A deep dive into how an anti-Islam influencer and CDU member received €390,000 of Berlin public funding to form a think tank developing AI tools to surveil criticism of Israel on social media.
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For an in-depth look at the Berlin antisemitism funding scandal, see our recent article:
For a long read about Berlin cultural repression, see our October 2025 article:
The Berlin anti-antisemitism funding affair has caused outrage since the story broke in early November of last year. As Berlin cut tens of millions from its cultural budget, €20 million in public funding was allocated to „antisemitism prevention,“ with politicians directly influencing jury nominations and the selection of funded projects, in breach of regulations and possibly also the law. Much public scrutiny is now focused on the direct allocation of €3.4 million from an „action fund“ by Joe Chialo’s administration to various „projects of special political importance,” which is now facing both a parliamentary inquiry committee and an audit by Berlin’s audit court. It’s recently been revealed that these projects were vetted directly by the Israeli embassy in Berlin.
Zera Institute
One beneficiary of the action fund is particularly interesting: Zera Institute, a self-styled „culture think tank against antisemitism,“ which received €390,000 and was founded only shortly before the funding was made available. Zera Institute is headed by the Israeli music producer Mark Pinhasov and Maral Salmassi, whose bio describes her as the daughter of a Shah-era Iranian diplomat to Israel, and who reinvented herself in late 2023 as an aggressively anti-Islam influencer.
Previously an obscure musician and techno DJ, Salmassi first gained notoriety in late 2024 when Elon Musk retweeted a conspiracy theory Tiktok video of hers, in which she alleged that the perpetrator of a deadly rampage at a Christmas market in Magdeburg was not, in fact, a psychologically troubled anti-Muslim activist and fan of the AfD, but rather a Muslim who had spent years elaborately pretending to be anti-Muslim. In 2025, she joined the board of the CDU Lichterfelde alongside Christian Goiny—a key figure in the scandal along with his fellow parliamentarian Dirk Stettner—whose emails are among released documents revealing how political pressure was used to attain public funding for their pet projects. The Zera Institute’s team also includes researchers (none of whom appear to be based in Berlin) involved in the Decoding Antisemitism project, which develops AI tools to surveil social media comments for signs of what they consider to be „implicit“ or „hidden“ antisemitism.
Maral Salmassi: Fueling Racial Hatred
Now propelled by a generous chunk of public funding via the Zera Institute, Salmassi’s far-right rhetoric includes blaming Islam for „the death of European identity,“ labeling the ICC case against Israel „A Modern Dreyfus Trial,“ praising Trump’s foreign policy, claiming PoC left politicians are „puppets of a new moral order“ and comparing them to Hitler and Khomeini, or articles such as „Why Islam Cannot Be Reformed—And Why It Threatens Civilization.“ In 2024, Salmassi took to the anti-trans podcast „You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist“ to claim that pro-Palestine queers would „ironically be thrown off the next tallest building if they stepped foot in Gaza or the West Bank,“ a popular myth among hasbarists that does not even square with Israel’s own assessment of LGBTQ+ rights in Palestine.
In Salmassi’s hyperbolic parallel reality, even moderate liberal institutions are painted as antisemitic destroyers of „civilization“: the UN is „the Engine of a Modern Caliphate,“ Israeli human rights org B’Tselem is part of „sadistic inquisition“ and „Holocaust inversion,“ and a Guardian documentary about Israeli opinions on Gaza is „Der Stürmer in 4K“ and „blood libel with a new soundtrack.“ This is the ideological perspective that gave birth to the Zera Institute.
Bringing Anti-Palestinian Racism and Antisemitism Together
Salmassi’s social media is peppered with extremely dehumanizing language about Palestinians, claiming that those resisting genocide in Gaza „forfeited their humanity long ago,“ and are „starving for the camera,“ which amounts to „blood libel.“ In her carefully scripted talking head videos she takes particular glee in denouncing people in solidarity with Palestine as „Palli Orcs,“ „woke orc hoards,“ or „woke Ayatollah,“ and praising the Israeli force’s female warriors in contrast to intersectional, aka „woke“ feminists whom she rants against while sporting a shirt featuring alt-right hate symbol Pepe the Frog. She often shares content from figures like Douglas Murray and Lauren Southern who espouse positions sympathetic to white nationalism. Her diatribes range from „I am convinced—beyond doubt—that Islam has become the most dangerous ideology of our time,“ to lamenting Europe’s „decades of importing tribal, theocratic, and antisemitic ideologies,“ and „The problem with the Palestinians is their culture of hate and death.“
In her unflinching drive for escalating hot takes in the attention economy, Salmassi has also taken to promoting antisemitic tropes, for instance, when she stated in a February 7, 2025 tweet that „Soros is and has always been a parasite.“ The „always has been“ is particularly sinister, since Soros survived the Holocaust as a child in Hungary. Salmassi has also repeatedly attacked those „opportunistic traitors“ she considers „token Jews„—scholars such as Amos Goldberg, Raz Segal, and Omri Boehm, who do not concur with her denialist view of the Gaza Genocide. On these Holocaust scholars, she writes: „It’s about pathologized hatred masked as scholarship, and these ‚activist-scholars‘ are nothing more than academic foot soldiers giving propaganda a PhD,“ a statement that appears to more accurately describe her own trajectory and that of the Zera Institute, if it weren’t for the detail that almost all the Zera staff have no academic record or credibility.
Her antisemitic statements are highly troubling and have provoked consternation even from within her own political party, making a glaring double standard apparent: while the dozens of racist, dehumanizing statements she’s made against Palestinians and Muslims have hardly merited comment from press or politicians in the context of Zera Institute’s role in the funding scandal, her antisemitic statements are scandalized and criticized. Dehumanization is seemingly a relative concept for much of German society. The fact that the Zera Institute—and with it, such inflammatory, divisive positions as Salmassi’s—is funded by the Berlin „Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion“ is nothing short of Orwellian… and it gets even scarier.
The „Women Life Freedom“-to-Hasbarist Influencer Pipeline
Salmassi’s social media brand of aggressive Iranian monarchist Zionism is a relatively new passion. While her posts have often mentioned women’s rights in Iran over the last years (not to mention a variety of unsavory conspiracy theories), her social media following skyrocketed from under 2,000 in 2023 to over 80,000 on X and Instagram once she leaned hard into promoting pro-Israel talking points.
Her trajectory mirrors a growing trend of influencers, sometimes actively recruited and remunerated, jumping on the hasbara bandwagon as it proves to be „good for business.“ While there is no direct evidence Salmassi has been paid other than via the Zera Institute, her rise is reminiscent of the Persian influencer „Elica Le Bon“, who gradually moved through the „Women Life Freedom“-to-hasbarist pipeline.
Mark Pinhasov’s Many „Freshly Founded“ Nonprofit Orgs
While the online presence of Zera co-founder Mark Pinhasov does not match Salmassi’s level of inflammatory rhetoric, his entanglement in the scandal is noteworthy. He managed to profit from funding for not one but three of the twelve total projects from the action fund for his „freshly founded nonprofit organisations.“ Alongside Zera Institute, his Mosaik G.C.B. gUG is also receiving €89,981.75; additionally, he sits on the board of Future Narrative Fund e. V., which was officially registered only in late 2025, mere days before the Tagesspiegel article broke the story of the latest scandal, and received €39,000 as a project of the real estate company FaBlhaft GmbH. This brings the total to €518,981.75 rewarded to projects with Pinhasov at the helm.
Years ago, Pinhasov also co-founded Avihu Pinhasov, „one of Israel’s best-selling music acts,“ which made headlines in late 2023 when video footage went viral of a performance for shirtless, machine-gun toting Israeli soldiers freshly back from Gaza. The footage, featuring Avihu riding in on a military bulldozer holding an Israeli flag, generated so much controversy that several soldiers were disciplined. It is not implied that Mark Pinhasov himself was present, but the incident generated a celebratory article in Welt by Mirna Funk who attempted to use the incident to whitewash the image of the Givati Brigade, several members of which are now facing war crime allegations.
Expertise in Antisemitism Prevention?
A report by Der Spiegel in November found that the bulk of Zera Institute’s team listed on its fresh website, including its DJ founders, had no credible expertise on antisemitism. According to Der Spiegel, an individual initially listed on their website as an „expert in antisemitism prevention“ appeared to be an ex-fashion model. As a result of this bad press, her role on the website was changed to „data analyst.“ Other personnel changes have also occurred since November, with the Zera Institute CEO, professional hypnotherapist Boriana Jürgens-Rosenmüller, now removed from the website completely [previous website version from November 6, 2025 archived here].
Following further reporting on the funding scandal, including on Salmassi’s antisemitic statements, several of Zera’s supporters have abandoned the institute. Sigmount Königsberg, the antisemitism commissioner of the Jewish Community of Berlin, confirmed his resignation from the Institute’s expert council on February 13, 2026. Königsberg should have long been well aware of Salmassi’s high-profile controversial statements, and has made controversial statements himself, relativizing the Holocaust by likening Berlin in 2023 to „Nazi times.“
Königsberg’s vacant spot on the Zera Institute advisory board alongside Seyran Ateş, Hudhaifa Al-Mashhadani, and Ali Ertan was filled the following week by Andreas Büttner, Germany’s most zealous pro-Israel advocate and the state of Brandenburg’s antisemitism commissioner. It is worth remembering that Andreas Büttner has no formal qualifications or expertise in the issue of antisemitism. He has however distinguished himself over the years as a more or less loyal party soldier, first for the CDU, then the FDP, and finally as a member of Die Linke. In May 2025, Andreas Büttner announced that Zera Institute’s Matthias Becker will join his own team as a research advisor.
Zera Institute has proven to be an unrelenting magnet for controversy: just this week the taz has reported that Hudhaifa Al-Mashhadani of the advisory board is under police investigation for allegedly falsely claiming that there was an “assassination attempt” on his life. He had garnered wide press coverage in November when he alleged that a person in a keffiyeh tried to push him onto the subway tracks at Rathaus Neukölln and then struck him in the head. taz reports that video footage from Berlin’s transit authority BVG does not show a physical attack. He further told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that he had a phone call with Minister-President of Bavaria Markus Söder about the incident and recounted that Söder invited him to come to Bavaria to „fight Islamists“ there. Söder’s office informed SZ that this call did not take place. Further doubts are raised in the taz article about Al-Mashhadani’s claims to several academic degrees in Iraq and the USA, which are unable to be verified.
Facing undesired press interest and criticism, both Zera Institute and Salmassi have issued statements, blaming „radical left journalists“ at Der Spiegel and „racist“ and „sexist“ attacks on Salmassi rooted in „white supremacy“ since the focus of the reporting was more on her, the face of the institute, than on Pinhasov or other white male members of the team. Nevertheless, Zera Institute does involve what appears to be at least one accredited expert in antisemitism. In the last weeks, under increasing pressure to prove how it spent €390,000, Zera Institute has finally begun releasing the results of its research studies.
Decoding „Decoding Antisemitism’s“ Pro-Israel Bias
The Zera Institute’s research wing is led by the German academic Matthias J. Becker, now based at New York University and formerly of the TU Berlin’s Centre for Research on Antisemitism. After October 7, Becker claimed he had to flee France for Israel due to the increase in anti-genocide protests in Paris. His research interest for Zera Institute appears to be closely linked with the Decoding Antisemitism project at the TU Berlin which Becker led from 2019 to 2025. Over the years Becker has held research roles at many institutions and has been a welcome guest speaker predominantly at what can be most accurately described as pro-Israel think tanks and organisations which misuse the charge of antisemitism to defend Israel’s crimes. For example, Becker presented his Decoding Antisemitism project to the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), an organization founded in 2004 at Tel Aviv University, funded by the Israeli government with at least $1.7 million since 2018, and with prominent advisers on its board such as former Likud minister Natan Sharansky and, until 2019, Alan Dershowitz of Epstein files fame. Becker’s NYU bio claims „he advises governmental bodies, tech companies, and international organizations—including the U.S. State Department, the European Commission, and META—across Europe, North America, and Israel.“
In his many public lectures, Becker often displays a Manichean worldview that seems to deliberately blur the lines between real antisemitism—such as Holocaust denialism, for example—and critiques of Israel’s policies, such as charges of apartheid or genocide. Indeed, Becker’s writings betray a thinking that appears unable to fathom that Palestinians or those in solidarity with their resistance to Israeli violence could be motivated by anything other than antisemitism. Every negative utterance against Israel is only seen as evidence of a vague and impossible to prove (or disprove) „implicit“ antisemitism.
A May 2025 article in Jacobin describes this approach and the Decoding Antisemitism project in detail concluding, „[Decoding Antisemitism] is, to date, the most authoritarian attempt to use antisemitism scholarship to erase from the public domain not only uncomfortable opposition to Israel but millions of Palestinian voices.“ This reading stems from Becker’s highly ideologically driven approach to the data collection and analysis he and his colleagues undertook for the Decoding Antisemitism project. This approach appears to be largely focused on defending Israel’s actions and policies through charges of antisemitism. Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the glossary published alongside the project. Here, Becker and his colleagues draw on age-old antisemitic tropes and forcefully press them into the moulds of justified critiques of Israel to brand them as antisemitic, a technique embodied in Salmassi’s online posts.
Mentions of internationally accepted and proven attacks on civilians and the killing of children are decried as blood libel and hence declared antisemitic. To avoid allegedly antisemitic language, the killing of children should be described in the passive voice instead, removing agency and responsibility from the Israeli military. Describing Israel as a “bully,” ascribing it the sole responsibility for the oppression of Palestinians, or referring to its system of segregation as apartheid is also considered a form of antisemitism—why, exactly, remains a mystery. Becker’s approach to researching antisemitism and in turn that of the Zera Institute, whose research he leads, does not seem to be grounded in a critical understanding of antisemitism at all but is instead build on the foundations of pro-Israel advocacy, which sees the left and its critiques of Israeli colonial practices as the main driver of antisemitism.
Authoritarian Staatsräson Ideology Meets AI
Decoding Antisemitism is what Staatsräson looks like when taken to its logical end. Its methodology reflects the atmosphere of „philosemitic McCarthyism“ common in Germany. Exoticizing or essentializing Jews–for example, claiming that they, unlike all other humans, are not capable of committing genocide or other evils–is a form of othering, of discrimination. Further, this type of philosemitism is almost always conditional on the Jews in question being pro-Israel, and sometimes even that is not enough.
Muddying the waters of discourse around Palestine by dangling the threat of „implicit“ or „hidden antisemitism“ accusations over anyone who engages in it with an opinion that strays from state-sanctioned support of war crimes inevitably leads to exactly what has transpired: the vast majority of people remain silent out of fear; press releases from the Israeli military are unquestioningly regurgitated by the Western media; and those expressing solidarity with Palestine are defunded, cancelled, arrested, or fired. Considering that Becker has made a career of monitoring and interpreting the speculative intentions of user comments online, one wonders what he makes of the vitriolic comment sections on his colleague Salmassi’s blog and social media posts (some of which have now been hidden).
The extreme danger of ideological and speculative use of AI has already been on deadly display in the Gaza Genocide in which Israeli intelligence systems developed by Unit 8200 like „Lavender“ and „Where’s Daddy?“ have been extensively used to target supposed Hamas operatives in their homes. Not only did these systems have a known error rate of around 10%, they also sometimes targeted very low-level civil servants. Targets were bombed along with their entire families, and everyone in their apartment buildings, often without human confirmation of the AI analysis.
While Decoding Antisemitism may seem benign in comparison to these warfare uses of AI, laws in Germany are changing fast. In Berlin, the recent ASOG amendments that came into force in December 2025 now allow police to deploy AI-supported video surveillance in public spaces, use predictive analytics systems that pool large volumes of police and administrative data, and scrape images from social media to train facial recognition systems, even if the targets are not formally under investigation. They are also now allowed to secretly break into homes to install surveillance malware on devices. Meanwhile, German police officers have been actively deployed in the Palestinian territories, in line with years of cooperation between German police forces and the Israeli state. In early December 2025, Berlin’s police chief traveled to Tel Aviv along with representatives from every German state’s police force to attend a conference with twelve Israeli arms manufacturers. Among the topics discussed for cooperation was „a stricter approach against criticism of Israel on social media.“
Questionable Research
A newly released 106-page report by Zera Institute called „Extremism and Threats to Liberal Democracy – Online Radicalization, Antisemitism & AI,“ which was published in English only, has all of the hallmarks of Decoding Antisemitism. It also contains data analysis from the May 2025 „Digital Aftermath of the Washington, D.C. Hate Crime,“ yet this data appears to be collected two months before Zera Institute’s funding was approved in July 2025.
In January 2026, under great scrutiny in Berlin over its funding, Zera Institute listed four new researchers on its website, three of whom are from the Decoding Antisemitism project: Oksana Stanevich, Marcus Scheiber, and Benjamin C. Rouda, only one of whom appears to be based in Germany. If Becker lives between Israel and the US, and the Director of Research at Zera, Benjamin Folit-Weinberg, is based at Ohio State University where he teaches ancient Greek classics (which is obviously unrelated to antisemitism research), one wonders why Berlin is so generously funding a research group not even based in Germany and which doesn’t publish their studies for a German-speaking audience.
The new report focuses on the „AI“ analysis of social media comments with four case studies: the Charlie Kirk Assassination, the Capital Jewish Museum Shooting in Washington, Friedrich Merz’s anti-immigrant comments on the „cityscape,“ and two social media posts by the Berlin-based activist and influencer Tarek Baé. The first two cases are clearly coming from a US-based focus, also focusing on US influencers barely known in Berlin. The majority of the report’s relevance to Berlin culture is a stretch and reads like existing research by Decoding Antisemitism that’s been shoe-horned into the Zera Institute report due to its funding framework.
In its „Micro-Level Analysis,“ Zera Institute claims that a whopping 23 percent of comments were antisemitic below an Instagram post by Baé criticizing Berlin’s projection of the Israeli flag onto the Brandenburg Gate on October 7, 2025, as the genocide raged in Gaza. However, a closer look shows that the top five most common categories of antisemitism on the post, according to the Becker’s and Folit-Weinberg’s classifications, were „Blood Libel Accusations, Genocide Accusations, Conspiracy Narratives, Holocaust Distortion, and Servility Media Narratives.“ While there may be evidence of some actual antisemitism in the comment section, by Zera’s criteria, explicit or borderline antisemitic remarks are lumped in with those that assert Israel is intentionally killing children, or that acknowledged it is committing genocide in Gaza and that the German state and media are complicit. Denial of these facts by Becker and Zera Institute points to the tragic and dangerous prevalence of Nakba denial in Germany, and a lack of a theoretical framework to understand genocides as something other than exceptional „ruptures of civilization,“ but a regularly occurring horror across history to which no society is indefinitely immune to committing.
A Surveillance Funding Pitch
The methodology of the new Zera Institute report states that „It does not engage in intervention, reporting, moderation, or law enforcement activity … The analysis does not produce actionable intelligence about specific individuals or imminent threats and does not claim causal attribution between online discourse and offline violence.“ Yet in Part 2 of the report, „Policy Implications & Applications,“ the purpose of the program becomes clear. Here they propose „Longitudinal cross-platform tracking of individual user discourse evolution,“ or in non-jargon: surveillance. The report states that surveillance could „support exposure-based risk models relevant to early-warning systems, education and prevention, and AI-assisted differentiation between organic radicalization and automated behavior,“ or, in short, their algorithms could flag risk cases according to chosen criteria, essentially using AI to detect proverbial „thoughtcrimes.“
The report continues with what is basically a funding pitch to state actors: „Security agencies increasingly recognize that violent acts rarely emerge without prior online signaling. Yet they lack reliable methods to distinguish [warning signs] …“ The implication is clearly that Matthias Becker and co. will provide the solution: „targeted investment in hypothesis-driven research can materially advance understanding of where and when intervention is most effective, generating empirical findings that directly inform subsequent policy, platform governance, and security decision-making.“ Zera Institute and Decoding Antisemitism appear to bring us one step closer to what was once a dystopian, science-fiction premise like that of the film Minority Report in which a „precrime“ unit uses esoteric, advanced technology to nab supposed would-be criminals.
Becker and his project reflect a new level of Staatsräson extremism, designing a system with public and private money pouring in from many directions to develop tools to surveil, analyze, and potentially deliver consequences to those individuals who threaten the diehard pro-Israel ideology Becker shares. Israel has boosted its budget for hasbara by twenty times of what it was before October 7, 2023. With estimates ranging from $150–700 million, the field is becoming increasingly lucrative as some call to „set up a grand government hasbara directorate or fiefdom.“ Aggressive pro-Israel mass-doxxing projects like Canary Mission and Kahanist extremists like Betar US are already using AI to target activists who speak out for Palestine. The new technology Becker and his team want to develop, at the expense of Berlin taxpayers, will make their task of serving the government lists of people to arrest and deport that much easier.
FragDenStaat: Bombshell Report and Further Revelations
On January 22, 2026, the German freedom of information portal FragDenStaat released thousands of documents and emails related to the antisemitism funding scandal. The emails offer concrete evidence of CDU pressure on Sarah Wedl-Wilson and other staff to quickly approve the funding of their wishlist of projects, including Zera Institute. Wedl-Wilson obliged without hesitation. The FragDenStaat documents also reveal several initial founders of Zera Institute who were never listed on its website, and who may have dropped out of the project at an unknown date. At the time of its funding application, Zera was supposedly coordinated and managed by an unknown figure, the „analyst and consultant“ Roy Razon. Communications show correspondence between Razon and Senate staff, including Razon asserting on June 4, 2025, „After consulting with the CDU parliamentary group, we were informed that the 10 percent reduction is not planned. I therefore request that the application be reviewed and approved in full, as originally requested.“ This implies not only close connections with the CDU, but that the parliamentary group had authority to bend rules as they pleased to fully fund Zera rather than cover only the customary 90 percent, with 10 percent self-funded. No information can be found online about Roy Razon, but the documents show he shares the same mailing address as Salmassi’s Konsequent record label.
The FragDenStaat documents also reveal several initial founders of Zera Institute in its „Who We Are“ profile who were never listed on its website, and who may have dropped out of the project at an unknown date. Though names have been partially redacted in the dossier, we were able to establish their identities through quick online searches based on their listed bios: Micki Weinberg, founder of the Beverly Hills-based organization Shiur International, (example of Berlin event here) which has partnered on events with the pro-settlement group Lavi Olami; Thorsten Sommer, aka the anti-Deutsch „DJ Phonatic,“ whose social media following increased as he began his pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian content focus; and the pianist Ohad Ben-Ari, founder of ID Festival (Israelisch-Deutsches Festival). Ben-Ari’s other project „Breaking the Binary“ received €89,900 of the same anti-antisemitism funding, and has already come under scrutiny over the use of the funds in an article by Tagesspiegel.
The trove also includes a May 2025 email from a redacted address @cdu-fraktion.berlin.de demanding that Wedl-Wilson approve a CDU-assembled list of projects „today“, including one from Israel lobby group ELNET that had not even been submitted on time, as well as that of Zera Institute. The email specified: „The relevance and urgency [of funding Zera Institute] is clearly underscored by the pledged support from Israel and the US.“ The names and descriptions of Zera’s three cooperation partners are fully redacted—one wonders who these US and Israeli backers might be, especially considering Matthias Becker’s connections as an adviser to the US State Department and other governmental entities.
Intertwined Fates: Becker and Salmassi
While the eccentricity of the Zera Institute has drawn attention in the German press, few articles have reached an international audience. The pro-Israel bias of even the left-leaning German media entails that coverage of the scandal is focused on the CDU’s mishandling of money and party favors as opposed to any critique of the intention of the funding apparatus in the first place. As Germany continues to back Israel materially, financially, and diplomatically, perhaps the glaring hypocrisies of the Zera Institute scandal can open up some space for deeper soul-searching on German denial of and complicity in the Gaza Genocide.
Unleashing the type of AI-based surveillance technology being developed by Becker on the world, and training its algorithms with the dehumanizing ideology of Salmassi paints a dystopian future indeed. The career Matthias Becker has designed for himself around antisemitism is now forever tied to Maral Salmassi, the „state-sponsored hate preacher,“ as taz has referred to her. Their fates are bound together thanks to the generosity of Joe Chialo, Sarah Wedl-Wilson, and the CDU Berlin.
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