‘The Zionist regime is melting before the eyes of the world’, gloated Ayatollah Khamenei in the aftermath of Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. His giddy foretelling of the death of the Jewish nation was echoed across the realm of Israelophobia. Israel’s downfall ‘is a matter of when, not if’, said the Islamo-loons of 5 Pillars. Leftist hotheads agreed that the invasion of Israel by Iran’s proxies sounded the death knell for ‘the Zionist project’.
Fast forward to 2026 and the only thing ‘melting before the eyes of the world’ is the Islamic Republic itself. All the terrible things Khamenei thought would befall Israel have in fact befallen his own regime. Israel has ‘entered a dead-end corridor’ from which it ‘will not be able to escape’, he boasted. Hilariously, he’s probably literally in a corridor right now, or some squalid room, the hatches well and truly battened down as he hides from the implacable fury of the glorious Iranian revolt.
The Islamic Republic thought it had signed Israel’s death warrant on 7 October 2023 – in truth, it may well have signed its own. It increasingly feels like that carnival of racist violence was not only the worst act of harm against the Jews since the Holocaust, but also the worst act of self-harm ever carried out by radical Islamists. One by one, those who authored or assisted it – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis – have been decimated. And now the benefactor of their barbarism teeters on the brink of oblivion, a victim of its own hubris and hatred.
It’s worth reminding ourselves of the regime’s existential crowing after 7 October. It is a ‘huge blow to Israel’, said Khamenei. The 7 October attack will leave an indelible ‘black mark’ on the ‘Zionist entity’, said Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal. ‘Victory is near’, he said. Defeat was nearer. Every premature dancer on the Jewish State’s grave has watched as their own movements and ideologies have been consumed by the blowback from their vicious push against the Jews.
Hamas has been throttled. Its leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, chief architect of 7 October, are dead. The army of anti-Semites might not be finished but it is depleted. It has suffered ‘considerable losses’, both in terms of manpower and finances, following its ‘degrading’ by the IDF. Hezbollah, if anything, has fared even worse. It rallied to Hamas’s bigoted cause after 7 October, raining missiles down on northern Israel to ‘destroy the Zionist entity’. All it destroyed was itself.
Israel’s assassination of its spiritual leader, Hassan Nasrallah, dealt it a mortal blow. In the same month – September 2024 – Israel took out virtually the entire command structure of Hezbollah with a strike in Beirut. The extraordinary pagers operation, when thousands of pagers simultaneously exploded in the trouser pockets of Hezbollah goons, heaped further humiliation on the militia. Operation Grim Beeper, people called it. Right now, the Lebanese government is in the process of disarming Hezbollah. What a boon for humanity: the Islamic Republic on the ropes while one of its cruellest militias sheepishly gives up its guns.
Then there’s the Iranian regime itself. It’s in serious peril, courtesy of the staggeringly brave men and women rising up against it. These warriors for liberty are the brilliant agents of the mullahs’ strife, proving to the world that even the most ruthless regimes can be taken to task by those they oppress. And yet it was the lethal folly of 7 October, the fascistic vanity of it, that paved the way for the regime’s crisis. The mullahs’ obsessive harrying of the Jewish State pushed the Iranian people’s patience to breaking point.
The wastefulness of the regime’s war on the Jews infuriated sections of the Iranian populace. As the rial kept falling in value against the US dollar, causing huge hardship, still the regime spunked billions on its anti-Semitic proxies. It’s estimated to have spent $20 billion on Hezbollah and Hamas since 2012. The cost to Iran – and more importantly to the Iranian people – of launching missile strikes on Israel is extraordinary. For example, the events of 1 October 2024, just one day, when the regime fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel, cost Iran an eye-watering $2.3 billion. That’s six times as much as it cost Israel to repel the missiles.
The 12 Day War between Iran and Israel in June last year inflicted huge costs on Iran. In retaliation for Iran’s strikes, Israel struck critical infrastructure across 27 of Iran’s provinces, including airports, oil and gas depots and, of course, nuclear infrastructure. The cost to Iran ran into the billions. Its firing back at Israel cost billions, too. The 12 Day War put ‘enormous strain [on] Iran’s already battered economy’, as one observer described it. And this was a nation where around 80 per cent of the population were ‘fail[ing] to meet the 2,100-calorie daily requirement’.
The mullahs’ cosmic animus for the Jewish State hit the Iranian people hard. The shopkeepers and students of Iran watched their cash lose its value as the theocrats sent billions to the rich racists who lead Hamas and Hezbollah. Little wonder one of the rallying cries on the streets is ‘Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran!’. In short, no more lavish, spiteful warmongering over there – focus instead on here.
After the 12 Day War, Western leftists said Israel’s strikes against Iran would cause the Iranian people to rally behind the mullahs. The opposite happened. Millions were sickened by the profligate hawkishness of the regime and now openly demand that it forget ‘Gaza and Lebanon’. What an extraordinary situation – the privileged keffiyeh classes of the West long for more strikes on the Jewish State, while Iranian rebels say: ‘Enough.’ Our own Islamo-left instinctively wants the Iranian regime to survive, in the catastrophically foolish belief that it is a counterweight to the West, capitalism and Israel. Iranian protesters want it to die, in the searing, true belief that it is a counterweight to their own freedom, and to reason itself
Some on the faux-left say the ‘Zionist lobby’ is behind the revolt in Iran. It is a testament to their own Orientalist bigotry that they would so cavalierly strip the rebels of agency and reduce them to dupes of the Jews. In truth, where 7 October might have pushed to the fore the question of Iran’s future, it is the Iranian people who will answer that question. And millions are saying: ‘No more Islamism, no more theocracy, no more war in Gaza and Lebanon.’ They want Iran to leave behind the Islamofascist experiment and once again take its place among the great civilisations. All good people do.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
The Islamic Republic thought it had signed Israel’s death warrant on 7 October 2023 – in truth, it may well have signed its own. It increasingly feels like that carnival of racist violence was not only the worst act of harm against the Jews since the Holocaust, but also the worst act of self-harm ever carried out by radical Islamists. One by one, those who authored or assisted it – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis – have been decimated. And now the benefactor of their barbarism teeters on the brink of oblivion, a victim of its own hubris and hatred.
It’s worth reminding ourselves of the regime’s existential crowing after 7 October. It is a ‘huge blow to Israel’, said Khamenei. The 7 October attack will leave an indelible ‘black mark’ on the ‘Zionist entity’, said Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal. ‘Victory is near’, he said. Defeat was nearer. Every premature dancer on the Jewish State’s grave has watched as their own movements and ideologies have been consumed by the blowback from their vicious push against the Jews.
Hamas has been throttled. Its leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, chief architect of 7 October, are dead. The army of anti-Semites might not be finished but it is depleted. It has suffered ‘considerable losses’, both in terms of manpower and finances, following its ‘degrading’ by the IDF. Hezbollah, if anything, has fared even worse. It rallied to Hamas’s bigoted cause after 7 October, raining missiles down on northern Israel to ‘destroy the Zionist entity’. All it destroyed was itself.
Israel’s assassination of its spiritual leader, Hassan Nasrallah, dealt it a mortal blow. In the same month – September 2024 – Israel took out virtually the entire command structure of Hezbollah with a strike in Beirut. The extraordinary pagers operation, when thousands of pagers simultaneously exploded in the trouser pockets of Hezbollah goons, heaped further humiliation on the militia. Operation Grim Beeper, people called it. Right now, the Lebanese government is in the process of disarming Hezbollah. What a boon for humanity: the Islamic Republic on the ropes while one of its cruellest militias sheepishly gives up its guns.
Then there’s the Iranian regime itself. It’s in serious peril, courtesy of the staggeringly brave men and women rising up against it. These warriors for liberty are the brilliant agents of the mullahs’ strife, proving to the world that even the most ruthless regimes can be taken to task by those they oppress. And yet it was the lethal folly of 7 October, the fascistic vanity of it, that paved the way for the regime’s crisis. The mullahs’ obsessive harrying of the Jewish State pushed the Iranian people’s patience to breaking point.
The wastefulness of the regime’s war on the Jews infuriated sections of the Iranian populace. As the rial kept falling in value against the US dollar, causing huge hardship, still the regime spunked billions on its anti-Semitic proxies. It’s estimated to have spent $20 billion on Hezbollah and Hamas since 2012. The cost to Iran – and more importantly to the Iranian people – of launching missile strikes on Israel is extraordinary. For example, the events of 1 October 2024, just one day, when the regime fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel, cost Iran an eye-watering $2.3 billion. That’s six times as much as it cost Israel to repel the missiles.
The 12 Day War between Iran and Israel in June last year inflicted huge costs on Iran. In retaliation for Iran’s strikes, Israel struck critical infrastructure across 27 of Iran’s provinces, including airports, oil and gas depots and, of course, nuclear infrastructure. The cost to Iran ran into the billions. Its firing back at Israel cost billions, too. The 12 Day War put ‘enormous strain [on] Iran’s already battered economy’, as one observer described it. And this was a nation where around 80 per cent of the population were ‘fail[ing] to meet the 2,100-calorie daily requirement’.
The mullahs’ cosmic animus for the Jewish State hit the Iranian people hard. The shopkeepers and students of Iran watched their cash lose its value as the theocrats sent billions to the rich racists who lead Hamas and Hezbollah. Little wonder one of the rallying cries on the streets is ‘Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran!’. In short, no more lavish, spiteful warmongering over there – focus instead on here.
After the 12 Day War, Western leftists said Israel’s strikes against Iran would cause the Iranian people to rally behind the mullahs. The opposite happened. Millions were sickened by the profligate hawkishness of the regime and now openly demand that it forget ‘Gaza and Lebanon’. What an extraordinary situation – the privileged keffiyeh classes of the West long for more strikes on the Jewish State, while Iranian rebels say: ‘Enough.’ Our own Islamo-left instinctively wants the Iranian regime to survive, in the catastrophically foolish belief that it is a counterweight to the West, capitalism and Israel. Iranian protesters want it to die, in the searing, true belief that it is a counterweight to their own freedom, and to reason itself
Some on the faux-left say the ‘Zionist lobby’ is behind the revolt in Iran. It is a testament to their own Orientalist bigotry that they would so cavalierly strip the rebels of agency and reduce them to dupes of the Jews. In truth, where 7 October might have pushed to the fore the question of Iran’s future, it is the Iranian people who will answer that question. And millions are saying: ‘No more Islamism, no more theocracy, no more war in Gaza and Lebanon.’ They want Iran to leave behind the Islamofascist experiment and once again take its place among the great civilisations. All good people do.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
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