Bob Blackman: The Iranian regime is taking the charity sector for fools

Bob Blackman is Chairman of the 1922 Committee and is MP for Harrow East. 

I was astonished to read that a charity had blamed “Islamophobia” for the cancellation of its pro-Iranian regime summer kids camp.

What rubbish. This was a children’s camp run by supporters of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei .

MPs and peers rightly raised concerns over this camp in Hertfordshire, and now it isn’t happening.

Good.

Iran plots terror attacks against targets in Britain, after sending agents to break into our country on small boats across the Channel.

Agents of the ayatollahs in Tehran walk our streets, threaten our citizens and attack people who oppose the fundamentalist regime. Regime-friendly activists are also seen stirring up dissent with the pro-Palestine hate marches on our streets week after week.

Recently we even read that Iran’s notorious Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is plotting to ‘hunt down’ operatives from a leaked list of the UK’s Afghan allies and our MI6 agents.

The summer camp in rural Hertfordshire is just the latest example of how Iran abuses Britain’s charity sector, exploiting our commendable history of philanthropy to spread its tentacles and influence across our land, while sowing discord in our communities.

The camp’s organisers, the Ahlulbayt Islamic Mission (AIM), has repeatedly praised Ayatollah Khamenei and described his books as “a great read”. The charity has also refused to condemn the terror group Hamas, and said in the wake of the Oct 7 2023 attacks on Israel that “Zionists brought this disaster upon themselves”.

Bosses of the Labaik Ya Zahra (LYZ) charity in London flew out to Tehran to meet a senior commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) who praised their work, saying it was “backed by the spirit of Imam Khomeini.”

A trustee even signed a memorandum of understanding with the Iranian state news agency promising to work together to spread “the ideals and discourse of the Islamic Revolution on an international level.”

Similarly, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, also based in London, was described as an “Islamist group ideologically aligned with the Iranian regime, that has a history of extremist links and terrorist sympathies” in a government counter-terrorism review two years ago. This was denied by the IHRC, that has a UK-registered charitable arm despite numerous complaints to the Charity Commission watchdog going back years.

The Islamic Centre of England mosque in London has been brazen in its role as a mouthpiece for the Iranian regime despite being a registered charity. It was described as the “London office” of the Iranian ayatollah’s regime by the Foreign Affairs Committee.

The mosque broadcast daily religious messages from Khamenei during Ramadan this year.

It even held a candlelit vigil in honour of a notorious IRGC commander, Qasem Soleimani, after he was assassinated by US forces in 2020, at which he was described as a ‘great martyr’.

This is a man who had the blood of tens of thousands on his hands.

Yet, ICE was given a mere slap on the wrist by the Charity Commission for staging the event. Astonishingly, the charity watchdog first started investigating ICE seven years ago, but there seems to be little real appetite to shut it down.

Pupils at the School of the Islamic Republic of Iran in London were disturbingly filmed in the playground singing about their preparedness to participate in wars against “non-believers” for an IRGC propaganda film in 2022. Ofsted inspectors have graded the school ‘inadequate’ four times since 2016, yet it remains open.

Two other London charities with links to Iran, Dar Al Hekma Trust and Abrar Islamic Foundation, are currently being probed by the national terrorist financial investigation unit.

They have denied any wrongdoing.

So what can we do about this?

Well, firstly we must not sit on our hands and wait for it to escalate and get out of control. We must crack down on pro-Iranian regime activists, wherever they appear.

MI5 say they have disrupted more than 20 Iranian assassination and kidnap plots in the UK since 2022. It’s beyond time that we took this seriously. Last month a new scheme was established in the UK to crack down on foreign agents here in the UK.

Any members of the Iranian state, or anybody acting on behalf of the state, carrying out “political influence activities” in the UK will have to register themselves with the authorities. Failure to register is a criminal offence and can mean up to five years in jail.

Will this be enough to deter fanatics who want to bring down the West? I doubt it.

For more than 40 years, Iran’s IRGC militia has been responsible for plotting global terrorist attacks, hostage-taking and other offences on foreign soil, including in Britain.

The IRGC’s commanders and the regime’s officials have openly called for homegrown Islamist terrorism in the West.

Will Labour ban the IRGC here in the UK? I won’t hold my breath.

So in the absence of that, the rest of our police and security apparatus must step up to the plate, before it’s too late.

A start would be ridding our charity sector of extremists.

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