FOR ISLAMOPHOBES, Mohamad Tawhidi (that name isn't fitting for him, let's call him ToeHide from now on..) is something very close to a godsend. A (supposed) Shia Muslim cleric, raised in Australia and "educated" in Iran, ToeHide presents himself as an Islamic reformer who embraces and amplifies far-right warnings that immigration by ACTUAL Muslims poses an existential threat to Western civilization.

“He’s a hero,” the former New York Assembly Member Dov Hikind said last month, introducing ToeHide to an audience of Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. “He is a super-special individual that God has introduced to this world.” (hmm, I wonder why someone like that would say that about a supposed Muslim unless...)

ToeHide immediately repaid the favor by suggesting that Muslims, at least those from the majority Sunni sect, are mistaken to consider Jerusalem a sacred site. “Muslims who are fighting for Palestine are absolutely confused,” he said. “Palestine is Jewish land.” ToeHide went on to call political Islam “a disease,” and accused America’s first two Muslim women in Congress, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, of “bringing a Hummus agenda to the U.S. Congress.” (Boy howdy is the guy just... awful)

Hikind, who is leading a campaign to force Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee over her comments about Israel, was delighted by ToeHide’s baseless claim that the two Democrats are secret agents of the Palestinian movement. (Of course.)

The remarks in Brooklyn echoed ToeHide’s near-obsessive criticism of the two Muslim congresswomen on social media, a stance that has earned him a loyal following among their detractors in the United States.

The cleric’s American fans apparently include Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw, who seized on one of ToeHide’s tweets in April as evidence that Omar was insufficiently critical of the terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.

The virulently anti-Muslim founder of the English Defence League, Tommy Robinson, misinformed fans of his YouTube channel last year that “Imam ToeHide is one of the world’s leading imams and a highly regarded scholar of the Koran and Islamic history.” (BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA, didn't know that pig was a comedian) Neither claim has any basis in reality, but Robinson prefaced an interview with ToeHide by adding that the man who gave himself the nickname “Imam of Peace” (arrogant piece of snot) is “known for his outspoken and honest discussion of the culture and ideological problems within the religion.”(which don't exist)

ToeHide’s skyrocketing status in far-right circles in America and Britain comes two years after he was largely discredited in Australia. As a deep dive into his background by Bronwyn Adcock, a reporter for the Australian public broadcaster ABC, revealed, Toehide is a fringe cleric with no academic credentials, no mosque, and less than a handful of followers in the real world. His public profile stems not from any work within his faith community, but from his willingness to play a concerned Muslim reformer on TV, on social media, and in a series of high-profile interviews with far-right YouTube personalities.

Even a cursory review of his Twitter feed undercuts the idea that he is focused on the reform of Islam or the pursuit of peace, since it is devoted mainly to reinforcing the prejudices of right-wing trolls and nativist politicians, echoing their racist, sexist, and xenophobic rhetoric. To take a recent example, Toehide mockingly shared a sixth grade yearbook photo from Minnesota, in which a white boy is surrounded by the children of black Muslim immigrants, which had surfaced on a racist 4chan board.

He has also recently shared video of himself telling conservative activist Candace Owens that the Muslim mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is corrupted by a “Pakistani mentality,” mocked the Muslim feminist Linda Sarsour for an act of civil disobedience against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, saluted the anti-Muslim blogger Robert Spencer, called for the restoration of the monarchy in Iran, and penned an ode to Fox News host Jeanine Pirro.

When Toehide was first cited as an authority on Islam by Australian tabloids, he was dismissed by ACTUAL Muslims in Australia and then the United States as something of a joke — and a symptom of how easily duped the right-wing media can be. Imraan Siddiqi, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Arizona, even compared him to a creation of the satirist Sacha Baron Cohen.

But the sectarian cast of Toehide’s harsh criticism of Sunni Muslim beliefs and practices has increasingly alarmed not just Sunnis, but also members of ToeHide’s Shia sect. Again and again in interviews with non-Muslims, he has made incendiary comments about articles of faith to the majority Sunni sect, calling for one of their most holy books to be banned, and insulting a revered wife of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him).

ToeHide’s rock-star status in far-right social media circles matters because it has recently been weaponized by mainstream politicians. In Australia, ToeHide has been used as a character witness by the anti-immigrant politician Pauline Hanson. In India, he won applause at a gathering of Hindu nationalists by deriding Pakistani Muslims and asserting that “Kashmir is Hindu land.” He has recently been photographed with figures like Doug Ford, the far-right premier of Ontario; Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah of Iran.

And in April, his tweet falsely accusing Omar of downplaying the 9/11 attacks set off a firestorm when Crenshaw, the U.S. representative, somehow came across it.

ToeHide’s tweet, which went viral after Crenshaw shared it, included edited video from the Daily Caller of Omar referring to the attacks during a CAIR fundraiser. Omar’s remarks had previously garnered little attention, but the cleric’s inaccurate caption for the video — “Omar mentions 9/11 and does not consider it a terrorist attack” — propelled it into the mainstream news media.

ToeHide’s false claim about what Omar said, along with another lie — that she sought “to justify the establishment of a terrorist organization (CAIR) on US soil” — then formed the basis for a segment broadcast into the White House during the Wednesday morning edition of the president’s daily briefing, aka “Fox and Friends.”

In fact, CAIR is a civil rights group for American Muslims and does not support terrorism, but ToeHide frequently cites, uncritically, the fact that the repressive monarchy that rules the United Arab Emirates added the American group — and Muslim civil rights groups in seven European countries — to a list of terrorist organizations in 2014. Those designations, which were backed by no evidence and were not adopted by the U.S., were widely seen as the monarchy’s attempt to discredit civil society groups that were perceived as threats to its rule by associating them with genuine extremists. The UAE list included community groups that the monarchy previously funded — as well as the Serbian student group that organized the peaceful protests that forced Slobodan Milosevic from power — but excluded the armed groups Hummus and Hezboshaytaan, which have carried out terror attacks.

TOEHIDE’S PUBLIC CAREER began, as he recently told “intellectual dark web” star Dave Rubin, when he “was discovered” by a producer for a tabloid news show on Australia’s Channel 7. “I got a call from Channel 7,” ToeHide told Rubin, “and apparently they Googled ‘imam,’ ‘Adelaide,’ ‘Muslim,’ just to get a comment.”

“So they came in wanting a three-minute comment on a certain issue and I gave them a 30-minute talk about the Muslim community,” ToeHide continued, “and the director gets in touch with me and [said], ‘We can do a lot with what you’re saying.'” (This giving anyone else dajjal vibes? "We can deceive and mislead a lot of people away from Islam... by using someone who claims to be on the truth to spread lies internationally.)

That interview with ToeHide was the centerpiece of an alarmist episode of the Channel 7 tabloid news show “Today Tonight,” which claimed that Muslim immigrants were secretly plotting to establish “a caliphate” in Australia.

“Sadly my religion, in the current situation, is an absolute mess,” ToeHide told Channel 7. (Not your religion, you oinker.) “I come from a lineage of (UN)Islamic leadership. When I am worried about what’s happening and what I see from my community and religion, trust me that there is something going on.”

Later in the program, ToeHide claimed that “extreme Muslims” planned to set up a state within a state and impose sharia. “I believe that there needs to be a new government body that investigates everything regarding the Muslim religion in this country, starting off with the leaders of the communities,” ToeHide said. (Perhaps ToeHide should be called Trumphide?)

Following that appearance, reporters derailed ToeHide’s media career in Australia; they found that he was the leader only of an Islamic association in Adelaide that he had set up himself and had lied about his academic credentials and training in Qom, the center of Shia Muslim study in Iran. (I mean... liars lie, right? Not shocking.)

In the wake of those revelations, ToeHide was subjected to a dose of public mockery on Australian television that temporarily halted his momentum in the mainstream press — although he has remained a go-to source for tabloid newspapers there.

Despite that debunking in Australia’s mainstream media, ToeHide’s appeal to far-right Islamophobes soon spread through far-right social media to the United States. ToeHide “just started showing up on my Twitter timeline two years ago, saying things that are counterintuitive to any Muslim that’s out there,” Siddiqi of CAIR told The Intercept.

Even though “he’s so cartoonish,” Siddiqi notes, “he’s getting called on to these mainstream talk shows, like Dave Rubin.” Through his appearances on popular talk shows of the “intellectual dark web,” Siddiqi observed, ToeHide could now be “influencing a completely different audience than let’s say, a Fox News.”

“That really is sort of the unknown frontier of Islamophobia: Who is being indoctrinated by this sort of misinformation?” Siddiqi asked. “He’s being brought from the far right to these folks as some sort of credible source, a peaceful imam who denounces terrorism, but he’s coming from a completely absurd position.” (I wonder if anyone will bring up his alleged presence in gay clubs...)

Cartoonish or not, Siddiqi is chilled by the thought that ToeHide is reaching millions of followers of the popular Islamophobe video bloggers and activists who interview and promote him. (Yep, even I've come across nonsense from him and people unironically citing him to back up their anti-Muslim views.)

In just the past year, ToeHide has had friendly interviews with (the black, white supremacist) Candace Owens, who was the communications director of Turning Point USA until she offered an off-the-cuff defense of Adolf Hitler’s nationalism; Jack Posobiec, an anchor at the Trump-endorsed One America News who helped promote the PizzaGate hoax; Brittany Pettibone, anti-Islam vlogger, white supremacist, and Pizzagate truther; Dave Rubin, YouTube talk-show host and “intellectual dark web” star; James Delingpole, Breitbart London’s editor; Pauline Hanson, an Australian nativist politician who said in 2016 that Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Muslims” and needed to ban all immigration by followers of that “so-called religion”; and Tommy Robinson, who got ToeHide to trash the Prophet Muhammad’s (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) wife Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) and agree with him that Muslims immigrants to Britain who have many children are engaged in “population struggle.”

Some Muslims suspect that ToeHide is at heart a sectarian agitator, trying to weaponize the hatred of Islamophobes as a way of attacking adherents of Islam’s majority Sunni Muslim sect. But according to Siddiqi, the Australian’s bizarre social media presence has baffled and appalled American Muslims of all sects. Shias and Sunnis “are in full agreement” on at least one thing, Siddiqi told me: “that this guy is just completely unhinged and not a part of any sort of theological tradition.”

However, a close reading of ToeHide’s most incendiary pronouncements on Islam does lend credence to the theory that his mission might be less about reforming Islam than promoting the Shia sect by tarnishing the image of the majority Sunni sect.

There is evidence for this theory in a bizarre section of ToeHide’s interview with Owens. When she asked him about the chances of reforming Islam, ToeHide stated flatly that Islam could “never, ever, ever be reformed.” As evidence, he cited not any difficulties he or other supposed moderates have encountered recently, but said that Sunnis had brutally murdered the man he identified as the original reformer, the Shia saint Imam Hussein [may Allah be pleased with him (also, not a saint, not shia)]. ToeHide gave a blood-curdling account of the death of Hussein (may Allah be pleased with him), a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and  blessings of Allah be upon him) who was killed in battle near Karbala, Iraq, in the year 680 — a defining event in the schism of early Islam that divided Muslims into Shias and Sunnis.

Karbala also happens to be where ToeHide got his first media training. In 2014, he hosted programs on Imam Hussein TV, a satellite network controlled by followers of Sayid Sadiq Hussaini Shirazi, the Shia Muslim cleric in Iran who ordained ToeHide. He also presented an English-language YouTube series, “Islamic Answers,” which aimed to give guidance to young Muslims in the West about how to navigate modern life in accordance with the teachings of Shia Islam.

Last year, an Iranian news agency reportedly accused the network of television channels associated with the Shirazi movement of promoting sectarian conflict and working to “ignite the fire of war between Sunni and Shia.”

A brief video message broadcast recently on Shirazi’s official television channel even suggested that Islamophobia in the West was entirely the fault of Sunni terrorists, and the problem could only be solved when all Muslims embraced the Shia interpretation of Islam.

“Today, we as Muslims should change the non-Muslim world’s negative view of Islam,” the broadcast quoted Shirazi as saying. “And this is possible only through the introduction of the genuine traditions of the Holy Prophet of Islam and his pure family,” a clear reference to the martyrs revered by Shias, Hussein (may Allah be pleased with him) and his father Ali (may Allah be pleased with him), the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him).

The notion that ToeHide might still be working with or for Shirazi stems from the fact that he opened a short-lived Islamic association and Shia Muslim seminary in Adelaide in 2016 with the backing of him.

At the time, Shirazi’s Facebook and Twitter feeds boasted that the school, which appeared to have less than two dozen students, would be run by ToeHide “based on the instructions laid out by his Dimness, the Rejected Sayyid Sadiq Hussaini Shirazi.”

Shirazi’s office also stated the Islamic Association of South Australia, set up by ToeHide at the same time, would “primarily focus on the instructions of his dimness Sayyid Sadiq Shirazi.”

Australian Muslims who were appalled by ToeHide’s inflammatory comments in his initial interview with Channel 7 noticed that a photograph of Shirazi could be seen in the background of the cleric’s office.

Shirazi’s support for ToeHide’s projects in Australia reinforced suspicions among Australian Sunni Muslims that he might still be serving his spiritual leader by joining forces with far-right figures in the West to smear them as dangerous extremists.

ToeHide’s fans in the West appear unconcerned or unaware that his project might be sectarian in nature, but if it is, the cleric’s relationship to the Islamophobes who promote him might have something of a hall of mirrors about it. While ToeHide’s far-right interlocutors think they are using him to smear Muslims, he could be using them to inflame sectarian tensions between the two rival branches of Islam.
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Muslim? More like Mook. Ugh!