Repost: NYT Actually Comments on the Islamist State
The New York Times, the paper of record that downplayed the Nazi party in the 1930s and continuously lied about Jews ever since, shockingly published a piece that captures something Western liberals refuse to confront: the Islamic State occupying Iran/Persia is not merely “anti-Zionist” or posturing for Palestinian rights, but obsessed with controlling, punishing, and erasing Jewish identity itself. The article, “Iran Sentences Iranian American Jewish Man to Prison, Family Says” (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/world/middleeast/iran-iranian-american-jewish-prison.html ), reports that a seventy-year-old Iranian American Jew was arrested and sentenced simply for having visited Israel thirteen years ago to celebrate his son’s bar mitzvah. His case is not an outlier; it fits a long pattern of the regime weaponizing citizenship, religion, and family ties to intimidate minorities and use them as political leverage.
This matters far beyond one tragic story. Islamist propaganda has penetrated Western discourse so deeply that people now scream that Israel is a “religious state” while ignoring that two million Arab citizens live there with full civil rights, LGBTQ protections, abortion access, and 100s of gay-friendly venues. These same voices then cheer attacks by the Islamic State occupying Iran/Persia, a regime that forces women under strict hijab, forbids dancing in public, and criminalizes basic freedom of movement. During the last war, I watched Americans defend that sharia-run system and deny atrocities outright. One example was Dominic D. Detetta III, a Washington, D.C. music promoter (3D Productions), who insisted that photos of women mutilated by the regime were AI fabrications; when presented with BBC reporting of the same victims, he continued dismissing the gender apartheid as invented, cheered on by people so thoroughly conditioned they cannot distinguish liberation from theocratic brutality.
Dominic D. Detetta III, a US music promoter (and drug dealer), not only encouraged the bombing and murder of Americans like myself under a veneer of pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-virtuous rhetoric, but also openly laughed and mocked protesters who were blinded by the Islamist regime, and ultimately tried to silence rebuttals by insisting that screenshotting his tirades about the “Zio Jews” somehow constituted libel.
Dominic touts himself as a clueless liberal, anti-racist…. except when it comes to his Jewish kampf. So it is worth remembering that Iran’s hell began with liberal idealists who believed the revolution would deliver a freer society; within a few years, many were dead, exiled, or forced to comply with the sharia state they helped empower.
The imprisonment of Kamran Hekmati is not just a diplomatic dispute. It is a window into a movement that punishes Jewish identity as if it were a crime, manipulates Western discourse with astonishing success, and hides the suffering of its own population behind a false narrative of “resistance.”
A synagogue in Tehran. (Credit: Hossein Beris/Middle East Images, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)
Iran Sentences Iranian American Jewish Man to Prison, Family Says
Kamran Hekmati of Long Island was arrested for visiting Israel 13 years ago to celebrate his son’s bar mitzvah, they said.
Farnaz Fassihi; Nov. 6, 2025
Iran has sentenced an Iranian American Jewish man from New York to prison on charges of traveling to Israel 13 years ago for celebrating his son’s bar mitzvah, members of his family said.
Kamran Hekmati, a 70-year-old jeweler who traveled to Iran in May for a brief visit, has been held in Tehran’s Evin prison since July, family members said in interviews. They asked not to be named because they feared that Iran’s government would retaliate against Mr. Hekmati for speaking publicly.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court sentenced Mr. Hekmati to four years in prison in late August, citing a law that bans Iranians from visiting Israel, family members said. Mr. Hekmati, who holds dual citizenship, was born in Iran but immigrated to the United States when he was 13 years old. He traveled to Iran to visit family using his Iranian passport, as Iranians are obliged to do, and Iran says it does not recognize dual citizenship.
In September, Iran’s judiciary reduced the punishment for traveling to Israel to two years in prison and subsequently cut Mr. Hekmati’s sentence in half, members of his family said. His name and his sentence have not previously been reported.
A lawyer for the family has filed an appeal, but a court date has not yet been set, the family members said. They said they hope Iran releases him on humanitarian grounds because he was not involved in politics, had visited Israel for personal reasons and was in poor health fighting aggressive bladder cancer.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations said it would not comment on Mr. Hekmati’s case.
Kamran Hekmati, in a family photo.
Iran is currently holding at least four American citizens: Mr. Hekmati, the journalist Reza Valizadeh, and two women whose identities have not been made public, according to rights groups, relatives and a lawyer representing one of the women.
The State Department, citing privacy and security concerns, said it could not comment on individual cases of Americans detained in Iran or divulge exactly how many were being held. It said in a statement that it was continuing to engage with allies and partners on “this issue and on cases of unjust detention in Iran in general.”
“The Iranian regime has a long history of unjustly and wrongfully detaining other countries’ citizens,” the State Department said in a statement. “Iran should release these individuals immediately.”
Iran’s government has a track record of detaining foreign and dual nationals and using them as political pawns for prisoner swaps and to release frozen funds. But Mr. Hekmati is the first known case in recent years in which Iran targeted a Jewish dual American citizen for traveling to Israel for personal reasons.
“By wrongfully detaining Mr. Hekmati and others like him, Tehran is once again unnecessarily fueling tensions with the United States and Israel,” said Siamak Namazi, an Iranian American and former prisoner in Iran. He was jailed for eight years and released in 2023 in a deal with the Biden administration.
Mr. Hekmati owns a jewelry business in Midtown Manhattan’s diamond district and lives in Great Neck, Long Island, home to a large population of Iranian American Jews. His family says he delights in spending time with his four children and first grandchild, is an active member of the local synagogue and has a deep love for Iranian culture.
“Kamran was the person who glued the family together. He was always there for everyone, his wife, his kids, all his relatives, anyone he met in Iran,” Shohreh Nowfar, a cousin who lives in California, said in a telephone interview. “It’s so ironic that the country he loved so much and tried to help has now imprisoned him.”
Mr. Hekmati returned to Iran on multiple occasions alone and with his wife and children, and did not encounter any problems until this past May, when tensions between Iran and Israel spiked ahead of military strikes, members of his family said.
Security forces stopped Mr. Hekmati at Tehran’s international airport as he tried to leave the country, confiscated his passport and demanded access to his mobile phone and social media accounts, members of his family said.
From May to early July, intelligence agents interrogated Mr. Hekmati several times as he remained at a relative’s home in Tehran while he was banned from leaving the country, members of his family said. In early July, shortly after a cease-fire with Israel that was brokered by the United States, security agents raided the home and arrested him, members of his family said.
He was charged and sentenced in late August without being allowed legal representation, they said. The family members added that they hired a lawyer after he was sentenced.
Iranian leaders, including President Masoud Pezeshkian, have long encouraged Iranians in the diaspora, including those from religious and ethnic minority groups, to visit without fear. Mr. Pezeshkian reiterated that message in September during the United Nations General Assembly.
Farnaz Fassihi is the United Nations bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the organization. She also covers Iran and has written about conflict in the Middle East for 15 years.
Thoughts on the Islamic State occupying Iran? This NYT article is a reminder that the Islamic State remains fixated on policing Jewish life everywhere, including in the diaspora. It is a testament to what Palestine Support ultimately is: refusal of Judaism under the pretense that Jews are offensive to Islamists. It does not even get into how the regime exports its ideology through proxy groups in Gaza, Yemen, and beyond, leaving millions of ordinary people impoverished while clerics and security elites cling to power. The world deserves better than Islamist State apologists, and the music community especially deserves better than bigots like Dominic D. Detetta III, aka old men who throw dance parties while laughing about the women who had their eyes gouged out for demanding the same rights.
