Iran has been blamed for stoking protests outside British schools in a new report that calls for MI5 to do more to tackle the growing threat.
The report by Policy Exchange reveals increasing attempts by Iran to impose de facto blasphemy laws in the UK, and says MI5 should reinstate “countersubversion operations”.
Dr Paul Stott, head of security and extremism at Policy Exchange, told The Times: “Iran has heightened the atmosphere around blasphemy and encouraged people to believe that you can protest against blasphemy in this country and encouraged an atmosphere which anything that smacks of blasphemy leads to intimidation.”
The think tank links a series of protests condemning acts of blasphemy to the growing influence of the Iranian regime on British Muslims.
It highlighted the protests that occurred outside Batley Grammar School in 2021, which forced a teacher who had shown his pupils a cartoon of Muhammad into hiding, as an example of Iran’s “ability to stir the pot of religious prejudice within the UK”.
It also cited the incident at a school in Wakefield in February last year where four schoolboys were suspended after one of them reportedly scuffed his own copy of the Qur’an.
The report also detailed how a coalition of Iranian state media and a group of UK-based Iranian scholars were able to orchestrate a series of protests against the film The Lady of Heaven at cinemas across the UK in 2022.
The report also claimed the Islamic Centre of England (ICE), which is run by a direct representative of Iran’s supreme leader, was the “nerve centre” of Iran’s presence in the UK.
