US National Security and Antisemitism, Issue 2 | The October 7 Mobilization, Militant Convergence in Europe, Iran’s Campaign in Britain, and the Flydubai Attack

This report, the second edition of a new series from Hudson Institute’s Center on Peace and Security in the Middle East, tracks how antisemitic and anti-Zionist ideas travel across platforms, languages, countries, and political movements—and how foreign adversaries weaponize these ideas against the United States and its allies.

Issue 1 demonstrated how a Chinese-led axis, which includes Russia and Iran, uses antisemitism and anti-Zionism to shape the political environment in which US policymakers operate and to persuade Americans that their country’s alliances are burdens.^[1] This issue shows this same logic at play in four different dynamics: the organization of transnational protests, the fusion of European far-left militancy with pro-Palestinian extremism, Iranian intelligence operations directed at US allies, and the radicalization of individuals whose paths to violence run through the schools, airlines, and security systems of several US partners.

Monthly Monitor | October 2026

The third anniversary of the attacks of October 7 offered a rare view of how maleficent actors are manipulating the forces of antisemitism and anti-Zionism against US interests. Over the course of several weeks, these forces operated at protest marches in Washington, DC, near air bases in the United Kingdom, and in the skies over Saudi Arabia—and in every case, they turned hostility toward Israel into costs for the United States and its partners.

In the UK, British counterterrorism police arrested two men under suspicion of aiding Iranian intelligence in connection with a suspected plot against US aircraft at Royal Air Force (RAF) Fairford in Gloucestershire, England. Designed to occur near the anniversary of the attacks of October 7, the plots in Britain included a coordinating alliance in London, a far-left protest network, and funding from Shanghai-based US tech mogul Neville Roy Singham. Chinese and Iranian state media amplified these efforts. In Germany, meanwhile, intelligence services concluded that domestic and diaspora extremist networks are targeting the country’s defense industry. And in the Middle East, a pilot employed by Flydubai and radicalized in Melbourne, Australia, by takfiri ideology—a jihadist doctrine that justifies violence against those it deems unbelievers—targeted an aircraft carrying 174 people from Dubai to Tel Aviv, Israel.

These activities prompt the question, Why does hostility toward Israel travel so easily from one arena to another? This report argues that anti-Israel sentiments offer a common enemy to movements and governments that otherwise share few interests. Anti-imperialist militants in Berlin, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) organizers in New York, Islamist networks in Melbourne, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Tehran emerged from different milieus. But Israel gives these actors a common cause and, increasingly, common targets in their war against the West. The United States, as Israel’s principal ally and the guarantor of the order these actors oppose, is already in their sights.

This issue examines four recent instances in which these anti-US forces have weaponized anti-Israel sentiment against the United States and its partners. The first part explores how a centralized anti-West alliance planned the worldwide Global Day of Action protests on October 10, 2026. The second part describes how German intelligence services discovered how hostility toward Israel unites Islamist, far-left, and pro-Palestinian extremists in Germany, and how the United States and its European allies treat the same networks under different laws. The third part examines Iran’s covert campaign in the United Kingdom, where operatives from the Islamic Republic conducted surveillance of Jewish and Israeli sites and masterminded an alleged plot against the RAF base that houses US strategic bombers. The final part traces the Flydubai attacker’s path of radicalization from Melbourne to the cockpit, and shows how his attack exposed weak vetting and security screening processes that Tehran moved quickly to exploit.

1. The October 7 Anniversary: A Coordinated Global Mobilization

Image 1. Anti-Israel Protest in New York on October 7, 2026

Source: Getty Images.

What Happened

On October 10, 2026, activists in dozens of countries staged what they described as a Global Day of Action under the banner “End the Genocide, Defend the Land.”^[2] The Global Alliance for Palestine (GAFP), a coalition launched in London in July 2025, planned and convened the campaign, which it billed as an “open, decentralised platform.”^[3] The group produced an interactive map that listed 322 events over three days, and 179 organizations signed on to participate in the day of protests.^[4] The alliance’s steering committee, according to a GAFP press release, includes many well-known members of the European and international left: Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the UK Labour Party; Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece; Gerry Adams, the former president of Sinn Féin; Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti; and former South African politician Ronnie Kasrils.^[5]

The coordination required for organizing these protests rested on a common playbook. The organizers’ own materials show how they devised their anti-Israel campaign.

First, the alliance standardized its message. Organizers provided a single toolkit to every local organization that included the same posters in seven languages, ready-made handheld placards and so-called street demands, a common set of slogans and hashtags, and prepared social-media kits. These tools enabled hundreds of rallies on several continents to speak with one voice.^[6] A GAFP concept paper set the tone of the protests, calling for messaging that was “disciplined, credible, urgent and impossible to ignore.”^[7]

Second, the alliance instructed its chapters to engage in disruption. The toolkit recommended “peaceful blockades,” walkouts, banner drops, and “die-ins,” and urged participants to “shut down city squares, encircle government buildings, and blockade complicit corporate hubs.”^[8] The toolkit also offered guidance on “legal, stewarding, and participant support,” and prepared local organizers for confrontations with police and the courts.^[9]

Third, organizers moved to apply pressure from the street to the legislative body. The group’s toolkit included template letters to lawmakers.^[10] In September, the alliance’s secretary-general, Anas Altikriti, announced a dedicated legislative track for the campaign. “Public pressure must cross the threshold of legislative assemblies,” he said.^[11]

Although the GAFP is based in London, the United States became the principal theater of the group’s actions. Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs counted 262 planned GAFP events across 37 countries in the days before the anniversary of October 7. The United States accounted for 45 of these, more than any other country.^[12] A later tally from the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs recorded 357 demonstrations worldwide between October 1 and October 14.^[13]

American participants in these events included groups from a network already drawing scrutiny from the US government. Neville Roy Singham, an American tech entrepreneur who lives in Shanghai, finances a web of nonprofits and media outlets that promote positions aligned with those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).^[14] From 2017 to 2023, Singham-linked entities transferred around $278 million to six US nonprofits, including $22.4 million to the People’s Forum and $1.3 million to Code Pink.^[15] About a quarter of Code Pink’s donations between 2017 and 2023 came from Singham, and a federal inquiry into the Shanghai-based entrepreneur that began under the Foreign Agents Registration Act has expanded into a criminal tax investigation. No charges stemming from the investigation have been announced.^[16]

Singham’s funding operation has drawn congressional scrutiny for three years. In July 2024, then-US Senators Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham asked the US Justice Department to investigate 18 Singham-linked entities, including Code Pink.^[17] In June 2025, US Representative James Comer and 20 of his Republican colleagues drew the attention of then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to CCP “influence operations” in Singham’s network.^[18] In July 2026, US House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith subpoenaed the Singham-affiliated organizations the People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental.^[19]

Despite this scrutiny, the network’s groups maintained their activity around this year’s October 7 anniversary. On October 10, Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin and the group’s Washington coordinator summoned group members to a “Feminist Contingent” at the Library of Congress.^[20] Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans, Singham’s wife, marched in New York and stated that her husband supports Code Pink’s work.^[21] The People’s Forum, another Singham-funded group, co-organized a protest in New York City’s Washington Square Park with the organization Shut It Down 4 Palestine.^[22] When Press TV, Iran’s English-language state broadcaster, promoted the day of action, it listed Code Pink among the participants.^[23]

If Iran’s role in the US events was limited to promotion, its involvement in protests in London was more extensive. On October 10, the Palestine Coalition—which includes groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Stop the War Coalition, the Muslim Association of Britain, and Friends of Al-Aqsa—led thousands of marchers through central London.^[24] Some protesters waved the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and others carried the flag of Iran’s IRGC.^[25] Demonstrators climbed the Battle of Britain Memorial on the Victoria Embankment, destroyed poppy wreaths, and unfurled a banner reading “Imperialists must die” beside the flags of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Far-left members of parliament John McDonnell and Zarah Sultana addressed the crowd. Police made 20 arrests at this event, including six for criminal damage at the memorial.^[26] London’s Metropolitan Police estimates that policing 35 anti-Israel marches since October 2023 has cost UK taxpayers £90 million.^[27]

The street marches of October 10 followed a wave of campus protests on October 7, 2026. At New York University (NYU), more than 100 students staged a walkout as part of a Students for Justice in Palestine “Week of Rage,” chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and demanding that the university close its Tel Aviv campus and divest from Israel.^[28] At Columbia University, about 100 protesters gathered at the university gates and chanted “globalize the intifada.”^[29] At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), more than 70 protesters marched across campus behind the local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.^[30]

These campus protests found willing amplifiers in Beijing and Tehran. The English-language report of Xinhua, the official state news agency of the People’s Republic of China, republished by Global Times on October 9, covered the rallies at UCLA, Columbia, NYU, and elsewhere. The report echoed organizers’ references to “three years of escalated genocide in Palestine,” and described October 7 as a commemoration of “the resistance of the Palestinian people.”^[31] The report quoted only protesters, and carried no response from the university authorities or from the US government. Xinhua’s Chinese-language version, carried by Beijing Daily, presented the rallies as instances of Americans “calling for lasting regional peace” (呼吁实现地区持久和平).^[32] Iran’s Press TV promoted the Global Day of Action a week earlier under the headline, “Over 200 Organizations Unite to Protest Against Israel on Anniversary of Gaza Genocide.”^[33]

Strategic Consequences

The worldwide mobilization of anti-US and anti-Israel forces that took place around this year’s anniversary of the October 7 attacks bears the fingerprints and serves the interests of Beijing and Tehran in several ways.

First, the worldwide mobilization demonstrated that anti-West forces possess an organizational capacity that can pressure several allied governments at once. A single body in London provided slogans, tactics, legal guidance, and lobbying templates to hundreds of local chapters, with the largest share of these groups in the United States. The alliance’s new legislative focus is explicitly designed to convert street pressure into legislative measures against Israel.^[34] A campaign built this way moves on a calendar of its own choosing, in many places simultaneously, and forces governments to respond on its terms.

Second, the funding record behind these events links part of that capacity to a network that US lawmakers and federal investigators attribute to the CCP. The Singham network fuses anti-Israel activism with pro-China propaganda; Code Pink’s staff webpage includes a listing for the coordinator of the group’s China Is Not Our Enemy campaign.^[35] The groups that Singham funds promote positions aligned with Beijing’s interests while organizing against Israel, against US military power, and against pro-West foreign policy.^[36] US Senator Jim Banks told the Senate in July that Singham helps China wage “political warfare” against the United States.^[37] Federal prosecutors and the House Ways and Means Committee are now examining the network’s finances. This year’s anniversary of the October 7 attacks demonstrated that Singham-funded groups remain embedded in the anti-US efforts of a global campaign.

Third, Chinese and Iranian state media extracted propaganda value from this year’s October 7 protests that the governments in Beijing and Tehran did not have to directly organize. Xinhua presented campus protests to Chinese and international audiences as evidence that Americans reject their government’s policies, and adopted the protesters’ framing of October 7 as resistance.^[38] Xinhua amplified a message that American society is divided over Israel and that American universities oppose Washington’s foreign policy. Press TV, in turn, told its audiences that Western civil society had joined Tehran’s cause. For Beijing in particular, an American body politic that is divided over Israel is a polity that is less willing to support US partnerships in the Middle East, a region where Beijing competes with Washington for influence.

The London march revealed an additional dimension of Tehran’s influence campaign. At that march, IRGC flags appeared in the capital of a country in which the government has designated the IRGC a national security threat, and which the police were, the very same week, investigating alleged Iranian plots against British Jews and an air base hosting US strategic bombers (see section 3).^[39] The display of a hostile state’s symbols at a rally addressed by prominent politicians normalizes Iranian state iconography in the public life of one of America’s closest Western allies. Additionally, the £90 million that the Metropolitan Police has spent policing these marches is a recurring cost that UK taxpayers now must bear.^[40]

2. German Intelligence Warns of a Converging Campaign Against Israel and the Allied Defense Industrial Base

Figure 1. Germany-Israel Defense Ties and the Militant Campaign Against Them, 2023–26 (Key Events Emphasized)

Source: Authors’ research.^[41]

What Happened

Germany’s intelligence agencies are documenting a convergence of anti-Western activist movements, with implications that extend beyond Germany. In May 2026, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, published an assessment of secular pro-Palestinian extremism. This review found that “Israel hatred and antisemitism serve as a bridge narrative” connecting Islamist, far-left, and other extremist milieus, and that cooperation between pro-Palestinian extremists and German left-wing extremists “continued to intensify, including through jointly organized demonstrations.”^[42] The city of Berlin, the BfV concluded, is the center of gravity for these operations, home to a “hard core” that seeks to inflame and deliberately escalate protests. The intelligence agency singled out Young Struggle, the youth wing of the Turkish Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP), as a group whose supporters are increasingly radicalized.^[43]

The BfV’s findings echo what Germany’s state-level intelligence offices have already reported. In April, the domestic intelligence office in the German state of Hesse presented a study that found German and foreign left-wing extremists had joined Islamists to mobilize demonstrations after October 7, 2023. These groups’ protest materials carried a slogan that revived an old antisemitic trope conveying Jews as child murderers: “Kindermörder Israel,” or “Israel the Child Murderer.”^[44]

Hesse’s interior minister, Roman Poseck, reported that Germany recorded a historic high of 2,267 antisemitic offenses in 2025, up from 1,825 in 2024^[45]. “Jews no longer feel safe,” Poseck reported.^[46] In January, the intelligence office in the German state of Saxony warned that cooperation between anti-imperialist left-wing extremists and pro-Palestinian extremists “gives additional momentum to the antisemitism existing in Germany.”^[47] When German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt presented the federal intelligence report on June 30, he called the rise in left-wing extremist violence a “serious warning signal for our constitutional state,” and noted that Russia, China, and Iran account for most of the hostile intelligence activity directed at Germany.^[48]

This year’s anniversary of the October 7 attacks put this worrying trend on display. In Berlin, police counted about 700 people at the peak of a march through the neighborhood of Kreuzberg on October 7.^[49] Marchers chanted slogans such as “yallah, yallah, intifada,” “Ruhm dem Widerstand” (“glory to the resistance”), and the same “Kindermörder Israel” libel that Hesse’s analysts had flagged.^[50] After protesters knotted their banners together at the front of the march and officers reported being attacked, police halted the procession and dissolved it, making more than 30 arrests.^[51],[52]

Similar scenes unfolded across Western Europe. In Amsterdam, about 150 demonstrators gathered in the city’s central Dam Square with a banner reading, “We support Hamas,” carried the flag of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is on the European Union’s terrorist list, and chanted “Long live the seventh of October.”^[53] In Barcelona, a rally organized by Samidoun, a group the United States treats as a PFLP front, described the October 7 massacre as a “heroic operation.”^[54]

The stakes in Germany are industrial as well as political, because Berlin has become Israel’s most important defense customer. Germany accounted for around half of Israel’s defense exports in 2025.^[55] Berlin bought Israel’s Arrow 3 missile-defense system for $3.5 billion in 2023, added a $3.1 billion follow-on purchase in December 2025, and declared the first Arrow 3 battery operational at Holzdorf later that month, with a second site announced at Kaufbeuren in June 2026.^[56] The missile-defense system currently protects German territory against Russian ballistic missiles.^[57]

Israeli firms are also moving production capabilities into Germany. The Israeli company Elbit is currently developing the SkyStriker loitering munition, with the German company Diehl Defence serving as the local manufacturer. Elbit’s PULS rocket artillery recently won a Bundeswehr competition with KNDS Deutschland as a partner, and Israel Aerospace Industries signed an agreement with the state of Berlin in June 2026 to establish a facility that will both develop and manufacture defense technologies locally. Rafael, another Israeli firm, signed a letter of intent to buy a Volkswagen plant in Osnabrück to build components for Iron Dome interceptors, and is cooperating with Rheinmetall on missiles and artillery.^[58]

Anti-West militants have begun to attack this multinational industrial base. Early on September 8, 2025, five activists—from Ireland, Britain, Spain, and Germany—broke into a factory in Ulm operated by a wholly owned subsidiary of Elbit Systems and destroyed equipment, causing more than €1 million in damage.^[59] Prosecutors in Stuttgart charged the activists with membership in a criminal organization, Palestine Action Germany, and told the court that they suspected an antisemitic motive behind the attack. The trial of the five alleged criminals opened at Stuttgart-Stammheim in April 2026.^[60] The multinational makeup of the “Ulm Five” mirrors the British campaign against Elbit described in issue 1 of this series.^[61]

The campaign against Israeli arms manufacturers in Germany has now merged with a broader far-left campaign against German rearmament. In September 2026, the self-described antimilitarist alliance Rheinmetall Entwaffnen (“Disarm Rheinmetall”) held a weeklong protest camp in Cologne, chosen in part for its proximity to Rheinmetall’s headquarters and to Dynamit Nobel Defence in Burbach, an anti-tank weapons maker owned by an Israeli arms company. Later that month, the alliance mobilized in Hamburg against Red Storm Charly, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) exercise that rehearses the deployment of troops to the alliance’s eastern flank.^[62] A related group, Peacefully Against Genocide, regularly blockades Rheinmetall plants, including a new one in Berlin, over allegations that Israel uses the company’s weapons in Gaza.^[63] The alliance’s spokesman, Luca Hirsch, recently argued that “there is no scenario in which German rearmament lowers the risk of war,” because “Russia is a nuclear power.”^[64]

The United States government treats some members of this network as terrorists. In November 2025, the US State Department designated four European groups, including Germany’s Antifa Ost, as foreign terrorist organizations.^[65] In August 2026, moreover, the US Treasury Department sanctioned Palestine Action and Masar Badil, which it called “a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine” controlled by Samidoun, as part of “a US government-wide effort to protect Americans from the risks posed by far-left terrorism.” One of the two Masar Badil leaders whom Treasury designated, Zaid Abdulnasser, is based in Germany.^[66] Germany banned Samidoun in November 2023, and the United States and Canada designated it a terrorist group in October 2024.^[67],[68]

Strategic Consequences

The United States and its allies should pay serious heed to the warning signs emerging from Germany, and for three reasons.

First, the convergence that German intelligence agencies describe is not a phenomenon unique to Germany, but one that is manifesting across the West. The same pattern has appeared in the United Kingdom, where Palestine Action attacked facilities run by Elbit, the French defense company Thales, and the RAF (see issue 1 of this series). Far-left groups have also staged similar attacks in the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States, where Samidoun’s fronts operate and where the US Treasury Department has taken action against what it describes as “far-left terrorism.” Islamists, pro-Palestinian extremists who reject Israel’s right to exist, and anti-imperialist groups that oppose NATO and the arms industry all march together because hostility toward Israel gives them a common cause.^[69] A movement organized around that cause also organizes against the Western alliance system that supports Israel; the past year’s events in Germany—from attacks on Elbit in Ulm to actions against Rheinmetall in Cologne and against a NATO exercise in Hamburg—reveal the progression of this anti-West alliance.

Second, the United States should pay attention to events in Germany because far-left actors are working to weaken the West from within just as Russia is attempting to weaken it from outside. Germany-Israel defense cooperation is now part of Europe’s defense against Russia. The Arrow 3 system protects Germany from Russian missiles, while loitering munitions, rocket artillery, and air-defense components jointly produced by Israel and Germany increasingly equip a Bundeswehr that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz wants to transform into Europe’s strongest conventional army.^[70]

Russia, meanwhile, is waging its own sabotage campaign against Europe’s defense industry. In August 2026, Germany blamed Moscow for a drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport. In September, police arrested two Bulgarians for an arson attack on facilities owned by the German company Rohde & Schwarz, which makes counter-drone radars. Alexander Dobrindt, Germany’s interior minister, warned that foreign powers could use extremist groups as proxies for attacks in Europe.^[71] The activists who attacked Elbit and blockaded Rheinmetall pursue targets that overlap with the Kremlin’s. Every factory opening that is delayed, every exercise that is disrupted, and every euro that is diverted to secure such facilities impose costs on European governments that serve Russian interests.

Third, the United States and its allies should pay attention to these developments in Germany because organizations that have pitted themselves against the West have begun to pair an anti-genocide frame with an anti-NATO argument that matches Moscow’s own rhetoric. Rheinmetall Entwaffnen’s claim that German rearmament raises the risk of war because Russia is a nuclear power echoes the Kremlin’s own message to European publics.^[72] When that argument travels under the banner of opposition to Israel, it reaches audiences that would never accept it from Russian propaganda sources.

The United States and many of its allies do not agree on how to deal with this anti-West and anti-Israel activity. The networks driving the activity are all too willing to exploit these differences. Washington has designated Antifa Ost and Masar Badil as terrorist entities. Yet Germany prosecutes the Ulm raiders as a criminal organization. Dutch prosecutors recently deemed lawful a banner marked, “We support Hamas,” while a Paris court overturned a government ban on an October 7 rally organized by the collective Urgence Palestine.^[73] Transnational networks can take advantage of divergent practices among Western governments by placing their organizing, fundraising, and leadership groups in the most permissive jurisdictions possible, as the Germany-based Masar Badil has done. Disagreement among allies complicates joint enforcement against fronts that operate on both sides of the Atlantic.

3. Iran’s Campaign Against Jewish, Israeli, and US Targets in Britain

Figure 2. Iran-Linked Cases Against Jewish, Israeli, and US Targets in Britain, 2025–26 (Key Events Emphasized)

Source: Authors’ research.^[74]

What Happened

The IRGC had identified RAF Fairford as a target of its operations two months before the September arrests made headlines around the world. On July 23, 2026, the Iranian organization issued a statement identifying the Gloucestershire base as a launch point for US bombers striking Iran and warned that “any base used to invade Iranian territory is our legitimate target.”^[75] Iran’s ambassador to the UK, Seyed Ali Mousavi, issued a similar warning about British bases in April,^[76] to which the British government replied that “our armed forces are ready to keep the United Kingdom safe.”^[77]

Iran’s threats took on new weight on September 27, when a farmer near the air base reported seeing three oddly parked vans and a “large group of men,” some with their faces covered. Police then arrested five British men, all in their 20s, from London.^[78] Officers first held the men on suspicion of explosives offenses and then on suspicion of preparing acts of terrorism.^[79] Authorities found petrol in the men’s vans but no improvised explosive device.^[80] The five suspects were released on bail the next day.

The UK’s Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP) then arrested a 25-year-old dual British-Iranian national in Westminster on October 1 and a 22-year-old British man on October 6.^[81] Investigators, said Laurence Taylor of CTP, were examining “proxies or individuals, either knowingly or unknowingly, working on behalf of a foreign state.”^[82] In the first days of the inquiry into the suspicious men, authorities also considered the possibility of Russian involvement in the alleged plot.^[83] On September 30, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham said, “There are strong indications that Iran played a part.” Two weeks later, on October 12, Burnham clarified that the plot targeting RAF Fairford was “highly likely” to have been coordinated in Iran, and almost ‌certainly directed by the IRGC.^[84] The investigation into the episode remains open.

Within a week of the October arrests, the United States pulled its 12 B-1 bombers out of RAF Fairford.^[85] According to US and British officials, base commanders had received information that the IRGC had ordered a drone attack on the site that was “loosely modeled” on Ukraine’s 2025 strikes on Russian airfields.^[86] US Vice President JD Vance stated that Washington had moved the aircraft “out of an abundance of caution.”^[87] The Pentagon elaborated only that the bombers had “redeployed to their home stations.”^[88]

As Washington moved its bombers, Tehran denied involvement in the alleged UK plot and, as it often does, pointed fingers at Israel. The Iranian embassy in London stated that it “categorically rejects and strongly condemns” any link to planned attacks on RAF Fairford.^[89] Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated that the UK was “barking up the wrong tree.”^[90] On October 1, Iran summoned the UK’s ambassador to Tehran, Hugo Shorter. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi called the British claims of Iranian involvement in the alleged plot “baseless and contemptible” and invoked accusations against “the Zionist regime.”^[91] Channels close to the IRGC mocked the British response to the alleged plot, and one declared that “Britain is wetting itself.”^[92]

In a separate case that reached the UK courts this fall, British prosecutors allege that two men linked to Tehran surveilled Jewish and Israeli targets in London on behalf of Iranian intelligence. On March 6, 2026, UK police arrested Nematollah Shahsavani, a 40-year-old dual Iranian-British national from North Finchley, and Alireza Farasati, a 22-year-old Iranian national from Edgware. Each is charged under section 3(2) of the National Security Act 2023 with “engaging in conduct likely to assist a foreign intelligence service” between July 9 and August 15, 2025. Prosecutors named Iran as the state concerned in the case,^[93] and allege that the men reconnoitered the Israeli embassy, the Israeli consulate, London’s Bevis Marks Synagogue, a Jewish community center, and the Community Security Trust, which protects Jewish institutions in the UK. Investigators further allege that Shahsavani tasked Farasati to surveil these sites after receiving instructions from Iranian intelligence services.^[94] On October 9 of this year, both men pleaded not guilty at the Old Bailey, where Justice Bobbie Cheema-Grubb noted that one of the operation’s alleged targets was “of intelligence interest” to Iran. The trial of the two men is currently set for April.^[95]

A third case, which unfolded in Manchester in early October 2026, indicates further Iranian planning for an attack on British soil. On September 20, UK Police arrested two Iranian nationals, Salam Ahmadyan, 36, of Liverpool, and Rahman Salehi, 34, of Salford, on Newton Street in Manchester.^[96] On October 2, prosecutors charged the men with preparing acts of terrorism, alleging that they had used encrypted apps to buy components for a homemade device, obtained instructions for a chlorine bomb, and identified Heaton Park Synagogue and Manchester’s Jewish Museum as targets.^[97] The third party “alleged to have directed and coordinated the planned attack,” prosecutor Mark Luckett told the court, is an Iranian national most likely operating from inside Iran.^[98] Police say the case is unrelated to the incident near RAF Fairford.^[99]

These cases follow a pattern that UK officials have documented for several years. In October 2024, Ken McCallum, the director of MI5, the UK’s domestic security service, stated that the agency had tracked 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots since January 2022.^[100] When the UK Home Office moved in July 2026 to designate the IRGC under the new National Security (State Threats) Act, it cited “at least 20” such plots in a single year.^[101] (UK officials designated the IRGC as a terrorist group on July 17, and supporting the group is now punishable in the country with up to 14 years in prison.^[102]) In March, arsonists in the London neighborhood of Golders Green burned four ambulances belonging to Hatzalah, a Jewish volunteer emergency medical organization, in an attack claimed by a group calling itself HAYI. Four men pleaded guilty to these acts in August.^[103] In June, 22 different governments condemned HAYI’s attacks and described Iran’s ties to “criminal groups” as “long-standing.”^[104]

On October 13, MI5 chief McCallum stated that Iran is trying to intensify its attacks in the UK beyond its traditional targets of Iranians opposed to the Tehran regime. He further stated that Iran is behind arson and sabotage attacks on Jewish sites in the country and that another “major shift this year has been Iranian ambitions to come at harder targets, like military sites.”^[105]

Strategic Consequences

These events and similar cases surfacing with increasing frequency in the UK legal system matter for three reasons.

First, they indicate that Iran is repeatedly targeting British Jews, Israeli diplomats, and US assets. UK prosecutors have alleged that Iranian intelligence looked to target a historic synagogue and the organization that protects British Jews, and that a handler in Iran directed a plot against a Manchester synagogue. The UK prime minister has cited evidence of strong indications of IRGC complicity in a plot at a base for US bombers that the IRGC had publicly named as a target. Tehran’s response to the RAF Fairford allegations, which sought to somehow implicate “the Zionist regime,” ties Tehran’s US and Israeli targets together in Iranian officials’ own words.^[106]

Iran’s efforts to recruit assets in the UK even follow a common pattern. In its recent plots in England, Tehran has targeted British nationals, a dual national reported to have served as a recruiter, and individuals working for Iran “either knowingly or unknowingly.”^[107] These are the same kinds of proxies about whom UK Counter Terrorism Policing has warned, and who targeted Golders Green with arson.^[108]

Second, the incident near RAF Fairford shows how much leverage Iran can extract from a modest operation. In that episode, UK police found petrol in three vans, and the investigation into the alleged plot remains open. Yet the incident led the United States to remove 12 bombers from the US Air Force’s primary heavy-bomber base in Europe, which it has used as a critical node in the war with Iran. With the threat of sabotage, Tehran set in motion a chain of events that led US planners to move strategic aviation assets out of the UK.

RAF Fairford is also the European base for the US Bomber Task Force rotations that deter Russia and reassure NATO allies.^[109] A threat that pushes these bombers out of Fairford, therefore, serves Moscow as well as Tehran. This may explain why investigators examined possible Russian involvement in the episode in the first days of their inquiry.

Third, Iran’s campaign in the United Kingdom raises the political price for any US allies that host American military forces. Any government that hosts US bombers or other assets must now weigh the risk that Iranian retaliation will reach its soil or target its Jewish community. The sequence of Iran’s alleged targeting of RAF Fairford—public threats against the base in July, arrests in September, and the withdrawal of US bombers in October—sends a message to every US ally in Europe that Tehran can make cooperation with Washington expensive at home. That IRGC flags flew at an anti-West London march in the same weeks the alleged Fairford plot unfolded illustrates how Iranian symbols and Iranian operations are now a part of UK public life.

4. The Flydubai Attack and the Vetting Gaps Among America’s Partners

Figure 3. Hammam al-Hammami’s Path Through Six Partner Countries of the United States, 2015–26 (Key Events Emphasized)

Source: Authors’ research.^[110]

What Happened

On the morning of September 30, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft operating Flydubai flight FZ1073 left Dubai in the United Arab Emirates for Tel Aviv, Israel, with 174 passengers, most of them Israelis, and eight crew members.^[111] Over Saudi Arabia, the flight’s co-pilot, Hammam al-Hammami, a 29-year-old Omani national, attacked the captain, Smit Machchhar, with the cockpit’s emergency crash axe and tried to seize the controls of the aircraft.^[112] The plane entered a steep drop, losing more than 14,000 feet in roughly 30 seconds. Despite his injuries, Machchhar opened the cockpit door, whereupon a group of passengers overpowered al-Hammami and steadied the aircraft.¹¹⁵ Reserve pilots were able to land the plane safely at Tabuk in Saudi Arabia.^[113] Both pilots survived, and al-Hammami is in Emirati custody.^[114]

Nine days after the attack, the UAE’s attorney general, Hamad Saif Al Shamsi, issued a statement that al-Hammami had planned a “premeditated terrorist plot to seize control of the aircraft” and crash it into the passenger terminal at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, to cause “the greatest possible loss of life.”^[115] Al-Hammami had used two earlier flights to Tel Aviv to study the plane’s likely route and Ben Gurion Airport. He drew inspiration from the attacks of September 11, 2001, embraced takfiri ideology, and told investigators that he had become a pilot to carry out such an attack.^[116]

The radicalization of al-Hammami, according to the UAE attorney general, began in Australia. In 2017, while studying engineering at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, al-Hammami read extremist writings and followed online content that “glorifies terrorist organizations and suicide operations.”^[117] He told investigators that he regularly attended a mosque near the university; that he met people linked to the city’s Multicultural Youth Centre (also called “MyCentre”), an Islamic center run by a Lebanese man known as Abu Hamza; and that the center received support from an association linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.^[118] Authorities later identified Abu Hamza as Samir Mohtadi,^[119] who denies any connection to the Flydubai attacker. “I have never met Al-Hammami,” he said, adding that the center has “no record of him ever attending.”^[120] Mohtadi has, however, called Zionists “bloodsuckers” and has stated they “are not human.”^[121]

Al-Hammami’s path from radicalization in Melbourne to the Flydubai cockpit took the pilot to several other US partners. After leaving Australia, he trained as a pilot in New Zealand at a flight academy based in the United Kingdom from November 2018 to May 2019.^[122] Australia canceled his student visa in 2019 after he left his studies.^[123] He then went on to fly for Oman Air, which grounded him in 2024 over his engagement with extremist websites, moved him to a desk job, and enrolled him in a deradicalization program. Omani officials failed to alert international aviation authorities to al-Hammami’s activities. He then resigned from Oman Air in early 2025,^[124] after which Royal Air Maroc trained him for three months later that year and then rejected his application.^[125] Flydubai hired him in early 2026 after conducting a criminal-records check but did not contact Oman Air in the process of its investigation.^[126] Israel’s Transport Ministry, for its part, said that vetting the crew was the responsibility of Flydubai.^[127] Omani authorities have not publicly addressed the attack.^[128]

Australia, where al-Hammami’s trail of radicalization began, opened its own inquiry into the pilot. The country’s Federal Police announced on October 4 that the Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism Team was “investigating the man’s links to Australia.”^[129] Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke stated his government “will not pre-judge the outcome” of its investigation.^[130] Opposition home affairs spokesman Jonno Duniam called for a review of a A$36,960 federal grant to MyCentre, the Melbourne Islamic center.^[131]

Tehran, by contrast, had its own explanation for the attack ready within hours after it had occurred. On September 30, Iran’s Fars News Agency quoted unnamed Iranian “security officials” claiming that Israel intended to attack planes or airports in the region.^[132] The next day, Iran’s Press TV called the incident “a scenario concocted by” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed, and published an article with the headline, “Flydubai Scenario: Netanyahu’s Plot to Drag US to War with Iran, Stay in Power.”^[133]

Two days later, Press TV amplified an anonymous Emirati-linked complaint that “we are going crazy over Israel’s behavior.” Kayhan, the hardline Tehran daily, ran a warning to the UAE from former Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati under the headline, “‘Imported Security Has an Expiration Date.’”^[134] Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei dismissed efforts to tie Iran to the attack as a “false flag” and a “worn-out tactic” of “the Zionist regime.”^[135] In Washington on October 1, US President Donald Trump, when asked whether he had an understanding that Iran was involved in the attack, stated that his answer, “based on what I’m hearing, is yes.”^[136]

Iran’s narrative explaining the origins of the Flydubai attack found a large audience online, and the false-flag story it promulgated spread more quickly than the facts. The Combat Antisemitism Movement recorded that the first posts blaming Israel, Mossad, or Jews appeared online 67 minutes after the plane issued its distress signal, and counted 2,963 such posts within 12 hours.^[137] The Anti-Defamation League counted at least 25,000 posts on the social-media site X pushing conspiracy theories about the incident within 48 hours of it occurring.^[138] Israel’s embassy in Canberra condemned “anti-Semitic ‘false flag’ conspiracy theories” that “recast victims as perpetrators.”^[139]

Strategic Consequences

The Flydubai attack exposed weaknesses in the security and vetting processes of US allies, weaknesses that America’s adversaries are well placed to exploit.

First, the attack revealed vetting failures in seven US partners. Omani authorities knew of al-Hammami’s radicalization and kept the information to themselves.^[140] Dubai’s state-owned low-cost carrier hired him on the basis of a criminal-records check alone. Morocco’s national carrier trained him. Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand educated and trained him. And Israel relied on a foreign airline to screen the pilots flying its citizens into its flagship airport. Each of these countries’ governments held a fragment of the record on al-Hammami but possessed no mechanism to link those fragments. As a result, a man who spent years preparing to strike Israel moved freely through the aviation and education systems of countries that cooperate closely with the United States.

Second, the investigation into the attack reopened a long-running dispute between the UAE and Western governments over the Muslim Brotherhood. Abu Dhabi traced the attack to a Melbourne-based milieu that Emirati authorities have linked to a Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated association. The UAE has urged action against the Muslim Brotherhood for more than a decade: in November 2014, it designated 82 organizations as terrorist groups, including the Muslim Association of Britain and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and in January 2026, it pulled British universities from its scholarship program over concerns about Brotherhood-linked radicalization on UK campuses.^[141] Moreover, the Muslim Association of Britain is a member of the Palestine Coalition that organized the October 10 march in London (see section 1 above).^[142] Canberra has declined to comment on the Emirati allegations of a Muslim Brotherhood nexus to the Flydubai attack, and Australian Muslim organizations have rejected any link between MyCentre and extremism.^[143] As a result, groups that one US partner considers terrorist organizations operate legally in other US partners.

Third, Tehran moved quickly to turn these frictions into a wedge between the UAE and Israel. Iran’s Press TV framed the attack as an Israeli-Emirati conspiracy, amplified purported Emirati frustration with Israel, and promoted the claim that Prime Minister Netanyahu was exploiting the incident to manipulate Israel’s coming election results.^[144] Iranian politician Ali Akbar Velayati told Abu Dhabi that security “imported” through its partnerships with the United States and Israel “has an expiration date.”^[145]

With these information operations, Iran worked to erode the logic of the Abraham Accords, the 2020 agreement under which the UAE and other nations normalized relations with Israel and which made Flydubai’s route from Dubai to Tel Aviv possible. On October 2, Flydubai suspended those flights “until further notice,”^[146] causing one of the most visible commercial links between Israel and the UAE to go dark just as Iranian outlets were telling the UAE that partnership with Israel is dangerous. Russian state media joined in this chorus from a different angle. RT, a Russian news outlet, built its coverage of the attack around reports of “multiple security failures” and spread the blame for the incident across Oman, the UAE, and Israel, turning a shared vulnerability into a dispute among partners.^[147]

The rapid spread of Iran’s false-flag narratives explaining the attack shows how antisemitic conspiracy theories can overtake an investigation in open societies. Within two days, tens of thousands of social-media posts recast an attempted mass murder of Israeli passengers as an Israeli plot. In Australia, this claim landed in a country already contending with a wave of incidents and hate targeting its Jewish community: In August 2025, the Australian government concluded that Iran had directed 2024 arson attacks on a kosher restaurant and a synagogue in the country, and it expelled Iran’s ambassador.^[148] Four months later, an attack inspired by the Islamic State killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s famed Bondi Beach.^[149]

So radicalization in one allied democracy, an attack launched from the popular airline of another US ally, and a disinformation campaign blaming a third US partner for the attack combined to strain relations among the very states Washington needs in its campaign against the regime in Tehran.

Endnotes

1. Michael Doran, Ludovic Hood, Zineb Riboua, and Natalie Arbatman, “US National Security and Antisemitism, Issue 1 | Ceuta, Anti-Japanese Propaganda, and Defense Industrial Attacks,” Hudson Institute, September 30, 2026, https://www.hudson.org/foreign-policy/us-national-security-antisemitism-issue-1-ceuta-anti-japanese-propaganda-defense. ↑
2. “About Us,” Global Alliance for Palestine, accessed October 12, 2026, https://palestine-alliance.org/; “October 10th Mobilisation Campaign,” Global Alliance for Palestine, accessed October 12, 2026, https://palestine-alliance.org/october-10th-mobilisation-campaign/. ↑
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5. Nomani, “Inside the Protest Playbook to Vilify Israel on ‘Global Day of Action.’” ↑
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7. Mathilda Heller, “Global Anti-Israel Protests Coordinated in Advance by International Alliance, Documents Show,” Jerusalem Post, October 11, 2026, https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-911360. ↑
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