分类： politics

In the bustling core of Manhattan’s Chinatown, nestled between a midtown hotel, a local spa, and a neighborhood coffee shop, sits an unassuming six-story glass-front building. What looks to passersby like an ordinary community space sits at the center of a high-stakes federal espionage case that opened this week in Brooklyn federal court, pitting U.S. prosecutors’ allegations of a secret Chinese spy operations hub against defense claims of an innocent community service project derailed by geopolitical tension.

U.S. prosecutors allege the location was an unregistered overseas outpost for China’s national police, explicitly tasked by Beijing with monitoring, silencing, and intimidating Chinese pro-democracy dissidents residing on American soil. Inside the space, authorities discovered a banner clearly labeling the site the “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, New York USA.”

The accused, 64-year-old Lu Jianwang — a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country for decades, also known as Harry Lu — went on trial Wednesday, more than three years after federal agents arrested him at his Bronx residence. He faces two felony charges: conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent and intentional destruction of evidence, including deleted WeChat communications that prosecutors claim were sent to his Chinese government handler.

Opening arguments laid out two starkly conflicting narratives of Lu’s work. Prosecutor Lindsey Oken told jurors that while Lu resided in New York City, he ultimately took direction from Beijing. Oken explained that Lu and co-defendant Chen Jinping, who has already pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge, launched the Chinatown outpost in 2022, shortly after Lu attended an official ceremony in his home province of Fujian. At that event, China’s Ministry of Public Security publicly announced the launch of 30 similar overseas police stations across the globe.

Oken emphasized that these outposts are a tool of the Chinese government to track and pressure individuals Beijing labels as threats to its national interests. She told the jury that the prosecution will call a dissident who was directly targeted by the New York outpost as a witness during the trial. The Manhattan outpost shared office space with the America ChangLe Association, a community group co-founded and operated by Lu and his brother Jimmy. Tax filings for the group list it as a “social gathering place for Fujianese people,” and defense counsel noted the name “ChangLe” translates to “eternal joy.”

While Oken acknowledged that the group openly advertised its service helping Chinese diaspora members renew Chinese driver’s licenses remotely, a workaround for pandemic-era international travel bans, she noted that even this public activity violates U.S. law. Under the federal Foreign Agents Registration Act, any individual acting on behalf of a foreign government or official entity must register their activity with the U.S. Department of Justice — a step Lu never took, Oken said.

Lu’s defense attorney, John Carman, pushed back hard against the prosecution’s framing of the case as a high-stakes international spy plot, instead casting it as a minor bureaucratic oversight that has been blown out of proportion amid rising U.S.-China tensions. Carman argued that the entire case boils down to an unfiled government form, not espionage. “He is not a spy, not a part of Chinese intelligence services, not a member of the Chinese Communist Party, and he is not an agent of the Chinese government,” Carman told jurors in his opening statement. He summed up the case with two common phrases: “No good deed goes unpunished” and “Guilt by association.”

Carman recounted that the FBI launched a raid on the Chinatown space in October 2022, acting on a report from a non-profit that monitors transnational repression by China. During the raid, agents searched through drawers, seized paperwork, broke open locked cabinets and a safe, and confiscated a desktop computer and multiple cellphones. “They turned the place upside down,” Carman told the jury.

Prosecutors confirmed that the day after the raid, Lu admitted to FBI agents that he had set up the outpost, maintained contact with a contact in China via WeChat, and deleted all of their messages. Carman noted that neither of Lu’s two hours of interviews with FBI agents were recorded, a procedural detail that undermines the reliability of the prosecution’s account. Lu was ultimately arrested in April 2023.

Co-defendant Chen Jinping pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as a foreign agent in December 2024. He is currently released on bond and will not be sentenced until after Lu’s trial concludes.

At the defense table on Wednesday, Lu sat alongside Baimadajie Angwang, a former New York Police Department officer who was acquitted of charges accusing him of acting as an “intelligence asset” for China three years ago. Angwang, who is currently suing the NYPD to get his job back, is working as an investigator for Lu’s defense team. Lu, dressed in a dark suit, pale blue tie, and glasses, speaks limited English and followed the proceedings through a translation earpiece that rendered arguments into his native Fujianese. Both Lu and Angwang wore small American flag pins on their lapels.

As Lu and his legal team arrived at the courthouse Wednesday morning, several dozen supporters — including members of Lu’s local church — gathered outside to rally on his behalf. Participants held signs reading “Justice for Harry Lu” and “Chinese Americans Are Americans!” and waved small American flags to demonstrate their support.

Carman closed his opening argument by reinforcing that Lu’s only loyalty is to his local community. “If Harry Lu is an agent of anyone, he is an agent for his community — the local people in his neighborhood,” he told jurors. “You have the life of an innocent man in your hands.”

A bipartisan-adjacent bloc of 30 progressive House Democrats has issued an unprecedented call for the U.S. government to abandon its 55-year policy of deliberate ambiguity around Israel’s undeclared nuclear program, demanding that Washington hold Israel to the same nonproliferation and transparency standards applied to all other nations in the Middle East.

Led by Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro, the group — which includes high-profile progressive lawmakers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Pramila Jayapal — sent a formal joint letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday laying out their demands. In the letter, the lawmakers highlight a glaring contradiction at the heart of current U.S. policy: Washington is deeply entangled in ongoing conflict in the region alongside Israel, yet the executive branch still officially refuses to acknowledge the country’s widely documented nuclear capabilities.

The representatives argue that Congress holds a clear constitutional obligation to gain full clarity on the regional nuclear balance, given that thousands of U.S. service members are deployed across the Middle East. Without transparent information about Israel’s program, they say, Congress cannot properly assess the risk of nuclear escalation in any regional conflict, nor evaluate the Biden administration’s contingency planning for high-stakes nuclear scenarios. The letter explicitly states that lawmakers have not yet received the level of detailed information they deem necessary to fulfill this oversight duty.

Currently, Israel stands as one of just five nations worldwide that have refused to join the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the global agreement that blocks non-nuclear states from acquiring atomic weapons and mandates international inspections for all signatories. Because of Israel’s non-participation, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has no legal authority to inspect or verify the size and status of Israel’s reported nuclear stockpile.

For decades, Israel has maintained its iconic policy of nuclear opacity: officials neither confirm nor deny the existence of a nuclear arsenal, even though the program has been an open international secret for more than half a century. Independent analysis from the Nuclear Threat Initiative estimates that Israel currently holds approximately 90 assembled nuclear warheads, with enough separated plutonium — between 750 and 1,110 kilograms — to build an additional 90 to 180 weapons, bringing the country’s total potential stockpile to between 187 and 277 nuclear devices.

The lawmakers argue that Washington cannot build a consistent, credible nonproliferation policy for the Middle East — which currently targets Iranian civilian nuclear activities and addresses emerging Saudi nuclear ambitions — while continuing to maintain official silence about Israel’s program at a time when the U.S. is a direct participant in regional conflict. “We ask that you hold Israel to the same standard of transparency that the United States expects from any other country that may be pursuing or retaining nuclear weapons capability,” the letter concludes.

The history of the U.S.-Israeli nuclear ambiguity stretches back to the founding of Israel’s program in the 1950s. Initially developed with covert French support, without the knowledge of the U.S. government, the program was centered at the Dimona nuclear complex in Israel’s Negev Desert. According to declassified U.S. documents analyzed by prominent Israeli-American nuclear historian Avner Cohen, author of *Israel and the Bomb*, U.S. officials grew suspicious of Dimona’s purpose as early as the late 1950s and conducted eight official inspections of the site between 1961 and 1969. During each visit, Israeli officials concealed an underground plutonium separation plant — critical for producing weapons-grade material — and camouflaged other sections of the complex to hide its true military purpose.

By the end of the 1960s, the U.S. had uncovered the full scale of Israel’s nuclear project, and a secret bilateral agreement was struck that remains in place today. As documented by Cohen, the 1969 Nixon-Meir deal — named for then-U.S. President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir — saw Washington agree to refrain from public questioning of Israel’s program, in exchange for Israel maintaining its policy of official opacity. “About half a century ago Israel acquired nuclear weapons capability, but it has done so in a manner unlike any other nuclear weapons state did, prior or after,” Cohen explained in a 2023 interview with Middle East Eye. Over the decades that followed, successive U.S. administrations have upheld this agreement, even reportedly threatening disciplinary action against any U.S. official who publicly acknowledges Israel’s nuclear program. As recently as 2009, when then-President Barack Obama was asked directly whether any Middle Eastern nation possessed nuclear weapons, he declined to answer, stating he would not speculate on the issue.

The only major public breach of Israel’s opacity came in 1986, when Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician who worked at Dimona for nine years, leaked full details of the program and 60 on-site photographs to the U.K.’s *The Sunday Times*. Vanunu’s disclosures confirmed that Dimona produced enough plutonium to build roughly 12 new nuclear warheads per year, confirming the program’s large scale. Before the story could be published, Vanunu — who was staying in London with support from the newspaper — was lured to Rome by a female Israeli Mossad agent, drugged, and abducted back to Israel. He was convicted of espionage and treason, serving 18 years in prison, more than half of that time in solitary confinement. Since his release in 2004, Vanunu has remained subject to strict travel bans and restrictions on speaking with foreign journalists, limitations that remain in force decades later.

On Wednesday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez made a public call for the European Commission to put into effect the EU’s long-dormant Blocking Statute, a defensive regulatory tool designed to counteract extraterritorial third-country sanctions. His demand comes in response to sweeping US sanctions imposed over the past year by the Donald Trump administration that target senior International Criminal Court (ICC) personnel and a top United Nations human rights official, measures that threaten the operational independence of both global institutions.

A high-stakes historical and political controversy has erupted in the United Kingdom after the Palestinian ambassador to the UK submitted an official formal complaint to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office over the deletion of the term “Palestine” from archaeological exhibits at the British Museum.

The alteration of exhibit labels took place in February, when museum leadership replaced references to “Palestine” in displays focused on ancient Egypt and the Phoenician civilization with the term “Canaan.” Officials justified the change by arguing that “Palestine” was not a historically meaningful geographical descriptor for the specific time periods covered in the exhibits. The revised labels now refer to the relevant region as Canaan and reclassify the Hyksos people, previously described as being of “Palestinian descent,” as of “Canaanite descent.”

Investigative reporting from The Telegraph has traced the decision back to pressure from UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), a controversial pro-Israel advocacy group. In a formal letter sent to British Museum director Nicholas Cullinan, UKLFI contended that labeling the eastern Mediterranean coast as Palestine in exhibits covering 1700–1500 BC amounted to erasing the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judea, and incorrectly framed the ancestral origins of the Jewish people as tied to Palestine. The organization’s objections specifically targeted the wording of those two exhibit labels, leading directly to the revision.

Critics of the change note that historical evidence contradicts the museum’s claim that the term Palestine is anachronistic for ancient contexts. One of the earliest surviving references to the region dates back to the 12th century BC, inscribed on the Great Harris Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian document that refers to the area as “Peleset”—a linguistic precursor to the name Palestine that covers territory including modern-day Gaza and the Israeli city of Ashdod. Despite the existence of these well-documented ancient sources, museum leadership moved forward with the label changes.

In an interview with The Guardian, Palestinian ambassador Husam Zomlot emphasized the gravity of the dispute, framing the erasure of Palestine from historical exhibits as an existential issue for the Palestinian people. This objection carries particular weight: the United Kingdom formally recognized Palestine as a sovereign state just months before the label changes were made. “I sent a letter to the minister in charge at the Foreign Office, and we are still waiting for a response,” Zomlot said Wednesday. “This is not only a political issue, not only a legal issue, not even just a historical dispute. This is an existential matter. Erasing our past is erasing our present.”

The British Museum has pushed back against claims that the change was a direct response to UKLFI pressure. In a statement to Middle East Eye in February, a museum spokesperson argued that the term Palestine, while one of the oldest documented names for the eastern Mediterranean’s southern Levant region, is only appropriate for historical contexts dating to the later second millennium BC. The spokesperson added that the institution uses UN-endorsed terminology for modern maps of the region, referencing Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Jordan, and uses the identifier “Palestinian” for cultural and ethnographic contexts when appropriate. Even so, the spokesperson acknowledged that the term was changed because it is no longer considered politically neutral in contemporary discourse—an admission that has fueled further criticism.

Palestinian advocacy groups have decried the museum’s decision as blatant hypocrisy. Energy Embargo for Palestine, a grassroots campaign organization, pointed out that the British Museum positions itself as a neutral guardian of global cultural heritage, claiming to preserve and communicate history objectively. “And yet after looting Palestinian artefacts from across the Middle East, it is now unashamedly preparing itself to rewrite history, to erase Palestine, and its millions of people, out of the history books,” the group said in a formal statement.

While the British Museum has repeatedly claimed it did not entirely remove the term Palestine from all its exhibits, photographic evidence contradicts this assertion. Documents obtained via a Freedom of Information request by independent website Unredacted also show museum staff cited incoming audience emails and social media posts from high-profile historians as additional justification for the terminology change.

This incident is not an isolated case: the British Museum is just the latest in a growing list of UK public institutions targeted by UKLFI over content related to Palestine. Earlier in February, UKLFI pressure prompted Encyclopaedia Britannica to amend multiple entries in its children’s platform Britannica Kids, removing the term Palestine from regional maps. A year prior, London’s Chelsea and Westminster Hospital removed a children’s artwork created by students in Gaza. UKLFI director Caroline Turner initially claimed the removal came in response to patient complaints, but a subsequent Freedom of Information request forced the hospital to admit that the only complaint received had been submitted by UKLFI itself.

Across shadowed gathering halls in Iran, hundreds of men clad in black strike their chests in synchronized rhythm, while religious orators chant measured, mournful refrains centered on martyrdom, sacrifice, and modern conflict. These dramatic performances, commonly lit with ominous red lighting and widely circulated across Iranian social media platforms and YouTube, have emerged as a defining feature of the nation’s wartime public landscape following the 12-day Iran-Israel conflict in June 2025.

Known as latmiyah, these mourning recitations trace their origins to centuries-old Ashura rituals, which commemorate the 680 CE martyrdom of Shia Imam Hussain ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at the Battle of Karbala. In Shia religious memory, Hussain’s death—after he refused to swear allegiance to the unjust Caliph Yazid ibn Muawiyah—has long stood as a foundational narrative of resistance against illegitimate rule. In the years following the 2025 conflict, high-profile state-endorsed eulogists including Mahdi Rasouli, Hossein Taheri, Seyed Reza Narimani and Hossein Sotoudeh have released a wave of new wartime recitations that frame the ongoing US-Israel military campaign against Iran through the ancient symbolic lens of Karbala.

The fusion of religious ritual and wartime messaging has split public opinion: pro-government supporters online have praised the new recitations as powerful expressions of national and religious solidarity, while critics decry them as a deliberate effort by the Islamic Republic to tie traditional religious mourning to state-led political mobilization. In a growing shift, these modern recitations have also begun incorporating Persian nationalist motifs, framing the current conflict not only as a defense of Shia Islam, but also as a fight for Iranian national sovereignty. This dual framing has sparked broader debate over the narratives shaping Iran’s wartime public discourse, and who holds the authority to define the meaning of Karbala, nationhood, and resistance in modern Iran.

To understand this contemporary moment, it is necessary to trace the deep historical roots of Ashura rituals in Iranian political and social life. Millions of Shia Muslims across Iran and the broader region mark Ashura every year through mourning processions, poetry recitations, and pilgrimage to Karbala, located in central Iraq. After the Safavid dynasty established Twelver Shia Islam as Iran’s official state religion in the 16th century, Ashura rituals became a core pillar of religious and communal life, building a ritual infrastructure that outlasted successive dynasties and political systems, and repeatedly shaped the course of Iranian politics.

As early as the 1891–1892 Tobacco Protest, a nationwide movement opposing a foreign concession that granted control over Iran’s tobacco industry to a Western power, preachers spread leading Shia cleric Mirza Hasan Shirazi’s anti-tobacco fatwa through Ashura gatherings in mosques and bazaars. Participants in the 1905–1911 Constitutional Revolution similarly leaned heavily on Ashura symbolism in their demonstrations and political rhetoric. Decades later, the 1979 revolution that ousted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi centered chants of “Our movement is Hussaini, our leader is Khomeini,” drawing a direct parallel between the 7th-century struggle for justice and the modern revolutionary movement.

In each of these moments, Ashura mourning rituals did more than preserve religious memory: they built emotional and political authority through preachers, reciters, and religious singers, known as maddahs. After the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979, this political role of ritual was amplified. During the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, Karbala symbolism became the central language of state wartime mobilization, cementing the role of maddahs as key intermediaries between the state and Iranian society.

That same ritual infrastructure remains central to the Islamic Republic’s mobilization efforts following the 2025 conflict. State-backed maddahs now frame both the June 2025 Iran-Israel war and the ongoing US-Israel campaign against Iran as modern extensions of the Karbala narrative, using mourning recitations to cast the conflicts as tests of sacrifice, resistance, and loyalty to the state. In a 2026 eulogy, for example, Sotoudeh framed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s modern “flag bearer,” drawing a direct parallel to Abbas ibn Ali, Hussain’s brother who carried the Islamic standard at Karbala.

This symbolic framing directly echoes recent statements from Iranian leaders. Two weeks before his death in February 2026, then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei drew an explicit parallel, stating that just as Hussain refused to pledge allegiance to Yazid, Iran would never “pledge allegiance to the corrupt people…who are today in power in America.”

Public polling and on-the-ground accounts confirm that most Iranians broadly oppose foreign military intervention in their country’s affairs, with online videos showing near-nightly pro-government rallies drawing hundreds to thousands of attendees, many featuring eulogists performing the new latmiyah recitations. But opposition to foreign intervention does not automatically translate into support for the state’s framing of the conflict through Karbala symbolism.

Multiple Iranian citizens who spoke to *Middle East Eye* expressed skepticism about the regime’s co-optation of Karbala narratives for political and foreign policy purposes. One Iran-based journalist claimed that some attendees at pro-government rallies in low-income neighborhoods had received financial incentives to participate, a claim *Middle East Eye* was not able to independently verify.

The limits of the state’s exclusive control over Ashura symbolism are not a new development. During the 2009 Green Movement opposition protests, demonstrators chanted slogans comparing Ali Khamenei to Yazid, the same unjust caliph that Karbala narratives condemn. More recently, during 2023 Ashura commemorations, mourners and independent maddahs across Iranian cities chanted anti-government slogans using the same Karbala motifs the state employs for its own messaging.

These examples demonstrate that while Ashura symbolism can confer political legitimacy, it does not serve only the interests of the state. While state-linked Karbala narratives can mobilize limited support during wartime, their long-term power depends on whether they are paired with broader social and political reforms that resonate with the Iranian public.

A key new development in recent years has been the growing integration of Persian nationalist symbols into state-backed eulogies. Shortly after the June 2025 Iran-Israel war, Ali Khamenei asked prominent maddah Mahmoud Karimi to perform a reworked version of the iconic patriotic anthem *Ey Iran* during an Ashura commemoration. Karimi revised several verses to add religious themes, rebranding Iran itself as the “land of Karbala” and folding Iranian national memory directly into the ritual language of Ashura.

In another example, a live recitation by maddah Hossein Taheri during last year’s Muharram commemoration drew heavily on imagery from the *Shahnameh*, Ferdowsi’s 10th-century epic of ancient Persian heroes and myths, blending Shia mourning traditions with references to Persian national legend. In the eulogy, Taheri declared that Hussain does not fight alone, because his modern supporters come from the “lineage of Rostam,” the *Shahnameh*’s most famous legendary warrior.

Critics argue that the state’s turn to Persian nationalist symbols is an attempt to shore up broader public legitimacy for its wartime policies amid growing domestic discontent. This debate over nationalist symbolism comes amid its use by anti-government protesters: following a sharp collapse in the value of the Iranian rial in December 2025, January 2026 anti-government protests saw demonstrators chanting slogans comparing Khamenei to Zahhak, the villainous mythical tyrant from the *Shahnameh*.

Iran has long sought to frame national identity and religious mission as inseparable. During the Iran-Iraq War, Ali Khamenei articulated this view, stating: “You cannot defend Iran without fighting for Islam, and you cannot protect the borders of Islam without raising the flag of Iran.” The presence of Iranian flags carried by many mourners during last year’s Ashura ceremonies suggests this idea still resonates beyond official state speeches, with official data recording tens of thousands of privately organized mourning ceremonies held during last year’s Ashura commemorations, a testament to how deeply these rituals remain rooted in Iranian civil society.

This deep social embeddedness explains why Karbala symbolism remains such a useful tool for the Islamic Republic during moments of war and national crisis. But wartime mobilization is not equivalent to lasting political legitimacy. The state can draw on Ashura, adapt its narratives, and fuse it with national symbols, but it cannot control how these narratives are received and interpreted by the Iranian public. The resonance of the state’s framing depends not only on the stories Tehran tells, but on the domestic political and economic conditions in which Iranians encounter those stories. Without broader political and economic reform, even the most skillful symbolic adaptation can only go so far.