TRACE Initiative

When I was about five or six years old, my uncle, who had never been religious and had lost all his wealth in a bad business deal in Kuwait after the Gulf War, decided to return to Allah and become a devout Muslim. I remember he went to Pakistan or Afghanistan for six months on a mission trip. When he came back, the first thing he did was drag our huge TV outside and throw it in the garbage and started taking me with him to the mosque five times a day. I grew up exposed to what was said inside the da’wah groups. My uncle was not a jihadi, but he was deeply involved in da’wah, Islamic evangelism. For years, I accompanied him during summers and weekends on mission trips across Jordan, visiting mosques around the country with other members of the da’wah movement. I still remember visiting Al-Hajar Mosque in the city of Zarqa, the same mosque of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, years before he became known. When I was eleven, my parents moved to another city, and I stopped going with my uncle. But when I was seventeen, the protests that erupted across the Islamic world after the Danish cartoons of Muhammad pulled me back to the mosque, and I spent another year with da’wah groups, until God miraculously changed my life and I converted to Christianity. Those years in the da’wah movement as a young kid gave me an exceptional ability to see through these people. The moment someone speaks, I can diagnose how infected he is with the spirit of jihad. I wish I could lend my eyes to Western governments so they could see how deeply their institutions have been infiltrated. The majority of those who present themselves as “moderate” or “normal” Muslims in Islamic organisations or Media, are on a mission. Once naturalized, they know exactly how to exploit the system to advance the goals of da'wah. And those who are running for public offices are very serious muslims who are on a mission to serve Islam by taking over the West.

Iran Has Just Told Us How It Intends to Fight the West For years Britain has treated the Iranian threat as a collection of separate problems. An assassination plot here. An extremist charity there. Intimidation of an Iranian dissident somewhere else. A demonstration carrying the Ayatollah's portrait. Each incident is investigated and filed away. Put them together and a more troubling picture emerges. The IRGC has now supplied another piece. In an open letter to the American people (see link), it singled out "the scholars, the students, and the members of the media". The choice matters. Iran's most powerful military organisation has identified universities, student politics and journalism as audiences worth addressing directly inside the country it regards as its principal enemy. Nobody needs to pretend every student activist is an Iranian agent or every academic takes instructions from Tehran. That would be absurd. The more important question is why the IRGC believes these institutions provide fertile ground for its message. Its letter speaks in a vocabulary already familiar in Western political debate: distrust of government, hostility towards Israel, racial grievance, American decline and suspicion of Western power. Tehran doesn't need to teach the West a new language. It has learned to speak one already circulating here. Britain has seen the harder edge of the same strategy. MI5 has warned of more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in recent years involving assassination, kidnapping and intimidation. Lord Walney's recent report describes a network of British charities with alleged links to Iranian state institutions and the IRGC, spreading Khomeinist ideology while some have benefited from Gift Aid. Iranian dissidents and journalists have been threatened on British soil. The Government designated the IRGC under new state-threat powers in July. Now consider RAF Fairford. Five British men were arrested after suspicious activity near the American airbase used during operations against Iran. On Wednesday, Burnham told the BBC there were "strong indications that Iran played a part in what happened over the weekend at RAF Fairford." The next day, a dual British-Iranian man was arrested in Westminster on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts, as part of the same investigation. Police are examining possible foreign-state involvement. No Iranian direction has been established and Tehran denies involvement. Those facts matter: suspicion must never be presented as proof, and the Prime Minister's words now sit inside that same unresolved picture. But they also sit inside a security picture that can no longer sensibly be examined incident by incident. Iran has spent decades developing methods that operate at different levels simultaneously. At one end lie covert plots, proxies and criminal intermediaries. Further along are religious and charitable organisations, political networks and influence operations. At the softer end comes propaganda directed at people who may have no connection with Iran whatsoever but whose existing beliefs can be harnessed to Tehran's advantage. This is where Western openness becomes both strength and vulnerability. A hostile state does not need thousands of agents when democratic societies provide universities, charities, demonstrations, social media and political movements through which ideas travel freely. It needs only to understand where the pressure points lie, cultivate useful relationships where possible, amplify existing grievances and exploit divisions already present. The IRGC's letter should therefore be read less for what it says about America than for what it reveals about Iran. Tehran has studied Western society closely. It knows which arguments resonate, which institutions shape opinion and which divisions can be widened. While Britain has spent years debating individual incidents, Iran has been thinking in networks. We should start doing the same. img9.irna.ir/d/r2/2026/09/29…

Coordinated Arrests and Charges Dismantle Hamas Terror Finance Network Raising Funds from the United States “Anyone who finances or assists terrorist organizations responsible for the deaths of American citizens should expect to be prosecuted by the Department of Justice,” said @AGToddBlanche. “For decades, members of Hamas have raised funding to carry out brutal terrorist attacks. Under the leadership of President Trump, the Department of Justice will continue pursuing terrorists who kill Americans, dismantling terrorist finance networks, and delivering justice for the families of victims.” 🔗: justice.gov/opa/pr/coordinat…

IDENTIFIED: Hackathon host Mostapha Benhenda, who applicant Adam Levi says rejected him over his IDF intelligence service. Trace Initiative also identified him as admin of an anti-Israel Telegram group urging members to seek Israeli tech jobs to “stay closer to the action.”