Jim Kouri
Law Enforcement Examiner
5/17/2012
While not widely known by Americans, there are millions of Arabs and Muslims living in Latin America, the majority of them Sunnis — with a Lebanese Shi’ite minority — who are the principle objective of Iran’s propaganda activities, according to a report by an Israeli terrorism think-tank.
According to the Israeli-based Meir Amit Information Center, there are two main communities in Latin American countries: one group’s roots are in India, Indonesia and Pakistan, while the other is mainly Arabs from Syria and Lebanon, descendents of immigrants who moved to Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s these groups that are “targeted” for recruitment by Iranian intelligence officers and their partners in the terrorist organization Hezbollah.
“While the percentages of the Arab-Muslim populations in each country are not statistically significant, their socio-economic status is relatively high,”
Meir Amit analysts say.
The two largest
Arab-Muslim communities in Latin America are in Brazil and Argentina. There are about a million to a million and a half Muslims in Brazil, including about 10,000 Brazilians to converted to Islam (less than 1% of the entire population)…
…The
spread of Muslims throughout Latin America, especially Shi’ite Muslims originating in Lebanon, are a convenient environment for Iran and Hezbollah to establish subversive, terrorist and occasionally criminal networks. Iran also conducts extensive ideological, religious, cultural and social activities within the Muslim communities to disseminate Khomeini’s radical Shi’ite Islam.
Iran’s intensive
efforts to export the Islamic Revolution to Latin America take many forms…
Read the complete article at the
Examiner.
