Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) IRAN MAPPING PROJECT USA Rep. Jack Bergman has raised national security alarm bells by calling on the Justice Department to investigate ongoing efforts of an anti-American website that is promoted by Iran’s regime and incites assassination attacks against U.S. law enforcement personnel and American Jews.
Rep. Bergman stated in his letter to the Department of Justice, Attorney General Garland, “I write to express my concern that the Islamic Republic of Iran is covertly supporting a purported social justice movement in the United States known as ‘the Mapping Project’ as part of a sophisticated campaign to sew social discord and undermine public faith in American institutions.
According to Bergman’s letter, “The Mapping Project combines elements of far-left extremism with anti-Western and pro-Communist ideologies to demonize and attack organizations not aligned with its profoundly illiberal and un-American worldview. It often uses extremist – and sometimes violent – rhetoric to name and shame organizations that run afoul of its views.”
ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN Over four decades, the size, responsibilities, capabilities, and numbers of the intelligence agencies have grown substantially. “Iran’s intelligence services are capable of sophisticated operations worldwide to counter potential threats to the regime, its revolutionary ideology, and its interests,” the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reported in 2019. Many agencies have their own counterintelligence (or information protection) organizations to prevent infiltration by foreign and domestic adversaries. Their operations are nominally coordinated by the General Office of Counterintelligence, which reports to the supreme leader as commander-in-chief.
The two most powerful intelligence branches are the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), which falls under the executive branch, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Intelligence Organization (IRGC-IO), which is part of the military.
click to enlarge
USA Rep. Jack Bergman letter to the DOJ, He added, “The Mapping Project is rife with antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment; an outsize number of the organizations the Mapping Project singles out are Jewish institutions, including synagogues, schools and NGOs.” Bergman’s letter stated, “On multiple occasions, the Mapping Project was endorsed by Iranian-owned media organization PressTV, which said that the Mapping Project should be expanded to additional states beyond Massachusetts, and by Al Mayadeen, which is affiliated with Hezbollah.”
Launched in 2022, the Mapping Project maintains a website with an interactive map that pinpoints the precise geographic locations of more than 500 civil society, government, national security, religious, and community organizations in the state of Massachusetts that it claims should be ‘dismantled’ for advancing perceived ‘harms’ in the United States and in Israel.”
Mapping Project website are some 271 police stations – law enforcement is a frequent target for the Mapping Project, which publicly called for the abolition of the Boston Police Department – nine U.S. military bases and installations, and several Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Secret Service offices. Nearly 300 of the approximately 500 organizations mapped by the Mapping Project contribute to the nation’s national security.”
The Mapping Project combines elements of far-left extremism with anti-Western and pro-Communist ideologies to demonize and attack organizations not aligned with its profoundly illiberal and un-American worldview.
click to enlarge
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also weighed in upon learning of the mapping project. A spokesperson for the ministry said in a Twitter threat that Israel “strongly condemns” it.
“This whole project is reminiscent of a dangerous antisemitic pattern of activity known from antiquity through the horrors of the 20th century: a pattern which has led to violence against Jews and their institutions,” ministry spokesperson Lior Haiat tweeted.
Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., rebuked the project for accusing Jews “of various evils in American society,” noting that “[s]scapegoating is a common symptom of Antisemitism, which at its core is a conspiracy theory.”
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., tweeted that the project is “wrong” and “dangerous,” calling it “an anti-Semitic enemies list with a map attached.”
Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., a Jewish member of Congress who represents a district with a large Jewish population, was appalled by the project. “This is just chilling to me. It is tapping into millennia-old antisemitic tropes about nefarious Jewish wealth, control, conspiracy, media connections and political string-pulling,” he told the Jewish Insider website. “To name names and keep lists, which has a very sinister history in Judaism, in terms of how we are targeted, is very irresponsible. [The group] needs to take this down and apologize.”
BDS Boston, which supports the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, posted an endorsement of the Mapping Project, claiming that various organizations and institutions are “structurally tied” to police, American imperialism, evictions, and the oppression of Palestinians.
The project features a map with markers for 482 agencies, organizations, media outlets, and politicians, including local police departments, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, Massachusetts Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, the Boston Globe, and groups such as the Jewish Teen Foundation of Greater Boston, Jewish Arts Collaborative, and the Synagogue Council of Massachusetts.
“Our goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them,” the project’s website says. “Every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted.”
SEE –
2) Congressman Urges DOJ Probe of Tehran-Endorsed ‘Mapping Project’