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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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Some % of Iranian Americans are likely Shiite extremist or Iranian extremists simply as a matter of statistics; it is not unheard of for extremists to be the children of those who left their country because of extremism. According to the official documents they were “voluntary telephonic interviews” and

SHAKERI's stated reason for participating in the interviews was to attempt to obtain a sentence reduction for another individual ("Individual-1"), who is serving a sentence in U.S. prison, by providing assistance to law enforcement on this individual's behalf.

But this really stretches the imagination, as Iran would brutally torture him to death for conducting such an interview, were he a real person.

Iran has a documented history of using criminals, foreign and domestic, to conduct assassination operations because they have leverage and plausible deniability

Plausible deniability would be paying someone who is not Iranian. Really this all sounds similar to the string of antisemitic arson attacks in Australia, where some mysterious overseas organization hired criminals to commit random acts of criminality against Jewish organizations, most of which never constituted a real threat, coincidentally as the Australian Jewish community pushed for tyrannical antisemitic hate speech laws:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8057j0mz5mo.amp

Australia's federal police have said they are investigating whether "overseas actors or individuals" are paying local criminals to carry out antisemitic crimes in the country.

There has been a spate of such incidents in recent months, the latest of which saw a childcare centre in Sydney set alight and sprayed with anti-Jewish graffiti. No-one was injured.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called a snap cabinet meeting in response, where officials agreed to set up a national database to track antisemitic incidents. Thus far, the federal police taskforce, set up in December to investigate such incidents, received more than 166 reports of antisemitic crimes. Albanese said it appeared some of the crimes were "being perpetrated by people who don't have a particular issue, aren't motivated by an ideology, but are paid actors".

These “attacks” were designed specifically to cause no damage: https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2025/3/10/mob-faked-attack-on-australian-synagogue-police

The caravan had been easily located, the AFP said, adding that the explosives were clearly visible and no detonator was present, suggesting there was never any intent to attack Jewish targets. “The caravan was never going to cause a mass casualty event but instead was concocted by criminals who wanted to cause fear for personal benefit,” Krissy Barrett, AFP’s deputy commissioner for nation

This has also been blamed on Iran, because of course.

You're right that it "could be" the case that Iranian-Americans were willing to conduct terrorism on the Islamic regime's behalf. That rate is infinitesimal, empirically.

Presumably Shakeri thought the FBI wasn't going to publish the fact of the interview. I don't know the logic of why the FBI did what it did.

There's a well-documented history of Iran conducting operations against Jews worldwide over decades.

People love to mistake Iranian incompetence for "ah they didn't actually want to hurt anyone." "They couldn't be that irrational." Like the time they wanted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US in Washington DC. Or like the time they fired ballistic missiles at US forces in Iraq and didn't do much, so the explanation among nonsensical people was "clearly it was all for show." For their part, the Iranians believed the MSM lied about the casualties they had actually caused, because they knew their missiles hit the geocoords. (We did have troops in bunkers get TBIs from the impacts.)

I've personally got to witness Iranian efforts to kill Americans and Jews, so I know not to confuse their incompetence with malicious intent.