Berlin shut down the Islamic Center Hamburg (IZH) due to its ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran and Hezbollah and its promotion of radical Islamism, the German Interior Ministry said on July 24.
Acting on a court order, German authorities have begun searching 53 of the IZH’s properties in eight federal states, the ministry said.
The IZH “promotes an Islamist-extremist, totalitarian ideology in Germany,” supports “the terrorists of Hezbollah,” and spreads “aggressive antisemitism,” said Interior Minister Nancy Faeser in a statement.
The ministry also noted that “as the direct representative of Iran’s ‘Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution,’ the IZH disseminates the ideology of the Islamic Revolution in an aggressive and militant way and seeks to bring about such a revolution in the Federal Republic of Germany.”
Iran has long sought to advance its Islamist agenda in Germany. In 1992, agents of Tehran assassinated three Iranian dissidents and their translator at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin. More recently, in 2023, a German court sentenced a German-Iranian man to two years and nine months in prison for plotting, with the help of Iran’s regime, to attack a synagogue in the western city of Bochum.
