Perez-Shakdam recounts how, after a violent decade-long marriage to a Yemeni man whose family she says beat and cut her for refusing to convert, she — a Paris-born, LSE-educated Jewish woman — infiltrated Iran’s media apparatus (Press TV, Russia Today, the Tehran Palestine conference) and met Ayatollah Khamenei, who she claims likened himself to God by asserting the right to decide who lives and dies. She argues Iran runs a deliberate “playbook” to project influence across the West through bought journalists, charities, the charity commission, pilgrimage trips, and covert training camps, exploiting Western appetites for sensationalism and moral vanity (she singles out Greta Thunberg) while “boiling the frog” so societies stop resisting. She warns that if Iranians overthrow the regime its operatives will simply relocate westward — naming Belgium and France — and contends grooming gangs, infiltrated institutions, and police passivity toward antisemitism show the West has already ceded ground.
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Setting the trap to infiltrate the IRGC: Perez-Shakdam says she began writing pro-regime pieces from Yemen, was picked up by outlets like Press TV after Marzieh Hashemi invited her on, and worked through Russia Today (meeting Alexander Dugin) and figures like George Galloway and Tariq Ramadan to get close. She claims being a non-Farsi-speaking woman married to a Muslim made the regime underestimate her and treat her as “safe.”
The Khamenei meeting and self-deification: She describes a cult-of-personality scene at the conference with Iranians weeping and collapsing at Khamenei’s feet, then a face-to-face where he allegedly asked whether God was a “maniacal tyrant” and said he does “pretty much the same thing as God does.” She presents this as the basis for her book The War Against God, arguing the regime treats its supreme jurist as a divine authority that brooks no competition, including Israel.
The Western influence “playbook”:She claims Iran maps a country into industries and sectors, finds “fault lines,” and infiltrates media, schools, activism, and the economy, including a scheme where pilgrimage trips to Iraq hold travelers’ passports in a hotel while they cross into Iran for paramilitary or psychological profiling. She alleges recruits — such as a young woman at Barclays — are then blackmailed or coerced into handing over financial information to the IRGC.
“Boiling the frog” and Western non-resistance: She argues regimes manufacture incremental crises that raise the public’s tolerance threshold until reactions amount to only words and condemnation rather than action, citing BBC framing of the Arab Spring and articles questioning whether Britain is “too dog friendly.” She contends even grooming gangs and the trafficking of children failed to provoke real pushback, which she calls evidence the West offered “zero resistance.”
The relocation warning and “useful idiots”: She claims the regime mocks Western leaders — pointedly France’s Macron and the UK government across parties — for letting infiltration reach every layer of society, and flags Press TV regaining a broadcast license through a different entity after Ofcom revoked it. Her central warning is that the regime is not bound to Iran’s geography, so a free Iran would push its operatives to replicate the “experiment” in the West.
