TEHRAN- Iran has denounced the Zionist lobbies in the U.S. for initiating a campaign of disinformation at college campuses to restrict free speech under the guise of combating anti-Semitism.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson, Nasser Kanaani, said in a post on X on Sunday that pro-Israel organizations have established “medieval inquisition courts” in America in the twenty-first century to conceal the Israeli regime’s extermination of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

“The exertion of pressure by the U.S. Congress to oust the presidents of several prominent universities in the country on charges of spreading anti-Semitism, which followed the expansion of protests by the students of these universities against the massacre of the defenseless people of Palestine, unmistakably reveals that the Zionist lobbies in America have set up medieval inquisition courts in the 21st-century America to censor the crimes of the Israeli apartheid regime in Gaza,” Kanaani noted. 

It occurred only days after the presidents of three of the country’s most famous colleges faced a barrage of criticism for refuting to acknowledge that calls for intifada, which translates to uprising, constitute bullying or harassment and are punishable.

Amid demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza, Harvard President Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth were questioned for hours on Tuesday by the U.S. House Education Committee regarding anti-Semitism on their campuses.

During the debate, they repeatedly denounced anti-Semitism and vowed to do more to combat it, yet the New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik went further than that, pushing them to clarify their positions on calls for the “genocide of Jews,” making a reference to calls for “intifada” against the Israeli regime’s atrocities against Palestinians.

They can be heard repeatedly stating that it is a “context-dependent decision” and that it depends “whether the speech turns into conduct” in a three-minute video of Stefanik and the three Ivy League presidents that went viral.

After donors threatened to withhold a $100 million donation due to the pro-Palestinian activities taking place on campus, and as pressure mounted on them for failing to denounce calls for the “genocide of Jews,” which many observers said were nonexistent at university campuses, Magill finally resigned on Saturday.

Her departure served as a catalyst for pressure from more than 70 members of Congress to fire the other two presidents and force Harvard and MIT to follow suit.

“One down. Two to go,” Stefanik said in a statement on Saturday. “This is only the very beginning of addressing the pervasive rot of anti-Semitism that has destroyed the most ‘prestigious’ higher education institutions in America. This forced resignation of the president of Penn is the bare minimum of what is required.”

On October 7, Israel started a deadly war on Gaza after the territory’s Palestinian resistance group, Hamas, launched a surprise retaliation strike against the occupying regime, codenamed Operation Al-Aqsa Storm.

Since then, the regime has killed almost 17,700 people in Gaza, the vast majority of them are women and children. More than 48,000 individuals have also been injured.

Meanwhile, since the onset of the Gaza conflict, several Israeli officials, including the regime’s prime minister, have either publicly advocated for or pledged to commit genocide against Palestinians.

Netanyahu used the biblical allusion to “Amalek” last month to defend the slaughter of Gazan citizens. Amichai Eliyahu, the Israeli “heritage” minister, has declared that dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza remains a possibility.

Additionally, on Friday, Aryeh Yitzhak King, the deputy mayor of occupied al-Quds (Jerusalem), demanded that the Israeli army bury hundreds of Palestinian citizens who had been arrested in Gaza alive. This is just one more instance of how Israeli officials have been advocating for the extermination of Muslims.

Tehran responds to sanctions imposed on Iranian citizens by U.S., UK, and Canada

In a statement released on Sunday, Kanaani strongly condemned the “groundless and interfering” move by the governments of the U.S., the UK and Canada to impose new sanctions on a number of Iranian nationals.

He stated that Iran retains the right to respond to the sanctions with proportionate and reciprocal measures.

He went on to add, “The countries with a dark record of colonialism and systematic violation of human rights, including the brazen violation of rights of minorities, migrants and natives in their own territories and also across the world, resort to such biased and theatrical measures (sanctions on Iran) to divert the attention of the world’s public opinion from their own anti-human actions in providing full-fledged supports for the child-murdering Zionist regime’s anti-human crimes.”

He asserted that by applying various norms to different countries, the West is seriously harming the principles and ideals of human rights.

Kanaani also maintained that the so-called human rights advocates are in no position to discuss or evaluate the state of human rights in other nations because they were directly involved in the war crimes and horrific massacre of thousands of women and children in Gaza by the Zionist regime, for which they have received widespread discredit.

“The governments of the U.S., the UK and Canada must be held accountable for complicity in crimes considering their age-old and constant supports for the Israeli regime and the overt political, military, intelligence and media backing for the war crimes the (Zionist) regime has committed in Gaza during the past two months,” the spokesman highlighted.