Iran and the anti-American left

Incredible as it may seem, there are those within the American tax-exempt sector that continue to publicly equivocate on—or even outright defend—the Iranian government, and especially its bellicose foreign policy.

The theocratic autocracy governing Iran has been among the world’s most destabilizing influences for decades. Institutionally sworn to the annihilation of Israel, it is one of just four countries designated by the United States as a state sponsor of terrorism. Iran’s network of militant regional proxies (known as the “Axis of Resistance”) includes U.S.-designated terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Yemen-based Houthis. The latter’s official slogan of “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam” is said to have its origins in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and rather succinctly illustrates the ideological underpinnings of the regime’s foreign policy. Against this backdrop, Iran’s nuclear program has been an understandable source of major anxiety.

Domestically, Iran is notorious for its corruption and the level of censorship, repression, and human rights abuses to which its citizenry is subjected. In early 2026—under the cover of an engineered internet blackout—government forces were reported to have massacred thousands to potentially tens-of-thousands of civilians who had taken to the streets to protest the country’s dire economic conditions. Many demonstrators were calling for an end to the regime, the brutality of which has few modern parallels.

The regime’s sympathizers in the American nonprofit sector, some of which the Capital Research Center has previously profiled through the lens of the “anti-American left,” are broadly characterized by left-wing (often far-left) politics and a global worldview that is unremittingly hostile to the influence of the United States, Israel, and the entire democratic West. Whether stemming from genuine ideological affinity or a crude “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” calculus, these organizations have—to one degree or another—aligned themselves with one of the planet’s most openly malevolent governments.

Committee of Anti-Imperialists in Solidarity with Iran

Referring to attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea perpetrated by the Iran-backed Houthis, the People’s Forum promoted a protest chant of “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud! Turn another ship around!”

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To illustrate this, consider an obscure coalition called the Committee of Anti-Imperialists in Solidarity with Iran. While it does not appear to be currently active (the most recent blog post on its website was from August 2024) or have its own IRS tax-exempt status, it has been endorsed by a number of nonprofit activist groups and fiscally-sponsored projects. The Committee rejects what it calls “the misrepresentation and orientalist framing of Iran and its people and movements by the Western media,” and asserts that “the parroting of State Department propaganda and the demonization of Iran serve only to promote U.S. imperial goals in the region.”

In April 2024, during a period of direct military conflict between Iran and Israel, the Committee released a statement entitled “No War on Iran, Stand with Resistance.” It condemned what it called “Zionist aggression” by “the occupation state” against the “Axis of Resistance,” while defending Iranian actions as being “part of the long decolonizing tradition and [an] expression of principled international solidarity among the peoples of the Global South.” The statement claimed that “Iran has practiced great restraint in the face of Zionist aggression,” but warned that “force is a legitimate response to the genocidal occupation state’s aggressions.” It declared that “the days of the US subjugating the nations of the region are over,” and praised “the steadfastness of Palestinian resistance and the growing deterrence capabilities developed by the Axis of Resistance from Palestine to Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.” Israel, according to the statement “has no right to self-defense against a population under its subjugation or against nations that it repeatedly violates and attacks.”

This statement, which amounts to a full-throated endorsement of Iran’s orchestration of international terrorism and a rejection of Israel’s very right to exist, was endorsed by twenty groups. Notable American tax-exempt signatories included:

The People’s Forum

The People’s Forum, a far-left 501(c)(3) nonprofit activist group that reported just over $7 million in 2024 revenues, $5.79 million of which were from contributions and grants. $5 million of this total—86 percent of the grants it received and 70 percent of its total revenue—came from the People’s Support Foundation, a private foundation created by pro-China activist-donor Neville Roy Singham and capitalized with proceeds from the sale of Thoughtworks. Singham’s wife, Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans, is the People’s Support Foundation’s president. In 2019, the People’s Forum received over $3 million from another Singham-linked nonprofit called the United Community Fund. From 2017 through 2022 it received a remarkable $22.44 million from the GS Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management, a donor-advised fund provider associated with Goldman Sachs which The New York Times has reported Singham is known to have used. The nature of donor-advised funds, however, makes it impossible to say definitively how much of this money may have originated with Singham.

The People’s Forum is active across a spectrum of left-wing initiatives, which it frequently approaches from an international angle. This has included helping to organize demonstrations declaring that “the greatest source of chaos in the Middle East isn’t Iran—it’s U.S. imperialism and Zionism!” The People’s Forum celebrated the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks upon Israel as “an unprecedented liberation struggle” carried out by “Palestinian resistance factions” which “shattered the myth of Israeli military invulnerability.” Referring to attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea perpetrated by the Iran-backed Houthis, the People’s Forum promoted a protest chant of “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud! Turn another ship around!”

National Lawyers Guild

The National Lawyers Guild (specifically its international committee), which is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that reported $827,926 in total 2024 Most of this came from its affiliated 501(c)(3) National Lawyers Guild Foundation, which had net assets of $4.45 million that year. Significant funding for the National Lawyers Guild Foundation has in turn come from donor-advised fund providers such as the American Online Giving Foundation ($138,936 from 2022-2025) and Donor Advised Charitable Giving ($104,350 from 2022-2024). The Amalgamated Charitable Foundation gave the group $105,500 from 2022-2023. The Community Foundation of Central Missouri provided $80,000 from 2022-2023, while the CS Fund gave the same amount from 2023-2024. From 2022-2024, the National Lawyers Guild Foundation received $600,000 from the NoVo Foundation (controlled by Warren Buffett’s son Peter Buffett), but this money appears to have been earmarked for the benefit of a separate nonprofit called the Water Protector Legal Collective.

The Guild has been thoroughly ensconced within the American radical-left since the 1930s, and while it has always tended to align itself with the United States’ geopolitical adversaries, its hostility towards Israel (and support for its Iranian-backed enemies) has veered in a particularly extreme direction. The Guild justified the October 7 attacks as a legitimate exercise “of the right of the Palestinian people to resist,” and characterized the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping as “principled actions in solidarity with the people of Palestine.” During the June 2025 military conflict between Israel and Iran, in which the United States also struck Iranian nuclear sites, the Guild declared its support for “the legitimate right of Iran, a sovereign nation, to defend itself” from what it called “unprovoked” and “unlawful aggression.”

The Palestinian Youth Movement

The Palestinian Youth Movement, which was formerly a fiscally-sponsored project of the WESPAC Foundation and is now a project of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Honor the Earth. As a sponsored project, the Palestinian Youth Movement does not disclose its own financials, though $1 million was transferred from WESPAC to Honor the Earth sometime between September 2023 and August 2024 for the purpose of supporting it. Recent grants specifically earmarked to support the Palestinian Youth Movement have come from the California Endowment ($125,000 from 2023-2024), the Solidaire Network ($75,000 in 2024),and the Bafrayung Fund ($60,000 from 2022-2024).

Regarding Iran, the Palestinian Youth Movement has published a statement supporting what it calls the country’s “right to defend itself” against unprovoked Israeli “atrocities” and “aggression.” In the group’s view, “Iran is confronting a project of global domination” being undertaken through “Western imperialist violations of Iranian sovereignty,” with the goal being “to de-develop, subdue, and crush any state or actor that opposes or resists Western hegemony.” According to the Palestinian Youth Movement, Western nations are waging an “existential war against Iran because Iran has rejected American and Zionist interests in the region, instead safeguarding national and regional sovereignty, and building power that challenges Western imperialism’s sphere of dominance.”

The ANSWER Coalition

The ANSWER Coalition, a fiscally-sponsored project of the 501(c)(3) Progress Unity Fund, which itself reported $650,576 in total 2024 Groups which have made recent grants to the Progress Unity Fund include the WESPAC Foundation ($62,000 in 2024), the LEF Foundation ($37,000 from 2022-2025), and the People’s Forum ($26,356 in 2023). ANSWER’s national director, Brian Becker, also co-founded the explicitly communist Party for Socialism and Liberation.

ANSWER has posted material characterizing the 1979 Iranian Revolution as an “anti-imperialist revolution” which overthrew a “U.S. client.” In June 2025, it helped organize “nationwide emergency protests” against what it called the United States’ “unprovoked bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities,” arguing that they constituted a war crime. One such protest in Washington, DC was co-organized with the Democratic Socialists of America, Code Pink, the People’s Forum, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and the National Iranian American Council—a group which has been accused of promoting polices aligned with the interests of the Iranian regime (an accusation it has repeatedly and forcefully denied).

The Black Alliance for Peace

The Black Alliance for Peace, which is a fiscally-sponsored project of Community Movement Builders—a far-left 501(c)(3) nonprofit with over $2.9 million in 2023 revenues and a history of supporting disruptive street protests. It was formerly a project of a different nonprofit called the Latin American and Caribbean Community Center, which has since rebranded as AfroResistance. The Black Alliance for Peace received $100,000 from the Common Counsel Foundation in 2024, and it has also received five-figure grants from Arc of Justice (formerly known as the Benjamin Fund) and ImpactAssets.

During the June 2025 Iran-Israel conflict, the Black Alliance for Peace reposted an extensive statement on its website entitled “We Stand With Iran.” The statement attacked the “terrorist state” of Israel for striking Iranian military and nuclear sites and thereby “reducing its ability to provide support for legitimate liberation organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.” The statement claimed that “the real reason that Iran is portrayed as a pariah, as dangerous, as an enemy of humanity [is] not because of anything they’ve done to harm the US or Israel, but because of the threat of unseating imperialism’s global economic dominance.” Elsewhere, the Black Alliance for Peace has decried “the notion that a rogue ethnostate [Israel] that is currently carrying out a genocide believes that it possesses the right to determine which countries can and cannot develop a nuclear weapon.” It labeled Israel and the United States as “the most dangerous nations in the world,” and stated that “their power must be dismantled.”

Other signatories of the Committee of Anti-Imperialists in Solidarity with Iran’s statement include Samidoun and the United National Antiwar Coalition (both of which have been projects of the Alliance for Global Justice, examined in more detail below), National Students for Justice in Palestine (which as of 2024 was a project of the WESPAC Foundation), Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, the Bronx Anti-War Coalition, Friends of Swazi Freedom, the International Action Center, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Sanctions Kill, and the Workers World Party. Some, but not all, of these groups are tax-exempt.

In addition to those groups which endorsed the Committee’s statement, it is worth examining several other nonprofits which have expressed notably sympathetic views towards Iran in the context of their broader anti-American and anti-Israel activism.

Democratic Socialists of America

Indeed, since 2025 it has been an expellable offense within the DSA to publicly speak in opposition to the Palestinian cause or to acknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself.

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The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the self-described largest socialist organization in the United States. It claims more than 95,000 members, including some prominent elected officials such as New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and U.S. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). The DSA’s national headquarters operates as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, and it reported over $6.3 million in 2024 revenues. The vast majority of this came from membership dues.

Though it has always existed at the left edge of the American political spectrum, the DSA has become increasingly radicalized over the past decade. In the international context, this has included expressions of support for Iranian actions and those of its regional terrorist proxies, especially vis-à-vis their conflict with Israel. Indeed, since 2025 it has been an expellable offense within the DSA to publicly speak in opposition to the Palestinian cause or to acknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself.

A statement released by the DSA in early 2024 asserted that “since October 7th [2023], Israel has continuously engaged in provocative military aggression,” and dismissed efforts to link Iran to the October 7th attacks as Israeli propaganda. The group also declared—in an apparent reference to Hamas and the Houthis—that “socialist internationalism obligates us to act in solidarity with the Palestinian and Yemeni people who have bravely resisted imperial aggression by the US and its partners for decades.” The statement characterized Houthi attacks on commercial Red Sea shipping as a “humanitarian blockade of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”

In another statement, published in the aftermath of the April 2024 exchange of strikes between Israel and Iran, the DSA’s international committee affirmed its support for “Iran’s right to self-defense” and “recognize[d] that Iran has long been targeted by the U.S. and its allies for its efforts to establish national self-determination and champion Palestinian liberation.” It praised what it called the “success” of Iran’s “defensive strikes” for “highlight[ing] the ability of Iran to defend itself against Zionist aggression” and for “restor[ing] crucial deterrence against increasingly rogue Israeli actions.” The DSA predicted that these Iranian strikes would “further undermine the mantle of invincibility which the Zionist project has constructed in order to allow its continual ethnic cleansing and genocide in their colonial occupation of Palestine.”

Alliance for Global Justice

An internationally oriented far-left activist group that has traditionally prioritized support for Latin American authoritarian regimes—such as those governing Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—the Alliance (and its projects) have also occasionally made favorable references to Iran.

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The Alliance for Global Justice is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that reported $6.7 million in total 2024 revenues. More than thirty different grantmakers gave at least $20,000 to the Alliance that year, with some of the largest totals coming from donor-advised funds such as the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program ($392,100), the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund ($303,908), and the Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust ($180,000). Other major funders in 2024 included the Colorado Health Foundation ($300,150), the William Penn Foundation ($250,000), the Groundswell Fund ($220,170) and the Common Counsel Foundation ($130,000).

In addition to its own activities, the Alliance serves as fiscal sponsor to numerous other groups that share its mission. It has described itself as “the accounting department for the movement for social change.” An internationally oriented far-left activist group that has traditionally prioritized support for Latin American authoritarian regimes—such as those governing Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—the Alliance (and its projects) have also occasionally made favorable references to Iran.

For example, in 2021 the Alliance co-sponsored (alongside Code Pink, the Black Alliance for Peace, and one of its own projects called Popular Resistance) a webinar exploring the “natural alliance” between Venezuela and Iran, through which they provide “mutual life lines in defiance” of the United States and its “illegal sanctions.” Material posted on the Alliance’s website in June 2025 spoke of how “Venezuela and Iran stand together against US aggressions,” and quoted Venezuelan National Assembly president Jorge Rodriguez in claiming that Iranian missile and drone attacks had “brought the criminals of the Israeli government to their knees” by supposedly revealing the country’s Iron Dome air defenses to have been a “paper dome.”

At least two projects that the Alliance has fiscally sponsored—the United National Antiwar Coalition and Samidoun—endorsed the statement from the Committee of Anti-Imperialists in Solidarity with Iran examined above. Samidoun has been sanctioned by the governments of Canada and the United States as “a sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization,” and as of February 2026 the Alliance remains unable to accept credit card payments on its website.

The United National Antiwar Coalition helped organize an “All Out for a Weekend of Action” protest against “Zionist-US aggression” in June 2025, which declared that “Iran has supported the regional resistance in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Syria for decades and is under attack because of its support for regional liberation from the clutches of US imperialist domination and Zionist colonialism.” The group subsequently posted a letter of “sincere gratitude” from an organization called the Global Resistance for Peace and Justice and its Iran-based co-founder, which noted how “the brave supreme leader of Iran” had “stood firm at the forefront of the historical liberation struggles of our heroic nation.” The letter predicted that Iran would secure “our final triumph…sooner than what our adversaries may even think.”

Code Pink

Another suggestion is to emphasize that “it’s not our business who governs Iran—or anywhere outside our borders.” This would seem to directly conflict with Code Pink’s demand that the United States arrest Israeli prime minster Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Code Pink is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that reported over $1.3 million in total 2024 revenues. One of its major funders ($952,600 from 2017-2020, plus $355,350 in 2022) is a private foundation called Arc of Justice (formerly known as the Benjamin Fund), which is controlled by Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin. The donor-advised fund provider GS Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund For Wealth Management granted Code Pink a total of $1.33 million from 2017-2023. Other major funders have included the Justice and Education Fund ($490,886 from 2020-2022) and the Tides Foundation ($372,500 from 2018-2024).

Code Pink is a well-known leftist agitation group whose activism stems from a core precept that the United States—which it has described as “a decadent, declining empire stumbling blindly into its agonizing death spiral”—is the central font of global misery. It attributes Iran’s ongoing economic collapse entirely to U.S. sanctions, not to the Iranian government’s profound corruption or its belligerent and self-isolating foreign policy. After the United States withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal in 2018, Code Pink published an open letter to the Iranian people saying that it was “ashamed” of its own government and apologizing for America’s “dreadful history of meddling in the internal affairs of your country.”

The following year, an official Code Pink delegation traveled to Iran, where they were “honored” with an audience with the country’s then-foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who was said to have “argued persuasively that the United States couldn’t be opposed to Iran for any of the reasons it routinely gives for its hostile stance.” A trip participant described him as “speaking for an isolated nation with few refuges aside from the moral high ground to fall back upon.” Another participant wrote in a blog for Code Pink’s website that “as I return home, I feel sickened by the US assault on Iran…It’s time to end US aggression against Iran and instead begin reparations.”

Code Pink’s website also features suggested talking points for protesters about Iran. These include a maxim that “we should not be talking about Iranian aggression, but about US aggression.” Another suggestion is to emphasize that “it’s not our business who governs Iran—or anywhere outside our borders.” This would seem to directly conflict with Code Pink’s demand that the United States arrest Israeli prime minster Benjamin Netanyahu. Elsewhere, Code Pink has criticized the U.S. government’s 2019 decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, and it has repeatedly opposed designating the Iran-backed Houthis as such.

Final thoughts

Though it may be tempting to explain away these radicals as paid puppets of malign foreign influence, the uncomfortable reality is that repugnant worldviews can be sincerely held and acted upon without requiring financial incentives, foreign-sourced or otherwise.

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There are a range of legitimate views regarding how the United States should engage with Iran, and the point here is not to weigh in on the relative merits of any of them. But even among those who favor some measure of diplomatic rapprochement, there must be firm moral clarity in condemning the country’s governing regime and rejecting any attempt to shift responsibility for its myriad domestic abuses and direct sponsorship of international terrorism onto the United States (or Israel).

This is the real problem with the groups detailed above, and others like them. Their entire worldview is premised on the belief that America (or the democratic capitalist West more broadly) is ultimately to blame for any given manifestation of global human misery. Because this is objectively false—indeed, reality is the near-polar opposite—these groups routinely find themselves in the position of trying to defend the indefensible. They may attempt this directly on its own terms, or through a combination of equivocation, moral relativism, whataboutism, and boilerplate sloganeering. It is extraordinary and revealing that nothing even remotely approximating the nationwide anti-Israel protests that have spread across the country in response to the war in Gaza have manifested to denounce the Iranian government’s cold-blooded massacre of thousands of its own citizens.

It might naturally be asked: are these groups, or others like them, being funded by Iranian or other sympathetic foreign sources? The nature of nonprofit disclosures in the United States generally makes this impossible for the public to determine, though some groups (such as Code Pink) have emphatically denied it. Such questions might also be something of a red herring—the past several years have provided ample evidence of virulent anti-Israel (and even antisemitic) sentiments within certain segments of the American left. This frequently overlaps with equally virulent anti-Americanism. Though it may be tempting to explain away these radicals as paid puppets of malign foreign influence, the uncomfortable reality is that repugnant worldviews can be sincerely held and acted upon without requiring financial incentives, foreign-sourced or otherwise.

One final observation: by virtue of being located in the United States, these tax-exempt activist groups enjoy broad First Amendment rights to denounce what they consider to be a malicious American government bent on inflicting misery upon the people of Iran—whose interests they generally purport to be speaking on behalf of. Meanwhile, the people of Iran are being massacred in the streets by an autocratic regime bent on preventing them from ever securing such rights for themselves. Posterity is rarely kind to authoritarian apologism.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/iran-and-the-anti-american-left/