The Washington Post has a report on “Carlos”, a Mexican college student who got suckered into going to Iran for indoctrination at the Oriental Thought Cultural Institute, in the ancient city of Qom:
With lure of religious classes, Iran seeks to recruit Latin Americans
Of the institute’s director he knew nothing, having never heard of Rabbani or his alleged ties to terrorism in Argentina and elsewhere. Later he would encounter the former cultural attache at the school and learn of his prominence from Iranian television programs and Web sites, where Rabbani is a tireless proponent of exporting Iran’s Islamic revolution to the Spanish-speaking world.
In addition to the training centers he runs, Rabbani helped start Iran’s largest Spanish-language Web site and was instrumental in launching HispanTV, a cable network that broadcasts Iranian programs and commentary in Spanish. Rabbani would boast in a 2011 interview of having shattered “the American myth” by helping drive Latin American opinion away from the West and toward Iran’s vision of revolutionary Islam.
“Carlos” ought to have googled Mohsen Rabbani before heading to the Institute.
The WaPo article:
A former cultural attache in Buenos Aires, Rabbani was accused by Argentina ofaiding the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in that city that killed 85 people, the country’s deadliest terrorist attack.
I had blogged about Rabbani’s aggressive proselytizing in Latin America back in 2011, pointing out that Reinaldo Azevedo blogged at Veja (link in Portuguese) that once converted to Islam, the young Brazilian men will travel to Iran, all expenses paid, with the official objective of “religious instruction.”
The WaPo does not specify whether “Carlos” was officially a convert, but I assume that the Iranians regarded him as such. By running away, he, in their eyes, is guilty of apostasy, which in Iran is punishable by death.
Now “Carlos” has had to go into hiding, seeking asylum . . . in the USA. Can’t Mexico afford him protection from Iranian agents the Mexican government is allowing in the country?
