The head of the Muslim group promoting a boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day has a history of working with the Iranian regime’s street thugs, the JC can reveal.
Massoud Shadjareh is the chair of the London-based Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), which won consultative status at the United Nations in 2007 and has an office at the European Union’s headquarters in Brussels.
But the pro-regime firebrand has spoken at numerous events in Iran organised by the Basij Resistance Force, a paramilitary group established by Ayatollah Khomeini that is sanctioned by the UK.
Iran-born Shadjareh – who blamed “Zionist financiers abroad” for the far-right riots last summer – has also backed the October 7 terror attacks and reaffirmed his support for the 1989 fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie a year after the celebrated British author was stabbed in the eye by a Shia extremist.
The Basij, a branch of the brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – which is also sanctioned by the UK – is notorious for enforcing the regime’s ideology on university campuses and contributing to Iran’s military research, including its nuclear and missile programmes.
In 2008, the Basij’s wing at the University of Tehran put out a call for suicide attackers against Israel and some 7,000 people registered their interest.
At one November 2023 event organised by the IRGC’s Student Basij Organisation in Tehran, Shadjareh appeared on a panel titled “Message of the resistance”.
He spoke alongside Mohammad Sadegh Shahbazi, a senior Basij figure, and Mohammad Sadegh Kowshaki, a founding member of the Ansar-e Hezbollah militia – a vigilante group composed of ex-members of the IRGC and Basij that has launched acid attacks on women for “bad hijab”.
The Wembley-based IHRC recently urged councils to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day, criticising its organiser, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, for “refusing to include Gaza” on its list of genocides.
In June 2024, the IHRC was behind a vigil at the Iranian embassy for Ebrahim Raisi, the former Iranian president known as the “Butcher of Tehran” for his role overseeing the mass execution of thousands of people.
The group are also behind the annual anti-Israel Al Quds Day rally in London, at which protesters have in the past carried posters of the late IRGC terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani, Hezbollah flags and placards demanding “resistance by any means necessary”.
In his review of the Prevent counter-extremism programme, William Shawcross described the IHRC as an “Islamist group ideologically aligned with the Iranian regime” with a “history of extremist links and terrorist sympathies”.
His comments were echoed by leading campaigner for Iranian women’s rights, Masih Alinejad, who has accused IHRC of acting as a “propaganda tool” for Iran.
The evidence about Shadjareh’s history of working with sanctioned regime organisations was obtained by Kasra Aarabi, director of IRGC research at United Against Nuclear Iran (Uani), which is campaigning to “make Britain a Khamenei-free zone”.
Aarabi claims that the IHRC is one of more than 30 entities, individuals and centres in Britain linked to the Iranian regime and the IRGC. At another Basij event in February 2024, Shadjareh appeared alongside IRGC commander Brigadier General Esmail Kowsari. Sanctioned by the EU, Kowsari is an ultra-conservative member of Iran’s parliament and played a key role in suppressing anti-regime protests in Tehran, including the November 2019 unrest during which the regime killed an estimated 1,500 civilians.
In 2024, Kowsari – whose phone reportedly has the ringtone “America, death to your deceit!” – told an Iran-state owned channel: “We’re determined to eradicate the Zionist regime”.
At a separate student Basij event on October 11, 2023, Shadjareh dialled in from the IHRC headquarters in London to give a speech addressing the October 7 attack. After signing a letter on October 9 affirming the “inalienable right” of Palestinians to resist, “including the right to armed struggle”, Shadjareh spoke via video link at the event that glorified Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa storm operation”.
Massoud Shadjareh beamed into a Student Basij event from the IHRC headquarters on October 11 2023
Meanwhile, in December 2022, while the Basij were violently suppressing Iranians during the protests that followed the notorious death-in-custody of 22-year-old Masha Amini – who had been arrested for wearing an “improper hijab” – Shadjareh addressed a student Basij event alongside Mohammad Saeed Bahmanpour, a cleric at the Islamic Centre of England, another London-based, Iran-linked group.
In 2018, Shadjareh spoke at another Basij event that was partially organised by a wing of the student group that besieged and ransacked the British Embassy in Tehran in 2011.
He has also addressed crowds at Sharif University, which is under EU and UK financial sanctions and which helped conduct the research for Iran’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) programme.
As head of the IHRC, Shadjareh has repeatedly engaged with IRGC-affiliated media including Tehran-based Ofogh and Masaf International.
In a three-part English interview on Masaf International, Shadjareh lauded the Islamic Republic and backed the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses.
Shadjareh said: “I was involved with a number of people long before the fatwa, we were petitioning… for the publishers to stop.” He suggested that the fatwa had a “calming” effect on hostilities – a remark he made a year after Rushdie was stabbed in the eye in an assassination attempt in 2022.
“No self-respecting Muslim or Islamic scholar anywhere around the world was able to come up and say this fatwa… is not right from [an] Islamic perspective. Not a single person.
“I think the fatwa calmed things down. Rushdie went into hiding, the demonstrations took a different form,” Shadjareh went on.
A poster for sale on the IHRC website listed for £120 is titled ‘From the West Bank to Baltimore – Intifada Street’ (IHRC)
This echoed comments made by Shadjareh in December 2021 during the IHRC’s “Islamophobia Conference” with former Hizb ut-Tahrir leader Dr Wahid Asif Shaida, anti-Israel academic David Miller, and ICE cleric Bahmanpour.
Shadjareh said that the Muslim community was not organised when The Satanic Verses were published but “ordinary Muslims… came with the understanding that this was wrong, and they supported the fatwa against this”. After Rushdie was attacked in August 2022, the IHRC reshared Shadjareh’s speech on X.
Meanwhile, his wife and former IHRC director, Arzu Merali, has also suggested support for the Rushdie fatwa. Writing in 2020, she called it the “peak” of Muslim political agency, adding that “every day since has been a step backwards”. She also called a criticism of the attack on the writer in 2022 “embarrassing”.
When the JC asked her about the comments, Merali said that condemnation of the attack on Rushdie “panders to racist and fascistic narratives” and “undermine[s] social cohesion and anti-racism”.
Elsewhere in his Masaf interview, Shadjareh praised the Islamic Revolution as a global movement against oppression. Despite Iran’s abysmal ranking on the Democracy Index, he argued that the Ayatollah’s regime has created “the only democracy offered to the people of the Middle East”.
Since its founding in 1997, the IHRC has campaigned against Israel. Between 2019 and 2023, the charity that funds the IHRC – the Islamic Human Rights Commission Trust – spent nearly £1.5 million on the IHRC and received more than £300,000 in taxpayer-funded gift aid.
The IHRC was also handed £10,000 in public funds as part of government support during the pandemic.
The Charity Commission is monitoring the IHRC Trust over its relationship with the Shadjareh-chaired Islamic Human Rights Commission.
A Charity Commission spokesperson said: “The Commission has previously engaged with Islamic Human Rights Commission Trust and provided regulatory advice and guidance regarding its relationship with the non-charitable organisation Islamic Human Rights Commission.
“We have an ongoing case into the charity to assess compliance with this advice and guidance.”
The charity’s online shop sells a range of books and posters depicting terror groups. An artwork listed for £90 shows the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) plane hijacker Leila Khaled. Other posters for sale are produced by a group called “Intifada Street”.
Another poster for sale on IHRC is titled ‘Long Live Free Palestine’ and depicts Leila Khaled with a gun (IHRC)
Books about Ayatollah Khomeini are also available, as is a book titled Poetry of the Taliban, and another extolling the “untold history of the liberation party” Hizb ut-Tahrir, which was proscribed as a terror group in the UK last year.
Under Shadjareh’s leadership, the IHRC has railed against UK anti-terror laws, which it argues is “a pretext for mass surveillance and social conditioning”. The group has campaigned against Prevent, the government’s counter-terror programme, telling members of the public not to engage with the “oppressive” system.
Shadjareh has spoken on mainstream British media outlets including the BBC, Sky and the Guardian on topics related to extremism, radicalisation and the police.
When IRGC general Soleimani was killed by the US in 2020, the IHRC leader attended a vigil for the terror chief and said: “We work hard to make sure there will be many, many more Qasem Soleimanis.
“We aspire to become like him.” In 2008, he co-authored a paper in which he wrote: “We are all Hezbollah.”
Another poster for sale on IHRC forming part of the ‘Intifada Street Journey of Love Exhibition’ (IHRC)
Addressing the JC’s investigation, Shadjareh said: “Neither I nor IHRC support, promote or endorse any proscribed organisation or illegal activity… I have never had any relationship with the national armed forces of any country, including Iran.
“In relation to my speaking engagements, I am regularly invited by student organisations both in the UK and around the world to give talks and deliver seminars on issues including decoloniality, Palestine, and human rights.
“I am proud to be afforded the opportunity to educate the next generation of activists from an Islamic perspective and I will continue to do so regardless of the intimidation and harassment I face.
“Attending these events and sharing a platform with other individuals does not equate to supporting them or endorsing their views, associations or actions.”
He accused the JC of “political bias in favour of a genocidal apartheid state”.
A spokesperson for the IHRC Trust said: “The IHRC Trust exists solely to fund and support charitable projects in line with its constitution and UK charitable law. All its expenditures are directed towards initiatives that promote its charitable aims. The items available in the IHRC shop are lawful and can be purchased lawfully elsewhere in the UK. Their inclusion reflects a commitment to providing a diverse range of materials that may appeal to a broad community. This approach is not an expression of a particular political or ideological viewpoint, but an effort to cater to varied interests and facilitate access to resources that foster discussion and understanding.”
Bahmanpour was contacted for comment.
