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FIRST READING: Iranian-Canadian activist threatened with criminal charges for posts

Goldie Ghamari told she faced possible jail time for encouraging Iranian mosques to be bombed

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FIRST READING: Iranian-Canadian activist threatened with criminal charges for posts Back to video

One of Canada’s most prominent Iranian activists has been threatened with criminal charges for suggesting that Iranian mosques should be destroyed for being “hubs of terrorism.”

“Mosques in occupied Iran are hubs of terrorism. Burn them down. Bomb them,” reads a since-deleted post on X from Goldie Ghamari, a former MLA in the government of Ontario premier Doug Ford.

Ghamari’s post was issued shortly after the start of the U.S.-Israel bombing campaign on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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On a subsequent post on Wednesday, Ghamari said she had been contacted by Ottawa Police and “told if I don’t delete my X posts where I say Mosques in Occupied Iran are hubs of terrorism and should be bombed, I would be charged under the Criminal Code of Canada.”

“So I deleted my posts,” she added, before including a video showing what appears to be an IRGC rally within a mosque.

I had a call with @OttawaPolice today. I was told if I don't delete my X posts where I say Mosques in Occupied Iran are hubs of terrorism and should be bombed, I would be charged under the Criminal Code of Canada.So I deleted my posts.Meanwhile, Mosques in Occupied Iran: pic.twitter.com/TAL1z1Pg0i— Goldie Ghamari | گلسا قمری 🇮🇷 (@gghamari) April 8, 2026

I had a call with @OttawaPolice today. I was told if I don't delete my X posts where I say Mosques in Occupied Iran are hubs of terrorism and should be bombed, I would be charged under the Criminal Code of Canada.So I deleted my posts.Meanwhile, Mosques in Occupied Iran: pic.twitter.com/TAL1z1Pg0i

The Ottawa Police confirmed to National Post that such an exchange had taken place, and that Ghamari had been presented with possible charges under Section 319 of the Criminal Code.

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The section includes the crimes of “public incitement of hatred” and “wilful promotion of hatred,” both of which can incur prison terms of up to two years.

Ghamari’s family moved to Canada from Iran when she was a child. In recent months, as the Islamic Republic has been roiled by mass protests and then an all-out military assault, Ghamari has emerged as one of the most prominent English-speaking opponents of the regime.

Her YouTube channel on Iranian affairs has 200,000 subscribers, and she is a regular guest on U.S. cable news and the online show Piers Morgan Uncensored.

Shortly after one such appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Ghamari was targeted by an assassination threat sent from the email address Handala_Team@outlook.com.

It was allegedly sent by the “Handala Hack team,” a group identifying itself as “loyal followers of the supreme leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei.”

Ghamari was told that she was subject to a $250,000 bounty to be collected by operatives of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, a Mexican drug cartel with a presence in Canada. The cartel was added to Canada’s official list of terror entities last year, with the Government of Canada noting they were active in “drug dealing, prostitution, extortion, kidnapping, and assassination.”

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Also included in the emailed threat was Elica Le Bon, a Los Angeles-based Iranian-American dissident who has similarly called for the toppling of the Islamic Republic.

“Both of you will be executed soon, and we have offered a reward of $250,000 for the operatives who kills and beheads both of you,” it read.

Ghamari filed a police report with local authorities, and told the Jerusalem Post she had been assured that police were taking it “very seriously.”

But it was ultimately U.S. officials who took action.

Just two weeks after Ghamari received the threat, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had shut down four web domains with links to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Included was Handala-Hack.to, the website on which Ghamari’s $250,000 beheading bounty had been posted.

“This FBI will hunt down every actor behind these cowardly death threats and cyberattacks and will bring the full force of American law enforcement down on them,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a March 19 statement.

In just the last few weeks, Canada has been subject to two suspicious deaths with potential political motivations.

On March 3, Nancy Grewal was killed in a stabbing attack at her Windsor, Ont. home. Grewal had been a vocal opponent of the Khalistani movement, a Sikh separatist campaign that has been linked to multiple acts of violence in Canada, including the 1985 Air India bombing.

Just three days later, authorities in B.C. would find the body of Masood Masjoody, an Iranian-Canadian math professor with a record of public criticism of the Iranian regime. Most notably, Masjoody had alleged that fellow academics at SFU were potentially doing military research for Tehran.

On March 14, the Burnaby RCMP charged two individuals in connection with Masjoody’s death.

Mehdi Ahmadzadeh Razavi, 48, and  Arezou Soltani, 45, are facing charges of first-degree murder but police have not disclosed the alleged motive.

Destroyed mosques were reportedly a central feature of a wave of Iranian public uprisings that occurred earlier this year, before being brutally put down by the Islamic Republic. Tehran’s mayor told state television that mosques had been burned by demonstrators, The New York Times reported. Ghamari’s own Instragram includes a video of demonstrators chanting “Iran” near a blazing Tehran mosque.

Iranian officials cited the mosque burnings as evidence of the need to crush the demonstrations, according to a report in Iran International, which is based in London, U.K. At the same time, regime officials have told Iranian state media about mosques serving a dual purpose as both places of worship and military hubs for the regime. The Basij, a militia force that operates within the Iranian Revolution Guard Corps, operates almost entirely out of mosques.

Iran International cited an Iranian media broadcast claiming that “79 per cent of Basij resistance bases are located in mosques.”

That same report would note that Ghamari wasn’t the only Iranian expat to associate mosques with the repression of the Islamic regime. After one Tehran mosque was burned by demonstrators, its destruction was cheered by Darya Safai, an Iranian-born member of the Belgian parliament. Safai wrote on X “for forty-seven years, its minarets echoed with ‘Allahu Akbar,’ and in that name, Iranian women and men were chained, silenced and broken.”

The NDP traditionally differs from the other major federal parties in that it doesn’t usually get any international press coverage.

The Liberals and Conservatives are routinely able to get their leaders on European and U.S. media, and even the Bloc Québécois will score the occasional mention in a foreign magazine article about Quebec separatism.

But Canada’s socialist third party rarely does anything worthy of foreign notice.

But twice in the last two weeks, an action by the federal NDP has spurred a flurry of viral social media posts and coverage in foreign media.

The first was a series of video segments from the NDP’s Winnipeg AGM in which delegates can be seen bickering over “equity cards”; literal cards that mete out priority access based on the holder’s various racial or sexual identities.

And then, just this week, it was a press conference in which NDP MP Leah Gazan condemned the Carney government’s failure to fund “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+.”

Just one video of the delivery posted online by a British social media influencer has garnered more than 63 million views as of Thursday.

“MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+”The Canadian government just dropped this absolute monstrosity (and no, it isn’t satire). pic.twitter.com/xY9R2W4kVz— Samantha Smith (@SamanthaTaghoy) April 9, 2026

“MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+”The Canadian government just dropped this absolute monstrosity (and no, it isn’t satire). pic.twitter.com/xY9R2W4kVz

The string of letters is the updated version of what used to be cited as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW). Although the term was coined to point to a very specific crisis of Indigenous women being murdered at outsized rates, activists have expanded the acronym to include every conceivable sexual and trans identity in addition to women, including “two spirit” (2S) and “questioning” (the second Q).

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

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