The greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is using the Internet to transmit propaganda targeting Hispanics and features a journalist based in South Florida. Founded in 2011 by the Islamist regime in Iran, HispanTV is a global satellite and Internet TV station which reaches the Hispanic population in all Latin American countries and Spain with a great variety of Spanish-language programs. But the Hispanic population of the U.S. can also view the propaganda of the Shi'ite Islamist regime in Iran by means of the Internet.

The programs of HispanTV include a weekly 25 minute television program called "Islam Responds." This program presents the Shi'ite Islamist clerics' point of view about questions and problems in the Islamic religion.

The web site includes specialized sections about the regional news from South America, Central America, the United States, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Iran. The news also contains sections about the economy, health, society, culture, society and culture, and sports. HispanTV has also created a 25 minute weekly television program about the situation in Iran. The news are consistently presented from the perspective of the Iranian regime. For example, the front page of the economics section contains an article about the alleged economic failures of the Trump Administration. The article is titled "Trump is the most unpopular of all the presidents with solid economies.

An especially disturbing program is entitled "Fort Apache." In this program the news announcers directly criticize the United States, Israel and the Jews, France, and democratic governments in Latin America, such as in Colombia and Brazil.

In the episode of June 30, 2018, entitled "Israel wants Palestine Dead", the announcers say about the administration's decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem,"This irrational and provocative decision will cause another intifadah equally as bloody or bloodier than the previous ones."

This program also presented guests who engaged in anti-Semitic forms of Israel-bashing. Carlos Prieto, a journalist with the New Left Review, called Israel an apartheid state, saying, "In Gaza Israel is experimenting with a great panoply of policies and instruments that we can characterize as genocidal or pre-genocidal, of aparthield, a racist system, of a hate-filled administration, of ethnic hatred."

One invited guest, journalist Teresa Araguen, said,"Israel has a free route to blockade Gaza, to assassinate more than 100 Palestinians. Israeli policy is a danger not only for the Palestinians but also for the whole world and Europe."

Ana Sanchez, a leader of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, which seeks to destroy Israel and the Jews, echoed a similar theme, saying,"What has occurred is fundamentally two things. The first is another example of Palestinian resistance. More than 100 people went into the streets and gave their lives for their rights as has occurred for more than 70 years. The second is the continued silence of the international community, which has given impunity to the Israeli government."

The speakers in this program used loaded words such as "genocide" and "aparthield" to describe Israeli policy toward the Palestinian Arabs. These characterizations are part of an organized campaign to promote the lie that Israeli seeks to exterminate the Palestinian Arabs. These programs also offer implicit justification for the global ideological effort of leftists and Islamists which seeks to destroy Israel and the Jews.

None of the speakers addressed claims by the Hamas terrorist organization that the majority or the dead persons in the riots were members of Hamas. The speakers also failed to address Israeli claims that the rioters were armed with a wide variety of weapons.

This station is part of a grand strategy to align with leftist regimes in the region, such as Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua. Mohsen Milano, a professor at the University of South Florida who specializes in Iran, believes that Iran plans to organize political campaigns against the United States with the help of Venezuela. Iran also works with Shi'ite communities in Latin America to strengthen Hezbollah, the Shi'ite terrorist group, and attack Israel and the Jews.

The station also contains a section of reports created by the journalist Marcelo Sanchez, who works in Miami and Washington D.C., the capital of the United States. Sanchez' reports are focused on controversies like the subject of immigration and economic, social, and political divisions in the United States.

According to the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in the United States, Sanchez was born and raised in Bolivia. Sanchez worked for Russian Television, a station funded by the Putin regime, and for Telemundo, a Miami television station with a leftist perspective. In a recent program, Sanchez used the inappropriate term "concentration camps" to describe the facilities used to detain illegal immigrants prior to their deportation from the United States.

In 2012, Sanchez produced a program about the growing number of Latino converts to the Muslim religion. Sanchez interviewed Wilfredo Amr Ruiz, a Puerto Rican who converted to the Islamic religion and became a leader of the radical Islamist movement. Ruiz is the communications director and lawyer for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in the state of Florida.

CAIR describes itself as a Muslim civil rights organization. But the group's critics note that the U.S. government argued that the group was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood and had connections with Islamist terrorist groups such as Hamas.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a Sunni Islamist group which began in Egypt in 1928. This movement has spread to all parts of the world, including the U.S., Europe, and the majority of Arab countries.

Iran has historically used propaganda and other methods to aid Hamas and other Sunni Islamist groups, despite the Shi'ite Islamist ideology of its own regime.

Representing the United States as a persecutor of Muslims is a long-standing theme of Islamist groups. In 2017, during his work for HispanTV, Sanchez produced a documentary called "The Persecuted Muslims in America." Like the majority of HispanTV programs, Sanchez's documentary exaggerated the level of animosity against Muslims in the United States.

Latinos and the people of Latin America and Spain should understand that HispanTV represents a propaganda effort of the Iranian regime, and not a balanced program about current news. Western democracies must continue to confront hostile foreign efforts to influence their societies. It is necessary to face Internet propaganda efforts such as HispanTV. The appropriate response is more education and more practical efforts to protect democratic values and policies.

Biography: Rebecca Witonsky is a South Florida-based freelance writer who specializes in Middle Eastern affairs and radical Islam.