk Sowell wrote on Twitter. “Whoever put them on the list, get a clue.”

Minimum Accountability

Tuesday’s crackdown was not the first time the U.S. government has censored foreign content online. Many registries for .com and .org domain names are based on American soil, so the Department of Justice has long insisted that it could seize foreign websites from domain registries if they violate U.S. law. In the case of the alleged Iranian propaganda channels, the U.S. claims the domain registries are violating U.S. sanctions.

U.S. dragnets against Iran have also previously swept up more than their intended targets. U.S. sanctions have long forced Iranians and even Iranian Americans off of popular online services, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Tuesday’s mass website seizure came at the tail end of the Trump administration’s campaign to drive pro-Iranian content off the internet, part of the “maximum pressure” campaign organized by right-wing, anti-Iran forces in the administration.

In September 2020, U.S. authorities seized the websites of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, citing U.S. counterterrorism sanctions. A few months later, the U.S. shut down the websites of several “fake news organizations,” alleging that Iranian intelligence was using them to interfere with the 2020 election. Prosecutors cited U.S. economic sanctions on Iran and the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which regulates foreign propaganda organizations operating on American soil.

That same month, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on the Islamic Radio and Television Union for its alleged connections to the Iranian military.

American think tanks may have helped push the U.S. government into making the decision. U.S. authorities often rely on “open source reporting” from journalists and academics to make decisions on sanctions, according to the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

In January 2019, the risk management firm Kharon published a report alleging that the Islamic Radio and Television Union — as well as the Shirazi-aligned Ahlulbayt TV and the Iraqi Hikma movement — were connected to components of the Iranian military under U.S. sanctions.

In May 2021, the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank, published a report praising U.S. sanctions against the Islamic Radio and Television Union but calling for “[a]dditional action against traditional media entities” and “affiliated television channels, radio stations, websites, and related organizations around the region.”

The sanctions against the Islamic Radio and Television Union were used to justify Tuesday’s censorship decision. Because the Iranian broadcasters’ union is now under U.S. sanctions, the Department of Justice claimed, it would not be allowed to purchase American domain names without a license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which enforces sanctions and issues exemptions.

“What you would want to see is some type of process where someone is notified that they are in violation of some of these rules. Then they have an opportunity to correct that.”

U.S. authorities’ statement on the decision was “disappointing,” said Greene, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, because it did not show the “extreme care” that should be taken when shutting down online content.

“We don’t learn anything about the conversations that went on behind this, what type of human rights assessments that went on. There’s no indication that there are free speech interests here,” he said. “What you would want to see is some type of process where someone is notified that they are in violation of some of these rules. Then they have an opportunity to correct that, or to argue that the rules do not apply to them.”

Indeed, there is no sign that U.S. authorities even asked these websites whether they actually belonged to the Islamic Radio and Television Union.

Ahlulbayt TV noted in a Wednesday statement that it had “not received any legal correspondence from any government or regulatory body” before its website was shut down, and was now working “to address the mistaken grounds on which this decision has been made.”

Greene said, “It is a cautionary tale in that we just don’t have enough information from the government that gives us the confidence that this was done in a careful way.”

Update: June 26, 2021, 1:37 p.m.
This story has been updated to include a statement from Lualua TV made after publication.

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