Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, March 04, 2026

03/04 Links Pt2: Iran’s shadow in Australia’s antisemitism debate; 5 Reasons Why Paraguay Matters to Israel and the Jewish People; Newsom’s Bright Idea: Defund Allies in Wartime

From Ian:

Iran’s shadow in Australia’s antisemitism debate

The political response in Canberra over the past week found a predictable reaction from the Australian Greens, led by Senator Larissa Waters. She focused squarely on condemning the military strike itself. Waters said: “The Greens condemn these illegal, abhorrent and unilateral attacks. Australians do not want to be dragged into another US-Israeli war.” She added: “Australia’s support of Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal attack last night was disgraceful. We cannot bomb our way to peace.”

In a climate of heightened sensitivity, such statements by Larissa Waters are adding fuel to the fire of a political debate already saturated with anxiety about antisemitism, extremism and foreign influence.

For Australian Jews, this convergence of events creates a uniquely complex terrain to navigate.

On one hand, many in the Jewish community view Khamenei’s leadership as synonymous with a regime that has called for Israel’s destruction, funded armed proxies targeting Jewish civilians, and, according to Australian reporting, been linked to antisemitic criminal activity domestically. On the other hand, public mourning gatherings in Australia are being defended by organisers as religious observances rooted in Shi’a tradition rather than explicit political endorsements. I see this as a thinly veiled platform to further criticise Israel and call for Australians to “globalise the Intifada”.

Layered onto that is a polarised political environment in which anti-war rhetoric, foreign policy debates, and diaspora identities intersect in unpredictable ways. The result is not a simple story of opposing camps, but a dense and emotionally charged national moment. Expressions of grief in one community are interpreted as ideological alignment by another. Political denunciations of military action are heard by some as moral consistency, and by others as insufficiently attuned to the security fears of Jewish Australians.

As the Royal Commission gathers evidence and tests the boundaries between free expression, foreign alignment, and hate, this episode illustrates the difficulty of drawing clean lines. In an era where overseas conflicts are instantly absorbed into Australia’s domestic discourse, symbols carry weight far beyond their immediate setting. For Australian Jews, the landscape is therefore not defined by a single event but by the cumulative effect of rising incident data, geopolitical reverberations, and the knowledge that narratives formed abroad can reshape the social climate at home.

In the meantime, Australia finds itself needing to balance principles of pluralism and freedom with a pressing need for security and cohesion. For many Jewish Australians, that balance feels more delicate than it has in decades. My prayers are with the most pro-Jewish US president of my lifetime, Donald Trump, as he attempts to rid the world of the most dangerous and evil regime in the history of the world in Iran.

Seth Mandel: A 2028 Contender Bets on the Nazi Tattoo Guy

Gallego’s move was important because he is testing the waters for a possible presidential run in 2028. He’s betting that the Nazi tattoo guy is where the country’s headed.

And how does Gallego himself talk about Israel? Not great. After backing Platner, he had this to say on the Iran conflict: “So Netanyahu now decides when we go to war? So much for America First.” A Democratic senator with national ambitions sounding indistinguishable from woke-right podcasters is a bad sign of what’s to come.

If the party’s officeholders engage in an Israel-bashing arms race, the distinction they think they are making between anti-Semitism and spirited criticism of Israel’s government becomes functionally meaningless. Moreover, what kind of atmosphere does this create for Jews who consider themselves part of the Democratic coalition? If the party’s prominent electeds egg on the post-tentifada atmosphere in which synagogues are mobbed by violent Hamas apologists calling for an intifada, does Ruben Gallego get to wash his hands of the repercussions of his actions simply because he didn’t say “Jews have horns”?

Now imagine Ruben Gallego and Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest assuring Jewish Democrats that they oppose hatred in all its forms including antisemitismandislamophobia. Feel better? Of course not. Recently, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen publicly suggested AIPAC is anti-American. What’s he accomplishing besides further encouraging the anti-Semites? Nothing. They hear every dog whistle loud and clear.

What’s happening here is the creation of an environment in which anti-Semitism will grow and prosper with almost nothing to slow it down. There will be less and less room for non-closeted supporters of Israel. And that will continue until the electoral incentives in the Democratic Party change. Ruben Gallego is betting they won’t.

Students for the ayatollah

You do not have to support the US intervention in Iran to be alarmed by the students shedding tears for the ayatollah. Under his rule, Iranian authorities violently suppressed dissent. They arrested, tortured and executed those who spoke out against the Islamic Republic. Mandatory hijab-wearing is imposed by law, with security forces routinely capturing and punishing women for dress-code violations. In 2022, 22-year-old Kurd Mahsa Amini died after being detained by Iran’s morality police, sparking the Woman, Life, Freedom protests across the country. Amini had just been admitted to a university in Urmia to study biology. Yet in 2026, students at a top London university openly celebrate the regime that killed her.

When it comes to the keffiyeh-wearing tote-bag-resistance class, many of whom grew up in Kent or Surrey and know nothing of Iran, Islamism or anything else, it is easy to dismiss such ayatollah apologism as ignorance, stupidity or naivety. Indeed, the bizarre notion that Islamic extremists – from Hamas and Hezbollah to the ayatollahs – are a part of some ‘global left alliance’ has a long, shameful history among post-class ‘progressives’. Meanwhile, Britain’s Islamists, who are legion on modern campuses, understand perfectly well what they are supporting and why when they express grief for Khamenei.

Since the student vigils started garnering attention in the press, the MSC has hit back, accusing the media of trying to ‘smear Shia Muslim students’. It also claims that accusations of ‘extremism’ are ‘Islamophobic’ for focussing on a ‘fake issue’ that ‘does not exist in the UK’.

The trouble is, the embrace of Islamist fanaticism is sadly nothing new for British universities. We saw it in October 2023, when students at Oxford chanted ‘Long live the intifada’ on campus. We saw it last year, when a ‘feminist’ society at Goldsmiths held a ‘night of remembrance’ for the butchers and rapists of the 7 October pogrom. No doubt we shall see more of it tonight, when the University of Manchester holds its candlelit vigil in honour of the supreme leader’s memory.

These campus celebrations of Islamic tyranny can no longer be dismissed as simple naivety or youthful radicalism. It is now a fixture of British universities and beyond. Those weeping for the ayatollah know they are on the side of barbarism.

03/04 Links Pt1: With Iran attacking the region, Israel has the chance to step out of the villain role; The US and Israel are fighting the same war — in opposite political realities

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: With Iran attacking the region, Israel has the chance to step out of the villain role

While much of the Jewish world marked Purim yesterday, Jerusalem is celebrating it today. The reason rests within Jewish law and memory. In antiquity, Jerusalem was a walled city, so it observes Purim on Adar 15, a day later than most communities in what Jews call Shushan Purim (Purim in walled cities).

Per the Book of Esther, Jews in Persia’s capital, Shushan, fought one more day, thus celebrated one day later. Jerusalem keeps that tradition alive, as if the city insists on living within the tale’s original rhythm.

One phrase from Purim captures the holiday’s spirit better than any military briefing. It is the term v’nahafoch hu, which suggests that all on this day is the opposite, all on this day is flipped upside down.

In the megillah, the plot reverses: The threatened become the defenders, the confident become the anxious, and the power dynamics turn upside down. Jerusalem reads that line in the scroll today with costumes in the street and, this year, with a war in the background.

The war has already delivered its own v’nahafoch hu.

A War Too Logical to Explain By Abe Greenwald
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The amnesiacs are forgetting America’s case for war on Iran not because the regime’s crimes directly caused them trauma. They’re discarding it, rather, because what’s traumatic for them is to accept that Israel, the U.S., and Donald Trump are doing the right, moral, and necessary thing—after so many administrations allowed the threat to grow.

This problem, like most of our current maladies, manifests in different versions on the left and right. To many on the left, American action abroad is by definition criminal. So, too, are the existence of Israel and Trump’s exercise of presidential power. Only the enemies of the U.S. and the Jewish state are righteous in the use of deadly force.

A smaller contingent on the right shares the left’s hostility to Israel and sees any shared goals between it and the U.S. as the deceptive product of Jewish manipulation. Alliances in general are a zero-sum trap for an America that must always shoulder the burden. Indeed, these populist right-wingers have anathematized a whole range of concepts and terms that would otherwise explain Trump’s decision to strike. Preemptive war is immediately suspect and specifically unacceptable absent an imminent threat. American military intervention becomes morally tainted if a byproduct of its success is the protection or liberation of non-Americans. And regime change is the language of madmen and fools.

For years, Trump helped to promote these anti-historical attitudes. They now permeate different parts of MAGA to varying degrees. As a result, he and his administration are at a loss to explain what they clearly now understand: that strong alliances based on shared values are the guarantors of civilization, and that the U.S.-Israel alliance is the strongest of all; that it’s better to strike one’s enemies before they pose an imminent threat; that liberation from tyranny is a rare miracle that the United States alone can facilitate in foreign lands; and that, except in wars over land, regime change is the only way that wars end.

Administration figures have instead offered thin, sometimes contradictory, justifications for Operation Epic Fury. These attempts at assuaging right-wing skeptics only stoke the populist suspicion that they’re being lied to. And they are, only not in the way they think. Trump isn’t protecting the secret agenda of an all-powerful cabal. He’s hiding the fact that he took his base for a wild ride only to return to the boring but valuable realities of establishment statecraft.

Spoiled by Peace, Again By Abe Greenwald
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When the U.S. went to war with Iran, more Americans disapproved than approved of the decision. But two new polls, one by Fox News and the other by Politico, show the country is now split almost evenly on the question. The change isn’t surprising. American and Israeli forces have done an incredible job of targeting the regime and its weapons, and success is a sure path to popularity. But when support for a war hangs on day-to-day military fortunes, that war is only as popular as the latest developments.

If Americans were down on the war from the start, and if that’s their baseline attitude, I suspect it has a lot less to do with the logical reasons for skepticism that pundits cite and more to do with feelings toward Donald Trump and ideas about America’s general safety.

There are, of course, many Americans who are unable to support anything that Trump does. Given that the president’s popularity has taken a big hit over the past year, I doubt he’d have made much headway with the public regarding Iran even if he and his administration hadn’t offered a confusing account of its war aims and painted a very blurry portrait of victory.

But beyond the public’s feelings about Trump, there’s the matter of how Americans think about threats to the country. The fact is, it’s very hard for many of us to believe that foreign actors or countries pose a threat to the United States so great as to require military action.

There are multiple reasons for this. One is that a massive majority of living Americans have enjoyed some or all of what’s called the Long Peace—the period from the end of World War II to the present. When your life coincides with a stretch of history during which there has been no great-power conflict, you can begin to believe that’s the norm. And if your own country—the United States—is the chief cause and guarantor of that peace, you’re even more likely to believe in it.

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein. Trigger warning for descriptions of violence.

The West’s political left can’t seem to decide what it stands for. Is it for gay rights and “love is love,” or is it for Hamas torturing gays? When leftist activists chant “from the river to the sea,” does this mean they want the entirety of the territory to be ruled by a government that suspends gays by their hands from the ceiling for hours?

It cannot be that this really is the left’s preferred option when the other one is Israel—the only country in the region where gays have full rights and protections by law. But never say this out loud, lest you be accused of “pinkwashing,” a term coined to describe those who would exonerate Israel from all crimes because the Israeli government is “nice” to gays. In fact, having a handy-dandy term like “pinkwashing” is what allows anti-Israel activists to look away from the cruel treatment gays receive at the hands of Hamas even as the LGBTQ crowd continues to demonize the Jewish State.

By the same token, Democrats and leftist activists are horrified by Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion, and by the decimation of the fanatic, repressive Iranian regime—even as Iranians take to the streets to celebrate, singing “Bibi Joon” (Bibi Dear) and doing Trump’s YMCA dance.

And it’s not just the men. Iranian women, too, are celebrating their freedom, gifted to them at great cost by Israel and the United States. They openly dance in the streets, burn their hijabs, and mark the end of a tyrannical regime and its ruler, going so far as to light posters of Khamenei on fire with lit cigarettes—the cigarette a symbol of the freedom they had finally gained to do as they wished.

Why, then, do leftist activists and Democrats not celebrate with the people in the streets of Tehran? Why don’t they take pride in the part their country played in granting them freedom from tyranny?

You would think that the socialists, at least, would be for the average Iranian Joe on the street. But no—New York City’s controversial socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, condemned the war and said that the “military strikes on Iran—carried out by the United States and Israel—mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression. Bombing cities. Killing civilians.”

Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression. Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war. Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit…
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) February 28, 2026

In actuality, the war of aggression was that of the Iranian regime against its own people.

In other words, Islamist movements like Hamas and the Islamic Republic adhere to a religious code that criminalizes the very people Western activists claim to defend. Which begs the question: if your political identity is built around protecting sexual minorities, why are you marching for a movement that hangs them? If your political identity is all about empowering women, why do you support a regime that rules through repression? Under Khamenei, women were compelled by law to wear the hijab. Anyone who disagreed with the regime—men or women—disappeared into prisons. Protesters were shot in the streets. And worse.

The world saw this repression play out in our own time when Mahsa Amini died in custody after being arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s dress code. Her death ignited nationwide protests. Iranian women burned their hijabs. Crowds filled the streets shouting “Death to the Dictator.”

Yet when pressure mounts against the regime—when Israel and the United States confront Iran with military might—the motley mix of Western progressive groups suddenly mobilizes in defense of the regime’s sovereignty. Coalitions of activist organizations march under banners declaring “Hands Off Iran.”

What is it they mean to say here? Hands off a regime that arrests women who show their hair? Hands off a tyrannical regime that executes dissidents and crushes the very protesters Western activists claim to support?

Why do they turn away from the Iranians who have risked their lives for decades protesting against the regime and telling the world, out loud, that they want freedom? Shouldn’t this matter to any feeling human being? Why does the left look away?

Why did Barack Obama refuse to help the Iranian protesters in 2009? They were begging for the most basic human rights. Yet Obama turned away from them, afraid to make waves. He just let them twist in the wind.

As for the days leading up to this war? Protesters were slaughtered in the tens of thousands—some estimate as many as 30,000 or more. Do the survivors not deserve the same support given to Ukraine by the very same people who now denounce the offing of Khamenei?

Apparently not—at least not according to aficionados of Western progressive groups, who suddenly mobilize in support of Khamenei when the US and Israel take action against him. Or the media, which featured loving obituaries like the one in the Washington Post that spoke of Khamenei’s “bushy white beard and easy smile,” and described him as cutting a “more avuncular figure in public” than his predecessor, Khomeini. They portrayed Khamenei as human. He liked Persian poetry and Les Misérables.

It made me think of Love Story: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved Mozart and Bach, the Beatles, and me?”

What will the protesters' banners say one year from now? Who will be deemed favorable or unfavorable in their eyes? Who really decides what causes are acceptable?

Is everything that Trump does bad—even when it involves freeing the Iranian people to take charge of their own destiny?

Is everything the Jewish State of Israel does bad? Even when it comes to preventing Islamic fanatics from offing the Great and Little Satans? This is difficult to understand.

Are they for a peaceful world, safe from nuclear war? Or do they prefer being nuked to appearing grateful to Bibi for his efforts to save them—and the entire free world?

Women’s rights and LGBTQ rights “matter,” unless those who persecute women and gays happen to be associated with a cause that is intersectional with the political left. Then they are abandoned

Sometimes I wonder what an onlooker—someone neutral, perhaps from an alternate world—would say about these seeming hypocrisies. They might see them as immature, even childish.

For myself, I see the left as so many lemmings jumping off a cliff. They espouse whatever cause is popular at the moment because all the cool kids are doing it. But of course they don’t actually believe in anything. Their beliefs are predicated on the moment, neither meaningful, moral, nor firm.

You can sense this truth about their character the minute they parrot their peers. They’d rather be with the in-crowd than have their own thoughts—something that can be achieved only by dint of thinking—a tedious, and inconvenient task. There’s no value in it unless you don’t want to have friends and prefer to be shunned by the class you hope you belong to.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

IDF on the ground in Southern Lebanon to uproot Hezbollah

Naharnet/AFP reports:

Lebanese state media reported on Wednesday that the Israeli army entered the southern Lebanese town of Khiam, about six kilometers from the Lebanon-Israel border.

"The town of Khiam is witnessing continuous artillery shelling, while the Israeli enemy army penetrated into the town," state media said.

A Lebanese military source told AFP on Tuesday that Israel had launched a ground incursion into a border area in southern Lebanon, in parallel with its campaign of airstrikes.

Khiam has been traditionally a Hezbollah stronghold, and Israel bombed it repeatedly in the previous war.

Google Earth shows that Khiam is on relatively high ground and it overlooks northern Israeli towns like Metula. It is definitely strategic and important for the IDF to keep Hezbollah out of that area.

So far, Israel has been largely successful in stopping Hezbollah rockets and drones. The USS Gerald Ford is nearby but I have not seen it doing anything yet, and if its purpose was deterrence against Hezbollah it clearly has not done that. It will be interesting to see if it gets involved in any level.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The War That Never Ends

The current war with Iran has prompted me to think more deeply about how we think of war. And I think that the West has been using a definition of war that has not been accurate for at least a century.

Clausewitz famously wrote "War is the continuation of politics by other means" in the early nineteenth century, after the Napoleonic Wars. It was accurate for its time: states fought, achieved or failed to achieve political objectives, and then politics continued.

The West took that insight and built a binary on it: either a nation is at war or at peace. War is the exception: it is violent, costly, and abnormal. The default is peace and stability, what all rational states prefer. Everything in the modern international order flows from that binary.

The UN Charter treats war as a discrete event with defined triggers and legal constraints on how it may begin. The Geneva Conventions regulate its conduct. The Rome Statute criminalizes its abuses. Wars are declared. Beneath all of it lies the same foundational assumption: wars start, wars end, and the rules exist to manage the transition between the two.

Revolutionary theory looked at that definition and saw a target.

Marx began it by reframing all of history as continuous class struggle: a single unbroken struggle expressed through different means at different moments. Lenin extended it: bourgeois peace was merely armed struggle conducted by other means. Then Mao formalized it into explicit military doctrine. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," he wrote in 1938. In "On Protracted War" the same year, he engaged Clausewitz directly, accepting that war and politics are continuous with each other, but drawing the opposite conclusion. For Mao, that continuity meant the struggle never ends. When military conditions favor fighting, you fight. When they don't, you organize, propagandize, negotiate - and wait. The underlying war continues regardless of which instrument is currently in use.

How seriously did Mao mean this? In 1957, speaking in Moscow, he said: "I'm not afraid of nuclear war. There are 2.7 billion people in the world; it doesn't matter if some are killed. China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left." The cause, for Mao, simply outweighed any calculation of lives.

Western theories of war could not even consider the willingness of a leader to sacrifice his people for the cause.

Gramsci, writing from a fascist prison in the 1930s, had already identified the next move: Western institutions themselves, like legal systems, cultural frameworks, and civil society, were battlefields. Capture them and you wage war without firing a shot.

Together these thinkers built a complete inversion of Clausewitz. War is not the continuation of politics, but politics is the continuation of war that never ends until victory is achieved. The struggle is permanent. It changes form — military, diplomatic, legal, cultural — but it never ends until final victory. The West's binary of war and not-war simply does not exist in this framework. What the West reads as not-war, the revolutionary reads as war by other means.

And crucially: the institutions the West built to manage conflict could be turned into weapons against it.

An organization that embeds fighters in hospitals or under schools isn't violating the spirit of Geneva - it's exploiting its architecture. A regime that uses UN agencies for political warfare isn't abusing the international system: it's operating it as another front. Lawfare, the manipulation of humanitarian and legal language to constrain an adversary's military response, isn't a corruption of the rules-based order. It's a precise understanding of how that order works and who it works against.

Islamist revolutionary movements absorbed this doctrine and adapted it to their own ideological framework. The continuous war became jihad - not merely military, but political, legal, cultural, and demographic, conducted across all available fronts simultaneously until final victory. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic Republic of Iran are not conventional actors pursuing bounded political objectives. They are revolutionary movements operating under an explicit continuous-war doctrine. We see this language all the time. When people say that "the war didn't start on October 7" or "the genocide is ongoing" even after a ceasefire, they are saying explicitly that the war is permanent no matter what the facts on the ground are.

The Cold War détente is the exception that proves the rule. The Soviet leaders of the 1950s and onwards were no longer revolutionaries; they has become a bureaucratic class with material interests in survival and privilege. Khrushchev's "peaceful coexistence" doctrine was a significant ideological retreat — an implicit acknowledgment that survival mattered more than victory. Mutually Assure Destruction worked because the Soviets had become, functionally, a conventional great power with conventional survival instincts. The ideology had become costume.

But to Mao, the revolution was still happening, which is why he didn't worry about a nuclear war that would destroy half his people.

MAD is a powerful disincentive - but only for actors who want to remain alive and in power more than they want victory. For movements where the ideology remains genuinely operative, that calculation changes entirely. Martyrdom isn't a cost to be absorbed. It is a contribution to inevitable historical triumph. The cause continues regardless of who dies for it. You cannot deter an actor for whom sacrifice is not a loss but a weapon.

The West mistook the Soviet exception for the rule and built its post-Cold War confidence on that mistake.

The consequences are structural and far-reaching. When the West says it wants peace, it actually means it wants stability - the absence of visible conflict. Inside the war/not-war binary those are the same thing: not-war is the goal achieved.

Revolutionary doctrine exploits that equivalence with precision. It offers stability - a ceasefire, a negotiation, a temporary de-escalation - and the West accepts it as progress because its own framework provides no tools for distinguishing tactical pause from genuine resolution and it regards a pause in hostilities not as a means to continue them but as a step towards permanent peace. . Meanwhile the revolutionary side is executing the next phase of the continuous war: rebuilding, rearming, repositioning, waiting.

The trap is deliberate. Under episodic war theory, not-war is peace and peace is victory. Under continuous war theory, tactical stability is war by other means — the strategy advancing, the next round being prepared.

This is why ceasefires so reliably produce the next war. This is why negotiations so consistently reward the side that started the fighting. This is why international pressure so predictably falls hardest on the party that actually wants resolution. This is the system working exactly as revolutionary doctrine predicted it would.

When a liberal democracy faces a revolutionary adversary, it enters the conflict already operating under a definition of war its enemy has rejected. It fights to restore deterrence, achieve defined objectives, and return to stability - which it will call peace, and which its enemy will call an opportunity.

This is what the West gets wrong about Iran. The Islamic Republic still operates under a genuine revolutionary war doctrine, built on the idea of continuous revolution. Its goal is to become a superpower representing Islam. Its nuclear weapons program, its ballistic missile program, its drone production is all geared towards spreading its revolution, usually using proxies to avoid direct accusations of violence, but expanding its political and military power using terror and violence. The West does not have tools to recognize this for what it is - a war against the West that has not stopped since 1979.

In such a revolutionary mindset, a military defeat is always temporary. As long as there is a political leadership still in place that can compel its people to do what it demands, it can never lose. And the West needs to realize that victory against revolutionary movements cannot mean restoring stability. It must mean ending the revolutionary regime itself.

As long as the regime remains in power, the war has not ended. It has merely changed form.

If our current concept of war is not accurate, then we need to grapple with what war actually is, what victory entails, and what the laws of armed conflict should look like against adversaries that deliberately subvert those rules themselves. These are difficult questions, but avoiding them carries its own moral risk. If we mistake temporary stability for peace, the result may not be fewer deaths but more.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/03 Links Pt2: Antizionism fuels the hatred of Jews; The Politics of the 'Good Jew'; This Purim, think of the 10,000 Jews who cannot celebrate

From Ian:

The holocaust that wasn’t

Persia is now Iran, and they have been plotting to wipe the Jewish people off the face of the earth for decades. They built an empire of proxies across the Middle East, from Iraq and Yemen to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza — planning to circle the Jewish Nation in a ring of fire that would be our ultimate destruction.

And then came October 7. For one day, the Gazan invasion brought the Holocaust to Israel. With deep understanding of history, the invasion was methodically planned to recreate the deepest Jewish horror in modern history — using fire, torture, and terror to rip families apart and not only slaughter but break the spirit of the Nation of Israel.

But we did not break.

The Nation of Israel fought back. And the nations of the world expressed horror at the death toll of the enemy who had tried to destroy us. And even some Jews joined the cries of pity for those who wished to slaughter Jewish men, women, and children.

We retrieved all of our hostages, dealt debilitating blows to all the proxies, and even struck the head of the snake — Iran.

But we were stopped before the job was completed.

And today we know that the ayatollahs of Iran are trying to reignite their ring of fire — their nuclear program, ballistic missiles, and their proxies.

And they slaughtered thousands of their own people who rebelled against the evil regime.

President Trump, like the king of ancient Persia, made decrees. He promised the demonstrators of Iran, “Help is on the way.” He told the world that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles that threaten other nations. And he built up unprecedented military might, ready to be unleashed on Iran.

But the ideologues of Iran will not — cannot — change their murderous ideology, because to do so would mean rejecting their identity. Like Haman, their one true desire is to destroy all of the Jews.

And they will never stop unless they are made to stop.

And now the world is waiting. What will President Trump decide? And what is he waiting for?

Iran is an existential threat to the Nation of Israel, a danger to the people of Iran, and the cause of enormous suffering around the world.

And now, as I write, the first siren goes off — not because there are incoming missiles, but because the attack has begun on Iran and we are to be ready for whatever might come next.

It is almost as if President Trump was waiting for Purim. Perhaps the man who writes his name in gold on towers he built knows that the stories of the Jews last longer than any building.

Happy Purim. There will be no celebrations now, but hopefully, when this is over, there will be. It is time for the horror Iran has inflicted on the world to be turned upside down and become a time of rejoicing and freedom — an opportunity for a better future for Israel, the Middle East, and the world.

Antizionism fuels the hatred of Jews

Denying Jews the rights afforded to all other peoples is not criticism, it is bigotry. Allowing Israel to be defined by libels rather than to be appraised along the same lines as all other states is not a political opinion, it is discrimination. And this discrimination is causing clear and present harm.

Indeed, the ideology responsible for this harm continues to not only be treated as legitimate political expression but applauded as brave dissent against a conspiratorial conception of Jewish power. This is how antizionism functions as a mask: by wrapping anti-Jewish hostility in the moral language of the day, it transforms prejudice into principle. As it has been throughout history, the targeting of Jews is repackaged as moral necessity.

For the overwhelming majority of Jews, Zionism is not a political position but an expression of peoplehood and self-determination – an indispensable and inextricable part of our Jewish identity. Targeting “Zionists” is a socially permissible way to target Jews, while offering plausible deniability.

Most institutions still refuse to make this connection.

Naming antizionism would require institutions to confront a belief system they have treated as morally legitimate, despite its discriminatory outcomes. Until they do, universities will continue to enforce anti-racism codes while tolerating antizionist “activism” that systematically marginalises Jewish students. Legal institutions will affirm equality before the law while permitting rhetoric that casts Jewish collective identity as inherently criminal. Politicians will condemn antisemitism in principle while remaining silent about Its contemporary permutation.

The upcoming Royal Commission has an opportunity to change this, and that must start with naming antizionism as the key driver of the anti-Jewish hostility now gripping Australia.

This “elephant in the room” will not disappear through silence. It must be named. And once named, it must be confronted. Otherwise, Jewish Australians will continue to hear solemn assurances that antisemitism is unacceptable — while watching the extremist and bigoted ideology that fuels it remain comfortably within the bounds of respectable debate.

The Politics of the 'Good Jew'

Historically, rulers could say: “I am not anti-Jewish; I employ one.” Today, movements can say: “We are not antisemitic; Jews support us.” The structure may be different, but the function looks strikingly similar. Just as in the past, this arrangement does not necessarily protect the broader Jewish community.

After the October 7th pogrom, when antisemitic incidents surged globally, it did not matter whether a Jew was Zionist, anti-Zionist, Left-wing, Right-wing, religious, or secular. Synagogues required security. Jewish schools increased guards. Students hid their Stars of David. The mob does not distinguish between court factions.

The medieval Court Jew believed that his access to power insulated him from the prejudices of the street. That turned out to be dead wrong — and deadly. The modern Jewish figure who aligns with dominant anti-Israel narratives may believe that proximity to cultural legitimacy offers similar insulation. They will learn, soon enough, that antisemitism is never that discriminating. Movements that chant “From the river to the sea” do not append footnotes clarifying which Jews are exempt. Conspiracy theories about “Zionist influence” do not pause to verify individual ideological credentials.

When Jewish identity itself is framed as structurally powerful, morally suspect, or politically malignant, internal Jewish disagreements offer little shield. There is a difficult tension here: Jewish tradition values debate, the Talmud is built on dissent, Zionism itself emerged from fierce ideological argument.

The problem is not that Jews disagree. It is that non-Jewish institutions selectively reward Jewish dissent that undermines Jewish collective security, while dismissing Jewish concerns about antisemitism as self-serving. That dynamic replicates something deeply old: Jews are most welcome when they reassure power, least welcome when they assert communal vulnerability.

One of Zionism’s central promises was the end of court politics. It would see Jewish policemen put Jewish criminals in Jewish jails. No more pleading before princes or dependence on elite favor. Sovereignty meant self-definition. Security meant self-defense. In the Diaspora, of course, Jews remain minorities. Engagement with broader society is inevitable and necessary. But the temptation to seek validation through disavowal is not new.

History shows that the court is never permanent. Legitimacy borrowed from power is conditional, and acceptance predicated on denunciation is fragile. The court will recalculate when the winds shift. The question for our moment is not whether Jews may criticize Israel, but whether Jewish identity itself is becoming contingent on ideological compliance — rewarded when it serves dominant narratives, suspect when it resists them.

We have seen this movie before, and many remakes. None have been good.

03/03 Links Pt1: Iran’s Irrational Self-Destruction; Spencer: Ending A Campaign Of Violence Is Not Starting A War; Britain Walks a Mile in Israel’s Shoes

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Iran’s Irrational Self-Destruction

Vladimir Jabotinsky once said of the role of anti-Semitism in World War II: “The Jewish tragedy is, of course, not the microbe which has caused this war. It is only the culture-medium in which the microbe has grown to maturity.”

The same might be said of Iran’s quest to destroy the Jews at the expense of its own sustainability.

Jabotinsky wouldn’t live to see how right he was—in this, as was usually the case, the Zionist intellectual was a prophet. As the Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer noted about the Nazis: “The killing was totally anti-pragmatic, anti-modern, anti-capitalistic, anti-cost-effective. They murdered the inhabitants of the Lodz ghetto although they were producing essential goods for the German Army; they did the same in Bialystok and elsewhere.” In 1942, the Germans “took some 40,000 or so Jews from the ghettoes near [a] planned road and established slave labor camps for them to build it. And as they were building the road, these Jews were killed.”

Yaron Pasher tried to quantify it: “had the Germans taken the 3,000 trains that were used during the war for the Final Solution plus 2,000 trains of booty to move troops to the front (whether the Eastern Front or the Western Atlantic Wall), the Wehrmacht could have in general transferred approximately seventy-one divisions — namely, about five armies totaling just about half a million troops with full gear, including the horses and other pack animals on which German logistics were based.”

I know people are tired of Nazi analogies, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that the ayatollahs in Iran were similarly beset with, and blinded by, a self-defeating obsession with the Jews.

To Iran, nuclear capability would give the regime two different ways to threaten a new Holocaust: a bomb itself, obviously, but also a nuclear umbrella that would give it immunity from outside attack and enable it to encircle the Jewish state in a “ring of fire” in perpetuity, making life in Israel increasingly difficult, squeezing Israel’s economy, and eroding its territory by making its existing borders indefensible.

The rallying of Western allies committed to nonproliferation used several means to derail Iran’s pursuit of a bomb. One of those means was economic: the policy of “maximum pressure.” President Trump made such pressure a priority, bleeding the Iranian economy with sanctions. The administration itself estimated that by mid-2019, the pressure campaign had cost Iran $10 billion in lost oil exports alone.

The President Fixes a Historical Mistake

President Trump is making a long-overdue correction to decades of a flawed U.S. Iran policy. Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been, both in ideology and in action, an enemy of the U.S. Washington tolerated its provocations, fearing regional instability or a military quagmire; or they convinced themselves that the Iranians, despite their fanatical rhetoric, were rational actors who could be bargained with.

Especially after the failure of U.S. nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which inadvertently strengthened Tehran's hand in the region, Iran came to be seen as a problem the U.S. would have to live with, for good and for ill.

The basic logic of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was that Washington should recognize Iran's aspirations as legitimate, so that the mullahs would come to feel they had a stake in maintaining the regional order. American allies, in turn, would have to learn to "share the neighborhood" with Iran. This meant restraining U.S. allies from taking their own steps to check Iran's growing regional power.

The fatal flaw in the scheme was in misunderstanding Iran's motivations. The mullah's terror regime wanted what it had always wanted and said it wanted over and over, which was to destroy the U.S.-led order in the region, wipe Israel off the map, and overthrow the Gulf Arab states in a global Islamic revolution to be headquartered in Tehran. The U.S.'s accommodating policy allowed Iran to build a fearsome regional empire. This made the Oct. 7 attacks possible. President Trump is making a long-overdue correction to decades of a flawed U.S. Iran policy. Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been, both in ideology and in action, an enemy of the U.S. Washington tolerated its provocations, fearing regional instability or a military quagmire; or they convinced themselves that the Iranians, despite their fanatical rhetoric, were rational actors who could be bargained with.

Especially after the failure of U.S. nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which inadvertently strengthened Tehran's hand in the region, Iran came to be seen as a problem the U.S. would have to live with, for good and for ill.

The basic logic of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was that Washington should recognize Iran's aspirations as legitimate, so that the mullahs would come to feel they had a stake in maintaining the regional order. American allies, in turn, would have to learn to "share the neighborhood" with Iran. This meant restraining U.S. allies from taking their own steps to check Iran's growing regional power.

The fatal flaw in the scheme was in misunderstanding Iran's motivations. The mullah's terror regime wanted what it had always wanted and said it wanted over and over, which was to destroy the U.S.-led order in the region, wipe Israel off the map, and overthrow the Gulf Arab states in a global Islamic revolution to be headquartered in Tehran. The U.S.'s accommodating policy allowed Iran to build a fearsome regional empire. This made the Oct. 7 attacks possible.

The Iran Endgame

On Sunday, Trump disclosed that he had agreed to talk with the regime and that they may now be more amenable to a deal—whatever that means at this point. Aside from optics, it is unclear what benefits such a “deal” would have for the United States or its allies. Furthermore, we have no idea who the president has agreed to talk to, since, as he put it, “most of those people are gone. Some of the people we were dealing with are gone.” Trump did not mention whether his “three very good candidates” for leadership in Iran are among the living. In fact, he later indicated that they were all dead: “The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump told ABC News. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”

A few hours before his Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump offered yet another set of options. He told a media outlet that he had several “off ramps”: “I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians: ‘See you again in a few years if you start rebuilding.’”

Neither of those options is particularly promising, either, as they both could result in the same undesirable outcome: the survival of the IRGC. On the other hand, what Trump means by “take over the whole thing” is unclear. But, given that the president is not interested in an Iraq-style takeover, it seems likely that such a scenario would morph into some version of the “Venezuela option.”

A third, hybrid option would offer the worst of both worlds: a quick end to the campaign followed by a Venezuela scenario. Yet any scenario that involves rehabilitating figures such as Larijani, assuming he’s still alive, or other IRGC veterans, such as Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf (who is also being promoted as a “Delcy” candidate), and lending renewed legitimacy to IRGC structures is clearly a terrible idea, for all the aforementioned reasons: It will lead to renewed IRGC control of the country, this time backed by the United States. A future Democratic administration would likely build on any such arrangement, including the removal of sanctions, to further strengthen an IRGC-led government, leading to a resurgence of the current regime under an American protective umbrella.

Given these options, and their negative likely outcomes, the preferable course of action is to continue to, first of all, destroy all critical nuclear and ballistic missile infrastructure in Iran while continuing to decimate the IRGC’s command structure as far down as possible—not just on the military side, but also the “political” (including Larijani and Ghalibaf and others). This could be done over a reasonable amount of time. Then, as the president said in his speech, let the Iranians seize their moment and figure it out. No “taking it over” and no “Venezuela.” Kill our enemies, obliterate their command structures, annihilate their offensive capabilities, and go home.

Whether the president will decide on this course of action or choose one of the many available off-ramps or “deals” will become clear soon enough. To date, the U.S.-Israeli joint campaign has been a model of operational integration and division of labor. But given the existing uncertainty, it behooves Israel—which, as of Sunday, has claimed to have eliminated some 40 senior figures on the clerical, military, and IRGC sides—to intensify the pace of targeting the command structure even beyond the first tier and to include “political” figures like Larijani (who reportedly has been targeted), Ghalibaf, and the rest of the country’s leadership cohort. The fewer such figures the Iranian opposition, however fractured, has to contend with, and the fewer experienced cadres it has to draw on for support, the more successful attempts to build something new in Iran are likely to be. If the opposition fails, a weakened IRGC is better than a stronger IRGC, especially one backed by the United States.

That the Iran regime, whose hands are soaked in American blood, has lived this long is a long-standing affront to the United States. Since 1981, the survival of the regime has emboldened American foes throughout the world while threatening the security interests of the United States and its regional allies. It allowed the regime to kill hundreds of Americans as well as hundreds of thousands of people throughout the region, and to murder its opponents on the soil of free countries around the world. Instead of putting an end to these malign activities, successive American administrations have kept Iran’s terrorist regime on life support, with Barack Obama even briefly elevating it to allied status. Its destruction would be a sizable contribution to world peace—while serving the American national interest. That alone should be enough.

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed reporters on March 2, 2026, he laid out a strategic case that deserves more attention than the absurd "This proves Israel dragged America into war!" noise surrounding it. The core argument isn't complicated, but its implications are stark: the United States (and Israel, and moderate Arab states) faced a narrowing window, and every month of inaction made the eventual reckoning worse.

Modern missile defense rests on an uncomfortable economic reality. Shooting down a ballistic missile costs far more than building one. Iran's short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles run somewhere between $100,000 and $2 million per unit to produce. The interceptors needed to stop them — Patriot PAC-3 MSE, THAAD, SM-3 — run $4 million to $36 million apiece. And you typically need more than one interceptor per incoming missile to achieve reliable kills.

This means it costs between 5 to 70 times more to shoot down a missile than it cost to build one.

If it was merely economics, perhaps this is not a strong enough argument. But this is only part of the story.

Rubio put it plainly:

"They are producing, by some estimates, over 100 [missiles] a month... compared to the six or seven interceptors that can be built [per month by the US]."

One hundred offensive missiles monthly against six or seven interceptors. That's not a defense gap: it's a math problem with only one feasible solution.

Rubio introduced a concept that should be central to every discussion of this operation: the "line of immunity." This is the point at which Iran's arsenal becomes so large, so distributed, and so capable of inflicting retaliatory damage that no government — American, Israeli, or otherwise — can absorb the political cost of striking Iran's nuclear program.

"This operation needed to happen... because Iran, in a year or a year and a half, would cross the line of immunity—meaning they would have so many short-range missiles, so many drones, that no one could do anything about it, because they could hold the whole world hostage."

And then the key line:

"Look at the damage they're doing now. Imagine a year from now. This had to happen no matter what."

This is the central argument, and it holds regardless of how one feels about the timing or the administration making the decision. A regime producing 100 missiles monthly, under sanctions, while already striking airports, embassies, and civilian infrastructure, would in 12–18 months have amassed an arsenal capable of making any military response politically and strategically untenable. And defense would be, literally, impossible.

Israel's Iron Beam, being deployed against Hezbollah and Hamas rockets and drones. dramatically reduces the cost per shot - but it cannot be used against Iran's ballistic missile arsenal.

The strategic calculus would be serious enough if we were dealing with a government that restricted its targeting to military assets. We are not.

"The United States will not deliberately target civilians. The Iranians, on the other hand — I'm sure you've seen it — [are] hitting embassies, airports, and all [civilian] infrastructure... They are deliberately targeting millions. You know why? They are a terroristic regime. They sponsor terrorism."

This matters enormously. Iran's willingness to strike civilian infrastructure tells you exactly how they intend to use a larger arsenal. A regime constrained by proportionality norms or international law is one thing. An Islamist government that makes decisions, as Rubio noted, "on the basis of theology, apocalyptic" reasoning is another.

An Iran holding 2,000–5,000 ballistic missiles — the stockpile projections for 2027 if production continued unchecked — with a demonstrated willingness to hit civilian targets and a theology that treats martyrdom as a feature rather than a bug is not a deterrable actor in any conventional sense.

All of the above exists without even considering Iran's nuclear program. Rubio continued:

"Why does Iran want those capabilities? What they've been trying to do for a long time is build a conventional weapons capability as a shield they can hide behind — meaning there would come a time where they have so many drones and so much damage that no one can do anything about the nuclear program. They are trying to put themselves in a place of immunity where the damage they can inflict will be so high that no one can do anything about their nuclear program or ambition."

This is the strategic architecture in full. The conventional missile buildup is not an end in itself — it's cover for the nuclear program. Once the conventional umbrella becomes impenetrable, Iran completes its nuclear development behind it, and deterrence collapses entirely. At that point, the region isn't just held hostage by ballistic missiles. It's held hostage by ballistic missiles pointed at it by a nuclear-armed apocalyptic regime.

Biding time is not an option. Every month without attacking Iran's ballistic missile program is a month with 100 new missiles aimed at US troops, moderate Arab nations and Israeli civilians - missiles that will be harder and harder to defend against to the point of impossibility in the near future.

Here is a case where "imminent threat" logic fails in international law. The threat is cumulative and, without military intervention, there is a foreseeable and irreversible tipping point.

Waiting is not prudence - it is suicide.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Academic book turning the Book of Esther into a story of Jewish genocide of "gentiles"

Sarojini Nadar’s Gender, Genocide, Gaza and the Book of Esther was released last year by Routledge. It takes a biblical story that begins with a legally sealed plan to exterminate every Jew in the Persian Empire and reframes it as a story about Jews wantonly killing Persians.

The interpretive lens is declared from the outset: Gaza. The book assumes Israel is committing genocide. That assumption then becomes the key for rereading Esther. The ancient text is retrofitted to match the contemporary accusation.

The first paragraphs of the book make it obvious that Nadar is shoehorning Esther into her hate for Israel:

As we've noted many times, Netanyahu's invocation of Amalek was in terms of remembering what they did, not annihilating them - two separate commandments.

The very premise of the book is false, based on a connection made by the author that has no basis in reality.

The Book of Esther is centered around a royal decree to “destroy, kill, and annihilate” the Jews — men, women, and children — on a single appointed day. The decree is sealed. Persian law does not allow it to be revoked.

That is the existential core of the story.

But in this reading, the moral focus is relocated to the end — to the 75,000 enemies killed when the Jews defend themselves from the would-be genocidaires That episode is elevated as the defining meaning of Esther. The extermination order against the Jews is a minor point barely mentioned.

In this book, Haman’s defining feature is not his genocidal antisemitism. It is his genealogy. He is an “Agagite,” linked to Amalek — a people once marked for destruction in earlier biblical texts. The Book of Esther definitely makes the link, but not in terms of destroying Amalek but in terms of the irrational hatred of the Jewish people that Amalek represents, both in the Torah and in Esther.

Any Jewish schoolchild immediately associates Amalek with unmitigated evil. That is Esther's use of "Agagite." His genocidal desire is based on one fact - that one Jew refuse to bow down to him, just as the Torah emphasizes that Amalek attacked the Israelites for no reason except hate, ambushing the Israelites from the rear where the weakest and slowest were trailing behind, when there was no threat. This is the paradigm of antisemitism.

Instead of noting that obvious analogy between Haman and Amalek, Nadar creates a completely different analogy -one based on the idea that Jews are always the guilty ones.

She even dismisses Haman's decree to murder every Jewish man, woman and child as a "literary exaggeration."

But not Jews trying to survive. That is not exaggeration - that is "genocide." The violence against Haman and his allies is read not primarily as self-defense against extermination, but as Jews enacting a divine mandate to annihilate an ancient enemy. Haman the exterminator becomes Haman the theologically marked victim in her retelling.

The Book of Esther says repeatedly that the Jews struck “those who sought their harm.” It specifies that in Susa, 500 men were killed. It emphasizes three separate times that the Jews did not take plunder — despite being legally allowed to do so.

The narrative does not describe Jews slaughtering Persian civilians indiscriminately. It does not narrate women and children being killed by Jewish forces. It does not present expansion, conquest, or domination. In other words, by no definition can the Jews' self-defensive actions be called genocidal - unless that is how you look at Jews in general. Yet Nadar repeatedly says that the Jews killed 75,000 “gentiles,” positioning self defense as a baseless hatred of anyone who is not Jewish.

Nadar denies any antisemitism. Yet her warped worldview prompts her to she even twist the Biblical account of Amalek itself to try to justify its actions as either self defense or pre-emptive defense of Canaan:

She's just "asking questions." Just like Holocaust deniers, just like Candace Owens. Instead of asking why people have hated Jews irrationally for the past 2,500 years, she asks what the Jews must have done to be hated.

In Esther, Jews are no longer a threatened minority fighting to live. They are the eternal aggressors. In the Torah, the Israelites are not newly freed slaves who are being led to liberation but an aggressive threat to the presumably peaceful Amalekites. In Gaza, Israel is not a state responding to violence or existential threat. It is the inheritor of a biblical annihilation script.

In all cases, Jewish self-defense becomes morally illegitimate by definition. Any exercise of force, even in response to extermination, is reframed as genocidal intent. And antisemitism, uniquely among all types of hate, is transformed into something that must be justified, somehow, because otherwise it doesn't make sense.

Nadar does something similar in her thesis that the Book of Esther connects the sexual subjugation of the king's harem with the Hebrew word herem, which can mean destruction. The words indeed are etymologically related, both denoting separation, but neither is used in Esther, yet Nadar uses this to connect the misogynistic behavior of a Persian king and the supposedly bloodthirsty Jews- she might as well connect Esther to the Arabic/Muslim word haram, forbidden, which also shares the same root word.

This book is moral inversion masquerading as scholarship. And it judges the Jews of Persia and even the Israelites through the same bigoted lens as it judges the Israeli Jews of today.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/02 Links: America’s Invaluable Ally; The death of a tyrant; Tehran’s traffic cameras allowed Israel to track Khamenei; Two more US servicemembers killed raising total to 6

From Ian:

Israeli President: "If Someone Rises to Kill You, Rise to Kill Him First"

Speaking at the site of an Iranian missile attack in Tel Aviv on Sunday, Israeli President Isaac Herzog thanked U.S. President Donald Trump "for his courage" and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "for the correct decision" in launching the strikes on Iran.

"We are united at this moment to defeat the enemy and bring about change," he said.

Israel is at war, "and in war, you must first take care of the home front and protect it, and second, attack and act with full force to defeat the enemy."

"If someone rises to kill you, rise to kill him first," he said, quoting the Talmud.

"It is our duty to be strong, resilient, and steadfast. We will get through this and move forward, and our children and grandchildren will one day be grateful for these moments."

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett said, "I've never been prouder to be an Israeli and we will never apologize for what we are doing. I give my full backing to the government and its leader." "There is no left and no right. The entire people of Israel stand behind the [air force] pilots."

John Spencer: Iran's War on the United States Did Not Start Yesterday

Iran started a war against the U.S. in 1979. It has never stopped. The Islamic Republic defined itself in opposition to the U.S. and built its foreign policy around confrontation with America and its allies. During the Iraq War, Iranian-backed militias killed 603 U.S. service members. I know this personally. My soldiers and I faced their weapons. This was part of a deliberate strategy by Tehran to attack American forces. The campaign never ended.

In January 2020, Iran fired ballistic missiles at U.S. bases in Iraq. More than 100 American service members were later diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries. Between October 2023 and early 2024, Iranian-backed militias conducted more than 170 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria.

At the same time, Iran has enriched uranium to levels far beyond civilian energy requirements. It has developed longer-range missile systems with capabilities that are not defensive in nature.

Diplomacy has been attempted repeatedly over decades. While talks proceeded, Iran continued to fund Hizbullah, Hamas, Shia militias in Iraq, and the Houthis. It continued to refine missiles. It continued enrichment. It continued attacks on Americans. At some point, a pattern must be acknowledged for what it is.

The question today is not whether Iran's war on the U.S. exists. It is whether the U.S. ends it. History suggests that when America fails to respond decisively to sustained aggression, the aggression grows. Americans have been targeted for 47 years. Enough.

The death of a tyrant

What he lacked in religious scholarship and charisma he made up for in ruthless political maneuvering. Alongside other hardline members of the clergy, he developed a tight-knit partnership with the IRGC. And so from the 1990s onwards, Khamenei’s reign was marked by an ever-tightening grip on civil society.

After reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami beat Khamenei’s choice in the 1997 elections, he launched a crackdown on even mild challenges to the status quo. He closed down newspapers, jailed key politicians and had his henchmen silence reformers. This pattern of responding to any internal challenge through brutal and increasingly lethal repression increased in intensity throughout his reign. He violently put down student protests in 1999; beat and shot demonstrators during unrest following the disputed 2009 election; and crushed large-scale, increasingly working-class protests with lethal force in 2019, killing hundreds.

The death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, at the hands of the so-called morality police, prompted what were then the most widespread anti-regime protests of his rule. Khamenei responded by killing nearly 600 protesters and arresting more than 20,000. It turned out that was just a foretaste of what he was to visit on anti-regime protesters earlier this year. Officially, the Islamic Republic claims that just over 3,000 people were killed. External observers suggest the real death toll could be over 30,000.

The growth of popular Iranian opposition to the Islamic Republic is not a surprise. Iranians’ living standards have plummeted, and their freedoms crushed, under the reign of the two ayatollahs. The economy is shattered, state-level corruption rife and the most basic of civil liberties non-existent.

At the same time as the Iranian populace has been living in dire straits, Khamenei and his IRGC cronies have been relentlessly and expensively pursuing their Islamist mission abroad. They ploughed billions into supporting a network of Islamist militias – the so-called Axis of Resistance – across the Middle East. They invested an enormous amount of resources into the military and perhaps even more in pursuit of a nuclear-weapons capability. And all the while ordinary Iranians struggle to access water and electricity.

Right from the start, Khamenei was only too happy to neglect the lives of Iranians in the interests of violently promoting the Islamist mission abroad. With Iranian backing, Hezbollah detonated a truck bomb outside the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, killing four Israelis and 25 Argentinians, including children. It struck again in Buenos Aires in 1994, bombing a Jewish community centre, killing 85 people. That was just the start. Since the early 1990s, Iran has backed its proxies to the hilt in their transnational war against the supposedly Satanic forces of America and Israel. Countless lives have been lost and a region torn apart, as Khamenei’s Islamic regime expanded its reach into Iraq during the 2000s, and Syria and Yemen in the 2010s.

It’s possible to argue that the Islamic Republic’s war with the Great and Little Satans has now come home to roost. The current US-Israeli intervention is the latest, most dangerous phase of a conflict started by an Iranian proxy slaughtering hundreds of Israeli Jews over two years ago – Hamas’s pogrom on October 7. And it has now claimed the life of Khamenei himself. He has become the most significant fatality in a war he has done so much to stoke.