The world has awoken to news of a decapitation. Early this morning, Israel time, the air force of the Jewish State struck with astonishing precision against the tyrants and infrastructure of the Iranian regime. The top dogs of the Islamic republic have been taken out. Its nuclear facilities have been reduced to ashen wreckage. None of us can afford the luxury of political aloofness in this moment, far less that moral cowardice that masquerades as pacifism. Too much is at stake. Events compel us to stir from our insouciance and take a side for once.
From what we know, this would appear to be one of the most laser-focussed strikes against a hostile regime in the history of warfare. Those images of apartment blocks entirely intact aside from the floor where one of Iran’s despots lived are a testament to the exactness of Israel’s daring raid. The list of the dead is astounding. They include General Mohammad Bagheri, the chief of military staff, and Hossein Salami, leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Imagine the glee of the families of the 500 youths who were butchered by Salami’s guards in 2022 for the crime of believing that women deserve ‘life and freedom’.
Just like that, the regime’s two chief military autocrats are gone. The man responsible for Iran’s murderous, imperial foreign ventures (Bagheri) and the man charged with maintaining the unforgiving diktats of the republic against its own freedom-dreaming citizens (Salami) are no more. Just this week, Salami said: ‘Our next confrontation with the Israelis will be far more crushing, devastating and destructive.’ Yes, for you.
Other military leaders were assassinated, too. So were nuclear scientists, including Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation. Israel says these regime boffins were developing a ‘nuclear programme’ for ‘military objectives’. They’ve been ruthlessly pursuing the ‘weaponisation’ of uranium, it says. Indeed, the prime justification for Operation Rising Lion, as the mission has been christened, was to ‘eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat’.
Naturally, given this is a military venture by the state that luvvies and activists love to hate, Israel’s operation already finds itself shrouded in misinformation and shrill censure. Israel is a ‘rogue’ nation launching an ‘unprovoked’ assault on poor Iran, cry the morally lost leftists of the West. They echo the Iranian regime itself, which tweeted: ‘Remember we didn’t initiate it.’ Excuse my language, but yes you f*****g did. You initiated this when you sponsored the largest mass murder of Jews since the Nazis and the largest exiling of Jews since the Arab wars of the 1940s.
It was the Iranian regime’s proxy, Hamas, that started the current war in Gaza, when it sent an army of 6,000 tooled-up fascists to rape Israeli women and slaughter Israeli families. And it was the Iranian regime’s proxy of Hezbollah that turned the heat up even further with its daily bombings of northern Israel that caused 60,000 Israelis to evacuate their homes – the single largest fleeing of Jews from war since the fallout from the Arab-Israel conflict of 1948. Say it with me: Iran started this war.
Israel is now accused of ‘escalating’ tensions. Why is it escalation when the Jewish State takes out a general of the Iranian regime but not when that general’s allies kidnap a mother and her two babies for the ‘crime’ of being Jews in the Holy Land? Those who wring their hands harder over the death of General Mohammad Bagheri than they did over the deaths of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas have forfeited the right to be considered morally decent human beings. They’ve taken a side, even if they refuse to acknowledge it: the side of Islamo-fascism against the Jewish nation.
Show me one state on Earth that would tolerate the existence of a nearby regime that had sent its proxies to rape and murder your people and had sworn itself to your annihilation. Israel is right to say the Iranian regime is ‘devoted to the destruction of the State of Israel, not just as an ideal, but as a binding directive’. That is clear from Iran’s statements, its terrorism and its war-making. Those referring to Israel’s op as a ‘regime-change war’, thus slyly likening it to the vain, reckless wars of the Western powers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are being outright duplicitous. Israel is carefully attacking a regime that attacked it, not violently blundering into a far-off nation in search of that fleeting moral rush of global importance as the postwar order corrodes.
Both sides must now ‘show restraint’, say the leaders of Europe with snivelling conformity. ‘We urge all parties to step back’, says Keir Starmer. Let’s leave to one side the fact that Israel is showing restraint, and is launching precise strikes rather than mimicking the lethally infantile ‘shock and awe’ that Britain and America pursued to such ruinous effect in Iraq. More pointedly, to call on Israel to ‘show restraint’ against the regime that sponsored a fascistic bloodbath against the Jews is, to be blunt, sick-making.
One envisions Starmer and the rest issuing their chickensh*t cries at every crisis point in human history. To America after Pearl Harbour, or to the Free French army following the Nazi conquest of France: ‘Show restraint. Step back. Don’t do anything too risky.’ It is moral cowardice in the drag of diplomacy, spinelessness dolled up as peacemaking. It is even worse on the so-called left, which expressly calls on Israel and Israel alone to lay down arms. That these people now shed tears over Israel’s assassination of Islamist tyrants confirms that it was never the tragic death of Palestinian civilians that horrified them about the Gaza war – it was the temerity of the Jewish State in standing up for itself against its foes. Their ‘pacifism’ masks a disgustingly blasé attitude towards the murder of Jews by religious hysterics.
War is awful, and sometimes necessary. Israel’s confrontation with the Islamic republic is being cynically coat-tailed by American war hawks who’ve long dreamt of vengeance for the humiliations the US suffered during the Iranian Revolution. And it is being cynically damned as criminal by leftists who seem to believe that every act of Jewish self-defence is by definition a war crime. The rest of us have a moral duty to rise above all this self-serving noise and answer the following question: are we on the side of a regime that sponsors the mass murder of Jews, the exportation of Islamist terror and the savage repression of women and homosexuals, or are we on the side of Israel? I know my answer.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
Just like that, the regime’s two chief military autocrats are gone. The man responsible for Iran’s murderous, imperial foreign ventures (Bagheri) and the man charged with maintaining the unforgiving diktats of the republic against its own freedom-dreaming citizens (Salami) are no more. Just this week, Salami said: ‘Our next confrontation with the Israelis will be far more crushing, devastating and destructive.’ Yes, for you.
Other military leaders were assassinated, too. So were nuclear scientists, including Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation. Israel says these regime boffins were developing a ‘nuclear programme’ for ‘military objectives’. They’ve been ruthlessly pursuing the ‘weaponisation’ of uranium, it says. Indeed, the prime justification for Operation Rising Lion, as the mission has been christened, was to ‘eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat’.
Naturally, given this is a military venture by the state that luvvies and activists love to hate, Israel’s operation already finds itself shrouded in misinformation and shrill censure. Israel is a ‘rogue’ nation launching an ‘unprovoked’ assault on poor Iran, cry the morally lost leftists of the West. They echo the Iranian regime itself, which tweeted: ‘Remember we didn’t initiate it.’ Excuse my language, but yes you f*****g did. You initiated this when you sponsored the largest mass murder of Jews since the Nazis and the largest exiling of Jews since the Arab wars of the 1940s.
It was the Iranian regime’s proxy, Hamas, that started the current war in Gaza, when it sent an army of 6,000 tooled-up fascists to rape Israeli women and slaughter Israeli families. And it was the Iranian regime’s proxy of Hezbollah that turned the heat up even further with its daily bombings of northern Israel that caused 60,000 Israelis to evacuate their homes – the single largest fleeing of Jews from war since the fallout from the Arab-Israel conflict of 1948. Say it with me: Iran started this war.
Israel is now accused of ‘escalating’ tensions. Why is it escalation when the Jewish State takes out a general of the Iranian regime but not when that general’s allies kidnap a mother and her two babies for the ‘crime’ of being Jews in the Holy Land? Those who wring their hands harder over the death of General Mohammad Bagheri than they did over the deaths of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas have forfeited the right to be considered morally decent human beings. They’ve taken a side, even if they refuse to acknowledge it: the side of Islamo-fascism against the Jewish nation.
Show me one state on Earth that would tolerate the existence of a nearby regime that had sent its proxies to rape and murder your people and had sworn itself to your annihilation. Israel is right to say the Iranian regime is ‘devoted to the destruction of the State of Israel, not just as an ideal, but as a binding directive’. That is clear from Iran’s statements, its terrorism and its war-making. Those referring to Israel’s op as a ‘regime-change war’, thus slyly likening it to the vain, reckless wars of the Western powers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are being outright duplicitous. Israel is carefully attacking a regime that attacked it, not violently blundering into a far-off nation in search of that fleeting moral rush of global importance as the postwar order corrodes.
Both sides must now ‘show restraint’, say the leaders of Europe with snivelling conformity. ‘We urge all parties to step back’, says Keir Starmer. Let’s leave to one side the fact that Israel is showing restraint, and is launching precise strikes rather than mimicking the lethally infantile ‘shock and awe’ that Britain and America pursued to such ruinous effect in Iraq. More pointedly, to call on Israel to ‘show restraint’ against the regime that sponsored a fascistic bloodbath against the Jews is, to be blunt, sick-making.
One envisions Starmer and the rest issuing their chickensh*t cries at every crisis point in human history. To America after Pearl Harbour, or to the Free French army following the Nazi conquest of France: ‘Show restraint. Step back. Don’t do anything too risky.’ It is moral cowardice in the drag of diplomacy, spinelessness dolled up as peacemaking. It is even worse on the so-called left, which expressly calls on Israel and Israel alone to lay down arms. That these people now shed tears over Israel’s assassination of Islamist tyrants confirms that it was never the tragic death of Palestinian civilians that horrified them about the Gaza war – it was the temerity of the Jewish State in standing up for itself against its foes. Their ‘pacifism’ masks a disgustingly blasé attitude towards the murder of Jews by religious hysterics.
War is awful, and sometimes necessary. Israel’s confrontation with the Islamic republic is being cynically coat-tailed by American war hawks who’ve long dreamt of vengeance for the humiliations the US suffered during the Iranian Revolution. And it is being cynically damned as criminal by leftists who seem to believe that every act of Jewish self-defence is by definition a war crime. The rest of us have a moral duty to rise above all this self-serving noise and answer the following question: are we on the side of a regime that sponsors the mass murder of Jews, the exportation of Islamist terror and the savage repression of women and homosexuals, or are we on the side of Israel? I know my answer.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
7 comments:
Oh dear. Brendan is hysterical, but what else is new? This is not a calm, rational analysis of a situation with potentially far reaching consequences (and worse, it is misguided), this is a man trying to cram as much emotive language and elaborate diversons from, and inversions of, reality as possible into a short amount of column space. Nobody who talks like this should be taken seriously, because if what he was saying were substantially true, he wouldn't have to express himself in such an overwrought manner as a substitute for truth.
Every commenter has his or her own view of anything at all, but really Eschaton, despair at the writers writing if you must, but disputing the facts without research is risky on your part.
I was encouraged by Brendan's article since the antisemitism that perversely has taken over the West needs countering by articulate people like him.
This is a religious war we are observing in the Middle East - Western Judeo-Christianity versus Mohammedanism. Maybe Israel has made mistakes but its main purpose on this planet is to survive, which according to scripture it will. Hebrew scripture and its prophets incidentally are astonishingly accurate on prophesy..
The main aim of those who don't support Israel's purpose is to demonize them because they see no value in the distinct value in Western Civilization's survival nor the Hebrew God. Meanwhile Muslims suffer at least severe punishment , probably death for criticizing the Koran or Mohammad.
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I so love the excitable responses to this columnist.
Oh I think Brendan's prose is excellent - factual and effective. Yours, on the other hand, Eschaton, doesn't add much to the debate.
Forget Hebrew scripture my prediction is Israel will be the first to launch a nuclear bomb. Israel is in the process of destroying its chief benefactor (the US), then they will have to find another state willing to hand over all it's blood and treasure to enable Israel's survival. Good luck with that. Meanwhile Isareli citizens are getting out from this failed state, as fast as they can.
It is interesting to note the supposed fact checking during the age of Trump. Those common folk who watch the US cable TV channels are flocking to the channel that reports the truth.
Fox News now has 5 times more viewers than their rival - the once great CNN. You can’t fool all the people all of the time.
That says it all really.
Notice how the G7 bunch of “also rans” have been quick to actually state in their meeting communique’ that Iran are the agents of terror in the region and that it should never have a nuclear weapon at its disposal and
how they are all queuing up salivating at the prospect of doing a trade deal with the US.
How much has changed in only 6 months since the election of 47.
Even his greatest enemies including the MSM, begrudgingly acknowledge that Trump is the only person capable of bringing an end to these wars and the trading imbalance that have been part of the problem for decades.
And the US President has shown remarkable restraint in using the power he undoubtedly has at his disposal. Few world leaders, even his predecessors, have spent as much time trying to bring about peace through negotiation. But no doubt those suffering from TDS will continue to say it is all his fault.
We should be thankful that he is going to prove them wrong and the world will be a better place because of it.
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