The Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, is using the run-up to Ashura—which will be celebrated later this week—to promote conspiracy theories that portray Israel and its allies in the United States as the embodiment of global evil and satanic manipulation. In sermons delivered last week by prominent Shiite activist Haj Hassanain Rajabali, the mosque has promoted medieval antisemitic tropes, portraying a cabal of bankers and Zionists as the root of wars, pedophilia, media control, and moral corruption. Rajabali is a Shiite Muslim who echoes the Manichean hatred preached against Jews by Catholic priests in Medieval Europe during Holy Week.
We do not want Muslim neighbors to be attacked, like happened in San Diego, but we also do not want Muslim leaders to stoke antisemitic attacks.
Ashura is a Shiite holiday that commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Hussein ibn Ali, Mohammad’s grandson, at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. Rajabali’s sermon on Monday, June 15, 2026, set the tone. He blamed the Rothschilds for creating “one of the most evil systems imaginable on Earth in 1790”—a banking system based on interest that “controls the entire world—every aspect: media, business, everything, even our minds.” According to Rajabali, “the bankers” orchestrated World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and ongoing conflicts. “The deep-rooted Shaitan is so deeply rooted” in world affairs as a result, he declared.
He tied these forces to “cannibalism, and what we call today pedophilia,” invoking the “Epstein class.” “The United States loses over 240,000 children a year,” he claimed, “because there is a machinery that takes the impoverished.” The perpetrators? “The elite,” the “0.01 percent” that includes the Rothschilds, who supposedly own “ninety percent of the wealth on Earth that gets exchanged” and are “worth hundreds of trillions of dollars.”
In his sermons, Rajabali described the Battle of Karbala and Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution—which installed a murderous regime in Tehran—as divinely inspired resistance against this machinery of oppressive corruption. “They assassinate. They kill, they threaten. They spend trillions of dollars,” he said. While he initially avoided naming Jews or Zionists explicitly, the target was unmistakable: Israel as the hidden hand controlling U.S. policy. “I don’t like the fact that legislation in all our bodies of government is preventing me from saying something about a foreign government,” he complained. “But I can say bad things about my own government. I can say bad things about God. But not this people.” (Predictably, Rajabali offered little if any criticism of the Islamic Republic of Iran which has murdered thousands of its own citizens since its founding in 1979.)
On Tuesday, June 16, 2026, Rajabali expanded on the “Ponzi scheme” run by figures like the Rockefellers, J.P. Morgan, and the Federal Reserve, describing it as the “work of Eblis” (Satan) involving blackmail and elite pedophilia. The following night, he named “the Zionists” directly while attacking mainstream media: “The Associated Press was started a century ago. It was created by the same people who control the media today—the Zionists and those who are in control.”
Rajabali used the story of Karbala to legitimize violence against Israel again on June 21—Father’s Day, no less. In last night’s sermon, he compared the fighters killed during the recent fighting in Gaza with the young defenders of Imam Hussein at the Battle of Karbala. He praised the “power of resistance today” that draws lessons from Karbala and described today’s fighters as excited and fearless: “Their fingers have been blown off. Families have been killed… They are excited. They’re so excited, they’re not afraid.”
He contrasted the deaths of those in Gaza with “those cowards, on the other side, [who] are running with their pants wet.” Rajabali explicitly likened the situation to Gaza, declaring, “How could the enemy of 30,000 soldiers corner these innocent people and threaten them by killing them, just like what’s happening in Gaza? Don’t blame the people who are getting killed… Blame the enemy who is occupying and killing innocently and killing their families.” With this sermon, Rajabali has legitimized the false allegation of genocide against Israel while glorifying armed “resistance.”
By framing Karbala’s martyrs as models for contemporary fighters, Rajabali deploys core Shia doctrine not merely for religious reflection but to sanctify the actions of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies. This narrative justifies a fruitless war across the Middle East that has already cost thousands of Muslim lives, while advancing a retrograde, anti-modernist ideology. If left unchallenged, this use of religious tradition will keep the region locked in perpetual conflict, rejecting modernity, pluralism, and peace in favor of perpetual jihadist confrontation.
This rhetorical strategy mirrors the antisemitic preaching that fomented anti-Jewish pogroms in medieval Europe. In the Middle Ages, Catholic priests used Good Friday homilies to remind congregants that Jews were responsible for the death of Christ. In The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism (Paulist Press, 1985), Catholic priest Edward H. Flannery detailed how, from 848 to 1160 in Toulouse, France, Christians ritually struck a Jew in the face each Good Friday. Special mallets were even crafted to symbolize the killing of Jews.
Not the First Time
The Islamic House of Wisdom is led by Mohammad Ali Elahi, who has deep ties to Iran’s regime—including past service in the Iranian Navy’s political-ideological office and praise for Ayatollah Khomeini and Hezbollah.
At a press conference in March, Elahi, who is also close to Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of nearby Dearborn, asked: “Why must the people of Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran pay the price so Netanyahu can be elected in Israel and the Jeffrey Epstein files and six million pages of crimes against young girls be forgotten in America?”
‘We do not Want Muslim Neighbors to be Attacked’
Ted Barham, a local Evangelical pastor who has confronted Islamism in the Dearborn area, voiced alarm over the impact of such preaching. “I am really concerned that Islamic leaders in Dearborn are only fanning the flames of antisemitism, rather than trying to reach across to neighboring Jewish communities,” he said.
Barham, who has repeatedly warned against using extremist outbursts from Islamists as a pretext for hostility against Muslims in general, warns against: “There has already been a major consequence to such rhetoric: the attack on the West Bloomfield mosque in which there were 140 babies and very young children.” He added that “dear Jewish friends of ours in the vicinity of Dearborn have been targeted over the past several years, including acts of vandalism to their home and acts of intimidation.”
“As Christians we follow a Jewish Savior, so we also take this personally,” Barham emphasized. “We do not want Muslim neighbors to be attacked, like happened in San Diego, but we also do not want Muslim leaders to stoke antisemitic attacks.”
Note: Focus on Western Islamism has contacted the Islamic House of Wisdom, the Dearborn Interfaith Network, and Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, for comment on Rajabali’s comments and has no response.
