A startling allegation has emerged regarding the International Criminal Court (ICC) proceedings, with claims that Iran allegedly paid off South Africa’s national debt to facilitate the ICC case against Israel. Dr. Sheila Nazarian, a prominent physician and Iranian exile, asserts that Tehran financially backed the South African government’s legal action against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to Nazarian, the South African government was in severe financial distress at the time, having failed to pay its public workers for months. She claims that Iran stepped in to clear these massive debts specifically in exchange for Pretoria bringing the war crimes allegations against Israel and Netanyahu to the international court. “Iran is a thread through all of this,” Nazarian stated, suggesting a coordinated geopolitical strategy by the Iranian regime to weaponize international legal institutions against the Jewish state.
These geopolitical claims intersect with a heated domestic debate in the United States, sparked by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani recently announced that his administration explored every legal avenue to execute the ICC arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. Concluding that the city lacks the jurisdictional authority to enforce the international warrant, the mayor nonetheless declared that Netanyahu is “not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large,” and refused to meet with the Israeli leader, labeling him a war criminal.
Mamdani’s posture has drawn fierce condemnation from lawmakers. Representative Mike Lawler branded the mayor a “raging anti-Semitic defender of terror regimes,” highlighting that Mamdani has not demanded the arrest of Hamas leaders or condemned the Ayatollah and other adversaries of the United States. Representative Nicole Malliotakis, whose family fled communist Cuba, also joined the criticism. Detractors pointed out that Mamdani previously attempted to meet with Iran’s ambassador, despite the nation being designated a terror regime by the U.S., Australia, Canada, the European Union, and the U.K. Activists remain highly critical of Iran’s financial backing of terror groups like Hamas and the Houthis, arguing that Mamdani’s suggestion that international law supersedes these terror designations is deeply problematic.
For Dr. Nazarian, the mayor’s political tactics mirror the authoritarian regime she fled during the Islamic Revolution. She compared Mamdani to the Ayatollah, accusing him of using “flowery words” and promising unrealistic freebies to manipulate the electorate. She likened his strategy to a student body president campaigning on “free ice cream Fridays,” warning voters that “offering free things is never free.” Furthermore, Nazarian pointed out that Mamdani is a Shi’ite—the same sect of Islam as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). She argued that his rhetoric against Jews and Israel serves as a puppet performance advancing IRGC propaganda.
Shifting the focus to the humanitarian crisis inside Iran, Nazarian detailed the brutal realities of the Islamic Republic, which she argues are being ignored by Western politicians sympathetic to its causes. She recounted the harrowing ordeal of a 17-year-old girl imprisoned for five years simply for distributing leaflets. Upon her release, the young woman was holding the hand of a 3-year-old child, conceived through rape while she was incarcerated. When the family sought dental care in the United States, a horrified dentist discovered the survivor had been stripped of her teeth and fingernails through severe torture.
“This is one story of the brutality of this regime, and there are thousands of them,” Nazarian emphasized. She highlighted the regime’s ongoing violence, noting that just two days prior, authorities publicly executed a 19-year-old protester whose only crime was demanding basic democratic freedoms. According to reports cited by the doctor, an estimated 40,000 innocent protesters have been killed in Iran since the beginning of the year.
