ADL Report Details Iran’s Coronavirus Anti-Semitism

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a report on April 3 chronicling the Iranian government’s various anti-Semitic conspiracy theories surrounding the coronavirus (COVID-19).

ADL Associate Director, Middle East Affairs Shaya Lerner and Washington Director for International Affairs Andrew Weinberg wrote that these conspiracy theories are based on the idea that Israel and Jews are using the coronavirus for world domination. For instance, Iranian Member of Parliament Gholamali Jafarzadeh and Iranian state television have called COVID-19 a “biological attack by the U.S. and the Zionist regime.” The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has similarly called the coronavirus a “Zionist biological terror attack.”

Additionally, Iran’s Tasnim News Agency has alleged that the coronavirus is part of an effort from “the unique Jewish scholar and American strategist Henry Alfred Kissinger” to use population control to achieve world domination. The Iranian Houthi rebels in Yemen are also claiming “that COVID-19 is a Jewish conspiracy to profit off of Muslim deaths and to stop Muslims from making pilgrimage, antisemitic slanders that semi-official Iranian news outlets are all too happy to rebroadcast as news,” per Lerner and Weinberg.

“The Iranian people have unfortunately been hit hard by COVID-19, and we can expect the regime to continue blaming Jews, Israel, and America as the current public health crisis transpires,” they wrote.

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted, “While battling the #COVID19 outbreak, the Iranian regime has once again become the number one state sponsor of scapegoating Jews, baselessly blaming world Jewry for the disease’s spread.”

While battling the #COVID19 outbreak, the Iranian regime has once again become the number one state sponsor of scapegoating Jews, baselessly blaming world Jewry for the disease’s spread. @ADL experts break down the #antisemitism they continue to spread: https://t.co/OHfo8jrcdX

— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) April 3, 2020

Simon Wiesenthal Center senior consultant Harold Brackman wrote in an April 2 report that Iran’s PressTV has told Iranians to “not use any vaccine or medicine developed by ‘Zionists,’ ” arguing that the U.S. is “entirely capable of launching World War III by way of a biological warfare attack on China and Iran, with the Iran component presumably led by Israel.” Brackman noted in the report that Jews have been scapegoated for prior pandemics, such as the bubonic plague during the Middle Ages.

“Dynamically linked to delusional anti-Semitism since the Middle Ages, viral pandemics still menace Jews today existentially as well as physically,” Brackman wrote. “In response, we should remain vigilant, monitoring online screeds that can translate into ‘lone wolf’ actions.”

More than 3,000 people have died in Iran from the coronavirus, although the death toll is believed to be much higher than that. A hundred Iranian academics have signed a March 29 letter blaming Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for the spread of COVID-19 in the country, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

“Everyone now knows that the initial obfuscation by the regime and its security forces robbed the Iranian people of their chance to curtail this dangerous virus,” the letter states. “Everyone knows the facts of how the lives of Iranian citizens were sacrificed, irresponsibly and inhumanely, in service of the regime’s political interests.”

The letter argued that the Iranian government’s failure to ban flights from China, unwillingness to lockdown the city of Qom — the initial epicenter of the virus breakout — and refusal to accept international aid caused the situation to become dire in Iran.

“The life of every single Iranian citizen is in the hands of the leader, his advisors, and the police and security forces,” the letter stated. “[Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s] obedient government is also abiding by these policies, and failing to take the necessary actions, despite all the warnings of officials in the health and hygiene systems. Thus, Iran’s citizens, including its medical personnel who are risking their lives, are paying the price of this stupidity and ineffectualness.”