Mohammed Elahi, the imam at the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn, Michigan, and other Shia leaders in the United States have a choice to make. They can continue to agitate for the antisemitic and anti-American regime in Tehran that has called the United States the “Great Satan” for decades and, in so doing, demonstrate their contempt for their neighbors in America, some of whom have lost sons and daughters at the hands of Iranian proxies in the Middle East.
Or they can start making phone calls and sending text messages to their contacts in Iran and tell them that it’s time for Tehran to surrender unconditionally, abandon the pursuit of nuclear weapons, quit murdering and oppressing Iranian citizens, and stop supporting the 3-H club—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis—in a fruitless effort to establish an empire in the Middle East. And while they’re at it, they can plead with operatives of Iranian sleeper cells that NBC reported about to stand down. Their overall message would be a simple one: the Shia Crescent is dead.
In order for Elahi and other Islamist imams in the United States to do the right thing and pressure Ayatollah Khamenei to give up the ghost, they will have to do two things: abandon the illusion of having any influence over the Trump administration and abandon the notoriety they enjoy while serving as conduits of Shia hostility toward their fellow citizens—Jews especially—in the United States.
The illusion of influence over American policy is strong in Elahi who late last week, took to Facebook to offer a warning to President Trump, telling him about the dangers of escalating the conflict with Iran. During his talk, Elahi, who has long standing ties to the Islamic Republic of Iran, told President Trump that he needed to engage in diplomacy and speak the language of peace, courtesy and compassion.
“We need diplomacy. there should be a dialogue among civilizations, not death and destruction,” Elahi told the president, three days before the U.S. military launched devastating attacks on three nuclear sites in the country: Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. The New York Times reported that the U.S. dropped “bunker buster” bombs on Fordow and that initial damage assessments indicate that the facility has been taken “off the table.”
President Trump had every right to ignore Elahi’s plea for peace and reconciliation. The imam leads a mosque whose online library included texts that advocated “the subjugation of the world under Islam,” called for the fighting of Jews and Christians, praised martyrdom, denigrating women, and prescribed the death penalty for apostasy.
Elahi himself has lionized the late Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani as “one of the main architects and founding fathers of the Islamic Republic.” Rafsanjani himself declared that “If one day, this Islamic World is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.” If Elahi was truly committed to promoting the language of compassion and courtesy and dialogue among civilizations, he would distance himself from Rafsanjani, not praise him.
The Islamic House of Wisdom is not the only Shia institution in the United States that needs to be put on notice. In 2024, the Islamic Center of America, also located in Dearborn, eulogized Ali Bazzi, a member of Hezbollah who died as the result of an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon that also killed his brother and sister-in-law. And as reported by Focus on Western Islamism, the mosque’s current imam, Ibrahim Kazerooni, condemned the U.S. killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Quds Force, an organization that supplied Iraqi forces with roadside bombs that killed dozens of American soldiers in Iraq between 2005 and 2011. In 2020, Kazerooni called the U.S. airstrike a “cowardly and heinous act.”
2/2 Dearborn, MI Imam Ibrahim Kazerooni Eulogizes Qasem Soleimani: He
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) January 9, 2020
Brought Hope to the Marginalized and Fear to the Enemies of Islam pic.twitter.com/svdAyb8mqB
MEMRI reported that Kazerooni praised Soleimani as someone whose “presence brought hope to the marginalized and to those who were afraid, and it brought hatred and fear to the enemies of Islam – particularly the United States.”
This is not the type of rhetoric coming from people who love their fellow Americans and want them to be safe. It is anti-U.S. incitement broadcast on American soil.
It needs to stop, now.
