In medieval Europe, Jews knew it was a good idea to stay indoors when their neighbors celebrated Good Friday, a Christian holiday commemorating the death of Jesus. Good Friday was the day Catholic priests throughout Europe took to their pulpits to remind their congregants that Jews were responsible for the death of Christ — even though it was Roman soldiers who put Jesus on the cross.
The Post reports Elahi has “deep, decades-long ties to his homeland” and has “praised the Islamic Republic’s bloodthirsty founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Hezbollah, saying he would die for the cause.”
These homilies had a real impact on Jewish life. In The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, Catholic priest Edward H. Flannery reports that from 848 to 1160, Christians in the French city of Toulouse gathered every Good Friday to strike a Jew in the face as revenge for the murder of Jesus. Flannery reports that, at some point, Christians initiated a practice of “making special mallets for a Holy Week ritual to symbolize the killing of Jews.”
Eventually, Jews in medieval Europe became the targets of accusations of ritual murder and host desecration, which, combined with the deicide charge, turned the Jewish people into a “demonic abstraction more real than any of its individual components,” reports Robert Wistrich in his 2010 book, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad. When this abstraction took root, Jews were viewed “as a dangerous source of unbelief in general,” Wistrich writes.
The problem of religiously inspired violence against Jews was not confined to Catholic Europe, nor was it limited to the Middle Ages. In April 1903, Orthodox Christians, incited by their religious leaders, embarked on a massacre of almost 50 Jews in Kishinev, Steven Zipperstein reports in Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History.
These and other acts of violence were motivated by an “obsessive focus on the Jewish menace [which] was at the core of Christian anti-Semitism,” Wistrich reports. “Not only had the Jews killed Christ, not only were they blind to divinely revealed truth, but they were perceived as a dangerous source of unbelief in general.”
By the mid-twentieth century, this hostility toward the Jew had morphed into what Jean-Paul Sartre characterized as a “criminal passion.” Wistrich summarizes Sartre’s insights as follows:
Wistrich reports that “Sartre shrewdly noted that the mania of Manichean anti-Semites was … always directed toward destruction” and that bitter antisemitism often concealed an optimistic belief that “‘once Evil is eliminated’ (as embodied in the Jew) then harmony would finally be reestablished in and of itself.” Sartre, Wistrich reports, understood that for the antisemite, “there is no question of building a new society, but only of purifying the one which exists.”
From Christian Holy Week to Shiite Ashura
Sadly, such Manichean antisemitism is has taken root in the Dearborn, Michigan area, which, as documented previously, has become a bastion of Islamist contempt for the United States, Israel, and Jews.
In a June 15, 2026, sermon, Rajabali localizes the spirit of evil in a hidden global cabal, explicitly naming the Rothschilds as creators of “one of the most evil systems imaginable on Earth in 1790.”
In particular, the Islamic House of Wisdom (IHW) in Dearborn Heights is a focal point for such hostility. The mosque was established in the 1990s by Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi, who according to The New York Post “served as head of the Iranian Navy’s political-ideological office during the 1980s.” The Post reports Elahi has “deep, decades-long ties to his homeland” and has “praised the Islamic Republic’s bloodthirsty founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Hezbollah, saying he would die for the cause.” Elahi is proud of his ties to the Iranian regime, which he defends from his mosque’s minbar. A now-deleted biography previously posted on the mosque’s website reports that Navy officers and personnel were “impressed by Imam Elahi’s openness and friendliness.”
At Elahi’s mosque, the run-up to Ashura — a Shiite holiday that commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Hussein ibn Ali (Muhammad’s grandson) and his companions at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE — serves as a pretext for vicious polemics.
A series of pre-Ashura sermons given at the mosque by prominent Shiite activist Haj Hassanain Rajabali embodied the same Manichean habits of mind that Sartre characterized. In a June 15, 2026, sermon, Rajabali localizes the spirit of evil in a hidden global cabal, explicitly naming the Rothschilds as creators of “one of the most evil systems imaginable on Earth in 1790” — a banking system that charges interest and “controls the entire world — every aspect: media, business, everything, even our minds.”
He declares that “the bankers” are behind modern wars — “World War I, World War II, Korean War, the war in Vietnam, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and the war that is there today.” Because of these bankers, “the deep-rooted Shaitan (i.e. Satan) is so deeply rooted” in world affairs.
He blames cannibalism and pedophilia on “the Epstein class.”
He declares that the United States “loses over 240,000 children a year because there is a machinery that takes the impoverished.” And who, Rajabali asks, abuses them? “The elite, the 0.01 percent that really runs the show… The Rothschilds and the bankers, they’re worth hundreds of trillions of dollars,” he answers. “Ninety percent of the wealth on Earth that gets exchanged is owned by that 0.01 percent.”
Throughout his sermon, Rajabali uses the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE and the Iranian Revolution in 1979 as moments of opposition to this global satanic machinery.
Rajabali describes the Trump administration as “a collection of people with the worst history” who have “committed some of the worst crimes on Earth, and they’re leading us.”
The following night — June 16, 2026 — Rajabali gave another sermon in which he made similar arguments. He again portrayed the global financial elite — naming the Rockefellers, J.P. Morgan and the Federal Reserve system — as perpetrators of a massive “Ponzi scheme” and satanic machinery of control. He explicitly linked current wars to efforts to distract from the “Epstein files” and elite pedophilia, describing these forces as the “work of Iblis” (i.e. Satan) pursuing supremacy over humanity through blackmail, crime, and moral corruption.
In one particularly harsh passage in his June 16, 2026, speech, Rajabali describes the Trump administration as “a collection of people with the worst history” who have “committed some of the worst crimes on Earth, and they’re leading us.” After deploying these polemics, Rajabali continues:
It’s not about cannibalism.
It’s a political move that was created by the same people who are fighting the resistance today. They are the same people who are behind this criminality that they have extended themselves. where their goal is to declare supremacy on the human race, and then they have people committing the worst crimes, and telling and encouraging, even those potential citizens, to commit those crimes so they have dirt on them. And then they can dangle it on this person and say, “You’re gonna support us or else we’ll expose you.” This is the work of Iblis.
On Wednesday, June 17, 2026, the third night of his lecture series, Rajabali slipped up and called out the Zionist enemy by name in a rant about the evils of mass media. Encouraging his audience to take advantage of alternative media, he declares that traditional media, most notably the Associated Press, is controlled by “shaitan.”
Rajabali frames Karbala and the Iranian Revolution as the divinely ordained resistance that purifies the world from these forces.
“The Associated Press was started a century ago,” he declares. “It was created by the same people who control the media today—the Zionists and those who are in control.”
In sum, Israel stands at the center of the evil Rajabali describes. He portrays the Jewish state as the hidden hand manipulating American policy, pulling the strings of U.S. leaders and preventing criticism of its actions, even as he repeatedly professes love for America and concern for its moral standing. In his telling, the United States is not a sovereign nation acting in its own interest but a captive power beholden to this foreign influence — a classic antisemitic trope updated for the 21st century, in which the Epstein class is portrayed as global manipulators.
The upshot is this: Just as medieval Christian preachers turned Jews into a demonic abstraction blamed for deicide, societal ills, and unbelief, Rajabali presents this cabal as the eternal enemy of God’s will. Rajabali frames Karbala and the Iranian Revolution as the divinely ordained resistance that purifies the world from these forces, positioning the commemoration of Imam Hussein as the model for confronting this abyss so that moral harmony can be restored.
Regular Message at Islamic House of Wisdom
Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi, the mosque’s founder, has echoed similar themes in his own sermons. In a talk last March, he 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?”
What Will Dearborn Leaders Do?
The implications are unmistakable: Israel and its supporters are cast as the contemporary embodiment of Shaitan’s opposition to divine order as embodied by the Islamic Republic of Iran whose leaders have murdered thousands of its own citizens to stay in power.
Dearborn’s political and religious leaders need to come to grips with IHW’s repeated promotion of hostility toward Jews and Israel, and make clear that such rhetoric has no place in American life.
Given the historical impact of such rhetoric, people in the interfaith community — typically reluctant to hold Islamist extremists accountable — need to speak up, particularly in the Dearborn area. Christians have learned that transforming a religious holiday into a platform for conspiratorial antisemitism has historically created an atmosphere in which anti-Jewish violence becomes likely. Dearborn’s political and religious leaders need to come to grips with IHW’s repeated promotion of hostility toward Jews and Israel, and make clear that such rhetoric has no place in American life.
Failure to do so risks repeating a tragic pattern: religious observance twisted into a vehicle for hatred, with real-world consequences for the targeted community. Just as medieval Europe’s Good Friday sermons helped turn Jews into a demonic abstraction deserving of punishment, the Ashura sermons at IHW risk doing the same in 21st-century Michigan. The interfaith community and local leaders must reject this medieval-style incitement before it further poisons communal relations.
If they don’t act, Ashura risks becoming the new Holy Week for Jews in Michigan.
Published originally on July 1, 2026.
