We waited. The silence my first article The Silence After the Lie diagnosed did not stay silent. It filled with the Counter-Islam industry doing what it was built to do — accusation, suspicion, and the steady transfer of a manufactured fear poisoning the public bloodstream. It filled with the propaganda outlets and pundits who make their careers from exactly this. It did not fill with clear corrections from the government officials, the Met, the BBC, or the mainstream outlets that ran the original framing.

Nearly two months in, the Metropolitan Police have arrested twenty-six people. Eight have been charged with arson-related offences. One has been convicted of arson. One man was arrested on 26 April on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts — the first terrorism-related arrest in the entire investigation.¹ The investigation that began under the lens of an Iranian-directed Islamic terror campaign has now been reframed by the Met itself as a paid-proxy criminal operation — “violence as a service,” in the words of the senior counter-terrorism coordinator.² But the Iran attribution has not been retracted. The framing has only shifted from Iranian-linked terrorism to Iranian-linked criminality — the same misinformation, the same dubious sources, the same pipeline, with the noun changed and the modifier preserved. The British government has not retracted the Iran link. The BBC has not retracted the framing — it has only softened it, now describing HAYI as a group with possible or suspected links to Iran rather than as a confirmed Iranian-backed group. The legislation Parliament wrote for foreign-state-directed hostile activity is not being used. The original framing has been left in place to do its work.

This article is about the evidence that has accumulated to date — not only in the three weeks since The Silence After the Lie was published, but from the moment HAYI first appeared on the ninth of March 2026. The first article established the pipeline through which the Iran-linked narrative was laundered and reached the British public: the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague, the BBC. That pipeline is established. This article is about the operational fingerprint of the people who built the HAYI brand. The technical impossibility of the Iranian-handler thesis. The Met’s quiet retreat from terrorism to criminality without any retreat from the Iran attribution itself. And the question the original article could not yet ask — not just who built this, but why, nearly two months in and twenty-six arrests later, no foreign sponsor has been named when the Met’s own most recent comparable case named one within months.³

Both communities are owed clarity. Jewish families in Golders Green were told they were under siege from Iranian-directed Islamic terror. They were not. Muslim families across Britain have been carrying the weight of an attack their communities had no part in and condemn without qualification. The Met, the British government, and the media that ran the original framing owe both communities the same correction, with the same prominence as the original story. They have not yet given it. The investigation was wrong from the beginning. The work of this article is to show what putting it right would actually require. Until it is put right, both communities cannot heal and the public cannot see the true problem.

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No Muslim Hands

HAYI claims to be a Shia Islamic militant group. That is the identity the brand asserts in its founding statement. The 9 March announcement, circulated through Iraqi pro-Iranian Telegram channels, declared the start of HAYI’s “military operations against US and Israeli interests around the world.” ⁴ The communiqués that followed framed the campaign as jihad — a sacred religious act in the framework of Islamic militancy — in retaliation for the US-Israeli war on Iran, conducted by a movement aligned with the Axis of Resistance. That is the identity the founding statement asserts. That is the identity the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs formalised in its 16 March report.⁵ That is the identity the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism amplified on 23 March.⁶ That is the identity the public received.

The evidence disqualifies that identity at every level the operation can be examined — language, theology, vocabulary, source material, soundtrack, and behaviour. None of it requires specialist analysis. Most of it is documented by the institutions whose own reports gave the original framing its credibility. The case is not that the framing was hard to verify. The case is that the framing was contradicted by the materials HAYI itself published, and the institutions that ran with it did not look.

Start with the strongest single point: the founding statement HAYI issued for the Golders Green attack — the document the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs republished on its own website — opens with a quotation from the Qur’an, Surah At-Tawbah verse 41. The text has been altered.⁷

The Quranic verse reads wa-jāhidū — “and strive” — the imperative form of the verb. HAYI’s version reads wa-jāhadū — past tense, “and they strove.” The vocalisation mark on the letter hāʼ has been moved from below the letter (kasra, short i) to above it (fatḥa, short a). One vowel. The vowel changes the tense, changes the grammatical function, and changes the meaning of the verse.

This is not a hard error to identify. The Arabic text of Surah 9:41 is available on Quran.com, in every printed Qur’an in the world, and in every Islamic-language corpus a translator might consult. Copy-paste produces the correct text. The error appears only when someone composes the line themselves — or asks an AI to compose it — without checking against the received text.

For Muslims, this matters in a way that cannot be overstated and is difficult to convey to a reader who does not share the formation. The Qur’an is considered divinely preserved — God’s words, transmitted through fourteen centuries with the precise vocalisation intact. Altering the text, even in a quotation, even by a single diacritical mark, is theologically unthinkable. It is taught from the moment a child first picks up a Qur’an. A Muslim militant group — any school, any sect, any tradition — does not alter Quranic text in the document that announces its existence. There is no internal religious framework in which the alteration would be permitted, and no operational framework in which it would be allowed to pass.

Whoever composed HAYI’s founding statement did not know this. The implication is binary: either the person had no Muslim religious formation at all, or the statement was generated by AI and published without anyone checking it against the Qur’an. Both possibilities preclude the identity HAYI asserts. A Shia Islamic militant group does not produce its founding statement with the Qur’an misquoted in Arabic on the first line.

And the misquotation is not on a hand-drawn logo or a low-resolution graphic where a letter might be miscopied. It is the body text of a written communiqué, reproduced as an image in the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs’ own report on the group. The Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs has been republishing the error. They do not note that it has been altered.

The vocabulary the operators chose for the rest of the statement points the same way.

The Golders Green communiqué describes the Machzike Hadath Synagogue as significant because of its connection to “Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Israel and one of the most influential thinkers of Religious Zionism, who served at this synagogue before immigrating to the Land of Israel.” ⁸ The phrase to mark is “the Land of Israel” — Eretz Yisrael. It is the formulation of Religious Zionism: the theological-political movement founded by Rabbi Kook that frames the modern state of Israel as the realisation of biblical promise. It is the vocabulary of Israeli nationalism and of the settler movement. It is not the vocabulary of any Iranian proxy. It is not the vocabulary of any Shia militant tradition. It is not the vocabulary of any Sunni jihadi movement. Real Islamist groups have a vocabulary for talking about Israel — the Zionist entity, the Occupation, the usurper entity, the Zionist regime. They use it because their ideological framework requires them to deny the legitimacy of the Israeli state in the act of naming it. The Land of Israel concedes the legitimacy in the act of naming. It is the formulation of the side that affirms the state, not the side that opposes it.

The same paragraph contains a second tell. The communiqué describes Machzike Hadath as “one of the important centers of Orthodox Judaism.” The construction is unremarkable to a Western reader who has grown up around Anglo-American Jewish denominational vocabulary — Reform, Conservative, Modern Orthodox, Hasidic, Haredi, the categories that organise diaspora Jewish religious life. To a Muslim militant, this construction is unwritable. The framework that motivates a real Islamist attack on a synagogue does not distinguish denominations. The framework is al-yahud — Jews — or Zionists. A Shia militant communiqué does not specify Orthodox versus Reform any more than anti-shariah propaganda would specify Sunni versus Shia when calling for violence against Muslims. Denomination is theologically irrelevant to the framework. Specifying it is the move of someone inside Jewish religious-political life, fluent in its internal categories — not someone hating Jews from outside it.

The two phrases together are the operators’ fluency, on display in the document that introduced HAYI to the world. “The Land of Israel” is Religious Zionist vocabulary. “Orthodox Judaism” is the language of someone who knows Jewish denominational categories. Neither is something a Muslim militant would write. Both are something a person fluent in Anglo-American Jewish religious-political life would write without thinking. The operators wrote a Muslim extremist communiqué in the wrong vocabulary — vocabulary they evidently knew well enough to use without noticing.

The same paragraph contains a smaller tell that compounds the others. The Machzike Hadath Synagogue is described as “one of the important centers of Orthodox Judaism” — American spelling, not the British centres. The communiqué is announcing an attack on a London target. The American spelling does not, on its own, prove who is sitting at the keyboard. It proves the device the document was composed on. A uniformly American communiqué is not the output of an unconscious bilingual habit slip — that produces a mixed document, with British spellings appearing alongside the American ones. Neither is it the output of a writer working on a British-defaulted machine, whose American keystrokes would be corrected back. And the analysts who have examined HAYI’s materials agree that the Arabic text shows the signatures of machine translation, with the ICCT specifically identifying the second Telegram channel name as “likely resulting from an incorrect English translation.” ⁹ The English text is the input, not the output. Uniform American spelling in the English source requires American-defaulted hardware. The device default does not, on its own, disqualify any operator — Muslim militants working in or near American-defaulted contexts exist. What it does is add another small fact to the picture HAYI’s own materials have already built: a Quranic verse altered in a way no Muslim composes, vocabulary describing Israel and Jews that no Muslim militant uses, and a communiqué for a London target composed on an American-defaulted device. Each of these alone is small. Together they describe an operation built somewhere other than where HAYI says it was built.

The strongest direct test of HAYI’s claimed identity came on the day after the Golders Green attack. CBS News reached the administrator of HAYI’s surviving Telegram channel and exchanged a series of messages with him. The administrator, who referred to himself as Asad-Allah, did three things in the exchange that revealed more than any of HAYI’s published materials. He revealed his working language. He revealed the conceptual framework he reasoned from. And he revealed what he would not answer.¹⁰

The administrator wrote to CBS in American English. Not the English of an Arabic-speaker translating into a second language, with the syntactic markers that betray a non-native speaker. American English. The language of someone for whom American English is the default working language, written without strain and without translation artefacts. CBS noted this directly in their reporting.

The conceptual framework was sharper still. CBS observed that posts on the account had repeatedly referenced Christian and Jewish philosophy to justify the group’s actions, with no mention of Islamic principles or teachings. A Shia Islamic militant group does not justify its attacks through Christian and Jewish philosophy. A Shia Islamic militant group justifies its attacks through the Qur’an, the hadith, the example of the Imams, the Karbala framework, the Khomeinist tradition, the rulings of senior Shia jurists. These are not interchangeable with Christian and Jewish philosophy. They are not equivalent intellectual traditions one might substitute for the other depending on audience. A Shia operative defending an attack reasons from sources internal to the Shia tradition, because that is the framework that makes the attack intelligible to the audience the operative cares about. The administrator of HAYI’s Telegram channel did not. He reasoned from sources outside the tradition the group claims as its own.

The pattern surfaced again, on the record, seven weeks later. On 29 April 2026, HAYI claimed responsibility for a stabbing attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green, in a video circulated through the same Iraqi Shia militia Telegram channels that had carried the founding statement. The video runs forty-one seconds. It contains no attack footage and no imagery from the perpetrator — only static text overlays on the HAYI logo, in English on the left and Arabic on the right. The operative phrase reads: "Historically, the Jews are the killers of Jesus Christ, and today the Zionists are the killers of innocent women and children."⁴⁵ This is deicide — the Christian theological accusation that the Jews collectively killed Christ, formally repudiated by the Catholic Church in Nostra Aetate in 1965. It is not an Islamic doctrine. The Qur'an explicitly denies that Jesus was crucified at all. Surah An-Nisa 4:157 reads: "And they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; but [another] was made to resemble him to them." The classical Islamic position, held across Sunni and Shia traditions for fourteen hundred years, is that Jesus was raised by God and another was substituted on the cross. No Muslim militant group invoking jihad against Jews could coherently use the deicide accusation, because doing so requires the speaker to affirm a crucifixion their own scripture denies. The video then compounds the incoherence. It praises "the followers of Jesus Christ (peace be upon him)" — Christians — for "participating in the operation." A supposedly Shia Islamic militant group is praising Christians, invoking deicide against Jews, as theological warrant for jihad. That position does not exist inside any actual Islamic militant tradition. It retroactively claims an alleged American attempted-assassin of US President Trump, named in the video as Cole Thomas Allen, as one of HAYI's own — and calls on "all free people" to kill Trump as well. What CBS observed in the administrator's private messages on 24 March — reasoning from Christian and Jewish philosophy rather than Islamic sources — has now appeared in HAYI's own published claim communiqué on 29 April, expanded into a fully Christian-framed call to action. The operators are not improvising one-off rhetorical errors. They are operating from inside Christian and Jewish theological frameworks, reaching for the most familiar piece of historical anti-Jewish vocabulary they have, and the one they reach for is Christian, not Islamic.

When CBS asked about the group’s structure and whether anyone was being paid, the administrator deleted the account.

That deletion is the moment the cover failed under direct questioning. The other tells in this section are tells of composition — what the operators wrote, in which language, with which vocabulary. The deletion is a tell of behaviour. Asked the operational question that any real militant group could answer with practiced rhetoric — we are a network of believers, we accept no payment, our cause is justice — the administrator chose silence and disappearance over even a propaganda answer. A real Shia operative would have welcomed the question as an opportunity to declaim. The HAYI administrator walked away.

CBS quoted Lucas Webber, a senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism, on the day of the attack: HAYI looks “less like a grassroots European cell that came out of nowhere and more like an astroturfed terror brand that has appeared suddenly in online ecosystems.” ¹¹ That phrase — astroturfed terror brand — is the technical term for what the operational fingerprint describes. The branding is real; the grass roots are manufactured. A Tech Against Terrorism analyst, on the day the pipeline was preparing to deliver the Iran-link framing to the public, told CBS what HAYI looked like to a specialist examining it. The framing the pipeline carried the next day did not absorb that finding.

The pipeline’s research-body stage — the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague — examined the same materials and produced findings the rest of the pipeline would carry forward. The ICCT report, published on the day of the Golders Green attack and titled Hybrid Threat Signals: Assessing Possible Iranian Involvement in Recent Attacks in Europe, contained the linguistic and visual analysis that mainstream outlets would cite the next day as institutional cover for the framing the IMDA’s earlier report had built. Read carefully, the ICCT’s own findings undermine the framing the report’s headline endorsed.

The ICCT’s central paragraph on HAYI’s authenticity, in the institute’s own words: “Doubts regarding the authenticity of HAYI are, however, not only raised by the appearance of its Telegram channel and the likely falsely claimed attack in Greece, but also by inconsistencies within the claim material itself. For example, the videos contain noticeable linguistic errors. Further, the Arabic inscription beneath the group’s logo, which closely resembles the flag of Hezbollah and other pro-Axis groups, except for featuring a Soviet SVD sniper rifle instead of the more typical AK-style imagery, includes multiple mistakes, including the misspelling of the word ‘Islamic.’” ¹²

Three findings in one passage, every one of them the ICCT’s own analysis.

The first: the videos contain noticeable linguistic errors. Plural. In the videos themselves — not just on a static logo. A supposedly Iranian-aligned Shia militant group whose own video output contains noticeable linguistic errors in the language it claims as its own.

The second: the logo is a near-clone of Hezbollah’s flag and the flags of other pro-Axis groups — except for one substitution. The AK-style rifle that appears in every actual pro-Iranian Shia militia’s iconography has been replaced with a Soviet Dragunov SVD. The Iranian-Iraqi-Lebanese militia ecosystem runs on Iranian-supplied or Iranian-copied AK-pattern rifles. The Kalashnikov silhouette is the universal symbol of every actual pro-Iranian Shia militia from Lebanon to Yemen.¹³ The Dragunov SVD is a Soviet-era designated-marksman rifle associated with Russian and Russian-aligned forces. For a supposedly Iranian-aligned proxy to brand itself with an SVD rather than an AK is the visual equivalent of an American militia branding itself with a British SA80 instead of an M16. It is the kind of detail that would never appear on real branding. It is the kind of detail you get when somebody reaches for generic menacing rifle rather than the appropriate symbol for the milieu being imitated.

The third: the Arabic inscription beneath the logo includes multiple misspellings, and the ICCT specifies one of them — the word Islamic. The error matters at the level of the vowel. As with the altered wa-jāhidū in the founding statement, the position of a single diacritical mark changes the word. The Arabic for Islamic — الإسلامية (Islamiyya)— requires a small symbol called a hamza placed beneath the initial alif: إ. The hamza signals the short vowel i — which is what makes the word read Islām. Move the hamza above the alif and the vowel becomes a, producing Aslām — not a word in Arabic. The position of the hamza is not decorative. It is taught in the first weeks of Arabic literacy and reproduced correctly by every Muslim child who learns to read the Qur'an. A supposedly Islamic militant group cannot spell Islamic in Arabic on its own logo. The institution whose research-body credibility the pipeline relied on for institutional cover, when it actually read the Arabic on HAYI's own branding, found multiple errors — including this one.

The ICCT’s report contains a fourth, separate finding on a piece of material the institute analysed in addition to the logo. The second HAYI Telegram channel — created on 21 March 2026, two days before the Golders Green attack, with a QR code in the claim video pointing directly to it — is also identified as inconsistent. The ICCT’s words: “there are also a number of inconsistencies with this account, foremost the misspelling of the Arabic channel name, likely resulting from an incorrect English translation.” ⁹

Read that carefully. A Telegram channel name is not a hand-drawn graphic where a letter might be miscopied. It is text typed into a box, with the option to correct it before publication. The ICCT’s specific characterisation — “likely resulting from an incorrect English translation” — is the institute identifying English as the source language for the channel name. Someone composed the name in English first and translated it into Arabic. The Arabic came out wrong. They published it anyway. A real Arabic-speaking group names itself in Arabic first and transliterates into English for foreign audiences. The direction documented here is the reverse — the signature of a non-native creator working from an English original.

These are real findings, and they are the findings of the institution whose research-body credibility the pipeline relied on for institutional cover. They are, in their own way, evidence that no Arabic speaker built HAYI’s brand. The altered Quranic verse in HAYI’s founding statement is not among them — the foundational error that requires Quranic literacy to identify is absent from the ICCT’s report.

But the more important analytical move the ICCT made is what it did with the inconsistencies it did identify. Julian Lanchès did not stop at the inconsistencies. He absorbed them into the Iranian-backed thesis. The misspelled Arabic, the SVD substitution, the dubiously authentic Telegram accounts, the falsely claimed attacks in Greece — all of it, in the ICCT’s reading, became evidence of a plausible-deniability layer on top of Iranian state backing. The argument runs: HAYI’s amateurism is too sloppy for Iranian intelligence operatives to have produced directly, but consistent with Iran outsourcing the operation to locally recruited disposable proxies on the Russian sabotage model. The inconsistencies, in this reading, are not evidence against Iranian involvement. They are evidence of Iranian involvement at one operational remove.

That move is the analytical decision the ICCT did not justify. The inconsistencies are consistent with Iranian backing via disposable proxies. They are also consistent with an operation that has nothing to do with Iran and is using Iranian-aligned distribution channels as cover. The same evidence supports both readings equally. The choice of which reading to fit the evidence to is the analytical move that determines the conclusion — and the ICCT’s reasoning for choosing the Iranian-backed reading rests on the dissemination through Iraqi militia channels, which is exactly the inference our analysis is contesting. Distribution is not origin. Channel administration can be genuine, persuaded, paid, infiltrated, or shared. The ICCT treated the dissemination network as evidence of origin, which allowed it to read the inconsistencies as plausible-deniability tactics rather than as evidence of fabrication. With a different starting assumption, the same inconsistencies become the fingerprint of an operation that is not what it claims to be.

The ICCT laundered the framing forward. Lanchès identified the inconsistencies and absorbed them into a thesis that the rest of the evidence — the altered Qur’an, the American English administrator, the Christian and Jewish philosophical reasoning, the no-Persian — does not support. He did not interrogate the upstream evidentiary base the IMDA had built. He did not test alternative readings. He published a report he knew or should have known would be picked up by mainstream outlets as institutional confirmation. The pickup happened the next day. The framing the public received rested on an analytical move the pipeline’s research-body stage made without justifying it, on a foundation the pipeline’s state-authoritative stage had built without disclosing what its evidence actually contained.

The institutional failure to identify HAYI’s source-language problem was not because the evidence was hidden. The evidence was published, by named specialists, in mainstream outlets, within days of the Golders Green attack. Two separate institutional sources, working independently, reached the same conclusion: HAYI’s materials were AI-generated.

The first was Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, examining HAYI’s multi-language communiqué for Middle East Eye. Al-Tamimi is one of the more credentialled subject-matter specialists on jihadist propaganda working in the open-source space. He holds a BA in Classics and Oriental Studies from Brasenose College, Oxford, and a PhD from Swansea University on the role of historical narratives in Islamic State propaganda — for which he received Swansea’s James Callaghan Thesis Prize for best doctoral thesis in 2024–25. He has been cited as expert by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, AFP, and the Associated Press. His professional affiliations include the Middle East Forum, the Hoover Institution, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and — relevantly — the ICCT itself.¹⁴ He is not a marginal figure. His finding on HAYI was published in mainstream English-language media on 24 March 2026.

Al-Tamimi’s reading of HAYI’s multi-language statement: “I think there was an initial AI prompt to give an answer in one of the three languages and then it was machine translated into the other two.” The same article reported that two separate AI-detection tools run by Middle East Eye gave the statement a “high likelihood of having been AI-generated.” ¹⁵

The second source was Adam Hadley, founder and CEO of Tech Against Terrorism, a UN-backed counter-extremism initiative. Hadley told The National that HAYI’s materials had been “generated using ChatGPT or similar,” describing HAYI as “probably the first AI-led terrorist movement.” ¹⁶ Two named institutional voices, working in different organisations, reaching the same conclusion. Both findings were on the public record before the pipeline’s framing reached its second day in the public mind.

A real Iranian-aligned Shia militant group does not produce its founding communiqué through ChatGPT. The IRGC has its own media apparatus. Hezbollah has its own media apparatus. Asaib Ahl al-Haq has its own media apparatus. These organisations have spent decades building production capability in Arabic, in Persian, in the visual and rhetorical idioms of their tradition.¹⁷ They do not need a machine-translation tool to write a claim of responsibility, and if they did, the document they produced would not be the document HAYI produced. The signatures the analysts identified — uneven multi-language output, machine-translation artefacts, ChatGPT-style phrasing — are signatures of an operation that had no in-house Arabic capability and substituted a commercial AI tool for the apparatus a real militant group spends years building.

That substitution is itself a finding. It tells you what the operators had and what they did not. They had access to AI tools, an English-fluent author, and the visual symbology of Iranian-aligned militancy at the level you can absorb from photographs. They did not have a native Arabic speaker, a Persian speaker, a Shia jurisprudential reasoner, or anyone with Muslim religious formation deep enough to catch a Quranic vowel. The gap between what the operators had and what a real Iranian-aligned Shia militant group has is the gap between an astroturfed terror brand and a real one — to use Lucas Webber’s phrase.

The way real institutional jihadist groups produce claims of responsibility is documented. Counter-terrorism analysts who track this material — the SITE Intelligence Group’s Rita Katz, The Long War Journal‘s Tom Joscelyn, others — have written extensively about how the architecture works.¹⁸ The Islamic State runs claim production through the Amaq News Agency, a semi-autonomous wire service inside the group’s Central Media Diwan. Provincial bureaus submit raw footage and event details. Central oversight enforces messaging protocols. The system was built over years of institutional investment. When the group is directly involved in an attack, the claim typically appears within twenty-four hours, includes specific details about the attacker, and is corroborated through the group’s verified-direct channel — for ISIS, the Nashir Media Foundation. When the group is not directly involved and is claiming opportunistically, the claim takes longer, lacks attacker details, and tends to appear only on the Amaq-equivalent broad-distribution layer.

The pattern is institutional. It rests on years of media-production capacity, dedicated personnel, established templates, encrypted distribution architecture, and chains of editorial review. Hezbollah operates al-Manar television and the Mayadeen network. Asaib Ahl al-Haq operates Sabereen News. The IRGC operates its own state media apparatus. These are not infrastructures that can be assembled in days. They are the products of decades of investment by movements with stable identities, recognised leadership, internal hierarchies, and institutional histories that the analyst community has been documenting for years.¹⁹

HAYI, on the public record, did not exist before 9 March 2026. There are no known references to the group online or offline before that date — the ICCT confirmed this in its own report. On 9 March, a Telegram channel affiliated with the Iraqi pro-Iranian militia Liwa Zulfiqar circulated a HAYI announcement of “the start of its military operations against US and Israeli interests around the world.” On 11 March, two days after the Liège attack, the first claim video appeared. By Rotterdam on 13 March, the production workflow had compressed to thirty-nine minutes from attack to branded video on Iraqi Telegram channels. For the Amsterdam Jewish school attack on 16 March, the ICCT’s own timestamps showed a Telegram mention apparently preceding the attack itself by one minute — almost certainly clock drift or time-zone formatting, but the institute flagged it as an anomaly. By the Golders Green attack on 23 March, two weeks after HAYI first appeared online, the brand was producing claim videos with embedded Google Maps street views, photographs of the targeted ambulances, and biographical research on Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook to justify the primary target selection.²⁰

The technical production of a one-to-two minute branded video is fast. A competent editor with a pre-built template can assemble one in under an hour from supplied footage. That is not the analytical question. The analytical question is whether the institutional architecture HAYI’s materials demonstrate — distribution channels with hundreds of thousands of pre-arranged followers in the pro-Iranian Iraqi Telegram ecosystem, branding templates ready to deploy, the cultural-fluency layer that produces Religious Zionist vocabulary and Anglo-American Jewish religious-political reasoning, the multi-language statement-assembly capacity, the persona of a Shia militant group — could have been built between 9 March, when HAYI first appeared online, and the production of the first claim videos. The answer is no. The dissemination network pre-existed HAYI; the ICCT documented that the first HAYI Telegram channel was registered in 2023, two years before activation. The branding was prepared before the campaign began, applied consistently to incoming footage from 11 March onward. The cultural fluencies the materials demonstrate are not built in days. What appeared in fourteen days was the activation of pre-existing infrastructure plus the application of pre-prepared branding to attack footage. Which means the architecture was built before HAYI publicly existed. The group is either the cover for an operation that already had the apparatus in place, or the brand layer on top of someone else’s.

The same gap shows up in the soundtrack of HAYI’s videos. Sharon Adarlo, a conflict analyst writing for Militant Wire and quoted by CBS on the day after the Golders Green attack, noted that HAYI’s videos used orchestral music rather than the Islamic nasheeds commonly used as soundtracks on jihadist propaganda.²¹ Nasheeds — vocal religious chants, traditionally performed without instruments, drawing on a musical tradition rooted in the recitation of Qur’anic and devotional Arabic — are the standard soundtrack convention of Sunni and Shia jihadist media production. ISIS produces nasheeds through its Ajnad Foundation. Hezbollah produces nasheeds through its media wing. Real Islamist propaganda uses them because they are the genre Islamist audiences expect, the genre that signals religious seriousness, and — for many Salafi-jihadi traditions specifically — the only musical form considered religiously permissible. Instrumental music is theologically contested in Islamist circles, with significant traditions holding it impermissible.

HAYI used orchestral music. Western orchestral music, with strings and horns and the sweeping cinematic feel of film scoring. A choice that signals nothing to a jihadi audience and everything to a Western one — the soundtrack convention of action films and political thrillers, not of Islamist religious media. The choice is small. It is also revealing. The operators reached for what menacing sounds like in their own cultural vocabulary — the language of Western cinema — rather than for what menacing sounds like in the tradition HAYI claims as its own. Once again, the operators were fluent in something they should not have been, and unfluent in something they should have been.

The point is not that Iran cannot produce Western-cultural propaganda. It can, and it does. Since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, Iran-based outlets — including Explosive Media, which has acknowledged to the BBC that the Iranian government is a customer — have produced an entire genre of AI-generated, LEGO-style animated videos using English-language hip-hop to mock Trump and reframe the war for Western audiences. Al Jazeera, MS NOW, and the BBC have documented the genre.²²

But these are different production tasks for different audiences. Iran’s LEGO videos are propaganda — outward-facing, made for Western non-Muslim audiences, aimed at winning narrative ground in the Western information space. The conventions of that task are hip-hop, LEGO animation, English-language lyrics, cultural reference points Westerners recognise. The form matches the function. HAYI’s videos are not making that kind of communication. HAYI’s videos claim to be internal Shia militant claims of responsibility for attacks framed as jihad — a sacred religious act, in the framework of Islamic militancy, declared to a Muslim audience inside the in-group conventions of the Axis of Resistance. That production task uses nasheeds. It uses Quranic recitation. It uses the visual idiom of Hezbollah and the IRGC. The conventions are solemn, religious, inward-facing — because the task is religious and inward-facing. Iran’s LEGO videos do not use nasheeds because LEGO videos for Western audiences are not religious communications. HAYI’s videos claim to be religious communications. They use orchestral music. The form does not match what HAYI claims to be.

There is one more language fact that closes the case for this section, and it is the language HAYI has not produced.

In nearly two months since HAYI announced itself, the group has issued statements and videos in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. It has not produced one word of Persian. CBS News reported the absence on the day after the Golders Green attack, and RFE/RL reported it again three weeks later. The Persian language has been entirely missing from HAYI’s output across the entire campaign.²³

This absence is not a small detail. Persian is the operational and ideological centre of gravity of the Iranian state and the network of proxies the pipeline’s framing places HAYI inside. The IRGC operates in Persian. Iranian state media operates in Persian. Khamenei’s communications are in Persian. The Iranian-language audiences that pro-Iranian militant groups care about read and listen in Persian. When Hezbollah wants to signal alignment with Iran, it produces Persian-language material alongside its Arabic. When Asaib Ahl al-Haq communicates with its Iranian sponsors, it does so in Persian. When the Houthis broadcast solidarity with Iran, Persian appears in the output. Real pro-Iranian militant groups produce Persian material as a matter of course. It is the language of the audience that matters to them.²⁴

A supposedly Iranian-linked Shia militant group that has never produced one word of Persian is not what it claims to be. The absence is structural. It is not the kind of gap a real Iranian proxy would have. It is, however, exactly the kind of gap an operation built by people whose source languages are English and Hebrew — and whose Arabic is produced by machine translation — would have. The languages HAYI does use are the three languages someone reading Western and Israeli media would default to. The language HAYI does not use is the one a real Iranian proxy could not afford to be without.

The synthesis is straightforward. The Qur’an in HAYI’s founding statement is altered. The vocabulary describes Israel and Jews in terms no Muslim militant uses. The English text was composed on American-defaulted hardware. The Telegram administrator wrote to CBS in American English, reasoned from Christian and Jewish philosophy, and deleted the account when asked who was paying. The ICCT found the logo Arabic misspelled, the iconography wrong, the second channel name machine-translated from English. Middle East Eye and Tech Against Terrorism found the materials AI-generated. The soundtrack does not match the production task HAYI claims to be performing. And the language a real Iranian proxy must produce is the one language HAYI has never produced.

There is a pattern in the operational fingerprint that has to be named. The errors HAYI’s materials contain are not the errors of a real organisation that has slipped on minor details. They are the errors of an operation built to be recognised as something it is not. The mistakes follow a consistent grammar — they are the mistakes of someone filling in a checklist of what Western analysts expect Iranian-aligned militancy to look like, without the deep knowledge of the tradition required to fill the checklist correctly.

Consider three of the findings already established. The Dragunov on the logo. Western analysts looking at Iranian-aligned militia branding have a mental model for what they expect to see — weapon imagery, raised fist, Arabic calligraphy, a flag-style composition. The HAYI logo has all of that. The general checklist is filled. What is wrong is the specific weapon. The Kalashnikov silhouette is the universal symbol of every actual pro-Iranian Shia militia from Lebanon to Yemen. The Dragunov is not. The error is not the absence of weapon imagery. It is weapon imagery filled in by somebody who knew the genre required a rifle and did not know which rifle.

The routing through Iraqi militia Telegram channels. Western analysts watch the Iraqi pro-Iranian militia ecosystem because that is where Iranian-aligned content normally appears. Asaib Ahl al-Haq, Liwa Zulfiqar, the Sabereen aggregator — these are the channels Western OSINT specialists already monitor. Content posted on those channels is content already pre-flagged for attribution. A real Iranian operation is not optimising its content placement for Western analyst detection — it has its own audience, internal to the Iranian-aligned ecosystem, that the placement is for. Content placed on exactly the channels Western analysts watch, in the sequence Western analysts would expect, is content placed for Western analyst consumption.

And the third instance, which appears in the post-Golders Green operational record. On 15 April 2026, an incendiary device was thrown into the car park of Iran International’s offices in Wembley — the most prominent Persian-language broadcaster critical of the Iranian regime, based in London. HAYI claimed responsibility. Three young men were arrested after a police chase: Oisin McGuinness, twenty-one, and Nathan Dunn, nineteen, both from Watford, and a sixteen-year-old. None of the three fits any ideological profile of pro-Iranian militancy. The device was thrown into a car park and went out on its own. The Met has stated it is not treating the incident as terrorism. Iran International has been a documented IRGC target on British soil for years — the UK’s own counter-terrorism leadership has flagged repeated Iranian state plots against the broadcaster, and the operational tradecraft of those plots involves contractors with surveillance teams and proper preparation, not teenagers throwing burning containers into car parks.²⁵

The point is not that Iran could not target Iran International. Iran has targeted Iran International, repeatedly, with the kind of professional tradecraft the documented record describes. The point is that an operation building a fictitious Iranian-aligned militant brand from scratch would, on any reasonable construction of the design problem, include an Iran International–style target on the list of attacks. Western analysts looking for Iranian-state activity in Europe have a known pattern: Iranian operations sometimes target Iran International. If the operation is being built to be read as Iranian-aligned, the target list has to include the targets a real Iranian operation would attack. Not including one would be the gap in the checklist that gives the brand away. Including one is the checkbox filled.

Three instances, the same logic. The Dragunov is the wrong rifle, but it is a rifle, because the genre requires one. The Iraqi channels are the right channels for distribution, because Western analysts watch them — but a real Iranian operation does not need to optimise for Western detection. The Iran International attack is the right kind of target for an Iranian-aligned brand, but the operational signature of the attackers is wrong for an actual IRGC operation against that target. In each case, the signature visible to Western analysts has been populated. The depth of execution beneath the signature is not what a real operation in that tradition would produce.

The operators are not necessarily inside any of the traditions whose imagery they are deploying. They are people who know what Iranian operations are supposed to look like to Western analysts, and they are giving the analysts what those analysts expect to see.

No Muslim hands on the production. Not in the Qur’an, not in the vocabulary, not in the source language of the Arabic, not in the conceptual framework of the administrator, not in the iconography, not in the soundtrack, not in the languages chosen, and not in the language conspicuously avoided. The fingerprint of the operators is the fingerprint of people fluent in Anglo-American Jewish religious-political life and in Western media production — and unfluent in Arabic, in the Qur’an, in Persian, in Shia jurisprudence, in the iconography of real Iranian-aligned militias, in the soundtrack conventions of jihadist media, and in the vocabulary Muslim militants actually use to describe Israel and Jews. That fingerprint is not the fingerprint of a Shia Islamic militant group. It is the fingerprint the original article’s conclusions already pointed toward. The new evidence is consistent with what The Silence After the Lie identified. It is not consistent with anything else.

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The Handler That Could Not Be in Iran

The Iranian-handler thesis the pipeline carried required a particular workflow to be running, in real time, from somewhere. The ICCT’s own report described it: “the close proximity of these channels to Iranian-aligned networks, combined with the near-immediate reporting and access to attack footage, suggests that they were informed of the incidents almost in real time, either directly by the perpetrators or via intermediaries.” ²⁶ That sentence describes a coordinator. Someone receiving mobile-phone footage from teenagers in Belgium and the Netherlands within minutes of attacks. Someone applying branded templates to that footage, producing edited claim videos, and pushing them through pre-arranged Telegram channels with hundreds of thousands of followers — fast enough to land branded content within thirty-nine minutes of an attack at four in the morning. A real-time editorial desk, with reliable two-way connectivity into European Telegram infrastructure, working through the night.

The framing the pipeline carried assumed this desk was Iranian, or directed by Iran. That is what Iranian-linked meant by the time it reached the British public. Either the IRGC was running the desk directly, or it was running through proxies it had directed and equipped. Either way, the operational coordination — the editorial work of receiving, branding, and distributing the material — was placed within the Iranian operational orbit. That placement is what allowed the framing to characterise the attacks as Iranian-backed. Without it, the framing has nothing to attach to.

This section examines whether that desk could have been running from inside Iran during the period in question. The answer, on the public record, is that it could not.

On 28 February 2026, following the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, the Iranian government cut its country off from the global internet. NetBlocks, the network observatory that monitors connectivity disruptions worldwide, reported Iran’s internet connectivity dropping to roughly four per cent of ordinary levels within hours of the strikes. Cloudflare Radar described the traffic that day as “close to zero across all major regions.” Through March, the connectivity held at one to two per cent of pre-war levels — a near-total state-imposed blackout, sustained day after day, while the HAYI campaign was running.²⁷

By 21 April 2026, NetBlocks had recorded fifty-three consecutive days of disruption — the longest nationwide internet blackout ever recorded in any country. Iran is, NetBlocks noted, “the first country to have had internet connectivity and then subsequently lost it by reverting to a national network.” ²⁸ Not Russia during the invasion of Ukraine. Not Israel during the war on Gaza. No conflict, in the history of measured connectivity, had produced anything comparable. The Iranian government had imposed on its own population a deeper and longer informational lockdown than any other state had attempted.

The blackout was not a passive failure. The Iranian government built a whitelist. Ordinary Iranians, private businesses, and most of the country’s economy were offline. Connectivity was granted only to those the state had specifically approved — officials, state-affiliated media, security-cleared entities. Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani stated that the state was permitting access only to those who could “get the voice out” — meaning those approved to broadcast on the state’s behalf. Whitelist applications were routed through the state-run Bale messaging app, registered with state telecoms. Every approved connection passed through the state’s gateway. Every packet was logged at the state level.²⁹

This is the connectivity environment the Iranian-handler thesis requires the editorial desk to have been running through. From inside Iran, during the period of the blackout, the desk would have needed reliable, low-latency, two-way connectivity into European Telegram infrastructure — receiving mobile-phone footage from teenagers in Belgium and the Netherlands, applying branded templates, pushing edited videos out to pre-arranged Iraqi militia channels, in some cases within thirty-nine minutes of an attack. That workflow requires bandwidth, speed, and operational privacy. The state-whitelist environment offered none of those things to anyone the state had not specifically approved. Every outgoing packet would have passed through the state gateway, logged and visible to the state security apparatus that had imposed the blackout precisely to prevent unmonitored outbound traffic.

Could the Iranian state itself have run the desk from inside the whitelist environment? The technical answer is yes. The operational answer is that doing so would mean direct state sponsorship of rapid-tempo European attack coordination at the exact moment the state was imposing the blackout to prevent that kind of outbound traffic. It would mean every editorial decision passing through the state’s logged gateway, with no plausible deniability, at the moment the state was demonstrably terrified enough of outbound information leakage to cut its entire population off the global internet. That is the opposite of how hybrid warfare operations are run. The architecture of plausible deniability requires distance between the state and the operation. The Iranian government, during the blackout, could not have given itself less distance from the operation if it had tried.

There is a further fact in the public record that complicates the Iranian-handler thesis from a different direction.

Within forty-six minutes of the Golders Green attack, scene footage of the burning ambulances was on a US-based news aggregator account with around a million followers, registered location Nashville, Tennessee. The post — at 02:21 AM London time — announced that the account had also “seen footage of the attackers” but did not yet publish it. Forty-nine minutes after that, at 03:10 AM, the same account published surveillance footage from the Machzike Hadath Synagogue’s own CCTV system. The footage shows the synagogue’s car park at the moment of the attack, with at least one Hatzola ambulance visible in the frame, bearing a visible in-frame timestamp of 01:36:06 on 23 March 2026 and a camera label reading “Front RHS” — consistent with one camera in the synagogue’s own multi-camera installation. By later that day, the same or related footage had appeared on Sky News, the Jerusalem Post, IBTimes UK, London Now, the National Pulse, Townhall, and the Jewish Edition. The Metropolitan Police’s senior officer on the case, Superintendent Sarah Jackson, said: “We are in the process of examining CCTV and are aware of online footage.” The Met was still examining the footage. Other parties had already published it.³⁰

The ICCT’s own description of the editorial workflow it was studying noted that the channels it identified were “informed of the incidents almost in real time, either directly by the perpetrators or via intermediaries.” The CCTV that appeared on Breaking911 documents the same phenomenon for a different set of intermediaries — people watching the attack location’s information environment closely enough, and connected to global media reliably enough, that internal synagogue surveillance footage was in the hands of a US-based aggregator within forty-six minutes of capture and on its public-facing account by 03:10 AM London time, with broadcast media following within hours. There was a someone. The someone was real. The someone moved fast.

How the footage moved between capture and global publication is not something this article can establish. The Met has not stated. The synagogue has not stated. No party has publicly described the path. What the article can say is what the path was not. The Machzike Hadath Synagogue’s CCTV system is not accessible to the Iranian state. It is not accessible to the IRGC. It is not accessible to Iranian-aligned proxies in Iraq or Lebanon. Whatever path the footage took into Anglosphere media within the first hour of the attack, that path did not run through Iran, and it did not require Iranian state involvement. The investigative question of who routed the footage and through what mechanism is a question for the institutions whose responsibility it is to investigate.

That has implications for the Iranian-handler thesis the pipeline carried. The thesis required real-time editorial coordination from somewhere — receiving footage, branding it, pushing it out fast. The thesis implied the somewhere was Iran or Iranian-directed. But the underlying material — the synagogue’s own surveillance of the attack — was already in Anglosphere media before HAYI’s branded claim video existed. The HAYI editorial desk that produced the branded claim video four hours later did not need to be in Iran to obtain attack footage. The footage was already moving through the open information environment, in the languages and on the platforms HAYI’s operators were demonstrably fluent in. Whatever the answer to the investigative question turns out to be, it is not the one the pipeline carried.

The clearest documented example of the editorial workflow the framing required is in the ICCT’s own report. The Rotterdam synagogue arson on 13 March 2026 occurred at approximately 03:40 AM. The first text mention of the attack on the four pro-Iranian Telegram channels the ICCT was studying was published at 03:57 AM — seventeen minutes later. The corresponding HAYI claim video, branded with the group’s logo and tagged with the date and location of the incident, was released at approximately 04:19 AM. From the moment the attack occurred to the moment a branded HAYI video was on a Shia militia Telegram channel, thirty-nine minutes had passed. The ICCT documented the timing in the body of its report.³¹

That is the workflow window the Iranian-handler thesis must explain. Attack at 03:40. First report at 03:57. Branded video at 04:19. Inside that window: someone received mobile-phone footage of the attack from teenagers in Rotterdam, applied the HAYI logo and the tagging template, and pushed the finished video to pre-arranged Iraqi militia Telegram channels. That is editorial work. It requires receiving raw material, processing it, and distributing the finished product. It cannot be done by someone passively watching a feed. It requires a desk.

The ICCT framed this workflow as evidence of Iranian backing — as material flowing from the perpetrators’ side, through Iranian-aligned coordination, into the amplification network. That framing is what the pipeline’s distribution stage carried to the public the next day. It is also the framing the analysis in this section is contesting on three grounds. The connectivity environment inside Iran during the period in question would not have supported the workflow. The underlying attack footage in the case of Golders Green was already moving through Anglosphere media before the HAYI claim video existed. And the same logic applies to Rotterdam: the footage of an arson attack at a synagogue in the early hours of a Friday morning is not material that could only have reached an editorial desk through Iranian intelligence channels. The phone footage of the perpetrators was on the perpetrators’ own phones, on whatever networks they used to share it, and the desk that produced the HAYI video needed only access to those networks — not to Iran.

That access raises the structural question section two has been working toward. If the desk does not have to be in Iran, where could it have been?

The logical possibilities are finite. The first is inside Iran, on the state whitelist, operating with explicit state approval and through the state’s logged gateway. The connectivity case has already been made. This possibility requires the Iranian state to be running the operation directly, with full visibility, at the moment the state was demonstrably terrified enough of outbound information leakage to cut its entire population off the global internet. It would mean the IRGC or its equivalent commanding the editorial desk through the state’s own monitored network, with no plausible deniability and no operational distance. It is the opposite of how hybrid warfare runs. It can be ruled out on operational grounds even though the technical possibility exists.

The second is through the Iraqi Telegram channels the ICCT documented as the dissemination network. Asaib Ahl al-Haq, Liwa Zulfiqar, the Sabereen aggregator channel, and others within the broader Iraqi Telegram ecosystem the ICCT studied. Iraq was not under blackout. Iraqi connectivity to European Telegram infrastructure was normal. An editorial desk operating through these channels could in principle have run the workflow the ICCT described. But this possibility, if accepted, dissolves the framing the pipeline carried rather than confirming it. The framing the pipeline carried was that the attacks were Iranian-backed — not Iraqi-routed, not ecosystem-adjacent, but directed by Iran. The militia organisations behind some of these channels — Asaib Ahl al-Haq most directly — have documented operational ties to the IRGC’s Quds Force.³² The Telegram channel administrators and operational chains of the channels themselves have not been independently documented. The militia’s political alignment does not transfer automatically to the channel’s operational chain. To accept that the workflow ran through Iraqi infrastructure is to give up the strong form of the Iranian-handler thesis the pipeline depended on, and to retreat to a weaker claim. That retreat is partly defensible and partly not. The dissemination of HAYI’s material through these channels is established on the public record. What is not established is that those channels originated the material, edited the material, were operationally directed by Iran in disseminating HAYI material, or were operationally responsible for the attacks themselves. The weaker claim, examined honestly, splits in two: the dissemination part runs through channels affiliated with Iranian-aligned militias; the production and execution parts do not. The retreat from Iran-backed to a weaker version is therefore not a retreat to a coherent thesis. It is a retreat that holds for one operational layer and collapses for the other two. And in any case, neither version of the claim is what the public was told. The public was told Iran-linked, in a tone that implied direction.

The third is somewhere else entirely, with the Iraqi militia infrastructure used as cover. Under this possibility, the editorial desk is operating from any location with reliable internet access — the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, anywhere in Europe, anywhere with a domestic broadband connection — and is pushing finished material into the Iraqi Telegram channels for amplification. The dissemination network does the political work of making the material look Iranian-backed. The actual editorial work is happening elsewhere. This possibility is consistent with everything section one of this article documented about HAYI’s operators: their fluency in English, in American spelling conventions, in Religious Zionist vocabulary, in the iconographic vocabulary of axis-of-resistance branding without the substance, in Christian and Jewish philosophical reasoning rather than Islamic. The desk that produced HAYI’s materials does not show the fluencies a desk inside Iran or running through Iraqi militia editorial structures would show. It shows the fluencies of operators working from somewhere with deep cultural literacy in Western and Israeli media space.

The article does not assert the third possibility. It identifies it as available. The ICCT did not identify it as available because the ICCT treated the dissemination network as evidence of origin. That assumption — that material distributed through Iranian-aligned channels must have originated within Iranian-aligned operational structures — is the analytical move the section has been working to dismantle. Distribution is not origin. A Telegram channel administrator can be genuine, persuaded, paid, infiltrated, or shared. A channel that amplifies particular content can amplify content the channel’s usual ecosystem did not originate. The Iraqi Telegram channels the ICCT identified were the route HAYI’s material took into the amplification ecosystem. They were not necessarily the place HAYI’s material was produced. The ICCT’s reading collapsed those two questions into one. The evidence does not support that collapse.

What the public record establishes about the editorial desk is structural. It moved fast. It produced AI-generated multi-language statements with English as the source. It used American spelling on a UK target. It reasoned from Christian and Jewish philosophy. It deployed Religious Zionist vocabulary on the founding statement of a supposedly Shia Islamist group. It altered a Quranic verse no Muslim composes. It used the visual idiom of axis-of-resistance branding without the substance. It used orchestral music where nasheeds belong. And it was demonstrably plugged into an information environment that had already moved synagogue surveillance footage of the Golders Green attack into US-based and broadcast media before the HAYI claim video for that attack appeared. None of that fingerprint is consistent with a desk inside Iran. None of it is consistent with a desk running through Iraqi militia editorial structures. All of it is consistent with a desk operating from a location with deep cultural fluency in Anglo-American Jewish religious-political life and Western media production, using the Iraqi militia channels as the relay path into the global information environment.

The handler that the pipeline’s framing required could not have been in Iran. The Iraqi militia infrastructure is a route, not an editor. Where the editorial desk actually was is a question for the institutions whose job it is to investigate. What this article establishes is that the question exists, and that the answer the pipeline delivered is not consistent with the public record.

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What Came After Golders Green

The first article documented the attacks HAYI claimed between 9 and 23 March — Liège, Rotterdam, two in Amsterdam, the Bank of New York Mellon site, Golders Green, alongside the falsely claimed incidents in Greece, Antwerp, Heemstede, France, and Haarlem. Five real attacks. Five fabrications or misrepresentations. The pattern of mixing genuine arson with falsely claimed incidents to manufacture the appearance of a coordinated transcontinental campaign was established in those first two weeks.

After Golders Green, the campaign continued. The pattern continued with it.

On 12 April 2026, two suspects climbed the fence of the Beth Yaakov Synagogue in Skopje, North Macedonia — the country’s only synagogue — poured accelerant on the entrance, and threw a firebomb. The doors and courtyard were charred. The fire did not sustain. The North Macedonian Foreign Minister condemned the attack publicly. The country’s top five religious leaders, including the head of the Islamic Religious Community, issued a joint statement of condemnation. North Macedonia had not seen a synagogue attack since the Holocaust. Three days later, on 15 April, HAYI released a video claiming responsibility, describing the synagogue as a “symbol of the historical and cultural identity of Jews of this region” with a “deep connection with the Zionist regime.” The vocabulary had shifted. Zionist regime is the standard hostile-rhetoric term used by Iran, Hezbollah, and the Iraqi Shia militias — the language a real axis operative would actually write. The operators were correcting the tells the earlier material had made visible.³³

The same HAYI video also claimed the Eclipse Grillbar in Munich, a Jewish-owned restaurant attacked the previous Friday with a small explosive device causing minimal damage. The video noted that the attack had occurred after midnight when the restaurant was closed, but added that it “could have happened during the day and the Zionists would have been killed.” The Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation, including an investigation of the HAYI video itself.³⁴

Then came the London cluster. On the evening of 15 April, an incendiary device was thrown into the car park of Iran International’s offices in Wembley — the attack discussed in section one of this article. On the same night, two men attempted an arson attack on the Finchley Reform Synagogue in north London by filling bottles with what was suspected to be petrol and throwing a brick at them.⁴³ When the bottles failed to ignite, the suspects fled. They were subsequently arrested and charged. Two days later, on the night of 17 April, an attempted arson hit the Hendon offices of a building that still bore the sign of Jewish Futures, a Jewish educational organisation. Three bottles containing accelerant were placed against the building and set alight; the bottles failed to ignite fully and the damage was minor. On 16 April, HAYI had posted a video claiming responsibility for a drone attack on the Israeli Embassy in Kensington, with two figures in protective clothing and a message that the embassy was being targeted with “radioactive and dangerous carcinogenic materials.” The Metropolitan Police investigated, closing public access to Kensington Gardens. The Met announced on Saturday 18 April that no hazardous materials had been found and that the incident was over. The HAYI claim of an Embassy drone strike — like the claimed attacks in Greece, Heemstede, France, and Haarlem before it — described an event that did not happen.³⁵

Overnight on 18–19 April, an arson attack hit the Kenton United Synagogue in Harrow. There was minor smoke damage to a room inside. A 17-year-old boy was arrested, charged, and pleaded guilty at Westminster Magistrates’ Court to arson not endangering life. In the police interview reported in court, the suspect said: “I have no hate towards the Jewish people or their community. I didn’t know it was a synagogue. I genuinely thought it was an empty building.” He was bailed pending sentencing, with conditions including staying away from synagogues. An accomplice filmed the attack, and the footage was released by HAYI in the claim video that followed.³⁶

The Met’s count by late April had moved to twenty-six arrests across the entire campaign, eight charges, one conviction. The first terrorism-related arrest came on 26 April, more than a month after Golders Green and after the entire London cluster — and it was on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts only, not on any predicate of foreign-state direction. Across the campaign, the suspect demographic has been consistent. The Rotterdam attackers were teenagers from Tilburg, aged seventeen to nineteen. The Golders Green attackers charged are eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and seventeen years old. The Iran International suspects are sixteen, nineteen, and twenty-one. The Kenton suspect is seventeen. The Finchley Reform suspects fled when their petrol bottles failed to ignite. None of the demographic profiles matches what an ideologically committed Shia militant cell, or any committed jihadi network, would produce. The profile that matches is the profile the Met has publicly named — paid criminal proxies, recruited for cash, with no allegiance to the cause.

There is a third fact the campaign produces that the demographic profile alone does not explain. Across Belgium, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom — across nearly two months and more than a dozen claimed attacks — not one person has been killed and not one person has been injured. Bottles fail to ignite. Fires fail to sustain. Accelerant is poured on benches and courtyards rather than on doors. A burning container thrown into the Iran International car park, in the Met’s words, “immediately put itself out.”⁴⁴ Attacks are staged at night, when synagogues are empty and Jewish-owned restaurants are closed. The Munich communiqué itself notes that the attack on the Eclipse Grillbar “could have happened during the day and the Zionists would have been killed” — an admission, in HAYI’s own words, that the timing was chosen to avoid this.

No real Shia militant campaign has a casualty record like that. Hezbollah’s bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 killed twenty-nine. The AMIA bombing in 1994 killed eighty-five. The Beirut barracks bombing in 1983 killed two hundred and forty-one US service members. The Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 killed nineteen. The Burgas bus bombing in 2012 killed six. The IRGC’s documented assassination operations against Iranian dissidents in Europe have killed people. Across forty years and on every continent, the consistent pattern of real Shia militant operations against Western, Israeli, and Jewish targets is the production of casualties — because that is the operational point of armed jihad in the framework these groups operate within. A supposedly Shia Islamic militant group, declaring jihad against Western and Israeli interests, conducting a transcontinental campaign over nearly two months, that produces a body count of zero, is not a campaign that exists anywhere in the historical record. HAYI is the first. The campaign was not designed to kill. It was designed to look as if it had been.

Two further structural facts emerge from the post-Golders Green record.

The first is that the fabrication pattern continued. The Israeli Embassy drone claim — like the Greece, France, Antwerp, Heemstede, and Haarlem claims before it — was not an actual attack. HAYI continued, after Golders Green, to claim incidents the public record does not contain. The behaviour of mixing real attacks with manufactured ones to amplify apparent reach was not a feature of the early campaign that the operators outgrew. It is a feature of the campaign throughout.

The second is the inverse fact. Between 23 March and the end of April, the campaign expanded its target set from synagogues, Jewish schools, and an American bank into Persian-language media (Iran International), an Israeli diplomatic site (the Embassy drone claim), and a Jewish educational charity. The targeting profile broadened in exactly the directions the brand needed to broaden to maintain its claim of being an Iranian-aligned militant organisation operating across multiple categories of legitimate-from-the-perspective-of-the-claimed-identity targets. Each new target type closed a checklist gap. By late April, HAYI’s claimed target set covered every category of target a Western analyst would expect a real Iranian-aligned militant campaign in Europe to attack — synagogues, a Jewish school, Jewish-owned businesses, an Iranian dissident broadcaster, and a claimed strike on an Israeli embassy. The brand had been completed.

The campaign that followed Golders Green did not contradict the analysis of section one. It extended it. The fingerprint stayed the same. The targeting evolved in the directions the brand-construction required. The fabrication pattern persisted. The suspect demographic remained — across multiple countries, multiple cities, multiple supposed cells — the same demographic of recruited teenagers and young adults with no identifiable ideological commitment to the cause they were nominally serving. And the Metropolitan Police, faced with this pattern, characterised it publicly as paid criminal proxies rather than as terrorism.

On 29 April 2026, HAYI did what its claim apparatus had done across the campaign — but for the first time, the underlying event involved real wounded people. A 45-year-old man with what the Metropolitan Police Commissioner publicly described as a history of serious violence and mental health issues walked through Golders Green in broad daylight with a knife and stabbed two Jewish men, aged 76 and 34, before attempting to stab the police officers who arrested him.⁴⁶ He did not flee. Hours later, at 15:21 BST, HAYI claimed responsibility for the attack, calling him one of their “lone wolves.” The pattern is the pattern the article has already catalogued. HAYI claimed the firebombing in Greece that did not happen. It claimed the attack in Heemstede that was a household gas explosion. It claimed an attack in Antwerp that was a botched theft from a Moroccan woman whose car was then set on fire. It claimed an attack in Haarlem that occurred before the supposed group existed. It claimed a drone strike on the Israeli Embassy that was three benign jars in Kensington Gardens. Now it has claimed the stabbing of two Jewish men by an unstable man with no established Iranian links and no established connection to any Islamic militant group. The claim apparatus claims everything. That is its function. It is not an apparatus that organises attacks. It is an apparatus that converts attacks — real, manufactured, falsely attributed, or unrelated — into evidence for the narrative the operators were paid to construct. The Golders Green stabbing was carried out by a man the police had reason to know about. The attack occurred at 11:16 BST. HAYI's claim video appeared on Telegram at 15:21 BST — four hours later.

The Met Now Says It

In the nearly two months since the Golders Green attack, the Metropolitan Police have made twenty-six arrests connected to the broader campaign of attacks attributed to HAYI. Eight people have been charged with arson-related offences. One has been convicted of arson. On 26 April, nearly two months after the Golders Green attack, one man was arrested on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts — the first arrest in the entire investigation under terrorism legislation. The investigation that began under the lens of an Iranian-directed Islamic terror campaign has been worked, in operational terms, almost entirely as a series of paid-proxy arson cases. The numbers tell their own story. Twenty-six arrests. Eight arson charges. One arson conviction. One terrorism-related arrest, nearly two months in.

The senior officers running the investigation have characterised it in their own words. On 19 April, after a series of attacks on synagogues and Jewish premises across north and northwest London, Deputy Commissioner Matt Jukes and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans, the United Kingdom’s Senior National Co-ordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing, gave a joint press conference outside Kenton United Synagogue in Harrow. Their statements are on the public record, archived in full on the Metropolitan Police website. They are not consistent with the framing the pipeline carried.³⁷

Evans’s characterisation of the operational pattern is precise. “I have spoken at length of the Iranian regime’s routine uses of criminal proxies. We are considering whether this tactic is being used here in London — recruiting violence as a service. Individuals carrying out these crimes often have no allegiance to the cause and are taking quick cash for their crimes. To anyone even considering getting involved — my message to you would be this: the stakes are high, and it is absolutely not worth the risk for a small reward. Those tasking you will not be there when you are arrested and face court. You will be used once and thrown away without a second thought.” ³⁷ That is the Met’s senior counter-terrorism coordinator describing what the investigation has actually found — not Iranian operatives committing attacks, but criminal proxies recruited for cash, with no ideological allegiance to the cause they are nominally serving. Violence as a service. The phrase she chose is the precise opposite of the framing the pipeline sold to the public. The pipeline framing was Iranian-directed Islamic terror. The framing the Met is now publicly using is recruited criminal violence dressed in cause language nobody believes.

Jukes drew the comparison directly. “We’ve seen a pattern with other actors of thugs for hire, people taking cash that looks like quick and easy money. This is part of the modern hybrid war fought by proxies.” ³⁸ The other actors he was referring to are documented. In March 2024, an arson attack hit a London warehouse linked to Ukrainian aid. Six men were later convicted — five of aggravated arson, a sixth of failing to disclose information about terrorist acts. The ringleader, Dylan Earl, had been recruited by Russia’s Wagner Group via Telegram and was sentenced in October 2025 to seventeen years for what the prosecution described as state-sponsored arson on behalf of Wagner — the first conviction under the National Security Act 2023. The pattern Jukes is describing — thugs for hire, taking cash, quick and easy money — is the pattern documented in the Earl case. Evans’s violence as a service names the same model. The Met is publicly characterising the HAYI cases as operationally similar to the Wagner-Earl proxy model, while continuing to leave the upstream-actor question open.

The Earl precedent is not the only documented payment trail in the proxy model. The Soufan Center, in its 17 April 2026 brief on the broader pattern, reported that the minors recruited for the foiled Bank of America Paris attack on 28 March were paid €500–1,000 each — small sums, in line with the quick cash characterisation Evans and Jukes have given the London cases. The proxy model the Met is now publicly describing is not a thesis. It is a documented operational pattern with named figures, in jurisdictions across Europe, in cases where the foreign sponsor has either been named or remains the open question.³⁹

What the Met is not doing is what the Earl case shows can be done. In the Earl case, the foreign sponsor was named at sentencing. The court heard evidence that Earl was acting as a Wagner proxy. The judge sentenced him on that basis. The state-sponsored hostile-activity legislation Parliament passed in 2023 — the National Security Act — was framed for exactly this scenario. It enables prosecutors to bring charges that name the foreign sponsor, that carry significant additional sentences, and that make the foreign-state involvement part of the public court record. Nearly two months into the HAYI investigation, with twenty-six arrests, eight arson charges, and one arson conviction, that legislation has not been used. The first arrest under terrorism legislation came on 26 April — nearly two months in, and on suspicion only of preparing terrorist acts, not on any foreign-state-direction predicate. The legislation Parliament wrote for the kind of attack the pipeline framing described is sitting unused. The Met has not named a foreign sponsor.

This is the disjunction that defines section three. The pipeline carried a story of Iranian-directed Islamic terrorism. The senior officers running the investigation are publicly characterising the cases as a paid-proxy criminal campaign, structurally comparable to the Wagner-Earl model. The legislation written for foreign-state-directed hostile activity is not being applied. No foreign sponsor has been named. Nearly two months in, the gap between what the public was told and what the Met is operating against is not a gap of nuance. It is a gap that requires explanation.

The Lie, the Silence, and What Comes Next

The Silence After the Lie named what happened.⁴⁰ The pipeline laundered misinformation into the mainstream. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies — a Washington-based pro-Israel organisation whose IRS filings state its mission as enhancing Israel’s image and educating the public on Israeli-Arab issues — set the predicate on 12 March 2026, when Joe Truzman in The Long War Journal floated the Iranian link in English-language coverage for the first time.⁴¹ The Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism formalised it on 16 March, in a special report giving the predicate its state-authoritative imprint — a ministry whose stated remit is combating antisemitism but whose operational mandate, on the documented record, includes Israeli state propaganda operations.⁴² The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague laundered it on 23 March, in a report that passed the conclusion forward without considering the motivations or operational backgrounds of its sources, despite the inconsistencies and doubts the report itself documented. The mainstream press, the BBC at its head, distributed it. Not terror with bombs or bullets. Terror with narrative. Israeli terror by narrative. A PsyOp, executed against two communities at once.

This article has put the evidence behind that naming.

The fingerprint of the people who built HAYI is the fingerprint of operators fluent in Anglo-American Jewish religious-political life and Western media production. The altered Qur’an. The Religious Zionist vocabulary. The American English of the administrator. The Christian and Jewish philosophical reasoning. The deletion of the account when asked who was paying. The misspelled Islamic in Arabic. The orchestral music where nasheeds belong. The absence of one word of Persian in nearly two months of operation. The institutional architecture that did not exist before 9 March 2026 yet was running a thirty-nine-minute editorial workflow by 13 March. None of this is the fingerprint of a Shia Islamic militant group. All of it is the fingerprint of an operation built by people fluent in the cultural and religious vocabulary of the very community the campaign was designed to terrify, dressed in the symbology of the community the campaign was designed to blame.

The Iranian-handler thesis the pipeline carried is excluded by the public record. Iran was, during the period in question, under the deepest and longest state-imposed internet blackout ever recorded. The connectivity environment did not support the workflow the framing required. The synagogue’s own surveillance footage was already moving through Anglosphere media before HAYI’s branded video for that attack existed. Distribution through Iraqi militia channels is not origin. The framing the pipeline delivered to the public is not consistent with what was operationally possible.

The Metropolitan Police, nearly two months in, have confirmed the operational shape of the campaign without confirming the predicate the pipeline sold. Recruiting violence as a service, in the words of the senior counter-terrorism coordinator. Thugs for hire, in the words of the deputy commissioner. The Wagner-Earl proxy model, named explicitly. Twenty-six arrests. Eight arson charges. One arson conviction. The legislation Parliament wrote for foreign-state-directed hostile activity has not been used. No foreign sponsor has been named. The same Met that named Wagner in the Earl case has not named Iran in this one. The reason for the absence is on the public record by virtue of being absent. The evidence the Met would need to bring an Iran charge has not been built, because what was built was never aimed at Iran.

What was built was aimed at the British public. At Jewish families in Golders Green made to fear an enemy the evidence does not support. At Muslim families across Britain carrying the weight of an attack their communities had no part in and condemn without qualification. At a public made to absorb a manufactured threat and to accept the political consequences flowing from it — the IRGC proscription campaigns accelerated, the legislation expanded, the war policy hardened, the Counter-Islam industry refed. Both communities are victims. Neither is the beneficiary. The beneficiary is the state that manufactured the fear, and the industry that profits from harvesting it.

One fact above all others should sit at the centre of this accounting. The pipeline sold the British public a story of Iranian-directed Islamic terror. Terrorism, by the definition the framing relied on, kills. Nearly two months in, across six countries and more than a dozen claimed attacks against synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish-owned businesses, an Iranian dissident broadcaster, false claims, and a claimed strike on an Israeli embassy, the 29 April 2026 stabbing in Golders Green produced the first injuries.⁴⁶ The campaign that was framed as the gravest Iranian-linked Islamist threat to British Jews in a generation produced, while the war was still raging, an operational record of zero casualties. That is not a feature of any real jihadist campaign in living memory. It is the signature of an operation built to manufacture fear without paying the price in blood that real terror exacts. The framing was not just wrong about who. It was wrong about what.

The institutions that laundered the operation will not correct themselves. The FDD set the predicate doing exactly what a front organisation for Zionist Israeli interests is built to do. The Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs built the report doing exactly what a ministry whose operational mandate includes Israeli state propaganda is built to do. The ICCT gave the framing research-body credibility without the due diligence that would have caught the Quranic alteration the IMDA’s own copy contained. The BBC and the mainstream outlets that ran the framing did so without disclosing the provenance to their audiences. The propagandists were never in the business of accuracy. The mainstream outlets that should have stood between the PsyOp and the public failed to, and face no requirement to repair the damage. The well was poisoned by actors with motive, capacity, and institutional cover to do exactly what was done — and the cleanup will not come from the people who poisoned the well.

The British government and the Metropolitan Police are complicit in the operation’s continuing effect on the British public. Nearly two months in, with twenty-six arrests, the Met has downgraded the offence from terrorism to criminality without retracting the Iran attribution that justified the original framing. The British press has followed the Met’s lead, softening the framing without correcting it. The British state and its principal broadcaster sit inside a structural relationship with Israel — diplomatic, intelligence-sharing, treaty-grounded — that constrains what they are willing to say about an Israeli information operation directed at their own public. The European Union’s Association Agreement with Israel, the United Kingdom’s bilateral partnerships, and the broader Western state architecture make Israeli information operations on Western soil something Western governments are institutionally configured to overlook rather than confront. That is not innocence. That is complicity by structural alignment.

The first article asked why no foreign sponsor had been named. This article has documented why: because the foreign sponsor named at the door of the operation is not the one the pipeline pointed at. The narrative-construction layer is on the documented record — the FDD predicate, the IMDA report, the ICCT laundering, the BBC distribution. That layer is Israeli-built. The operational-execution layer — who built the HAYI brand, ran the editorial desk, and recruited the proxies on the ground — is a separate question this article does not answer. What the evidence establishes is that the actors the public was told to suspect are excluded by the operational record. What it does not establish is who is responsible. That question has not been investigated. It must now be asked.

The hate is not reinforced by the fire. It is reinforced by the silence after the lie. The silence is not an accident. It is the product. And until the framing is publicly put right, with the same prominence the framing received, both communities will continue to be forced to experience the effects of the operation. The Jewish community will continue to fear an enemy it does not have. The Muslim community will continue to carry the blame for an attack it did not commit. And the state that manufactured the fear will continue to harvest it.

Until it is put right, both communities cannot heal and the public cannot see the true problem.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ Metropolitan Police, “Further arrest in investigation led by counter terrorism officers,” 26 April 2026.

² Metropolitan Police, “Statements on linked arson attacks in north west London,” 19 April 2026. Statement by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans, Senior National Co-ordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing.

³ Crown Prosecution Service, “How the CPS used new National Security Act legislation to prosecute the plot to sabotage Ukrainian aid warehouses on UK soil,” July 2025. R v Earl & others, sentenced at the Old Bailey by Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb, 24 October 2025 — the first conviction under the National Security Act 2023.

⁴ International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), Hybrid Threat Signals: Assessing Possible Iranian Involvement in Recent Attacks in Europe, Julian Lanchès, 23 March 2026, on the HAYI announcement of 9 March 2026 circulated via Telegram channel affiliated with the Iraqi pro-Iranian militia Liwa Zulfiqar.

⁵ Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, “Special Report: Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia,” 16 March 2026 (updated 24 March 2026).

⁶ ICCT, Hybrid Threat Signals, 23 March 2026.

⁷ HAYI Golders Green communiqué, circulated via Telegram, 23 March 2026, as reproduced in the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs special report on HAYI. The opening Quranic citation is from Surah At-Tawbah 9:41. The published image shows the verb form wa-jāhadū (past tense) rather than the canonical wa-jāhidū (imperative). The canonical Arabic text of Surah 9:41 is available in every standard mushaf.

⁸ HAYI Golders Green communiqué, 23 March 2026, as reproduced in the IMDA special report.

⁹ ICCT, Hybrid Threat Signals, 23 March 2026, on the second HAYI Telegram channel created 21 March 2026: “there are also a number of inconsistencies with this account, foremost the misspelling of the Arabic channel name, likely resulting from an incorrect English translation.”

¹⁰ CBS News, “European antisemitism attacks: group threatens US-Israel interests worldwide,” Joe Stocker and Haley Ott, 24 March 2026.

¹¹ Lucas Webber, senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism, quoted in CBS News, 24 March 2026.

¹² ICCT, Hybrid Threat Signals, 23 March 2026, p. 6.

¹³ Adam Rawnsley, “Is that an AK-47 on Hizballah’s flag?”, Center for a New American Security, 6 September 2016.

¹⁴ Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi profile: Hoover Institution. Credentials: BA Brasenose College, Oxford; PhD Swansea University; James Callaghan Thesis Prize 2024–25; affiliations with Middle East Forum, Hoover Institution, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the ICCT.

¹⁵ Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, quoted in Middle East Eye, “Ashab al-Yamin: The obscure new group claiming the Jewish ambulance attack,” Areeb Ullah and Mohamed Mulla, 24 March 2026.

¹⁶ Adam Hadley, founder and CEO of Tech Against Terrorism (UN-backed), quoted in The National, March 2026.

¹⁷ Avi Jorisch, Beacon of Hatred: Inside Hizbullah’s al-Manar Television, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2004.

¹⁸ Rita Katz, SITE Intelligence Group, quoted in NPR, “What Does It Mean When ISIS Claims Responsibility For An Attack?”, 24 May 2017.

¹⁹ Michael Knights, “Profile: Asaib Ahl al-Haq,” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 27 April 2021.

²⁰ ICCT, Hybrid Threat Signals, 23 March 2026.

²¹ Sharon Adarlo, Militant Wire, quoted in CBS News, 24 March 2026.

²² Jerusalem Post, “’The regime is a customer’: BBC interviews activist behind pro-Iran Lego propaganda videos,” April 2026.

²³ Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, “What Is HAYI, The Shadowy Islamist Group Claiming Attacks Across Europe?”, Meliha Kesmer, 17 April 2026.

²⁴ Counter Extremism Project, “Asaib Ahl al-Haq” profile, on al-Khazali’s Persian-language meetings with Khamenei and Soleimani.

²⁵ UK Intelligence and Security Committee, Iran (special report), published July 2025, on the Iranian state threat to the UK and Iran’s use of proxy criminals to target Iranian dissidents and Jewish/Israeli targets on UK soil. Ken McCallum, Director General of MI5, annual threat update, October 2025, citing “more than twenty potentially lethal Iran-backed plots” tracked since the prior year.

²⁶ ICCT, Hybrid Threat Signals, 23 March 2026.

²⁷ NetBlocks, reports on Iran connectivity disruption beginning 28 February 2026.

²⁸ NetBlocks, statement on Iran reaching fifty-three consecutive days of disruption, c. 21 April 2026.

²⁹ Iranian government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani statement on whitelist access, March 2026, reported by Iranian state media. State-run Bale messaging app routing for whitelist applications: Article 19, “Iran’s national internet and the Bale app,” 2024.

³⁰ Breaking911 X account posts, 23 March 2026 (02:21 AM and 03:10 AM London time):

Statement of Detective Superintendent Sarah Jackson per Metropolitan Police press contact, 23–24 March 2026. Timestamp preservation:

³¹ ICCT, Hybrid Threat Signals, 23 March 2026, timing data for the Rotterdam attack of 13 March 2026.

³² Counter Extremism Project, “Asaib Ahl al-Haq” profile: “AAH is one of three prominent Iraqi Shiite militias funded and trained by Iran’s external military wing, the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).” U.S. State Department, designation of AAH as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, 3 January 2020.

³³ Times of Israel, “North Macedonian synagogue hit by arson in country’s 1st antisemitic attack since Holocaust,” 15 April 2026. HAYI claim: Jerusalem Post, “Ashab al-Yamin claimed responsibility for Skopje, Munich attacks on Jewish sites,” 15 April 2026.

³⁴ Jerusalem Post, “Ashab al-Yamin claimed responsibility for Skopje, Munich attacks on Jewish sites,” 15 April 2026.

³⁵ Iran International incident, 15 April 2026: Committee to Protect Journalists, “3 arrested after arson attack on London-based Iran International,” 16 April 2026. Finchley Reform, Jewish Futures Hendon, and Israeli Embassy drone claim: Times of Israel, “Arson attempt hits London synagogue; Iran-linked group claims attack,” 18 April 2026. Met response on the Embassy drone claim: Metropolitan Police statement, 19 April 2026.

³⁶ R v [name redacted under reporting restrictions], Westminster Magistrates’ Court, April 2026, reported in The Guardian / Irish Times, “Iran behind low-level ‘hybrid warfare’ attacks in Europe, analysts say,” 23 April 2026.

³⁷ Metropolitan Police, “Statements on linked arson attacks in north west London,” 19 April 2026.

³⁸ Matt Jukes, BBC interview, 19 April 2026, reported in Times of Israel, “UK arrests 2 teens as ‘thugs for hire’ after latest arson attack on London synagogue,” 21 April 2026.

³⁹ The Soufan Center, “Iran War Exacerbates the Terrorist Threat Landscape in Europe,” IntelBrief, 17 April 2026.

⁴⁰ James S. Coates, “The Silence After the Lie: How an Israeli Influence Operation Became the News — and No One Corrected the Record,” Fireline Press, April 2026.

⁴¹ Joe Truzman, “Purported Iran-backed group claims responsibility for attacks in Belgium and Greece,” The Long War Journal / Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 12 March 2026. FDD founding mission documented in Sima Vaknin-Gil (then Director General, Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs), public remarks, 2018, reported in Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2018.

⁴² The Guardian, “Israel fund US university protest Gaza antisemitism,” 24 June 2024, on the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs’ propaganda operations.

⁴³ RFE/RL, “What Is HAYI, The Shadowy Islamist Group Claiming Attacks Across Europe?”, Meliha Kesmer, 17 April 2026: “None of the attacks caused casualties.” Confirmed across reporting on the campaign through 28 April 2026.

⁴⁴ Metropolitan Police statement on the Iran International incident, 17 April 2026, reported in Euronews, “Three charged over attempted arson on Persian-language TV channel, UK police say,” 17 April 2026.

⁴⁵ Jerusalem Post, "Two wounded in London terror stabbing against Golders Green Jews, HAYI takes responsibility," 29 April 2026. The HAYI claim was first reported by SITE Intelligence Group and circulated via Iraqi Shia militia–affiliated Telegram channels.

⁴⁶ Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, public statement at the scene of the 29 April 2026 Golders Green stabbing, reported in ITV News London, "'Shame on you': Met boss and local MP heckled after two Jewish men are stabbed in terror attack," 29 April 2026; and The Jewish Chronicle, "Golders Green stabbing: Suspect arrested as two injured," 29 April 2026. Suspect's actions and arrest detailed in Metropolitan Police statement, 29 April 2026, as reported across BBC, ITV News, Jerusalem Post, and Jewish Chronicle coverage of the same date.

This is not a historical curiosity. It is a documented, recurring pattern.¹ Ultranationalist settlers in the Old City harass priests, nuns, and monks with such regularity that Israeli President Isaac Herzog met with church leaders in August 2023 to address what he called “very serious phenomena towards the Christian denominations in the Holy Land.”² The Rossing Centre for Education and Dialogue documented 111 anti-Christian incidents in 2023 alone — up from 89 the previous year — including spitting, vandalism, arson, and physical assault.³ Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, responded by declaring that spitting on Christians was “not criminal.”⁴ The Armenian Quarter — one of the oldest Christian communities on earth, present in Jerusalem since the fourth century — is being squeezed by settler-linked real estate projects.⁵ The Christian population of Jerusalem numbers roughly 15,000 today, a fraction of the community that existed a century ago.⁶

The irony is worth sitting with. The state that presents itself as the sole defender of Abrahamic civilisation in the Middle East is presiding over the erosion of two of the three Abrahamic communities in the city all three call holy.

But this article is not about Christians in Jerusalem, except insofar as their treatment reveals something about the narrative we have all been sold.

The dominant narrative in the Western world — the one that anchors news coverage, congressional speeches, think-tank reports, and the entire edifice of Middle Eastern policy — positions Muslims as the civilisational enemy of Jews. It is the recent narrative that makes Israel’s existence feel necessary, its wars feel justified, and its critics feel dangerous. It is so deeply embedded in Western political culture that most people absorb it without ever questioning whether it is true.

It is not true. It is historically illiterate. And its illiteracy is not accidental — it serves a political project that I have been documenting across this series. In “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” I traced the theological infrastructure that captured American foreign policy for a dispensationalist agenda. In “Just for Fun: The War in Iran,” I documented the illegality of a war launched without legal authority and sustained by arguments that collapse under scrutiny. This article does something different. It inverts the historical record that both of those articles operate within — the assumption that Islam and Judaism are locked in an ancient civilisational conflict.

They are not. And the evidence is not ambiguous.

If Muslims are the existential enemy of Jews, why did Jews flee to Muslim lands for safety — not once, but repeatedly, across a thousand years of documented history? Why did the greatest works of medieval Jewish philosophy get written in Arabic, under Muslim patronage? Why did a Jewish scholar at Vanderbilt University open an essay in the Jewish Chronicle with three words that should have ended this debate: “Islam saved Jewry”?⁷

Those are the questions this article answers. The history it recovers is not obscure. It is simply inconvenient for the people who profit from its erasure.

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Omar ibn al-Khattab and the Return to Jerusalem

The story begins in 637 CE, when Caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab arrived at the gates of Jerusalem.

The city had been under Byzantine Christian control. The Patriarch Sophronius, realising that resistance against the Muslim armies was futile, agreed to surrender — but insisted that Omar himself come to accept it.⁸ The Caliph travelled from Medina, entering the city in simple garments, sharing a single mount with his servant, taking turns to ride and walk. He was the ruler of an empire stretching from Persia to Egypt. He arrived looking like a pilgrim.⁹

What happened next has echoed through fourteen centuries. Sophronius offered Omar the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to pray in. Omar refused. He understood that if he prayed inside the church, his followers would eventually turn it into a mosque. So he prayed outside. The church still stands.¹⁰ That single act — a conqueror refusing to pray in the holiest site available to him, specifically to protect another faith’s sacred space — encapsulates a principle that has no equivalent in the Crusader record or, for that matter, in the conduct of the state that governs Jerusalem today.

Omar issued the Assurance of Safety — al-’Uhda al-’Umariyya — guaranteeing the Christians of Jerusalem protection of their persons, property, churches, and crosses. The text, preserved in the chronicle of al-Tabari and witnessed by Khalid ibn al-Walid among others, is one of the earliest documents of religious pluralism in recorded history.¹¹

But here is the detail that matters most for this article. The Covenant included a clause, inserted at the insistence of the Christian authorities, stipulating that Jews should not reside in the city. This was not Omar’s demand. It was Sophronius’s — a continuation of a Byzantine Christian policy that had excluded Jews from Jerusalem for five centuries, dating back to Emperor Hadrian’s suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE.¹² The Christians surrendered the city on the condition that their longstanding exclusion of Jews be preserved.

Omar overrode it. He invited the Jews back.¹³

According to historical tradition, around seventy Jewish families resettled in Jerusalem under Omar’s protection.¹⁴ In Jewish writings of the period, Omar is referred to as a “friend of Israel.”¹⁵ The Times of Israel — not a publication inclined toward flattering Islamic history — noted in 2025 that this return, after five centuries of exclusion, “marked a pivotal moment in Jewish history.”¹⁶

The pattern established here would repeat for a thousand years: Muslim rulers restoring Jewish presence where Christian rulers had removed it. It is the first documented instance. It would not be the last.

The Crusaders and What They Did

Before we reach Saladin, we need to understand what the Crusaders did — not to Muslims, but to Jews. Because the dominant narrative treats the Crusades as a clash between Christendom and Islam. It was. But the first victims of the Crusading impulse were not Muslims. They were Jews.

In the spring of 1096, as the armies of the First Crusade gathered across Europe, bands of Crusaders decided that if they were marching to kill the enemies of Christ in the Holy Land, they might as well start with the enemies of Christ at home.¹⁷ The Rhineland massacres that followed were among the worst acts of organised violence against Jews in European history before the twentieth century.

At Speyer, Crusaders killed twelve Jews on the third of May.¹⁸ At Worms, they broke into the bishop’s palace where the Jewish community had taken refuge and slaughtered between 800 and 1,000 men, women, and children who refused baptism.¹⁹ At Mainz, at least 1,000 more were killed, despite the archbishop’s attempts to protect them.²⁰ The violence spread to Cologne, Trier, Metz, Regensburg, and Prague.²¹ Total estimates range from 2,000 to 12,000 killed across the Rhineland and beyond.²² The historian David Nirenberg has written that the events of 1096 “occupy a significant place in modern Jewish historiography and are often presented as the first instance of an antisemitism that would henceforth never be forgotten and whose climax was the Holocaust.”²³

Jewish mothers killed their own children rather than see them forcibly baptised. The Hebrew chronicles record these acts not as desperation but as sanctification — kiddush hashem — choosing death over the renunciation of their faith.²⁴ This is what Christian Europe offered its Jews.

Three years later, in July 1099, the Crusaders took Jerusalem. Muslims and Jews had fought side by side to defend the city.²⁵ When the walls were breached, the slaughter was indiscriminate. The Crusader chronicler Raymond of Aguilers described men riding through the Temple of Solomon in blood “up to their knees and bridle reins.”²⁶ The Jewish population, according to the Muslim chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi, assembled in their synagogue. The Crusaders burned it over their heads.²⁷ A contemporary Jewish letter, written just two weeks after the siege, confirms the destruction of the synagogue, though it does not specify whether people were inside when it was set alight.²⁸ What is beyond dispute is the outcome: the Crusaders eliminated the Jewish community of Jerusalem entirely.

For eighty-eight years, Jews were barred from the city.²⁹ Every time Muslim forces retook Jerusalem, Jews were permitted to return. Every time Christian forces recaptured it, they were expelled again.³⁰ The pattern is not ambiguous. It is not a matter of interpretation. It is the documented historical record, attested by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sources alike.

This is the civilisation that now presents itself as the protector of the Jewish people.

Saladin and the Return to Jerusalem

In 1187, Saladin retook Jerusalem.

The contrast with the Crusader conquest eighty-eight years earlier could not have been sharper. There was no general massacre. The city surrendered after negotiation with Balian of Ibelin.³¹ Saladin offered ransoms — ten dinars for men, five for women, two for children — and those who could not pay were, for the most part, permitted to leave.³² Thousands were released without ransom at all. The Crusader chroniclers themselves — men with every reason to demonise Saladin — recorded his conduct with something approaching admiration.³³

And then he invited the Jews back.

For eighty-eight years, Crusader rule had excluded Jews from Jerusalem. Saladin reversed the ban. Jewish families, primarily from Ashkelon, resettled in the city under his protection.³⁴ This was not a one-time gesture. It was the resumption of a pattern. In the years that followed, control of Jerusalem shifted back and forth between Crusader and Muslim forces. Each time the Christians took the city, the Jews were expelled. Each time Muslim forces retook it, Jews were permitted to return.³⁵

Saladin’s treatment of Jerusalem’s non-Muslim communities was not an anomaly. It was an expression of the Islamic legal framework that governed relations with the People of the Book — a framework built on Quranic injunction and the precedent set by Omar five centuries earlier. This does not mean it was flawless. No empire’s conduct across centuries is uniformly just. But the framework existed, it was institutionalised, and it produced results that had no parallel in Christendom.

Consider the trajectory of one man.

Moses ben Maimon — Maimonides — was born in Córdoba in 1138, during the golden age of Jewish life under Muslim rule in Spain.³⁶ When the Almohads, a fundamentalist Berber dynasty, conquered Córdoba in 1148, they abolished the dhimmi protections that had safeguarded non-Muslim communities. The Maimon family was forced to flee.³⁷ This is an important caveat: Muslim rule was not uniformly tolerant. The Almohad period represents the most significant counter-example in the historical record, and honesty requires naming it directly. Maimonides’ family spent years in exile — in southern Spain, then Fez, then Palestine — before settling in Fustat (Old Cairo) in 1166.³⁸

There, under the Ayyubid dynasty founded by Saladin, Maimonides flourished. He became court physician, first to al-Qadi al-Fadil, Saladin’s chief secretary, and then to Saladin himself.³⁹ He served as the head of the Egyptian Jewish community. He wrote his greatest philosophical work, The Guide for the Perplexed, in Judeo-Arabic — the literary form of Arabic used by Jewish scholars throughout the Islamic world.⁴⁰ When Richard the Lionheart reportedly invited Maimonides to become his personal physician, Maimonides declined. He stayed in Cairo.⁴¹

Sit with that for a moment. The greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval world — a man whose influence on Jewish thought is compared to that of Moses himself — wrote his masterwork in Arabic, under Muslim patronage, in the court of the man who had just retaken Jerusalem from the Crusaders. He was offered a position in the Christian West and chose to remain in the Islamic East.

The Almohad persecution that drove Maimonides from Córdoba is real, and this article does not minimise it. But the trajectory of his life tells the larger story: he fled one Muslim regime and found safety, patronage, and intellectual freedom under another. He did not flee to Christendom. He fled from it — or rather, from the Holy Land that Christendom had turned into a place where Jews could not live.

The Golden Age — Al-Andalus

Maimonides was not an anomaly. He was a product of something much larger.

For roughly three centuries — from the mid-900s to the mid-1200s — Jewish intellectual, literary, and scientific life reached heights under Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula that had no parallel anywhere in the medieval world. Historians call it the Golden Age of Jewish culture in Spain. It happened under Islam. Not in spite of it.⁴²

The roll call is staggering. Solomon ibn Gabirol, philosopher and poet. Judah Halevi, whose poetry is still recited in synagogues today. Abraham ibn Ezra, mathematician and biblical commentator. And Samuel ibn Naghrillah — Samuel ha-Nagid — who rose from a spice shopkeeper in Málaga to become the grand vizier and military commander of the Muslim kingdom of Granada.⁴³ A Jew commanding Muslim armies. For nearly two decades, he led Granada’s forces in battle, secured its borders, and expanded its territory — all while serving as the head of the Jewish community and producing some of the finest Hebrew poetry since the Bible.⁴⁴ Try to imagine a comparable position for a Jew in medieval Christendom. You cannot, because it did not exist.

David Wasserstein, the Jewish studies professor whose essay anchors this article, put the relationship plainly: Jewish cultural prosperity in the medieval period operated largely as a function of Muslim cultural prosperity. When Muslim Arabic culture thrived, so did Jewish culture. When Muslim culture declined, so did Jewish culture. The cultural capital created under Islam then served as the foundation for later Jewish cultural revival in Christian Europe.⁴⁵

The Jews of Al-Andalus wrote in Arabic. They composed poetry in Hebrew using Arabic metres. They studied philosophy, astronomy, medicine, and mathematics within the Islamic scholarly tradition. They did not merely survive under Muslim rule. They flourished in ways that reshaped Jewish civilisation permanently.

This article does not pretend that Al-Andalus was a paradise. It was not. The 1066 massacre of Jews in Granada — triggered by political resentment against Samuel ha-Nagid’s son Joseph, who had succeeded his father as vizier — killed hundreds and destroyed the Jewish community of the city.⁴⁶ The Almohad invasion of the mid-twelfth century ended the tolerance entirely, forcing conversions and driving Jewish and Christian communities into exile.⁴⁷ These are facts, and they belong in the record.

But the comparative question is the one that matters. What was happening to Jews in Christian Europe during the same centuries? The Rhineland massacres. The blood libel. The ghettos. The expulsions — from England in 1290, from France repeatedly, from one territory after another.⁴⁸ The forced conversions. The Inquisitions. The pogroms. A systematic, institutional, centuries-long campaign of persecution that would culminate, eight centuries later, in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Set the imperfect tolerance of Al-Andalus beside the systematic persecution of Christendom. The comparison is not close. It is not even in the same category.

The Ottoman Centuries and the Kol Nidre

When Christian Spain finally completed the Reconquista in 1492, the new Catholic monarchs moved immediately from territorial unity to religious uniformity. On the thirty-first of March, Ferdinand and Isabella signed the Alhambra Decree, ordering every unconverted Jew to leave Spain by the end of July.⁴⁹ The choice was conversion, exile, or death. An entire civilisation — the Jewish community that had flourished for centuries under Muslim rule — was uprooted in a single decree.

Where did the expelled Jews go?

To the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Bayezid II sent the Ottoman navy to evacuate Jews from Spain.⁵⁰ He issued a firman — an imperial decree — to every governor in his European provinces, ordering them not only to admit the refugees but to welcome them. He threatened with death anyone who mistreated the arriving Jews.⁵¹ And he reportedly mocked Ferdinand for the decision: “You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler — he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!”⁵²

Tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews settled across Ottoman territory — in Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Izmir, and throughout the Balkans. They brought with them skills, languages, and commercial networks that enriched the Ottoman economy for centuries.⁵³ A Jewish community writing for +972 Magazine — an Israeli publication — noted in 2018 that Bayezid’s policy of welcoming Jewish refugees stands in documented contrast to the modern State of Israel’s treatment of non-Jewish refugees.⁵⁴

The Ottoman millet system provided the legal framework. Under this system, recognised religious communities — Jewish, Christian, Armenian, Greek Orthodox — governed their own civil and family affairs, maintained their own courts, ran their own schools, and practised their faith freely, under the protection of the Ottoman state.⁵⁵ It was not equality in the modern liberal sense. Jews and Christians were dhimmis — protected non-Muslim subjects — not citizens with identical legal standing. But the system provided something that had no equivalent in Christendom: institutional, legally guaranteed religious coexistence.

And here is where we must address the Kol Nidre.

Kol Nidre is not technically a prayer. It is a legal formula, recited in Aramaic on the eve of Yom Kippur — the holiest night in the Jewish calendar.⁵⁶ It annuls vows made between the individual and God. The text predates the Inquisitions by centuries, and scholars debate its precise origins.⁵⁷ But its emotional power — the reason it has become the most recognisable moment in the Jewish liturgical year, the reason grown men weep when the cantor’s voice rises through the three repetitions — is inseparable from its association with forced conversion.

Throughout the medieval period, Jews across Christian Europe were given a choice that was no choice: convert to Christianity or suffer persecution, expulsion, or death.⁵⁸ Those who converted under coercion — the anusim, the conversos, the people the Spanish called marranos — continued to practise Judaism in secret. And when Yom Kippur came, they would make their way to hidden gatherings to recite Kol Nidre, seeking release from vows they had been forced to take under threat to their lives.⁵⁹

This formula exists because of Christian persecution. Not Muslim persecution. It carries within it the memory of centuries of coerced conversion, inquisitorial torture, and the desperate preservation of Jewish identity against a civilisation that was determined to erase it.

The next time someone tells you that Islam is the historic enemy of Judaism, ask them about the Kol Nidre. Ask them which civilisation made that prayer necessary. And then ask them which civilisation provided the refuge when the prayer was not enough.

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“Islam Saved Jewry” — and the Charge Against the Record

The argument of this article is not original to me. It was made by a Jewish scholar, in a Jewish publication, on the basis of Jewish and Islamic historical sources.

David J. Wasserstein, the Eugene Greener Jr Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, published an essay in the Jewish Chronicle on the twenty-fourth of May 2012, adapted from his Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.⁶⁰ His thesis was direct: when the Prophet Muhammad was born in 570 CE, the Jews and Judaism were on the path to oblivion. Christianity had become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, and with that dominance came systematic legal degradation, forced conversion, and the steady erasure of Jewish communal life across the Mediterranean world. Had Islam not arrived, Wasserstein argued, the separation between western Judaism and Babylonian Judaism would have intensified until both were extinguished — one by Christian assimilation, the other by oriental obscurity.⁶¹

The Islamic conquests of the seventh century changed everything. Within a century of Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, Muslim armies had conquered almost the entire world in which Jews lived, from Spain to the eastern frontier of Persia. The result, Wasserstein wrote, was a transformation of Jewish existence in legal, demographic, social, religious, political, geographical, economic, linguistic, and cultural terms — all for the better.⁶²

Wasserstein was careful to note that the status of dhimmi — protected non-Muslim subject — made Jews second-class citizens in Islamic law. But he was equally careful to note what that status replaced. In Visigothic Spain, shortly before the Muslim conquest in 711, Jews had seen their children removed and forcibly converted to Christianity, and had themselves been enslaved. Second-class citizenship, Wasserstein observed, “was a far better thing to be than not to be a citizen at all.”⁶³

This is the point where critics of Islam will raise the charge they always raise: dhimmitude. The argument, as deployed by counter-Islam commentators, runs something like this: the dhimmi system was a form of institutionalised oppression; the jizya was a punitive tax designed to humiliate non-Muslims; and the entire framework proves that Islam is inherently hostile to non-Muslim minorities.

The argument depends on ignorance — either the ignorance of the person making it, or the ignorance they are counting on in their audience.

Here is what the dhimmi system actually was. Under Islamic law, non-Muslim communities recognised as People of the Book — primarily Jews and Christians — entered into a contractual arrangement with the Muslim state.⁶⁴ In exchange for the jizya tax, the state guaranteed their protection, their property, their freedom of worship, their right to govern their own civil and family affairs through their own courts, and their exemption from military service.⁶⁵ Muslims, by contrast, were required to pay zakat — the obligatory wealth tax that constitutes one of the five pillars of Islam — and were subject to conscription.⁶⁶ The jizya was levied only on able-bodied adult men of financial means. Women, children, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, monks, and the mentally ill were exempt.⁶⁷ If dhimmis served in the Muslim military, they were exempt from the jizya entirely.⁶⁸ And — critically — if the Muslim state could not fulfil its obligation to protect its dhimmi subjects, the jizya had to be returned. Caliph Omar himself set this precedent, returning the jizya to a Christian tribe when he could not defend them from Byzantine attack.⁶⁹

Was the system abused? Of course it was. Corrupt rulers throughout Islamic history weaponised the jizya, extracting excessive payments, humiliating dhimmi populations, and violating the contractual protections the system was designed to guarantee.⁷⁰ These abuses are documented, and they are real. But they are abuses of the system — violations of Islamic law, not expressions of it. The distinction matters. When a corrupt tax collector in the Abbasid Empire extorted a Jewish merchant, he was breaking the dhimma contract, not fulfilling it. When the Almohads abolished dhimmi protections entirely, they were repudiating the established Islamic legal framework, not implementing it.

The counter-Islam commentators who cite these abuses as evidence that Islam is inherently hostile to minorities never apply the same standard to their own civilisational tradition. They do not argue that the Inquisition represents the essence of Christianity, or that the transatlantic slave trade — conducted under the Doctrine of Discovery, a papal bull — defines the Christian relationship with non-European peoples. They treat Christian atrocities as aberrations and Islamic protections as facades. The double standard is not accidental. It is the mechanism.

The honest comparison — the one the critics will never make — is between the dhimmi system at its best and Christendom at its best. And even at its most imperfect, the dhimmi system provided Jews with legal protections, communal autonomy, and physical safety that medieval Christendom did not offer at any point in its thousand-year history.

Bernard Lewis, the historian most frequently cited by Western conservatives on matters of Islam, put it plainly: many dhimmis found the change from Byzantine to Arab rule to be a welcome relief, “both in taxation and in other matters,” and some among the Christians of Syria and Egypt “preferred the rule of Islam to that of Byzantines.”⁷¹

The Inversion

So how did we get from there to here? How did the civilisation that sheltered Jews for a thousand years become, in the Western imagination, their eternal enemy?

The answer is not complicated. It is a political project, executed over the last century, and it required the erasure of the history this article has just documented.

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was driven by European Jewish refugees fleeing European Christian persecution. The Zionist movement was born in Europe, in response to European antisemitism, and its founders were explicit about this. Theodor Herzl did not write Der Judenstaat because of Muslim persecution. He wrote it after witnessing the Dreyfus Affair in France — a Christian country.⁷² The Holocaust that made the case for Israel undeniable was perpetrated by a Christian civilisation, in the heart of Christian Europe, with centuries of Christian antisemitism as its foundation.

But when those European refugees arrived in Palestine, the conflict that resulted was reframed — not as a colonial displacement of an indigenous population by European settlers, but as a civilisational conflict between Jews and Muslims. The Nakba — the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1947–49 — was buried beneath a narrative of ancient enmity.⁷³ The people who had protected Jews for a millennium were recast as their eternal oppressors. And the civilisation that had actually persecuted them — Christendom — rebranded itself as their guardian.

The role of Christian Zionism in cementing this inversion is documented in my earlier article, “Holy War.”⁷⁴ The evangelical movement that now constitutes Israel’s most powerful support base in America — Christians United for Israel, with over ten million members — is driven by a theology that instrumentalises Jews as prophetic stage props. The short-term interests align: evangelicals want Israel supported; the Israeli right wants American backing. But the long-term theology is, at its structural core, antisemitic — it envisions Jewish conversion or destruction at the Second Coming.

The irony is breathtaking. The civilisation that persecuted Jews for a thousand years now presents itself as their protector — against the civilisation that sheltered them. And most people in the Western world have absorbed this inversion without ever questioning it, because they have never been taught the history that this article has laid out.

The Language of Genocide

This inversion does not operate only at the level of historical narrative. It operates at the level of language — the language being used right now, by the leaders of the state that claims to speak for the Jewish people.

On the ninth of October 2023, two days after the Hamas attack, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip. “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed,” he said. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”⁷⁵

On the twenty-eighth of October, as the ground invasion began, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed IDF soldiers: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”⁷⁶ In the Hebrew Bible, the commandment regarding Amalek is unambiguous: destroy everything — men, women, children, infants, livestock.⁷⁷ South Africa cited this statement in its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.⁷⁸

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza.⁷⁹ President Isaac Herzog declared that there were no innocent civilians in Gaza — that the entire population bore responsibility.⁸⁰ Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested dropping a nuclear bomb.⁸¹

These are not fringe voices. These are the Prime Minister, the Defence Minister, the Finance Minister, and the President of the State of Israel.

Amnesty International reviewed 102 statements by Israeli government and military officials issued between the seventh of October 2023 and the thirtieth of June 2024. Of these, the organisation identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for or justify genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent.⁸² In December 2024, Amnesty International formally concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.⁸³

If the standard for judging a movement is the most extreme language of its leaders — and it is, when the movement in question is Palestinian — then apply that standard equally. The leaders of the State of Israel have used language that meets every threshold for genocidal intent. This is not my assessment. It is the assessment of the world’s largest human rights organisation, based on 296 pages of evidence, 212 interviews, and analysis of visual, digital, and satellite imagery.

Who Protected Whom

This article has asked one question: if Muslims are the existential enemy of Jews, why did Jews flee to Muslim lands for safety for a thousand years?

The answer is in the historical record. Omar invited the Jews back to Jerusalem when the Christians had excluded them for five centuries. The Crusaders slaughtered Jews on their way to the Holy Land and burned them alive in their synagogues when they arrived. Saladin retook Jerusalem and invited the Jews to return — again. Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval world, wrote his masterwork in Arabic, under Muslim patronage, and declined an offer from the Christian West. The Jews of Al-Andalus produced a golden age of culture, poetry, and philosophy under Islamic rule that had no equivalent in Christendom. When Christian Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the Ottoman Sultan sent his navy to rescue them and mocked the Christian king who had driven them out. And through it all, the Kol Nidre — the most sacred formula in the Jewish liturgical year — carried within it the memory of Christian persecution, not Muslim persecution.

This is the history. It is not ambiguous. It is not contested by serious scholars. And it is being systematically erased by people who need you not to know it — because if you knew it, the entire narrative that sustains unconditional Western support for the State of Israel would collapse.

The next time someone tells you that Islam is the enemy of the Jewish people, ask them one question.

Who protected whom?

And watch how fast they change the subject.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that's how the fire spreads.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ Nir Hasson, “Jews Spit at Christian Pilgrims in Jerusalem’s Old City,” Haaretz, 2 October 2023. Video footage of the incident during Sukkot went viral, prompting rare condemnations from Israeli officials.

² “Israeli President Slams Rising Attacks Against Christians as a ‘True Disgrace,’” CBN News, 12 August 2023. Herzog met with leaders of the Orthodox and Catholic churches of the Holy Land.

³ Rossing Centre for Education and Dialogue, “Attacks on Christians in Israel and East Jerusalem,” annual report, 2024. The centre documented 111 incidents in 2023, up from 89 in 2022, including 47 physical assaults, the majority targeting clergy identifiable by religious garb.

⁴ “Spitting on Christians in Jerusalem ‘Not Criminal,’ Says Ben Gvir,” Middle East Eye, 4 October 2023. Settler activist Elisha Yered, under house arrest for suspected involvement in the killing of a Palestinian teenager, called spitting on Christians “an ancient Jewish custom” on X (formerly Twitter).

⁵ “Violence Against Christians Is on the Rise in Israel,” Armenian Weekly, 11 September 2025. The report documents repeated attacks on the Armenian Orthodox Convent and settler-linked land grabs in the Armenian Quarter.

⁶ “Christians in Jerusalem Under Attacks from Israeli Settlers,” WAFA, 3 October 2023; Middle East Monitor, 4 October 2023. The figure of approximately 15,000 Christians in Jerusalem today is cited in multiple reports. During the British Mandate, Christians constituted roughly 11 per cent of the total population of Palestine.

⁷ David J. Wasserstein, “So, What Did the Muslims Do for the Jews?” The Jewish Chronicle, 24 May 2012. Adapted from the Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. Wasserstein is the Eugene Greener Jr Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University.

⁸ The siege and surrender of Jerusalem is documented in multiple sources. See Maher Y. Abu-Munshar, Islamic Jerusalem and Its Christians: A History of Tolerance and Tensions (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), pp. 85–89. The date is variously given as 637 or 638 CE depending on the source.

⁹ The account of Omar’s humble arrival — sharing a single mount with his servant, taking turns to ride and walk — is widely attested in Islamic historical tradition. See al-Tabari, Tarikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk (History of the Prophets and Kings).

¹⁰ The refusal to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is one of the most consistently reported details of Omar’s entry into Jerusalem, attested in both Islamic and Christian sources. The Mosque of Omar, built near (not inside) the church, marks the site where he prayed instead.

¹¹ The text of the Assurance (al-’Uhda al-’Umariyya) is preserved in al-Tabari’s chronicle. For scholarly discussion of the various versions and their authenticity, see Abu-Munshar (2007), pp. 85–95. Scholars debate the precise wording of the document, with some later versions considered embellished, but the core provisions — protection of persons, property, churches, and religious practice — are broadly accepted as authentic.

¹² Emperor Hadrian banned Jews from Jerusalem (then renamed Aelia Capitolina) following the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 CE. Byzantine Christian authorities maintained this exclusion. See Shlomo Pereira, “638 — The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Promise Caliph Omar Would Not Keep,” The Times of Israel, 22 October 2025.

¹³ The clause excluding Jews from Jerusalem appears in the Covenant text but is understood by scholars as a concession to the Byzantine Christian authorities rather than an expression of Islamic policy. Omar’s decision to override it and invite Jews to return is documented in both Islamic and Jewish sources. See Pereira (2025); Abu-Munshar (2007).

¹⁴ The figure of approximately seventy Jewish families is drawn from historical tradition. See “Islamic Conquest of Jerusalem: A Brilliant Lesson in Tolerance, Justice and Humanity,” Al Mujtama Magazine, which cites the tradition that Omar instructed a Yemeni Jewish convert to Islam to bring Jewish families to settle in the city.

¹⁵ Pereira (2025): “In Jewish tradition, Caliph Omar is viewed as a tolerant and benevolent ruler, referred to in some Jewish writings of the time as a ‘friend of Israel.’”

¹⁶ Pereira (2025): “The return of Jews to Jerusalem after five centuries of exclusion marked a pivotal moment in Jewish history.”

¹⁷ Robert Chazan, In the Year 1096: The First Crusade and the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996). Chazan’s work is the standard scholarly treatment of the Rhineland massacres. See also the Solomon bar Simson Chronicle, a Hebrew account written approximately fifty years after the events.

¹⁸ “Rhineland Massacres,” Wikipedia, citing primary sources including Albert of Aachen and the Hebrew chronicles. The Bishop of Speyer intervened and sheltered the remaining Jewish community; he had the hands of some of the attackers cut off as punishment.

¹⁹ At least 800 Jews were killed at Worms on 18 May 1096. The Crusaders broke into the bishop’s episcopal palace where the community had taken refuge. See the Worms massacre entry in the Jewish chronicles and Chazan (1996).

²⁰ The Mainz massacre of 27 May 1096 killed at least 1,000 Jews (some estimates say 1,100). Archbishop Ruthard of Mainz attempted to shelter the community but was overwhelmed. See Haaretz, “This Day in Jewish History: Crusaders Massacre the Jews of Mainz,” 27 May 2014.

²¹ The violence extended beyond the Rhineland to Cologne, Trier, Metz, Regensburg, and Prague. In Regensburg, the entire Jewish community was forcibly baptised in the Danube. See “Rhineland Massacres,” Wikipedia, and Chazan (1996).

²² Estimates of total deaths range widely. The Historica Wiki entry cites “between 2,000 and 12,000 Jews.” The variation reflects the difficulty of establishing precise figures from medieval sources. Even the lower estimate represents a catastrophic loss for communities numbering in the thousands.

²³ David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). The passage is also cited in the Wikipedia entry on the Rhineland massacres.

²⁴ The Hebrew chronicles — particularly the Solomon bar Simson Chronicle, the Mainz Anonymous, and the Eliezer bar Nathan Chronicle — record numerous instances of Jewish self-sacrifice (kiddush hashem) during the 1096 massacres, including mothers killing their children to prevent forced baptism.

²⁵ “Massacre of Jerusalem (1099),” Wikipedia, citing multiple sources: “Jewish Jerusalemites defended their city from the besieging Christians, fighting side-by-side with Muslim soldiers until the Crusaders breached the walls.” See also the Muslim History Chronicles account of the siege.

²⁶ Raymond of Aguilers, eyewitness account, cited in Andrew Sinclair, Jerusalem: The Endless Crusade (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995), pp. 55–56.

²⁷ Ibn al-Qalanisi, Dhail Tarikh Dimashq (The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades): “The Jews assembled in their synagogue, and the Franks burned it over their heads.” Cited in Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 64–66.

²⁸ A contemporary Jewish communication, identified by Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein from the Cairo Geniza, was written approximately two weeks after the siege. It confirms the destruction of the synagogue but does not mention people being inside during the burning. The discrepancy between Muslim and Jewish accounts is noted in multiple scholarly treatments. See “Siege of Jerusalem (1099),” Wikipedia.

²⁹ For eighty-eight years (1099–1187), Jews were barred from Jerusalem under Crusader rule. See the MuslimMatters article “Islamic Jerusalem: ‘We Will Drive the Jews into the Sea’” (Part 2 of 3), 24 July 2009.

³⁰ “Each time the Christians conquered the city, the Jews were expelled, and restored when the Muslims re-conquered it.” MuslimMatters (2009), citing H.A.R. Gibb and Harold Bowen.

³¹ The siege lasted from 20 September to 2 October 1187. Balian of Ibelin, one of the few surviving Crusader nobles, negotiated the surrender. See “Siege of Jerusalem (1187),” Wikipedia, and John Man, Saladin: The Life, the Legend and the Islamic Empire (London: Bantam Press, 2015).

³² The ransom terms are documented in multiple Crusader and Muslim sources. Saladin agreed to release 7,000 of the poorest inhabitants for a lump sum of 30,000 dinars after Balian argued that 20,000 could never pay individually. See “Siege of Jerusalem (1187),” Wikipedia.

³³ Saladin’s conduct was widely noted by Western chroniclers. The World History Encyclopedia entry on Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem describes the event as one in which his “triumph was far less violent than that of the medieval knights of the First Crusade, and for this, he has been endlessly romanticized by Muslims and Christians alike.” See Syed Muhammad Khan, “Saladin’s Conquest of Jerusalem (1187 CE),” World History Encyclopedia, 18 May 2020.

³⁴ “After recapturing the holy city, Saladin allowed the remaining Jews in the Holy Land, mainly from Ashkelon, who had somehow remained alive despite the Crusaders’ enthusiastic efforts to change that situation.” Quora response citing Baha al-Din ibn Shaddad and Ibn al-Athir. See also MuslimMatters (2009): “Just as Caliph Umar had reversed the Christian ban on Jewish settlement, so too did Saladin allow the Jews to return.”

³⁵ MuslimMatters (2009): “During the next few years, Jerusalem shifted between Muslim and Christian control: each time the Christians conquered the city, the Jews were expelled, and restored when the Muslims re-conquered it.”

³⁶ Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon) was born in Córdoba in 1138 (some sources give 1135). See “Maimonides,” Encyclopaedia Britannica; “Maimonides,” Wikipedia.

³⁷ The Almohads conquered Córdoba in 1148 and abolished dhimmi status, forcing Jewish and Christian communities to choose between conversion, exile, or death. See “Maimonides,” Encyclopaedia Britannica. This represents the most significant episode of religious persecution under Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula and is an essential caveat to any argument about Muslim-Jewish coexistence.

³⁸ Maimonides’ family spent approximately a decade in southern Spain, then moved to Fez (c. 1160), then to Acre in Palestine (1165), and finally to Fustat (Old Cairo) in 1166. See “Maimonides,” The Great Thinkers (thegreatthinkers.org/maimonides/biography).

³⁹ Maimonides was appointed court physician to al-Qadi al-Fadil, Saladin’s chief secretary and regent of Egypt, around 1174. He subsequently served Saladin and, after Saladin’s death in 1193, his son al-Afdal. See Fred Rosner, “The Life of Moses Maimonides, a Prominent Medieval Physician,” Einstein Journal of Biology and Medicine, citing primary sources.

⁴⁰ The Guide for the Perplexed (Dalālat al-Ḥāʾirīn) was written in Judeo-Arabic — Arabic written in Hebrew script — and completed around 1190. It was later translated into Hebrew by Samuel ibn Tibbon. Wasserstein (2012) notes that “much of the greatest poetry in Hebrew written since the Bible comes from this period” of Jewish cultural flourishing under Islam.

⁴¹ The tradition that Richard the Lionheart invited Maimonides to become his personal physician, and that Maimonides declined, is widely reported but not fully verified by primary sources. See Rosner (Einstein Journal) and “Maimonides,” Jewish History (jewishhistory.org). The tradition is included here as it is commonly cited; even if apocryphal, Maimonides’ choice to remain in Cairo under Muslim patronage rather than relocate to Christendom is historically documented.

⁴² The term “Golden Age of Jewish culture in Spain” is standard in Jewish historiography. See the Encyclopaedia Judaica entries on Spanish Jewry; María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York: Little, Brown, 2002). Menocal’s account has been criticised by some scholars as overly optimistic, but the core claim — that Jewish culture reached extraordinary heights under Muslim rule in Iberia — is not contested.

⁴³ Samuel ibn Naghrillah (993–1056), known as Samuel ha-Nagid (”Samuel the Prince”), served as grand vizier and military commander of the Taifa of Granada under its Zirid Berber rulers. See “Samuel ibn Naghrillah,” Wikipedia; “Samuel ha-Nagid,” Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes his career as “the highest achievement of a Jew in medieval Muslim Spain.”

⁴⁴ Samuel ha-Nagid commanded Granada’s Muslim armies for approximately eighteen years (1038–1056). He led campaigns against rival taifa kingdoms including Almería, Seville, and Málaga. His Hebrew war poetry, composed on the battlefield, is considered among the finest of the Golden Age. See “Samuel ha-Nagid,” Encyclopaedia Britannica; E.I. Weinberger, Jewish Prince in Modern Spain: Selected Poems of Samuel ibn Nagrela (1973).

⁴⁵ Wasserstein (2012): “Jewish cultural prosperity in the middle ages operated in large part as a function of Muslim, Arabic cultural (and to some degree political) prosperity: when Muslim Arabic culture thrived, so did that of the Jews; when Muslim Arabic culture declined, so did that of the Jews.”

⁴⁶ The 1066 Granada massacre followed the assassination of Joseph ibn Naghrillah, Samuel ha-Nagid’s son, who had succeeded his father as vizier. The massacre was triggered by political resentment rather than purely religious hostility, but it resulted in the killing of a large number of Jewish inhabitants. See “Samuel ibn Naghrillah,” Wikipedia; “1066 Granada Massacre,” Wikipedia.

⁴⁷ The Almohad dynasty conquered much of Al-Andalus from the 1140s onward, abolishing dhimmi protections and forcing conversions of both Jews and Christians. This was the most significant episode of religious persecution under Muslim rule in Iberia. See “Almohad Dynasty,” Encyclopaedia Britannica; “Maimonides,” Wikipedia.

⁴⁸ The Edict of Expulsion of 1290, issued by Edward I, expelled all Jews from England. Jews were not formally readmitted until 1656 under Oliver Cromwell. France expelled its Jewish population multiple times, including in 1182, 1306, and 1394. See “History of the Jews in England,” Wikipedia; “History of the Jews in France,” Wikipedia.

⁴⁹ The Alhambra Decree was signed on 31 March 1492 by Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. Modern estimates of the number expelled range from 40,000 to 200,000. See “Expulsion of Jews from Spain,” Wikipedia; “Alhambra Decree,” Wikipedia.

⁵⁰ “Bayezid II sent out the Ottoman Navy under the command of admiral Kemal Reis to Spain in 1492 in order to evacuate them safely to Ottoman lands.” See “Bayezid II,” Wikipedia; “Sultan Bayezid II Welcomes Jewish Refugees from Spain,” History of Information (historyofinformation.com).

⁵¹ “Bayezid addressed a firman to all the governors of his European provinces, ordering them not only to refrain from repelling the Spanish refugees, but to give them a friendly and welcome reception. He threatened with death all those who treated the Jews harshly or refused them admission into the empire.” See “Bayezid II,” Wikipedia.

⁵² The quote is widely attributed to Bayezid II in multiple forms. The version cited here follows the Wikipedia entry on Bayezid II and the Alhambra Decree: “You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!” See also “When the Sultan Took in Jewish Refugees,” +972 Magazine, 25 January 2018.

⁵³ Sephardic Jews established the first printing press in Constantinople in 1493. Jewish communities in Thessaloniki, Istanbul, and Izmir became major centres of commerce and scholarship under Ottoman rule. See “Ottoman Lands Provided Safe Haven for Sephardic Jews Expelled from Spain,” Anadolu Agency, 2022.

⁵⁴ “When the Sultan Took in Jewish Refugees,” +972 Magazine, 25 January 2018. Written by a Jewish author of Sephardic origin, the article explicitly contrasts Bayezid II’s refugee policy with the modern State of Israel’s treatment of African asylum seekers.

⁵⁵ The Ottoman millet system granted recognised religious communities (millets) autonomous governance over their own civil and family affairs, including marriage, divorce, inheritance, and education. The system lasted from the fifteenth century until the late Ottoman period. See “Millet (Ottoman Empire),” Wikipedia; Stanford Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York: New York University Press, 1991).

⁵⁶ “Kol Nidre,” Encyclopaedia Britannica: “Kol Nidre (Aramaic: ‘All Vows’), a prayer sung in Jewish synagogues at the beginning of the service on the eve of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement).”

⁵⁷ The text of Kol Nidre appears as early as the ninth-century prayer book Siddur of Rav Amram Gaon. Its origins are debated. Historian Joseph S. Bloch suggested it may have originated during the Visigothic persecutions of Jews in Spain (seventh century). See “Kol Nidre,” Wikipedia; “A Brief History of the Kol Nidrei Prayer,” Reform Judaism (reformjudaism.org); Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, “Moses Annuls a Vow,” The Jewish Press, 12 March 2020.

⁵⁸ Forced conversions of Jews occurred throughout medieval Christendom, including under the Visigoths in seventh-century Spain, during the Rhineland massacres of 1096, and culminating in the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition specifically targeted conversos suspected of practising Judaism in secret. See “Kol Nidre,” Wikipedia; “The Curious Case of Kol Nidre,” Commentary Magazine.

⁵⁹ While most scholars agree that Kol Nidre predates the Spanish Inquisition, the association with forced converts is well established. “It is probably true that ‘secret Jews,’ in various times and places, did utilize Kol Nidre as a means of absolving themselves from vows made under coercion.” Commentary Magazine, citing historian Joseph S. Bloch. The Chabad.org article on Kol Nidre notes: “While this story is beautiful, it’s not historically accurate, as the prayer predates the Inquisition by centuries. However, some suggest that the conversos popularized the text.”

⁶⁰ David J. Wasserstein, “So, What Did the Muslims Do for the Jews?” The Jewish Chronicle, 24 May 2012. The article was adapted from Wasserstein’s Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion, delivered at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London.

⁶¹ Wasserstein (2012): “Had Islam not come along, the conflict with Persia would have continued. The separation between western Judaism, that of Christendom, and Babylonian Judaism, that of Mesopotamia, would have intensified. Jewry in the west would have declined to disappearance in many areas. And Jewry in the east would have become just another oriental cult.”

⁶² Wasserstein (2012): “Within a century of the death of Mohammad, in 632, Muslim armies had conquered almost the whole of the world where Jews lived, from Spain eastward across North Africa and the Middle East as far as the eastern frontier of Iran and beyond. Almost all the Jews in the world were now ruled by Islam. This new situation transformed Jewish existence.”

⁶³ Wasserstein (2012): “This should not be misunderstood: to be a second-class citizen was a far better thing to be than not to be a citizen at all. For most of these Jews, second-class citizenship represented a major advance. In Visigothic Spain, for example, shortly before the Muslim conquest in 711, the Jews had seen their children removed from them and forcibly converted to Christianity and had themselves been enslaved.”

⁶⁴ The dhimma was a contractual arrangement under Islamic law. The word literally means “protection.” See “Dhimmi,” Wikipedia; Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

⁶⁵ The Pact of Umar stipulated that Muslims must “do battle to guard” the dhimmis and “put no burden on them greater than they can bear.” See “Jizya,” Wikipedia; “Jizyah,” Encyclopaedia Britannica.

⁶⁶ Zakat is obligatory for all Muslims of financial means and constitutes one of the five pillars of Islam. Dhimmis were exempt from zakat but subject to jizya. The two taxes served parallel functions within the Islamic fiscal system. See “Islamic Taxes,” Wikipedia.

⁶⁷ “The tax was to be levied only on able-bodied males, and not on women or children. The poor who were dependent for their livelihood on alms and the aged poor who were incapable of work were also specially excepted, as also the blind, the lame, the incurables and the insane.” Sir Thomas Arnold, cited in “Does Islam Oppress Dhimmis?” (alislam.org). See also “Jizyah,” Encyclopaedia Britannica: “The non-Muslim poor, the elderly, women, serfs, religious functionaries, and the mentally ill generally did not pay any taxes.”

⁶⁸ Sir Thomas Arnold documents multiple instances of dhimmi communities exempted from jizya in exchange for military service, including the al-Jurajima tribe (a Christian community near Antioch) and frontier tribes in Persia. Similar exemptions existed under Ottoman rule. See “Does Islam Oppress Dhimmis?” (alislam.org).

⁶⁹ Caliph Omar returned the jizya to a Christian Arab tribe when he was unable to protect them from a Byzantine military attack. This precedent established the principle that the jizya was conditional on the state’s fulfilment of its protection obligations. See “Jizyah,” Encyclopaedia Britannica; “Jizya,” Study.com.

⁷⁰ Abuses of the jizya system are documented throughout Islamic history. Norman Stillman described the tax burden on some dhimmi populations as “crushing.” The Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil imposed additional restrictions on dhimmis in the ninth century. The Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire saw instances of enslavement for non-payment. See “Dhimmi,” Wikipedia; “Jizya,” Wikipedia. These abuses are violations of the Islamic legal framework, not expressions of it — a distinction the counter-Islam commentariat consistently fails to make.

⁷¹ Bernard Lewis, cited in “Dhimmi,” Wikipedia and “Does Islam Oppress Dhimmis?” (alislam.org): many dhimmis “found the new yoke far lighter than the old, both in taxation and in other matters, and that some even among the Christians of Syria and Egypt preferred the rule of Islam to that of Byzantines.”

⁷² Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896, following his coverage of the Dreyfus Affair in France as a journalist. The Dreyfus Affair — the wrongful conviction of a Jewish French army officer on charges of espionage — crystallised Herzl’s conviction that Jewish assimilation in Europe was impossible.

⁷³ The Nakba (”catastrophe” in Arabic) refers to the displacement of approximately 700,000–750,000 Palestinians during the 1947–49 war. The figure is cited by UNRWA and is broadly accepted by historians on both sides, though the causes and responsibility remain contested. See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

⁷⁴ James S. Coates, “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” Fireline Press, 18 March 2026.

⁷⁵ Yoav Gallant, Israeli Defence Minister, 9 October 2023. Reported by Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, The Times of Israel, HuffPost, and Human Rights Watch. Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, called the statement “abhorrent” and a “call to commit a war crime.”

⁷⁶ Benjamin Netanyahu, address to IDF soldiers, 28 October 2023: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” Reported by NPR, NBC News, The Christian Post, Common Dreams, and others.

⁷⁷ 1 Samuel 15:3: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” Netanyahu’s office stated he was quoting Deuteronomy 25:17 (”Remember what Amalek did to you”), not 1 Samuel 15. Both passages concern Amalek; the distinction is contested. See NPR, 7 November 2023; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 16 January 2024.

⁷⁸ South Africa cited Netanyahu’s Amalek statement in Section 101 of its application to the International Court of Justice, filed December 2023. See “International Court of Justice in The Hague Genocide Proceedings,” Israel Democracy Institute; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 16 January 2024.

⁷⁹ Bezalel Smotrich’s statement calling for the destruction of Gaza is documented in the Amnesty International report and in multiple media sources. The precise wording varies across translations.

⁸⁰ Isaac Herzog, President of Israel, 13 October 2023: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved.” Widely reported, including by The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Middle East Eye.

⁸¹ Amichai Eliyahu, Heritage Minister, suggested in a radio interview that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was “one of the possibilities.” He was suspended from cabinet meetings but not dismissed from his position. Reported by The Guardian, BBC News, The Times of Israel, November 2023.

⁸² Amnesty International, “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza, December 2024, 296 pages. The organisation reviewed 102 statements by Israeli government and military officials between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024, identifying 22 that provided direct evidence of genocidal intent.

⁸³ Amnesty International formally concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Secretary-General Agnès Callamard stated: “Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them.” See amnesty.org, 5 December 2024.

Franco is not a random pundit. He holds a Juris Doctor from Creighton University. He served as Assistant Administrator for Latin America at USAID from 2002 to 2007 — one of the longest tenures in that role under the Bush administration. He was a foreign policy advisor on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and a surrogate for Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2024 campaigns. He served as chief counsel to the Chairman of the House International Relations Committee.¹ This is a man with legal training, government experience, and a professional obligation to know what international humanitarian law actually says.

He either does not know, or he does not care. Neither option is comforting.

President Trump had issued a series of public threats targeting Iran’s civilian infrastructure — bridges, power plants, electrical grids, desalination facilities — ahead of a deadline demanding Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz.² On 7 April 2026, he posted on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”³ The interviewer asked a fair question: do these threats constitute war crimes? Franco’s answer was a masterclass in confident wrongness. He made three claims:

One: you cannot commit a war crime by threatening to do something — only by doing it.

Two: the real war criminals are the Iranians, who have been striking civilian infrastructure in Gulf states.

Three: if threatening infrastructure is a war crime, then Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower are all war criminals.

Each of these claims is wrong, misleading, or both. And each maps onto a broader pattern — the way international law gets selectively invoked, selectively dismissed, and selectively explained depending on who is doing what to whom.

This article takes Franco’s claims one at a time. Not because he matters — he is one of hundreds of commentators making identical arguments across cable news and social media — but because his segment is a near-perfect specimen. Every evasion, every deflection, every confident falsehood that circulates in the public conversation about war crimes is present in ninety seconds of live television. If you can see through Franco, you can see through all of them.

“You don’t commit a war crime unless you do something”

Franco’s first claim is the foundation on which the rest of his argument sits. It sounds intuitive. You cannot be guilty of a crime you did not commit. In domestic criminal law, there is a version of this that holds — you generally cannot be convicted of murder for thinking about murder. But international humanitarian law is not domestic criminal law, and the distinction matters in ways Franco either does not understand or chose not to mention.

The United Nations Charter — which the United States signed on 26 June 1945 and ratified through the Senate, making it binding domestic law — addresses this directly. Article 2(4) states: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”⁴

Read that again. The threat or use of force. Not the use of force alone. The drafters of the Charter did not accidentally include the word “threat.” They included it because they understood — in 1945, in the wreckage of a war that killed tens of millions — that the threat of force against another state is itself a violation of international law. It does not require follow-through. It does not require a bomb to land. The threat is the violation.

This is not an obscure academic reading. The UN Security Council’s own repertoire confirms that Article 2(4) “prohibits the threat or use of force” and has been cited in dozens of resolutions addressing situations where states threatened the territorial integrity or political independence of others.⁵ The International Court of Justice has confirmed that the prohibition in Article 2(4) is not limited by weapon type or method of delivery — it applies to any threat or use of force, whether nuclear or conventional.⁶

Then there is Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1977. Article 51(2) states: “The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.”⁷

Again: threats of violence. Not acts alone. The law explicitly prohibits threatening violence against civilian populations when the primary purpose is to terrorise them. When a sitting president goes on social media and announces that he will destroy every bridge and power plant in a country of ninety million people — that is not a negotiating posture. It is a threat of violence against a civilian population. The text of Article 51(2) was written to cover exactly this.

Now, a fair objection: the United States never ratified Additional Protocol I. The Reagan administration rejected it in 1987, primarily due to Pentagon objections about the prohibition on reprisals and concerns about its application to national liberation movements.⁸ This is true, and it should be stated honestly. But it does not end the analysis. The US State Department has itself acknowledged that key provisions of Additional Protocol I — including Articles 51 and 52 on the protection of civilians — reflect customary international law.⁹ Customary international law is formed when a practice becomes so widespread and consistent among states that it is recognised as legally binding — regardless of whether any individual state has signed a specific treaty codifying it. The prohibition on targeting civilians and on using threats of violence to terrorise civilian populations has achieved that status. The United States cannot opt out of it by declining to ratify the document that wrote it down.

The Rome Statute adds another layer. Article 25(3)(b) establishes individual criminal responsibility for anyone who “orders, solicits or induces” the commission of a crime within the Court’s jurisdiction.¹⁰ Article 8(2)(b)(i) defines as a war crime “intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities.”¹¹ A public order or inducement to attack civilian infrastructure — issued by the person with the authority to give that order — does not require the attack to succeed for criminal responsibility to attach.

Franco may respond that the United States does not recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. That is also true. But non-recognition of a court does not change the underlying law. The United States does not recognise the ICC’s jurisdiction over American personnel — but it has enthusiastically supported ICC arrest warrants when they target adversaries. The law is either law or it is not. You do not get to choose which parts apply to you based on whether you like the court that enforces them.

There is a final dimension Franco’s framing erases entirely: the distinction between a private citizen’s angry words and a head of state’s public declaration of intent. When an anonymous account on social media posts angry rhetoric about bombing another country, that is objectionable but carries no operational weight. When the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military on earth publicly identifies specific categories of civilian infrastructure he intends to destroy — bridges, power plants, desalination facilities — and then declares that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” that is a credible threat backed by operational capacity. The legal character of the statement changes categorically. Franco collapses this distinction as though it does not exist. It is the most important distinction in the analysis.

“What about Iran?”

Having failed to address the legal question he was asked, Franco pivots. The real war criminals, he insists, are the Iranians — who have been striking civilian infrastructure in Gulf states. “My god,” he says, “they’ve been hitting Oman and Azerbaijan, not to mention all of the other Gulf states, who of course have nothing to do with this conflict. They’ve hit civilian structures as targets. And no one talks about war crimes that I’ve heard of. For Iranian leaders.”

Set aside for a moment whether Franco’s factual claims about Iranian strikes are accurate. Even if every word is true — even if Iran has struck civilian infrastructure in Oman, Azerbaijan, and every other Gulf state — it does not answer the question he was asked. The question was whether Trump’s threats constitute war crimes. Franco’s answer is: but Iran did bad things too.

This is not a legal argument. It is a rhetorical manoeuvre with a Latin name and a long history of being rejected by every international court that has ever considered it.

It is called tu quoque — “you too.” The argument that if your adversary has committed the same crime, you cannot be held accountable for committing it yourself. It has an intuitive appeal. It sounds like fairness. It is not.

The tu quoque defence was invoked at Nuremberg. Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the German Navy, argued that he should not be convicted of unrestricted submarine warfare because the United States Navy had conducted identical operations in the Pacific.¹² Admiral Chester Nimitz provided testimony confirming that American submarines had indeed waged unrestricted warfare against Japan from the day after Pearl Harbor. The tribunal did not acquit Dönitz — but it declined to impose a sentence on the submarine warfare charges, creating what scholars have described as one of the most ambiguous moments in the tribunal’s legacy.¹³

The subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals were less ambiguous. In the High Command case, the tribunal stated: “Under general principles of law, an accused does not exculpate himself from a crime by showing that another has committed a similar crime, either before or after the commission of the crime by the accused.”¹⁴ In the Einsatzgruppen and Hostage cases, defendants argued that they could not be convicted of crimes against humanity because Allied bombings had also killed civilians. The tribunals rejected both arguments.¹⁵

Half a century later, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia closed the door entirely. In the Kupreškić case, the Trial Chamber ruled that tu quoque “has no place in contemporary international humanitarian law.” The defining characteristic of modern IHL, the Chamber stated, is “the obligation to uphold key tenets of this body of law regardless of the conduct of enemy combatants.” The obligations are absolute and non-derogable.¹⁶

That word — regardless — is doing the heavy lifting. It means that even if Iran has committed every violation Franco alleges, it does not create a legal permission slip for identical conduct by the United States. It does not reduce Trump’s legal exposure by a single degree. It does not make the threats less threatening or the law less applicable. The conduct of one party to a conflict does not modify the obligations of the other.

Franco knows this — or should. He is a lawyer. Tu quoque is not an obscure doctrine. It is one of the most well-established principles in international criminal law, precisely because it has been raised so often and rejected so consistently. If Franco were making this argument in a courtroom, the judge would not need to look it up. The judge would tell him to sit down.

Now — and this is important — none of this means that Iranian strikes on civilian infrastructure are acceptable or should be ignored. If Iran has struck civilian targets in Oman, Azerbaijan, or any other Gulf state, those strikes should be investigated, documented, and — where the evidence supports it — prosecuted. Franco’s underlying factual claim may be legitimate. But he is not making it as a standalone argument for accountability. He is making it as a shield — deploying Iranian conduct to deflect scrutiny from American threats. That is not a call for consistent application of international law. It is the opposite. It is an argument that the law should apply to them and not to us.

The distinction between “Iran should also be held accountable” and “Iran’s conduct means we cannot be held accountable” is the difference between a legal argument and a talking point. Franco is making the talking point.

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“Roosevelt, Churchill, Truman, Eisenhower are terrible war criminals”

Franco’s third move is his most revealing. If threatening to hit infrastructure is a war crime, he argues, then Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower are all terrible war criminals. The implication is that this conclusion is self-evidently absurd — that no reasonable person would call the architects of Allied victory war criminals — and therefore the premise must be wrong.

The problem is that Franco is half-right. And the half he is right about destroys his own argument.

The Allied strategic bombing campaigns of the Second World War killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9–10 March 1945 killed an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people in a single raid — more immediate deaths than either atomic bomb.¹⁷ The bombing of Dresden in February 1945 killed approximately 25,000 civilians in a city of limited strategic value.¹⁸ Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.¹⁹

Would these acts face prosecution under modern international humanitarian law? The honest answer is: almost certainly yes. The indiscriminate firebombing of civilian population centres, the deliberate destruction of cities with no meaningful military objective, the use of weapons whose effects could not be limited to military targets — each of these would constitute a grave breach under the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and a war crime under the Rome Statute.

Franco presents this as a reductio ad absurdum. If the law says Roosevelt is a war criminal, the law must be wrong. But that is not what the history shows. What the history shows is that the international community looked at what Roosevelt, Churchill, Truman, and Eisenhower did — looked at the firebombings, the area bombings, the nuclear attacks on civilian cities — and decided to build an entire legal architecture to make sure it never happened again.

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 were drafted in the direct aftermath of the Second World War.²⁰ The Nuremberg Principles were confirmed by the UN General Assembly in 1950.²¹ Additional Protocol I, with its explicit protections for civilian populations and its prohibition on indiscriminate attacks, was adopted in 1977.²² The Rome Statute, establishing the International Criminal Court with jurisdiction over war crimes, was adopted in 1998.²³ Every one of these instruments exists because of what happened between 1939 and 1945. They are not abstract exercises in legal theory. They are direct responses to specific conduct by specific leaders — including the leaders Franco names.

Franco’s argument amounts to this: because the men who committed these acts were never prosecuted, the acts themselves must be legal. That is not how law works. The absence of prosecution does not create a legal precedent for legality. It creates an injustice — one the international community spent the next half-century trying to correct through the development of the very legal frameworks Franco is now dismissing.

There is a deeper irony Franco appears not to notice. The Nuremberg Tribunal — the same tribunal that tried the defeated Nazi leadership — declared that to initiate a war of aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”²⁴ The tribunal was created by the same Allied leaders Franco cites. They built the system. They established the principle that leaders can be held personally accountable for violations of international law. Franco is invoking the architects of international criminal accountability as evidence that international criminal accountability does not apply.

He is using the men who built the house to argue that the house does not exist.

The temporal dimension matters too. Franco is applying pre-Geneva Convention conduct as a standard for post-Geneva Convention legality. The law in 1945 was different from the law in 2026. That is not a weakness of the legal system — it is the point of the legal system. Laws evolve in response to the horrors they failed to prevent. The fact that strategic bombing was not prosecuted in 1945 does not make threatening it legal in 2026, any more than the fact that slavery was legal in 1820 makes it legal today. Franco’s argument requires you to believe that international law froze in 1945 and nothing adopted since then counts. It is an argument that could only be made by someone who either has not read the Geneva Conventions or is hoping you have not.

The selectivity problem

Franco’s three claims share a common thread. Each one treats international law as something that applies to other people — other countries, other leaders, other conflicts. None of them engages with the possibility that the same legal standards might apply to the United States. This is not an oversight. It is the defining feature of how the United States engages with international humanitarian law — and it has been for decades. The pattern is so consistent it barely qualifies as hypocrisy any more. It is closer to a doctrine.

Consider the timeline. In 2022 and 2023, the United States government accused Russia of committing war crimes for launching missiles and drones at Ukrainian power plants, electrical substations, and heating infrastructure.²⁵ The argument was clear and correct: deliberately targeting civilian energy infrastructure to deprive a population of heating and power, with no proportionate military advantage, constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law. The State Department said so. The Pentagon said so. The President said so.

In April 2026, the President of the United States threatened to destroy every bridge and power plant in Iran. He declared that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” He was asked whether he was concerned about committing war crimes. He said he was “not at all.”²⁶

This is not a matter of interpretation. It is not a question of legal nuance or the complexities of dual-use infrastructure. It is the same conduct — threatening or executing the destruction of civilian energy and transport infrastructure — described by the same government in opposite legal terms depending on who is doing it.

When Russia does it to Ukraine, it is a war crime. When the United States threatens to do it to Iran, it is leverage.

The French Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, stated publicly that attacks targeting civilian and energy infrastructure could constitute a war crime.²⁷ The UN Secretary-General’s spokesman said he was “deeply troubled” by the threats, stating that no military objective justified targeting civilian infrastructure.²⁸ Iran’s representative at the United Nations, Amir-Saeid Iravani, described the threats as “incitement to war crimes and potentially genocide.”²⁹ Representative Jim McGovern called them “a genocidal threat to commit war crimes.”³⁰

These are not fringe voices. They are the French Foreign Minister, the United Nations, a senior member of Congress, and the representative of the targeted state. The international response to Trump’s threats was immediate, specific, and grounded in the same legal frameworks the United States itself invokes when the roles are reversed.

Franco mentions none of this. He does not address the Russia comparison. He does not acknowledge that his own government has described identical conduct as criminal when perpetrated by an adversary. He does not engage with the legal frameworks at all — because engaging with them would require him to explain why the law applies in one direction and not the other. And that explanation does not exist.

This is the deeper problem the article is about. It is not really about Adolfo Franco. It is about a political culture that has learned to treat international law as a costume — something you put on when it makes you look righteous and take off when it becomes inconvenient. The Geneva Conventions are sacred when Russia violates them. They are irrelevant when the United States does. The ICC is a beacon of accountability when it issues warrants for African and Russian leaders. It is an illegitimate overreach when it turns its attention to American or Israeli personnel.

The people on X repeating Franco’s arguments are not inventing this selectivity. They are absorbing it — from cable news, from social media, from commentators who say what Franco said and never get challenged on it. Every time a credentialed commentator dismisses the legal question, waves away the treaty obligations, and pivots to “but what about the other side,” the message is reinforced: the law is a tool, not a standard. It applies to our enemies. It does not apply to us.

A culture that no longer believes in the law is doomed to repeat the darkest moments in human history.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Banner image: Defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials. Photograph by Raymond D'Addario, United States Army Signal Corps. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Endnotes

¹ Adolfo Franco biographical details: Al Jazeera contributor profile, aljazeera.com/author/adolfo-franco; Prabook, prabook.com/web/adolfo.franco/329562; LegiStorm, legistorm.com/person/bio/59052/Adolfo_A_Franco.html.

² Trump threats against Iranian civilian infrastructure reported across multiple outlets, including NBC News, PBS, and the Washington Post, 7–8 April 2026.

³ Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, 7 April 2026, 8:06 AM.

⁴ Charter of the United Nations, signed 26 June 1945, entered into force 24 October 1945, Article 2(4).

⁵ UN Security Council Repertoire, “Article 2(4) — Prohibition of threat or use of force in international relations,” main.un.org/securitycouncil/en/content/purposes-and-principles-un-chapter-i-un-charter.

⁶ International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, 8 July 1996.

⁷ Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Additional Protocol I), adopted 8 June 1977, Article 51(2).

⁸ Reagan administration rejection of Additional Protocol I: National Security Archive, “Humanitarian Law of War: The U.S.-NATO Review of Additional Protocol I, 1978–1986,” 21 September 2023.

⁹ Michael Matheson, Deputy Legal Adviser, US State Department, remarks at Red Cross–American University workshop, 1987. Matheson stated: “We support the principle that the civilian population as such, as well as individual citizens, not be the object of acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among them.”

¹⁰ Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted 17 July 1998, Article 25(3)(b).

¹¹ Rome Statute, Article 8(2)(b)(i).

¹² Admiral Karl Dönitz defence at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945–1946. See also “Trial of K Doenitz,” Judgement, International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 1 October 1946, 1 IMT 171, at 310–15.

¹³ Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, interrogatory testimony submitted to the International Military Tribunal on behalf of the defence, 1946. The tribunal declined to impose a sentence on the unrestricted submarine warfare charges. See Nicole A. Heise, “Deciding Not to Decide: Nuremberg and the Ambiguous History of the Tu Quoque Defense,” 2009.

¹⁴ “Trial of Wilhelm von Leeb et al” (High Command Case), Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 1948, XI TWC, at 481.

¹⁵ “Trial of Otto Ohlendorf et al” (Einsatzgruppen Case), Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 1948, IV TWC, at 467; “Trial of Wilhelm List et al” (Hostage Case), Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 1948.

¹⁶ Prosecutor v. Kupreškić et al., Judgement, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Case No. IT-95-16-T, 14 January 2000, paras. 511, 515.

¹⁷ Firebombing of Tokyo, 9–10 March 1945 (Operation Meetinghouse). The US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated approximately 88,000 killed; the Tokyo Fire Department estimated 97,000 killed; other estimates range up to 100,000 or higher. See Britannica, “Bombing of Tokyo”; Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (1999).

¹⁸ Bombing of Dresden, 13–15 February 1945. The Dresden Historians’ Commission, established by the Dresden city council in 2004, published its findings in 2010 and concluded that between 22,700 and 25,000 people were killed. See “Official report: Dresden bombing killed 25,000,” The Local (Germany), 17 March 2010.

¹⁹ Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945). The Radiation Effects Research Foundation estimates 90,000–166,000 deaths in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 deaths in Nagasaki within the first two to four months. Combined range: 150,000–246,000. See Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), rerf.or.jp; International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), icanw.org/hiroshima_and_nagasaki_bombings.

²⁰ Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, ratified by the United States on 2 August 1955.

²¹ UN General Assembly Resolution 95(I), “Affirmation of the Principles of International Law Recognized by the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal,” 11 December 1946; “Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal,” formulated by the International Law Commission, 1950.

²² Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions (Additional Protocol I), adopted 8 June 1977.

²³ Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted 17 July 1998, entered into force 1 July 2002.

²⁴ Nuremberg Tribunal, Judgment, 1 October 1946.

²⁵ US State Department, “Russia’s Attacks on Ukraine’s Energy Infrastructure,” press statement, 23 November 2022; Secretary of State Antony Blinken, remarks on Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, multiple occasions 2022–2023; US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, statement to the UN Security Council condemning Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure as war crimes, 23 November 2022.

²⁶ Trump stated he was “not at all” concerned about committing war crimes. Reported in NBC News, Washington Post, and PBS, 7 April 2026.

²⁷ French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot statement reported in PBS NewsHour, 8 April 2026.

²⁸ Spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, statement reported in PBS NewsHour, 8 April 2026.

²⁹ Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s representative at the United Nations, statement reported in PBS NewsHour, 8 April 2026.

³⁰ Representative Jim McGovern, statement posted on X, reported in NBC News, 7 April 2026.

They demand the attacks stop. They require guarantees the war won’t be restarted the moment it’s convenient. They insist on compensation for the damage. They refuse any settlement that doesn’t cover all fronts — not just the one the US feels like negotiating. And they assert their sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway they have controlled for centuries.

Does that sound crazy? Ask the people making the demands what happens when they try to negotiate instead.

On 1 April 2026, an airstrike hit the Tehran home of Kamal Kharazi — Iran’s former foreign minister, head of the Strategic Council on Foreign Relations, and an adviser to the late Supreme Leader. His wife was killed. He was pulled from the rubble gravely wounded. Just weeks earlier, he had told CNN: “Trump had been deceiving others and not keeping with his promises, and we experienced this in two times of negotiations — that while we were engaged in negotiation, they struck us.”¹

That sentence is not propaganda. It is a factual description of what happened — twice. And it was spoken by a man whose home has now been bombed.

Set aside, for a moment, everything you think you know about Iran. Set aside the cable news framing and the congressional sound bites and the op-eds that treat the Islamic Republic as a monolith of irrationality. Ask a simpler question: if a country were attacked during active peace negotiations, its leader killed on the first day, its universities and hospitals bombed, its civilians buried under rubble — what would that country ask for before it agreed to stop fighting?

It would ask for exactly what Iran is asking for.

The problem is not that Iran’s demands are irrational. The problem is that the United States does not understand the framework that produced them — the civilisational identity, the moral logic, the cultural and religious architecture through which Iran processes conflict, obligation, and resolution. And because the US does not understand that framework, it cannot read what Iran is saying. It hears noise where there is signal. It sees madness where there is a coherent tradition older than most Western legal systems.

This is not a defence of the Islamic Republic. This is not an argument that Iran’s government is just or its conduct beyond reproach. This is something more basic: you cannot negotiate with someone whose language you refuse to learn. And right now, the United States — from the Oval Office to the Pentagon briefing room to the Fox News desk — is negotiating blind, with a country it has decided in advance is incapable of reason.

That is not strategy. It is arrogance. And it has a cost that is measured in the lives of the people on both sides who will die while their leaders talk past each other in languages neither has bothered to understand.

The country the United States is bombing is not the country the United States thinks it is bombing.

Ask most Americans what they know about Iran and the answers will cluster around 1979: the revolution, the hostages, the ayatollahs. Maybe the nuclear programme. Maybe Ahmadinejad. Iran, in the American imagination, begins with the Islamic Republic and extends no further. It is a theocracy, a rogue state, a problem to be managed. It has no depth. It has no past worth knowing.

Iran has a past worth knowing.

The Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great was the largest the world had seen when it was founded in the sixth century BCE — more than two thousand years before the United States existed. When Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, he did something no conqueror before him had done: he freed the enslaved, permitted exiled peoples to return to their homelands, and declared that his subjects could worship as they chose. The decree he issued — inscribed on a clay cylinder now held in the British Museum, with a replica at the United Nations — has been called the first declaration of human rights.² Scholars debate that characterisation, and they should. But the impulse behind it — that governance requires tolerance, that empire is sustained by consent rather than coercion, that diverse peoples can be administered under a common framework of justice — is not debatable. It happened. It was Persian. And it predated the Magna Carta by nearly two thousand years.

This is not ancient trivia. It is the civilisational identity that Iranians carry with them every day. Persian contributions to mathematics, astronomy, medicine, poetry, architecture, and philosophy shaped the foundations of what the West claims as its own intellectual heritage. The algorithms that power your phone trace their name to the Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi. The medical canon that European universities taught for centuries was written by the Persian physician Ibn Sina. The poetry of Rumi — the best-selling poet in America — is Persian. The gardens that gave English the word “paradise” are Persian.³

When Iran’s leaders speak about sovereignty, dignity, and the right to be treated as equals, they are not posturing. They are speaking from a civilisational memory that stretches back millennia — a memory that regards the current conflict not as a dispute between a superpower and a rogue state, but as an assault by a country barely two and a half centuries old on one of the oldest continuous civilisations on earth.

The American reader does not have to agree with that framing. But they need to know it exists. Because every signal Iran sends — every condition it sets, every demand it makes, every refusal to beg — is shaped by it. Miss this, and you will misread everything that follows.

Now place yourself inside Iran on the morning of 28 February 2026.

Negotiations were underway. Not hypothetical negotiations. Not back-channel feelers. Actual, mediated, internationally witnessed talks aimed at preventing a war. Three rounds of Omani-mediated indirect negotiations had taken place — the first in Muscat on 6 February, the second and third in Geneva on 17 and 26 February. On the eve of the third round, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told India Today that a deal was achievable and warned that war would be “devastating.”⁴ After the Geneva session concluded on 26 February, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi reported “significant progress.” Technical teams were scheduled to meet in Vienna the following week to begin drafting an agreement. On 27 February — one day before the strikes — Al Busaidi appeared on CBS News in Washington and told the American public that a peace deal was “within our reach.” He disclosed that Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium, to downgrade its existing stockpiles, and to submit to full IAEA verification.⁵

On 28 February, the United States and Israel struck. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed on the first day.⁶ Schools were hit. Hospitals were hit. Residential buildings were hit. Cultural heritage sites were hit. Within hours, Iran’s national security council issued a statement promising retaliation, and the country was at war — a war it had been actively trying to prevent through the very diplomatic channels the US claims to value.

From inside Iran, the sequence is not ambiguous. They were negotiating. They had made concessions. A mediator was on American television saying it was working. And then they were bombed. The supreme leader was assassinated. Their cities were on fire.

The US calls this a pre-emptive strike. Iran calls it a betrayal — an attack launched under cover of a peace process. And the historical record gives Iran’s reading considerable weight: the June 2025 ceasefire had already collapsed after eight months. The JCPOA — the nuclear deal Iran negotiated, signed, and complied with — was unilaterally abandoned by the US in 2018 while Iran was still in compliance. From Tehran’s perspective, the pattern is not complicated. The United States negotiates until it decides not to. Then it attacks. Then it asks to negotiate again.

That is the context in which Iran’s conditions were issued. Not in a vacuum. Not from a position of irrational aggression. From the wreckage of a peace process that was working until the other side decided to start killing people instead.

And the killing has not stopped at military targets. Ali Larijani — secretary of the supreme national security council, former speaker of parliament, former chief nuclear negotiator, the man who helped steer the JCPOA — was killed by an Israeli airstrike on 17 March 2026.⁷ His son died with him. His bodyguards died with him. He was the tenth senior Iranian official killed since the war began. He had been seen days earlier walking the streets of Tehran during the Quds Day rally. He had been considered one of the more pragmatic figures in the Iranian establishment — a man who might have brokered a transition at the end of the conflict. Israel killed him anyway. The US had placed a $10 million bounty on his head.⁸

Iran’s national security council announced his death in the language of martyrdom: “After a lifetime of struggle for the advancement of Iran and of the Islamic Revolution, he ultimately attained his long-held aspiration, answered the divine call, and honourably achieved the sweet grace of martyrdom in the trench of service.”⁹

Western audiences hear that language and dismiss it as propaganda. It is not propaganda. It is how Iran processes the death of its people. Martyrdom in the Islamic tradition is not a euphemism for dying. It is a theological category — it confers honour on the dead and obligation on the living. Every official killed, every civilian buried under rubble, every student who died when a university was hit — their deaths create a moral debt. In Iran’s framework, the blood of the innocent is not “collateral damage” to be regretted in a press briefing and moved past. It is an obligation. The dead have rights. The living owe them justice.

This is the worldview that produced the five conditions. Not madness. Not theocratic delusion. A civilisation processing an act of aggression through a moral framework in which unpunished harm to the innocent is an offence against God, and unanswered blood is unfinished business.

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On 25 March 2026, as reported by Press TV and confirmed by NPR, Al Jazeera, CNBC, and PBS, a senior Iranian political-security official set out five conditions for ending the war.¹⁰ Foreign Minister Araghchi insisted these were not “conditions” but “what reason dictates” — a phrase that carries more weight than Western audiences realise. In Iran’s intellectual tradition, reason and faith are not opposed. What reason dictates and what God requires are understood to converge. Araghchi was not making a rhetorical point. He was invoking a framework.¹¹

Here are the five conditions, and what each one actually means.

Stop attacking us.

This is not a negotiating position. It is a moral starting point.

In Iran’s framework — shaped by both Islamic theology and Persian civilisational identity — war is only legitimate as defence. The Quran is explicit: fight those who fight you, but do not transgress.¹² The prohibition on aggression is not a guideline. It is a boundary with the force of divine command behind it. The demand that the aggressor stop is not the first item on a wish list. It is the precondition for any conversation at all.

Western audiences hear “stop the attacks” and think: of course, that’s what ceasefires are for. But Iran is not asking for a ceasefire. It is asserting a principle — that the party who started the killing has a moral obligation to stop before anything else can be discussed. From inside this framework, asking Iran to negotiate while the bombs are still falling is not diplomacy. It is asking the victim to set terms while being beaten.

Araghchi’s insistence that these are “what reason dictates” rather than conditions makes sense here. Iran is not bargaining. It is stating what it considers self-evident: the aggressor stops first. Everything else follows from that.

Guarantee it won’t happen again.

This is the condition that reveals most clearly why the US and Iran are talking past each other.

Iran is not asking for a ceasefire. Araghchi has said this repeatedly, in interviews with NBC, CBS, Al Jazeera, and the BBC: “We do not want a ceasefire. We want the war to end in a way that it does not repeat.”¹³ The distinction matters enormously, and the US either does not understand it or has decided it does not care.

A ceasefire is a pause. Iran has seen what American pauses look like. The JCPOA — the nuclear deal Iran negotiated, signed, and complied with — was unilaterally abandoned by the US in 2018 while Iran was still in compliance, because a new president decided his predecessor’s agreement was inconvenient.¹⁴ The June 2025 ceasefire lasted eight months before the US and Israel struck again.¹⁵ Now, in 2026, negotiations were underway — three rounds of Omani-mediated talks, technical teams scheduled for Vienna — and the US launched a war in the middle of them.

The pattern, from Iran’s perspective, is not complicated: the US negotiates until it decides not to. Then it attacks. Then it asks to negotiate again. And the people who do the negotiating get killed.

Ali Larijani — former chief nuclear negotiator, the man who helped steer the JCPOA — killed by an Israeli airstrike alongside his son on 17 March 2026.¹⁶ Kamal Kharazi — former foreign minister, head of the Strategic Council on Foreign Relations — pulled from the rubble of his own home on 1 April 2026, gravely wounded, his wife dead beside him. Weeks earlier, Kharazi had told CNN he saw “no room for diplomacy” with the US, but had also been quoted saying Iran had not shut down all avenues for negotiation.¹⁷ Both men were among the more pragmatic figures in Iran’s establishment. Both were seen as potential bridges to a settlement. Both were targeted.

So when Iran demands “concrete mechanisms to ensure the war is not reimposed” — it is not being difficult. It is responding rationally to a demonstrated pattern. In Iran’s legal and moral tradition, a binding agreement is fundamentally different from a truce. A truce is a pause in fighting — temporary, revocable, built on nothing but the other side’s word. What Iran is asking for is a contractual commitment with structural guarantees and enforceable consequences for violation.¹⁸ The historical model they draw from — the Treaty of Hudaybiyya of 628 CE — is a case in which the Prophet Muhammad accepted disadvantageous terms to secure a genuine, binding peace. Not a tactical pause. An end.¹⁹

Iran has watched the US break the JCPOA. It has watched the US break the June 2025 ceasefire. It has watched the US launch a war during active negotiations. It has watched its negotiators get killed. The demand for structural guarantees is not obstruction. It is the rational response of a country that has learned, through repeated experience, that American promises have an expiration date — and that expiration date is whenever America decides it is.

Pay for the damage — because the dead have rights.

This is the condition Western audiences are most likely to dismiss, and the one they most need to understand.

Iran’s demand for reparations is not a financial shakedown. It is a moral claim rooted in a principle that predates Western tort law by centuries: when you harm someone, you owe them. Not an apology. Not a press conference expressing regret. A material acknowledgment of what was done, with consequences attached.

In Iran’s moral tradition, the response to harm follows a hierarchy. The victim has the right to proportional retribution — but compensation is preferred, and forgiveness is praised as the highest response.²⁰ Forgiveness, however, is a choice the victim makes. It is not something the aggressor gets to claim by default. You do not get to bomb a country’s universities, hospitals, and homes, kill its leader, kill its negotiators, kill its civilians — and then expect the conversation to move on because you are ready to move on.

The dead have rights. That is not a metaphor in Iran’s framework. It is a legal and theological principle. Every civilian killed, every student buried under a collapsed university, every family destroyed by a strike on a residential building — their blood creates an obligation that does not expire when the news cycle moves on. Unanswered blood is unfinished business. For Iran, moving forward without that acknowledgment is not pragmatism. It is moral capitulation — a betrayal of the dead by the living.

And before anyone dismisses this as uniquely Islamic or exotic: the West knows exactly how this works. The Treaty of Versailles extracted 132 billion gold marks from Germany.²¹ The UN Compensation Commission made Iraq pay $52.4 billion to Kuwait over thirty-one years — funded by Iraqi oil revenue — for the damage caused by its invasion.²² Libya paid $2.7 billion for the Lockerbie bombing — $10 million per victim.²³ The United States designed those enforcement mechanisms. It built them. It operated them. It collected the money.

Iran is asking for the same thing. The only difference is who is asking.

Everyone at the table, or nobody.

Iran will not make a deal that leaves Hezbollah, the Houthis, or Iraqi militias exposed. Araghchi told Al Jazeera: “We don’t believe in a ceasefire. We believe in ending the war on all fronts … and that we witness peace throughout the region, in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Iran and other countries of the region.”²⁴

Western analysts hear this as obstruction — Iran linking unrelated conflicts to complicate negotiations. But inside Iran’s framework, these conflicts are not unrelated. They are threads in a single fabric. The groups Iran supports are not pawns to be sacrificed in a bilateral deal. They are allies under fire, and the prohibition on abandoning allies is foundational.

This principle goes back to the Constitution of Medina — the earliest Islamic political charter, which bound diverse tribal and religious communities into a mutual defence pact. The principle it established is simple: you do not make peace for yourself while your people are still at war. Leaving your allies behind is not pragmatism. It is dishonour.²⁵

The strategic dimension is real — Iran understands that the US wants to peel off its allies one by one through bilateral agreements, isolating each in turn. But the refusal is not purely strategic. It reflects a worldview in which solidarity under fire is a moral obligation, not a negotiating chip. The theological and the strategic align — and when they align, they reinforce each other in ways that make the position unshakeable from the inside, even when it looks inflexible from the outside.

The West, again, already understands this concept. The Allies did not negotiate with Germany while leaving Japan out of the conversation. NATO is a mutual defence pact — an attack on one is an attack on all. The principle of comprehensive settlement is not alien to Western diplomacy. It is just considered unreasonable when Iran invokes it.

Recognise our sovereignty over Hormuz.

This is the demand that generates the most outrage and requires the least explanation.

Iran has controlled the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz for centuries. The strait’s shipping lanes pass through Iranian and Omani territorial waters. The demand is not for new territory. It is for acknowledgment of something that already exists — and has existed for longer than the United States has been a country.²⁶

The monetisation angle — Iran charging ships for passage — has drawn particular fury. But Egypt charges for the Suez Canal and earns $700–800 million a month from it.²⁷ Turkey controls the Bosporus under the Montreux Convention of 1936.²⁸ Nobody calls them rogue states. Nobody calls their sovereignty over a strategic waterway irrational. The principle that a nation can regulate and profit from a waterway that passes through its territorial waters is established international practice — when Western-aligned nations do it.

Iran sees Hormuz as two things simultaneously: a sovereign right and a guarantee. If the US breaks its word again — as it broke the JCPOA, as it broke the June 2025 ceasefire, as it broke the Geneva negotiations — Iran retains leverage that does not depend on American honesty. Hormuz is the guarantee Iran can enforce itself, because it has learned that guarantees dependent on American goodwill have a shelf life measured in election cycles.

The legal picture is genuinely complicated — Iran signed but never ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and its position that innocent passage rather than transit passage applies gives it broader regulatory authority than most maritime lawyers would accept.²⁹ This article is not going to resolve that legal dispute. But the reader should understand that the demand itself — sovereignty over a waterway that passes through your territory — is not radical. It is normal. It is only treated as outrageous because Iran is the one asserting it.

There is something else nobody in Western media has identified, and it may be the most important signal Iran is sending.

Iran has anchored its conduct in international law from the start. Araghchi invokes illegality constantly. The war violates the UN Charter. It violates the sovereignty of a member state. It was launched during active negotiations. Iran’s public position — repeated in interviews with NBC, CBS, Al Jazeera, the BBC, CNN, and India Today — is that it is the aggrieved party operating within the law, responding to an illegal war of aggression.

But where Iran has deviated from international law, it has done so with a specific and consistent logic: it mirrors. It waits for the other side to cross a line, and then it crosses the same line — and only that line.

On 7 March, Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi accused the US of striking a desalination plant on Qeshm Island, cutting water to thirty villages. His statement on X was precise: “The US set this precedent, not Iran.”³⁰ The next day, an Iranian drone hit a desalination plant in Bahrain.³¹ When Israel struck the Mobarakeh and Khuzestan steel plants, Iran declared six steel plants in Israel and five regional countries as retaliatory targets.³² When coalition strikes hit the South Pars gas field, Iran struck the Haifa oil refineries.³³ When strikes hit the Natanz nuclear facility, Iran fired on Dimona — the site of Israel’s own nuclear programme.³⁴ When the Tehran University of Science and Technology and Isfahan University of Technology were struck, the IRGC declared all American and Israeli universities in the region legitimate targets, and gave the US until noon on 30 March to officially condemn the bombing of Iranian universities — or face retaliation.³⁵

The pattern is not escalation. It is equivalence. Iran waits for the other side to open a category of target, and then it responds within that category. Desalination for desalination. Steel for steel. Gas for oil. Nuclear for nuclear. University for university.

Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, made the principle explicit on 10 March: the Islamic Republic would apply an “eye for an eye” policy.³⁶ He repeated it a week later. The phrase is not a metaphor. It is a direct reference to the Quranic principle of proportional retribution — respond with the equivalent of what was done to you, no more. The Arabic term is qisas: like for like, measured, bounded.³⁷

Whether you agree with this or not — and there are strong arguments against it, particularly when the “equivalent” targets are in countries that did not start the war — it is a coherent moral framework. It is operating. It is shaping targeting decisions in real time. Iran sees itself as the disciplined party in this conflict — the one that held to international law until the other side violated it, then applied its own principle of equivalence category by category. The US hits whatever it wants and calls it strategy. Iran hits the equivalent and calls it justice.

The reader does not need to accept Iran’s framing to understand that it exists. But they do need to understand that it exists — because it is shaping every signal Iran sends, and the US is either not seeing it or has decided it does not matter. Both options lead to the same place: a negotiating table where one side does not understand the language the other side is speaking.

The United States is in a war it launched during a peace process, against a country whose civilisational identity it does not understand, whose moral framework it has never bothered to learn, and whose conditions for ending the war it has dismissed as irrational — while making identical demands every time it finds itself in the same position.

This is not the first time.

The United States invaded Vietnam — a civilisation with a thousand years of resistance to foreign domination — and reduced it to a domino on a board game. It lost. It invaded Afghanistan — a civilisation at the crossroads of Persian, Central Asian, and Indian cultures, governed by tribal structures, honour codes, and community obligations the US never made any effort to understand. It spent twenty years there. It built nothing that lasted. It left. It invaded Iraq — Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilisation, the land of Babylon and the Abbasid Caliphate that preserved and advanced the knowledge Europe forgot during the Dark Ages. It dismantled the state, disbanded the army, and imposed a governance model with no understanding of the sectarian, tribal, and religious dynamics that actually hold Iraqi society together. It created ISIS. And now it is bombing Iran — one of the oldest continuous civilisations on earth — and it cannot tell you what the other side’s conditions mean, where they come from, or why they take the form they do.

The pattern is not complicated. Ancient civilisation with deep internal logic. American intervention with no cultural literacy. Catastrophic failure. Withdrawal. And then the same mistake again, somewhere else, against someone else the US has decided in advance is incapable of reason. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq. Iran. The laboratory changes. The experiment is always the same. And it always fails — because the United States does not lose wars on the battlefield. It loses them at the negotiating table, where it sits down across from people it has never bothered to understand and discovers, too late, that it doesn’t speak the language.

Iran’s five conditions are not crazy. They are the product of a civilisation processing an act of aggression through a framework built on three things the US has refused to engage with: a civilisational pride that stretches back thousands of years and will not accept being treated as a subordinate; a religious and moral obligation to the innocent dead that does not expire when the news cycle moves on; and a principle of proportional, bounded response that Iran has applied with more consistency than the country bombing it.

Every one of these conditions has a Western precedent. Reparations — Versailles, Kuwait, Lockerbie. Structural guarantees against recurrence — NATO, the Marshall Plan. Sovereignty over a strategic waterway — Suez, the Bosporus. Comprehensive settlement covering all fronts — the Allied settlement of the Second World War. The demands are not foreign. They are only treated as foreign because Iran is the one making them.

You do not have to agree with Iran to understand Iran. But you do have to understand Iran to negotiate with Iran. And right now, the United States is not even trying. It has decided in advance that the other side is incapable of reason, and it is conducting its diplomacy accordingly. The results are on the evening news every night. They were on the evening news after Saigon. They were on the evening news after Kabul. They were on the evening news after Baghdad. And they will be on the evening news after Tehran — because the United States refuses to learn the lesson that every failed war has tried to teach it.

Understanding is not agreement. Understanding is not sympathy. Understanding is the minimum requirement for competent diplomacy. And the United States has never met it. Not in Vietnam. Not in Afghanistan. Not in Iraq. Not now.

That failure has a name. It is called arrogance. And it is measured in bodies.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Banner image: Azadi Tower, Tehran, October 2020. Photograph by Mojde fr / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Endnotes

¹ Kamal Kharazi, interview with CNN, quoted in Al Jazeera, “Iran’s ex-foreign minister Kharazi ‘gravely wounded’ in attack on his home,” 2 April 2026. Kharazi’s home in Tehran was struck on 1 April 2026; his wife was killed and he was hospitalised with serious injuries.

² The Cyrus Cylinder (539 BCE) is held in the British Museum, with a replica at the United Nations headquarters in New York. It has been widely described as the first declaration of human rights, a characterisation promoted by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in the 1960s and endorsed by the British Museum for its US tour in 2013. Specialist scholars on the Persian Empire, including the British Museum’s own C.B.F. Walker, have noted that the cylinder is more accurately described as a building inscription in the Babylonian tradition. The debate over its characterisation does not diminish the substance of its content — religious tolerance, the return of exiled peoples, the restoration of temples — which was remarkable for its time.

³ The word “paradise” derives from the Old Persian pairidaēza, meaning an enclosed garden. Al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–850 CE), born in Khwarazm (modern Uzbekistan) in the Persian cultural sphere, gave his name to the concept of the algorithm; his work Kitāb al-Jabr also gave English the word “algebra.” Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037 CE), a Persian polymath born near Bukhara, authored The Canon of Medicine, which remained a standard medical textbook in European universities into the seventeenth century. Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, 1207–1273) has been described as the best-selling poet in the United States; see Rozina Ali, “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi,” The New Yorker, 5 January 2017.

⁴ Araghchi’s pre-Geneva comments reported by India Today, 25 February 2026. He warned that war would be “devastating” and stated that a deal was achievable.

⁵ Al Busaidi’s CBS News appearance, 27 February 2026. He described the talks as “really advanced, substantially” and disclosed Iran’s agreement to never stockpile enriched uranium, downgrade existing stockpiles, and accept full IAEA verification. See also Al Jazeera, “Peace ‘within reach’ as Iran agrees no nuclear material stockpile: Oman FM,” 28 February 2026.

⁶ US-Israeli strikes on Iran began 28 February 2026. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day. See Congressional Research Service, “U.S. Conflict with Iran,” R48887, 26 March 2026; Wikipedia, “2026 Iran war.”

⁷ Ali Larijani killed by Israeli airstrike, 17 March 2026. His son and bodyguards died with him. He was the tenth senior Iranian official killed since the war began. Patrick Wintour and Lorenzo Tondo, “Iran’s national security council confirms death of its chief, Ali Larijani,” The Guardian, 17 March 2026.

⁸ The US offered a reward of up to $10 million for information on senior Iranian military and intelligence officials, including Larijani, as part of a list of ten figures linked to the IRGC. The Guardian, 17 March 2026.

⁹ Statement of Iran’s supreme national security council on Larijani’s death, quoted in The Guardian, 17 March 2026.

¹⁰ Iran’s five conditions reported by Press TV, citing a senior Iranian political-security official, 25 March 2026. Confirmed by NPR, Al Jazeera, CNBC, and PBS.

¹¹ Araghchi’s “what reason dictates” phrasing reflects the concept of maṣlaḥa (public interest/welfare) in Islamic jurisprudence — a foundational principle in which reasoned assessment of the common good is a legitimate source of legal and policy guidance. In Twelver Shi’a jurisprudence, the role of ʿaql (reason) as an independent source of law is a distinguishing feature of the Ja’fari school.

¹² Quran 2:190: “Fight in the way of God those who fight you, but do not transgress. Indeed, God does not love transgressors.” The word ʿudwān (transgression/aggression) carries legal weight across all major schools of Islamic jurisprudence, including the Ja’fari (Twelver Shi’a) school that governs Iranian law. See N.A. Shah, “Use of Force under Islamic Law,” European Journal of International Law, vol. 24, no. 1, 2013.

¹³ Araghchi’s rejection of a ceasefire in favour of a permanent end to the war stated in interviews with NBC (”Meet the Press,” 8 March 2026), CBS (”Face the Nation,” 15 March 2026), Al Jazeera (18 March 2026), and at his weekly press conference in Tehran (16 March 2026, reported by Xinhua).

¹⁴ Trump announced US withdrawal from the JCPOA on 8 May 2018. At the time, the IAEA confirmed Iran was in compliance. General Joseph Dunford and Secretary of State Pompeo both acknowledged Iran’s compliance. See Jim’s “Just for Fun: The War in Iran, Part II” (Fireline Press) for detailed documentation.

¹⁵ The June 2025 ceasefire (Twelve-Day War ceasefire) was brokered by Qatar on 24 June 2025. Trump declared it a “victory for everybody.” The US and Israel struck Iran again on 28 February 2026, approximately eight months later.

¹⁶ Larijani killing: see endnote 7.

¹⁷ Kharazi attack and CNN interview: see endnote 1. Additional reporting: Shargh, Etemad, and Ham Mihan newspapers confirmed Kharazi’s hospitalisation. Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Vall, reporting from Tehran, confirmed the attack and Kharazi’s grave injuries.

¹⁸ In Islamic jurisprudence, ṣulḥ (conciliatory agreement) is a contractual commitment distinct from hudna (temporary truce). It must fulfil three conditions: (1) terms must be clearly quantified to exclude ambiguity; (2) the agreement must not involve anything forbidden; (3) it must not waive something that cannot be alienated.

¹⁹ The Treaty of Hudaybiyya (Ṣulḥ al-Ḥudaybiyya, 628 CE) was a ten-year peace agreement between the Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh of Mecca. Muhammad accepted terms widely regarded as disadvantageous to secure a binding peace. The treaty was broken by the Quraysh, not by the Muslims — a point consistently misrepresented in counter-Islam literature. See Mustafa Abu-Sway’s analysis (Palestine-Israel Journal).

²⁰ Quran 2:178 establishes the hierarchy: qisas (proportional retribution) is permitted for intentional harm, but diyya (compensation) is preferred, and ʿafwa (forgiveness) is praised as the highest response. The concept of diyya applies to any harm caused, not only homicide, and functions as restorative rather than punitive justice.

²¹ Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919), Article 231 (the “War Guilt Clause”) and Articles 232–247 established Germany’s obligation to pay reparations. The London Schedule of Payments (1921) set the amount at 132 billion gold marks (approximately $33 billion at the time).

²² United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), established 1991 under Security Council Resolution 687. Iraq paid $52.4 billion to approximately 1.5 million successful claimants over 31 years, funded by Iraqi oil revenue. Iraq completed its final payment in January 2022. See UN News, “Iraq makes final reparation payment to Kuwait for 1990 invasion,” 9 February 2022.

²³ Libya’s Lockerbie settlement: $2.7 billion ($10 million per victim of Pan Am Flight 103), finalised 2003, with additional payments through a $1.5 billion fund established in 2008 covering Lockerbie, the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing, and UTA Flight 772. See Kreindler & Kreindler case history; Al Jazeera, “$2.7billion Lockerbie settlement reached,” 14 August 2003.

²⁴ Araghchi interview with Al Jazeera, 18 March 2026. See also “Iran rules out ceasefire: Araghchi says aim is to end war ‘on all fronts,’” The National, 18 March 2026.

²⁵ The Constitution of Medina (al-Ṣaḥīfah, c. 622 CE) established a mutual defence pact among the diverse tribal and religious communities of Medina, including Muslim, Jewish, and pagan groups. Its provisions included collective defence obligations and prohibited separate peace agreements that would leave allied parties exposed.

²⁶ Iran’s control of the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz is longstanding. In 1971, Iran took control of the Greater and Lesser Tunbs islands west of Hormuz, extending its control of the navigation channels. Both Iran and Oman expanded their territorial seas to 12 nautical miles, effectively closing the strait under their combined territorial waters by 1972. See Wikipedia, “Strait of Hormuz”; Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “Clarifying Freedom of Navigation in the Gulf,” July 2019.

²⁷ Egypt’s Suez Canal revenue: $700–800 million per month in a typical year, though revenues dropped sharply during 2024–2025 due to Red Sea disruptions. See CNN, “Iran has a new demand to end the war — and it could bring in billions,” 28 March 2026.

²⁸ The Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits (20 July 1936) governs passage through the Turkish Straits (Bosporus and Dardanelles), granting Turkey sovereignty and regulatory authority over the waterway while permitting certain categories of transit.

²⁹ Iran signed UNCLOS in 1982 with a declaration that only states parties would benefit from its provisions, including transit passage rights. Iran enacted a 1993 national maritime law asserting the right to require prior authorisation for warships and nuclear-powered vessels exercising passage through its territorial waters. The US has not ratified UNCLOS but treats transit passage as customary international law. See EJIL Talk, “The Legality of Iran’s Closure of the Strait of Hormuz,” March 2026; Lawfare, “The Strait of Hormuz and the Limits of Maritime Law,” March 2026; ASIL Insights, “Transit Passage Rights in the Strait of Hormuz.”

³⁰ Araghchi statement on X, 7 March 2026, following the alleged US strike on a desalination plant on Qeshm Island: “Water supply in 30 villages has been impacted. Attacking Iran’s infrastructure is a dangerous move with grave consequences. The US set this precedent, not Iran.” See Al Jazeera, “Schools, water, industry: What civilian targets have US, Israel, Iran hit?,” 30 March 2026; Wikipedia, “2026 Qeshm Island desalination plant attack.”

³¹ Bahrain Interior Ministry statement, 8 March 2026, confirming Iranian drone damage to a desalination plant. See Al Jazeera, “Bahrain says water desalination plant damaged in Iranian drone attack,” 8 March 2026.

³² Israel struck the Mobarakeh and Khuzestan steel plants in Iran. In response, Iran declared six steel plants in Israel and five regional countries as retaliatory targets. See Tasnim News Agency, reported in CNN, “Airports, plants and ports: The civilian targets increasingly under threat in the Middle East,” 30 March 2026.

³³ Iran struck the Haifa oil refineries in response to coalition strikes on the South Pars gas field. See Ynet News, “’The fire isn’t random’: Iran’s retaliation strategy shows command and control still intact,” 1 April 2026.

³⁴ Iran fired on Dimona — the site of Israel’s nuclear research centre — in response to strikes on the Natanz nuclear facility. See Ynet News, 1 April 2026.

³⁵ IRGC statement declaring all American and Israeli universities in the region legitimate targets following strikes on Tehran University of Science and Technology and Isfahan University of Technology. The IRGC gave the US until 12:00 noon Iran Standard Time on 30 March to officially condemn the bombing of Iranian universities. See Inside Higher Ed, “Iran Targets U.S. Universities in the Middle East,” 30 March 2026; The Tribune (India), “All Israeli, US universities in region now ‘legitimate targets,’ warns Iran,” 30 March 2026.

³⁶ Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, 10 March 2026, declaring Iran would apply an “eye for an eye” policy. Repeated 17 March 2026. See Ynet News, 1 April 2026.

³⁷ Qisas (proportional retribution) is a Quranic legal principle (see Quran 2:178, 5:45) permitting response in kind — but only in kind. The principle establishes an upper bound on retaliation: the response may not exceed the original harm. In practice, compensation (diyya) and forgiveness (ʿafwa) are presented as preferable alternatives.

Within hours, a group called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia — a fictitious organisation that no intelligence agency, no counter-terrorism database, and no analyst had ever encountered — claimed responsibility via Telegram. The first institutions to introduce this group to the English-speaking world were not intelligence agencies or law enforcement. They were the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a front organisation for Zionist Israeli interests, and the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which published a report attributing a wave of European attacks to the group and linking it to Iran. Then the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague provided the assessment that gave the narrative the institutional credibility mainstream media required before repeating it. By the twenty-fourth of March, the BBC was reporting the attacks as potentially Iran-linked. The framing was set: Islamic terror had arrived in Europe.²

Then the evidence started arriving. And it did not match the story.

Five people have been arrested in connection with the Golders Green attack. Two British men, aged forty-five and forty-seven, were detained and released on bail — not charged with terrorism. Three more were arrested on the first of April: two British nationals, aged nineteen and twenty, and a seventeen-year-old dual British-Pakistani national. All were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson. Not one has been charged with a terrorism offence.³

The group that claimed responsibility cannot write its own name correctly in Arabic. Its communiqués misspell the word “Islamic.” Its logo changes between messages, consistent with AI generation. Its Telegram channels were created after most of the attacks they purport to claim. A Dutch professor specialising in transnational Shia militant groups examined the materials and concluded that the group’s inability to write fluent Arabic disqualifies it as a seriously organised radicalised cell.⁴

Between the ninth and the twenty-third of March, HAYI claimed responsibility for ten incidents across five countries — Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, France, and the United Kingdom. The record does not survive scrutiny. The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism — the same institution whose assessment launched the narrative into mainstream media — flagged three of the ten incidents as likely disinformation: a purported attack in Greece on the eleventh of March, and claimed attacks in France and the Netherlands on the twenty-third of March. None appear to have occurred. Of the remaining incidents, one “attack” in Antwerp turned out to be a car fire belonging to a Moroccan woman named Fatia, whose vehicle was robbed of jewellery before being set alight. A “terror plot” in the Netherlands consisted of two teenagers, aged fourteen and seventeen, found in possession of fireworks. Half of everything the group claimed either did not happen or was not what it was presented as.⁵

No law enforcement agency in any country has confirmed a link to Iran.

But here is the part that matters: no one has said so. Not with the volume, the prominence, or the urgency that accompanied the original claim. The narrative that these were acts of Islamic terror — orchestrated by Iran, executed by radicalised operatives, representing a new front in a civilisational war — entered the public bloodstream through every major news outlet in Europe. The correction, such as it exists, has been confined to specialist analysts, independent journalists, and a handful of outlets that most of the original audience will never read.

The fear was planted. The hate was seeded. And when the evidence collapsed, the institutions that amplified the claim did not retract it. They simply went quiet.

This article is about that silence. It is about what happens when media, governments, and propaganda outlets amplify a narrative of Islamic terror — and then, when the facts fall apart, choose not to correct the record. It is about who benefits from the silence, who pays for it, and why it keeps happening.

Because this is not the first time. It is not even the second.

The Anatomy of Amplification

To understand how the Golders Green arson became “Islamic terror” in the public mind, it helps to trace the claim from its origin to its destination. The journey has three stops. Each one is necessary. Without the first, the claim has no content. Without the second, it has no authority. Without the third, it has no reach. Together, they form a pipeline — and the pipeline works the same way every time.

The first stop is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

On the twelfth of March 2026 — eleven days before the Golders Green attack, but three days after a small incendiary device damaged the door of a synagogue in Liège, Belgium — Joe Truzman, a research analyst at the FDD, published a short article on the organisation’s website and its affiliated Long War Journal. It was the first English-language source to float the possibility of an Iranian link to the European incidents. The article was cautious in its language but unmistakable in its direction: “The claimed attacks could signal that Iran or Iran-aligned actors are executing acts of terrorism in Europe.”⁶

The FDD is not a neutral research institution. It was founded in 2001 with the stated mission of working to “enhance Israel’s image.” The then-Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, Sima Vaknin-Gil, publicly identified the FDD as a resource used by the Israeli government, telling a conference in 2018: “We have FDD. We have others working on this.” The FDD’s analysis of the European attacks gained limited traction on its own — picked up by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs on social media and a handful of niche pro-Israel outlets, but not by mainstream media. A front organisation for Israeli interests asserting an Iran link was not, by itself, newsworthy. The claim needed institutional weight.⁷

It got it four days later, from the second stop: Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism.

On the sixteenth of March, the Ministry published a special report formally attributing the European attacks to Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia and linking the group to Iranian terror networks. The report was detailed, branded with the authority of a government ministry, and distributed through diplomatic and media channels. It provided the framework that almost all subsequent English-language coverage would adopt: a new Iranian proxy group was conducting hybrid warfare operations against Jewish targets across Europe.⁸

The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs is not a disinterested observer. Following the downgrading of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, the Diaspora Ministry absorbed Israel’s international propaganda operations. Minister Amichai Chikli’s department relaunched the former Concert project as “Voices of Israel” after October 2023, directing it to go “on the offensive” against critics. The Ministry has allocated millions to covert social media campaigns, campus operations, and overseas cutouts designed to evade foreign-agent scrutiny. When this Ministry publishes a report attributing attacks to an Iranian proxy, it is not performing intelligence analysis. It is performing a communications function — providing the raw material for a narrative that serves Israeli strategic interests.⁹

But even a government report from an allied state is not sufficient to move the BBC. For that, the claim needed its third stop: an institution that Western media would treat as independent.

On the twenty-third of March — the same day as the Golders Green attack — the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague published an assessment titled “Hybrid Threat Signals: Assessing Possible Iranian Involvement in Recent Attacks in Europe.” The ICCT receives core funding from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and lists NATO, the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs, USAID, and RUSI Europe among its partners. Its assessment was more cautious than the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs’ report — it flagged linguistic errors in the group’s materials, noted that several claimed attacks were likely disinformation, and acknowledged the amateurism of the incidents. But its headline framing — “Assessing Possible Iranian Involvement” — was enough. Within twenty-four hours, the BBC, Fox News, and outlets across Europe were reporting the attacks through the lens the pipeline had constructed: a shadowy new Iranian-backed terror group was targeting Jews in Europe.¹⁰

Three sources. A front organization with documented ties to the Israeli government. A foreign government’s propaganda ministry running covert influence operations across multiple continents. And a Western-funded counter-terrorism institute whose junior researcher’s career runs through Zionist-linked organisations. This is not analysis. It is a PsyOp — a fabrication manufactured in one country’s strategic interests, laundered through successive institutions until it arrived on the desks of Western journalists looking indistinguishable from independent assessment.

This is how narratives are built. The FDD needs the threat narrative to justify its existence. The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs needs it to support IRGC proscription campaigns. The ICCT needs it to demonstrate relevance to its government funders. And the journalists at the end of the chain need a story — preferably one that arrives with enough institutional backing that they can report it without doing the verification themselves.

Someone in that chain knew what they were selling. The rest chose not to ask. And when the evidence began to contradict the narrative, no one in the chain issued a correction. Because the pipeline only flows in one direction.

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What Was Said and What Was Not

The communiqué that Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia published claiming responsibility for the Golders Green attack contains a passage that should have stopped every newsroom in Europe. It reads, in part: the Machzike Hadath Synagogue is “one of the important centers of Orthodox Judaism,” connected to Israel through “Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Israel and one of the most influential thinkers of Religious Zionism, who served at this synagogue before immigrating to the Land of Israel.”¹¹

Read that again. “The Land of Israel.” That is not a phrase used by Iranian operatives. It is not a phrase used by any Shia militia. It is not a phrase used by anyone in the Axis of Resistance. “The Land of Israel” — Eretz Yisrael — is a Zionist formulation. It is the vocabulary of Israeli nationalism, of Religious Zionism specifically, and of the settler movement. No Iranian proxy would use it. No Arabic-speaking militant group would use it. The phrase identifies the author as surely as a fingerprint.¹²

The communiqué also uses the American spelling of “center” rather than the British “centre” — despite purporting to describe a target in London. It demonstrates detailed insider knowledge of Rabbi Kook’s historical connection to the synagogue — a connection unlikely to be known by anyone outside the congregation or those with close familiarity with the institution’s history. And it describes the Machzike Hadath Synagogue as “one of the main bastions of support for Israel in Britain” — a claim that is not remotely true. The synagogue is a member of the Federation of Synagogues, a body gathering Hasidic and central-orthodox congregations. It is not an explicitly Zionist institution. There are hundreds of organisations in Britain with far stronger and more visible ties to the Israeli state. The communiqué reads like it was written by someone who knows the synagogue intimately but does not know how to pretend to be its enemy convincingly.¹³

These are not minor discrepancies. They are the kind of details that any competent journalist, any intelligence analyst, any counter-terrorism professional would notice — if they were looking. The BBC reported the Iran-linked framing on the twenty-fourth of March. Not one of these details appeared in the coverage. Fox News ran a feature on the “new terror group.” Not one of these details appeared. The broadsheets, the tabloids, the evening bulletins — all carried the story. None carried the evidence that contradicted it.

The silence extends beyond the media.

The Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit is leading the investigation. Five people have been arrested. Two were bailed. Three more were detained on the first of April. The charge is conspiracy to commit arson — not terrorism. The Met has not publicly stated whether the HAYI claim is considered credible. It has not publicly stated whether any link to Iran has been established or ruled out. It has issued careful, procedural updates about arrests and community reassurance. What it has not done is say the single sentence that the evidence demands: there is no confirmed connection between this attack and any Islamic terror group.¹⁴

The British government has not said it either. The Prime Minister called it a “deeply shocking antisemitic arson attack.” He was right. But in the vacuum left by institutional silence, the narrative that this was Islamic terror — Iranian-directed, religiously motivated, part of a coordinated campaign — remains the dominant public understanding. The people who read the original headlines have not been told that the group claiming responsibility appears to be fictional. The people who felt the fear have not been told that the evidence points away from Islamic extremism, not toward it.¹⁵

This is the accountability failure at the heart of this article. It is not that institutions got it wrong in the heat of the moment — early reporting is always provisional. It is that when the evidence arrived, when the arrests were made, when the analysts flagged the disinformation, when the communiqué’s language gave the game away — the institutions that amplified the original claim chose silence. The BBC did not update its reporting. The politicians did not qualify their statements. The propagandists of course did not revise their assessments. The fear was left to do its work undisturbed.

And the people who pay for that silence are the ones who always pay: Muslim communities who inherit the blame for an attack they had nothing to do with, and Jewish communities who inherit a fear that has been deliberately manufactured and deliberately sustained.

The Pattern

If the Golders Green case were an isolated incident — a single attack, a single false claim, a single failure to correct — it might be explained as the fog of a crisis moment. Newsrooms move fast. Governments react before investigations conclude. Mistakes happen.

But this is not an isolated incident. The same pattern — fabricated claims of Islamic or antisemitic terror, instantaneous amplification, and a correction that never arrives with the same force as the original narrative — has repeated across three continents in less than a decade. Each time, the machinery works the same way. Each time, the silence afterward is the same.

In early 2017, a wave of more than two thousand bomb threats struck Jewish Community Centres across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Schools were evacuated. Communities were terrified. Fighter jets were scrambled. The story dominated the news cycle for weeks. Politicians condemned the attacks. Commentators speculated about a coordinated antisemitic campaign. Some attributed the threats to the rise of right-wing populism under the new Trump presidency. Others pointed the finger at Islamic extremism. The threats were covered, overwhelmingly, as evidence of a rising tide of ideological hatred — and for Muslim communities in a country already deep into the War on Terror’s second decade, the implication was familiar and dangerous.¹⁶

Two people were eventually arrested. The first was Juan Thompson, a disgraced former journalist who had been fired from The Intercept for fabricating quotes. Thompson had made at least twelve of the threats — not out of antisemitism, but as part of a campaign to frame his ex-girlfriend. He pleaded guilty to cyberstalking and making hoax bomb threats and was sentenced to five years in prison. The second was Michael Ron David Kadar, a dual American-Israeli citizen living in Ashkelon, Israel, who was responsible for the vast majority of the threats. Kadar had been rejected from enlistment in the Israel Defence Forces due to mental health issues. According to Israeli police, he had used advanced technologies to disguise his voice and mask the origin of his calls. He had also advertised a service on the dark web offering to threaten any school for thirty dollars. He was convicted on hundreds of counts and sentenced to ten years. His motive, according to investigators, was boredom.¹⁷

Neither perpetrator was Muslim. Neither was motivated by Islamic extremism. Neither had any connection to any terror group. A disgraced journalist stalking his ex-girlfriend and a teenager in Israel acting out of boredom — these were the authors of a “wave of antisemitic terror” that shaped political discourse across multiple countries for months.

The correction, when it came, received a fraction of the coverage the threats had generated. The politicians who had condemned the attacks did not return to the microphones to note that the perpetrators were not who the public had been led to imagine. The commentators who had built segments around the threat did not revisit their analysis. The fear — and the political utility of that fear — remained undisturbed.¹⁸

Seven years later, the pattern repeated in Australia.

Between late 2024 and early 2025, Jewish communities in Sydney and Melbourne were subjected to months of escalating attacks. Synagogues were firebombed. A childcare centre near a Jewish school was set alight. Vehicles and homes of community leaders were vandalised with antisemitic graffiti. A caravan packed with explosives was discovered on the outskirts of Sydney, containing a list of Jewish targets. Politicians described the situation as an unprecedented national crisis. The Prime Minister called the caravan discovery an act of terrorism. New South Wales and the federal government invoked the attacks to pass sweeping hate speech legislation targeting, in practice, opponents of the war in Gaza. The head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation warned that the attacks had “not yet plateaued.”¹⁹

On the tenth of March 2025, the Australian Federal Police held a press conference and dismantled the entire narrative.

The caravan plot was a hoax — fabricated by an organised crime network. The explosives were forty years old. There was no detonator. The caravan had been deliberately placed where it would be easily found. The criminals behind it intended to tip off police and then leverage the information to bargain for reduced sentences in unrelated proceedings. The wave of arsons and graffiti attacks that had terrorised Jewish communities for months had been carried out by the same network — petty criminals hired and paid by an offshore figure, not one of them ideologically motivated. The AFP’s deputy commissioner called it “a criminal con job.”²⁰

Not a single perpetrator was Muslim. Not a single attack was motivated by Islamic extremism. The entire wave — every firebombing, every piece of graffiti, every terrifying headline — had been manufactured by criminals for money.

The correction was devastating in its implications. The legislation that had been passed on the back of the fear was already law. The public perception that Australian Jews were under siege from Islamic or pro-Palestinian extremism had already calcified. The politicians who had invoked the attacks did not return to Parliament to acknowledge that the evidentiary basis for their laws had collapsed. The media outlets that had covered the crisis daily for months did not run the correction with anything approaching the same intensity. And six months later, the Australian government pivoted to blaming Iran — despite the fact that the charges filed against the perpetrators make no mention of Iranian involvement and the NSW Police confirmed they had no information connecting Iran to the attacks.²¹

Three continents. Three waves of fabricated or misattributed threats against Jewish communities. In every case, the amplification was instantaneous — politicians, media, propaganda outlets, all moving in lockstep to frame the incidents as evidence of a coordinated ideological threat. In every case, the perpetrators turned out to be something entirely different from what the public was told. And in every case, the correction was buried — not retracted, not amplified, not given the prominence the original claim received. Simply allowed to die in the specialist press while the fear lived on in the public mind.

These are the cases documented in this article. They are not the only ones. The pattern repeats more often than most people realise — because the corrections never reach the audience that absorbed the fear. The lie is the headline. The truth is the footnote. And the footnote does not trend.

This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern. And the pattern has a beneficiary.

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The Industry That Feeds

The question that every case in the previous section demands is not how the correction failed to arrive. The mechanics are straightforward: a retraction gets less airtime than the original claim, a correction runs on page twelve, an update is published without the headline that accompanied the accusation. The question is why. Why does the same pattern repeat? Why do the same institutions amplify the same kind of claim, from the same kind of sources, and then fall silent when the claim collapses? Why does no one learn?

The answer is that the silence is not a failure. It is a feature. There is an industry that depends on the perception of an Islamic threat — and that industry cannot afford corrections.

In 2011, the Center for American Progress published a report called “Fear, Inc.” that mapped, for the first time, the counter-Islam network in the United States as a traceable system: identifiable organisations, documented funding streams, and a pipeline that runs from think tank to media to legislation. What the researchers found was not a conspiracy. It was something more effective — a small, tightly connected group of organisations funded by a handful of foundations, whose manufactured claims about Islam were amplified through conservative media and converted into policy by sympathetic legislators. Seven foundations spent $42.6 million between 2001 and 2009 funding the intellectual core of this network. By 2014, the inner core organisations alone had access to at least $119.6 million in total revenue.²²

This is the machinery that makes the silence possible. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies — the same organisation that first floated the Iran link for the European attacks — is a node in this network. It was founded to “enhance Israel’s image.” Its analysis serves Israeli strategic interests. When it publishes a report attributing attacks to an Iranian proxy, it is not performing journalism or intelligence work. It is feeding raw material into a pipeline that converts fear of Islam into policy outcomes — in this case, the proscription of the IRGC as a terrorist organisation across Europe, a goal that pro-Israel lobbying networks have pursued for years.²³

The propaganda outlets need the threat narrative to justify their funding. The media figures who amplify the narrative need it to sustain their audience. The politicians who legislate on the back of it need it to justify the laws they have already passed. And the governments that have committed to the narrative — whether through IRGC proscription in Europe or hate speech legislation in Australia — need it to avoid the admission that they acted on fabricated evidence.

This is why the correction never comes. It is not that journalists are lazy, or that politicians are forgetful, or that these organisations make honest mistakes. It is that every institution in the chain has a structural incentive to leave the lie undisturbed. A retraction would require the BBC to admit it amplified an unverified claim from a foreign government’s propaganda ministry. It would require the Australian government to admit it passed laws on the basis of a criminal hoax. It would require the FDD to admit that its analysis served a geopolitical agenda rather than an analytical one. It would require the ICCT to admit that its assessment gave institutional cover to a PsyOp.

None of them will do this voluntarily. And so the fear remains.

The counter-Islam industry — documented in detail in “Antisemitism and Counter-Islamism: The Industry,” published on this platform — is not a fringe operation. It is a funded, staffed, transatlantic network with a product. The product is fear of Islam. The market for that product is Western public opinion. And the silence that follows every debunked claim is not an accident. It is inventory management. Every correction that fails to reach the public is a unit of fear that remains in circulation — available to be drawn on the next time a politician needs a threat, a think tank needs a grant, or a government needs a war.²⁴

The result is a ratchet. Each fabricated claim that goes uncorrected raises the baseline of public fear. Each unchallenged attribution of violence to Islamic extremism makes the next attribution easier to sell. The audience does not remember the correction that never came. It remembers the headline. And the headline always says the same thing.

Muslims inherit the blame for attacks they did not commit. Jews inherit the fear from threats that were manufactured. And the industry that profits from both — the propaganda outlets, the media amplifiers, the politicians, the defence contractors, the surveillance firms — faces no accountability for any of it.

The industry does not fight hate. It farms it. And the silence after the lie is the harvest.

The Accountability Gap

Accountability, in this context, is not a philosophical abstraction. It is a list of specific things that specific institutions have failed to do — and could do tomorrow.

The BBC reported the Golders Green attack through the lens of a potentially Iran-linked terror campaign. The source of that framing was a pipeline that began with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — a front organisation for Zionist Israeli interests — passed through the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which runs covert influence operations across multiple continents, and arrived at the BBC’s newsroom laundered through a Western-funded counter-terrorism institute. The BBC did not report this provenance. It did not tell its audience that the narrative originated with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs. It did not note that the group claiming responsibility could not write its own name correctly in Arabic, that its communiqués used Zionist vocabulary no Iranian proxy would use, or that half the incidents the group claimed were fabricated. It reported a PsyOp as analysis. It owes its audience a correction — not buried in a follow-up, not phrased as “questions have been raised,” but with the same prominence and the same certainty with which the original framing was delivered.²⁵

The Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit is leading the investigation. It has issued procedural updates about arrests and community reassurance. It has not issued a public statement addressing whether the HAYI claim is considered credible. In the absence of that statement, the narrative that this was an act of Islamic terror stands unchallenged in the public record. The Met does not owe the public a conclusion before the investigation is complete. It does owe the public a single, clear sentence: no link to any Islamic terror group has been established. If that sentence is true — and the evidence strongly suggests it is — then the failure to say it is a choice to let the lie stand.²⁶

The British government called the attack “deeply shocking” and “antisemitic.” Both descriptions are accurate. But the Prime Minister did not qualify his statement when the arrests revealed that the suspects were not Islamic extremists. He did not address the fabricated claim of responsibility. He did not note that the narrative of Iranian-directed terror had no confirmed evidentiary basis. In the political climate of a war with Iran, the failure to clarify is not neutral. It is a contribution to the atmosphere that makes the next fabrication easier to believe.²⁷

The European governments that have accelerated IRGC proscription campaigns in the wake of these incidents owe an accounting of the evidentiary basis for those decisions. If the attacks attributed to HAYI formed part of the justification — and the timing strongly suggests they did — then the fact that half the claimed incidents were fabricated and the rest were carried out by teenagers and petty criminals is not a footnote. It is a challenge to the integrity of the policy itself.²⁸

The propagandists — the FDD, the ICCT, the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs — will not correct the record. They were never in the business of accuracy. Their assessments were not mistakes to be revised. They were operations to be executed. And they were executed successfully. The narrative is in the bloodstream. The fear is doing its work. The mission is accomplished.

But the media are not propagandists. Or at least they claim not to be. The BBC, the broadsheets, the evening bulletins — these are institutions that present themselves as bound by editorial standards, by obligations to accuracy, by a duty to their audience. They are not supposed to pass unverified claims from a foreign government’s influence operation directly to the public and then walk away when the claims collapse. If a person yells fire in a crowded theatre and there is no fire, they are arrested. If a news organisation amplifies a fabricated claim of Islamic terror to millions of people through algorithmic distribution, generates fear, fuels hatred, and shapes government policy — and then the claim turns out to be false — they face no consequence whatsoever. No obligation to reach the same audience with the correction. No requirement to match the prominence of the retraction to the prominence of the original claim. No accountability for the hate crimes, the legislation, and the foreign policy decisions that their unchecked amplification helped to produce.

This is the accountability gap. Not that propagandists propagandise — that is what they do. But that the media organisations and governments that are supposed to stand between a PsyOp and the public failed to do so, profited from the failure, and face no requirement to repair the damage. A foreign influence operation was played on our nations. The public deserves to know. And the institutions that served as its delivery mechanism owe more than silence.

This article is that demand.

The evidence documented in this article leads to a conclusion that no mainstream outlet will state, so I will state it here: what happened in Golders Green — and in Belgium, and in the Netherlands, and in the pattern that stretches back through Australia and the United States — is not Islamic terror. It is Israeli terror.

Not terror with bombs or bullets. Terror with narrative. A front organisation for Zionist Israeli interests manufactured a fictitious Islamic extremist group. The Israeli government amplified it, attributed a wave of attacks to it, and fed that attribution through a pipeline of institutional laundering until it reached the front pages of every major news outlet in Europe. The result was not the defeat of Iran or the protection of Jewish communities. The result was Muslim communities blamed for attacks they did not commit, and Jewish communities in the diaspora left more frightened, more isolated, and more dependent on the very state apparatus that manufactured their fear.

This is what the operation achieved. Jewish families in Golders Green are afraid to walk to synagogue — not because of Islamic extremism, but because an Israeli influence operation made them believe Islamic extremism was at their door. Muslim families in the same neighbourhood carry the weight of a lie that was designed, from its inception, to fall on them. Both communities are victims. Neither is the beneficiary. The beneficiary is an industry — and a state — that needs the fear to continue.

The hate is not reinforced by the fire. It is reinforced by the silence after the lie. And the silence is not an accident. It is the product.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

This article was updated on 21 April 2026 to correct the attribution in the closing section. The original text attributed the manufacture of the fictitious group to the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs. The corrected text distinguishes between the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which first introduced the group, and the Ministry, which amplified and formalised the attribution.

Article Image: CCTV footage released by Metropolitan Police

Endnotes

¹ Metropolitan Police statement, 23 March 2026; Hatzola Northwest; “Jewish volunteer ambulances fire Golders Green suspected arson antisemitic,” The Guardian, 23 March 2026.

² Foundation for Defense of Democracies / Long War Journal, Joe Truzman, 12 March 2026; Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, “Special Report: Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia,” 16 March 2026 (updated 24 March 2026); International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), “Hybrid Threat Signals: Assessing Possible Iranian Involvement in Recent Attacks in Europe,” 23 March 2026; BBC News, 24 March 2026.

³ Metropolitan Police, “Further arrests made in Golders Green arson investigation,” 1 April 2026; Metropolitan Police statement, 25 March 2026 (initial arrests). Ages, nationalities, and charge details per Met Police statements.

⁴ ICCT, “Hybrid Threat Signals,” 23 March 2026 (linguistic errors); The Grayzone, “Who’s Behind the Mysterious ‘Iran-Backed Terror Cell’ Haunting Europe?”, 28 March 2026 (Dutch professor, logo inconsistencies); Washington Examiner, “The emerging terrorist group claiming attacks across Europe,” 24 March 2026 (ICCT quotation on misspelling and amateurism).

⁵ ICCT, “Hybrid Threat Signals,” 23 March 2026 (Greece, France, and Netherlands claims flagged as likely disinformation); HLN / Nieuwsblad (Antwerp car owner identified as Fatia M., Moroccan national); NL Times, 23 March 2026 (Heemstede arrests, teenagers with fireworks); Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, “Special Report,” 16 March 2026 (acknowledged Greece incident “may constitute disinformation” and Heemstede connection unconfirmed).

⁶ Joe Truzman, “Purported Iran-backed group claims responsibility for attacks in Belgium and Greece,” Long War Journal / Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 12 March 2026.

⁷ FDD founding mission: see “Foundation for Defense of Democracies,” Wikipedia; Sima Vaknin-Gil quoted in Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2018.

⁸ Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, “Special Report: Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia,” 16 March 2026 (updated 24 March 2026). Available at gov.il.

⁹ Ministry of Diaspora Affairs absorption of hasbara operations: The Guardian, “Israel fund US university protest Gaza antisemitism,” 24 June 2024; “Voices of Israel” relaunch: Al Mayadeen English; covert social media campaigns: New York Times, “Israel campaign Gaza social media,” 5 June 2024; campus operations funding: Peace Now.

¹⁰ ICCT, “Hybrid Threat Signals: Assessing Possible Iranian Involvement in Recent Attacks in Europe,” 23 March 2026; BBC News coverage, 24 March 2026; Fox News, “Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiyya: What to know about new terror group,” March 2026; ICCT funding and partners listed on icct.nl/about.

¹¹ HAYI communiqué on the Golders Green attack, circulated via Telegram, 23 March 2026. Text reproduced and analysed in The Grayzone, Wyatt Reed, “Who’s Behind the Mysterious ‘Iran-Backed Terror Cell’ Haunting Europe?”, 28 March 2026.

¹² “The Land of Israel” (Eretz Yisrael) as Zionist terminology: see analysis in The Grayzone, 28 March 2026. The phrase is standard in Religious Zionist discourse and Israeli nationalist vocabulary. It does not appear in the lexicon of Iranian proxy groups, Shia militias, or Axis of Resistance communications.

¹³ American spelling and insider knowledge of Rabbi Kook’s connection to the synagogue: HAYI communiqué, circulated via Telegram, 23 March 2026. The communiqué’s description of Machzike Hadath as “one of the main bastions of support for Israel in Britain” is not supported by the evidence — the synagogue is a member of the Federation of Synagogues (federation.org.uk), a body gathering Hasidic and central-orthodox congregations, and is not an explicitly Zionist institution. The discrepancies in vocabulary, spelling, and insider knowledge have been independently noted by multiple analysts.

¹⁴ Metropolitan Police statements, 25 March and 1 April 2026. Charge details: conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life. No terrorism charges have been filed against any suspect as of 2 April 2026.

¹⁵ Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s statement on the Golders Green attack, 23 March 2026.

¹⁶ “2017 Jewish Community Center bomb threats,” Wikipedia; Anti-Defamation League reports on JCC threats, January–March 2017; media coverage compiled in Newsweek, “In College, Bomb Threat Suspect Juan Thompson Had…,” 10 March 2017.

¹⁷ Juan Thompson: United States Department of Justice, Southern District of New York, sentencing statement, 20 December 2017; United States Secret Service press release, 20 December 2017. Michael Ron David Kadar: “2017 Jewish Community Center bomb threats,” Wikipedia; Israeli police statements; Israeli court conviction, June 2018.

¹⁸ Media coverage disparity between the original threats and the subsequent arrests and convictions is documented in the coverage archives of ABC News, CBS News, and Haaretz, all of which covered the arrests but with significantly less prominence than the original threat reporting.

¹⁹ Australian Federal Police, Deputy Commissioner Krissy Barrett, statement on Operation Kissinger, 10 March 2025; CBS News, “Australia police say seemingly antisemitic terrorism incidents were really ‘criminal con job,’” 10 March 2025; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Antisemitic terror plot in Australia was fake and staged by a crime boss, police say,” 11 March 2025; ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess, annual threat assessment, February 2025.

²⁰ AFP Deputy Commissioner Barrett, 10 March 2025: “The caravan was never going to cause a mass casualty event but instead was concocted by criminals who wanted to cause fear for personal benefit.” NBC News, “Explosives-filled caravan was planted by criminals to play on fears of antisemitic attacks,” 11 March 2025; Al Jazeera, “Mob faked attack on Australian synagogue: Police,” 10 March 2025.

²¹ Post-correction political response: World Socialist Web Site, “Australian Labor government accuses Iran of ‘antisemitic’ attacks to justify Trump’s criminal war,” 4 March 2026 (documenting the pivot to Iranian attribution six months after the hoax admission); NSW Police confirmation of no Iranian connection to the Lewis’ Continental Kitchen attack; charges filed against perpetrators reference arson and criminal damage, not terrorism or foreign interference.

²² Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matthew Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and Faiz Shakir, “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,” Center for American Progress, 26 August 2011; Corey Saylor, “The U.S. Islamophobia Network: Its Funding and Impact,” Council on American-Islamic Relations, April 2014 ($119.6 million figure).

²³ FDD founding mission and Israeli government ties: see “Foundation for Defense of Democracies,” Wikipedia; Sima Vaknin-Gil, Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, quoted in Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2018. IRGC proscription campaigns: documented across European parliamentary debates and lobbying disclosures, 2023–2026.

²⁴ James S. Coates, “Antisemitism and Counter-Islamism: The Industry,” Fireline Press, 2026. The article provides a comprehensive mapping of the counter-Islam network’s funding, personnel, and policy pipeline across the United States and the United Kingdom.

²⁵ BBC News coverage of Golders Green attack, 24 March 2026. No subsequent correction or update reflecting the absence of a confirmed Iran link has been published as of 2 April 2026.

²⁶ Metropolitan Police statements, 25 March and 1 April 2026. No public statement addressing the credibility of the HAYI claim has been issued as of 2 April 2026.

²⁷ Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s statement on the Golders Green attack, 23 March 2026. No subsequent qualification or update has been issued.

²⁸ European IRGC proscription timeline: the European Union formally designated the IRGC in March 2026; the campaign to achieve this designation predates the HAYI incidents but was accelerated by them. See ICCT, “Hybrid Threat Signals,” 23 March 2026; European Council statements, March 2026.

To the people of the United States of America, and to all those who, amid a flood of distortions and manufactured narratives, continue to seek the truth and aspire to a better life:

Iran—by this very name, character, and identity—is one of the oldest continuous civilizations in human history. Despite its historical and geographical advantages at various times, Iran has never, in its modern history, chosen the path of aggression, expansion, colonialism, or domination. Even after enduring occupation, invasion, and sustained pressure from global powers—and despite possessing military superiority over many of its neighbors—Iran has never initiated a war. Yet it has resolutely and bravely repelled those who have attacked it.

The Iranian people harbor no enmity toward other nations, including the people of America, Europe, or neighboring countries. Even in the face of repeated foreign interventions and pressures throughout their proud history, Iranians have consistently drawn a clear distinction between governments and the peoples they govern. This is a deeply rooted principle in Iranian culture and collective consciousness—not a temporary political stance.

For this reason, portraying Iran as a threat is neither consistent with historical reality nor with present-day observable facts. Such a perception is the product of political and economic whims of the powerful—the need to manufacture an enemy in order to justify pressure, maintain military dominance, sustain the arms industry, and control strategic markets. In such an environment, if a threat does not exist, it is invented.

Within this same framework, the United States has concentrated the largest number of its forces, bases, and military capabilities around Iran—a country that, at least since the founding of the United States, has never initiated a war. Recent American aggressions launched from these very bases have demonstrated how threatening such a military presence truly is. Naturally, no country confronted with such conditions would forgo strengthening its defensive capabilities. What Iran has done—and continues to do—is a measured response grounded in legitimate self-defense, and by no means an initiation of war or aggression.

Relations between Iran and the United States were not originally hostile, and early interactions between the Iranian and American people were not marred with hostility or coup d’état—an illegal American 1953 tension. The turning point, however, was the intervention aimed at preventing the nationalization of Iran’s own resources. That coup disrupted Iran’s democratic process, reinstated dictatorship, and sowed deep distrust among Iranians toward U.S. policies. This distrust deepened further with America’s support for the Shah’s regime, its backing of Saddam Hussein during the imposed war of the 1980s, the imposition of the longest and most comprehensive sanctions in modern history, and ultimately, unprovoked military aggression—twice, in the midst of negotiations—against Iran.

Yet all these pressures have failed to weaken Iran. On the contrary, the country has grown stronger in many areas: literacy rates have tripled—from roughly 30% before the Islamic Revolution to over 90% today; higher education has expanded dramatically; significant advances have been achieved in modern technology; healthcare services have improved; and infrastructure has developed at a pace and scale incomparable to the past. These are measurable, observable realities that stand independent of fabricated narratives.

At the same time, the destructive and inhumane impact of sanctions, war, and aggression on the lives of the resilient Iranian people must not be underestimated. The continuation of military aggression and recent bombings profoundly affect people’s lives, attitudes, and perspectives. This reflects a fundamental human truth: when war inflicts irreparable harm on lives, homes, cities, and futures, people will not remain indifferent toward those responsible.

This raises a fundamental question: Exactly which of the American people’s interests are truly being served by this war? Was there any objective threat from Iran to justify such behavior? Does the massacre of innocent children, the destruction of cancer-treatment pharmaceutical facilities, or boasting about bombing a country “back to the stone ages” serve any purpose other than further damaging the United States’ global standing?

Iran pursued negotiations, reached an agreement, and fulfilled all its commitments. The decision to withdraw from that agreement, escalate toward confrontation, and launch two acts of aggression in the midst of negotiations were destructive choices made by the U.S. government—choices that served the delusions of a foreign aggressor.

Attacking Iran’s vital infrastructure—including energy and industrial facilities—directly targets the Iranian people. Beyond constituting a war crime, such actions carry consequences that extend far beyond Iran’s borders. They generate instability, increase human and economic costs, and perpetuate cycles of tension, planting seeds of resentment that will endure for years. This is not a demonstration of strength; it is a sign of strategic bewilderment and an inability to achieve a sustainable solution.

Is it not also the case that America has entered this aggression as a proxy for Israel, influenced and manipulated by that regime? Is it not true that Israel, by manufacturing an Iranian threat, seeks to divert global attention away from its crimes toward the Palestinians? Is it not evident that Israel now aims to fight Iran to the last American soldier and the last American taxpayer dollar—shifting the burden of its delusions onto Iran, the region, and the United States itself in pursuit of illegitimate interests?

Is “America First” truly among the priorities of the U.S. government today?

I invite you to look beyond the machinery of misinformation—an integral part of this aggression—and instead speak with those who have visited Iran. Observe the many accomplished Iranian immigrants—educated in Iran—who now teach and conduct research at the world’s most prestigious universities, or contribute to the most advanced technology firms in the West. Do these realities align with the distortions you are being told about Iran and its people?

Today, the world stands at a crossroads. Continuing along the path of confrontation is more costly and futile than ever before. The choice between confrontation and engagement is both real and consequential; its outcome will shape the future for generations to come.

Throughout its millennia of proud history, Iran has outlasted many aggressors. All that remains of them are tarnished names in history, while Iran endures—resilient, dignified, and proud.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

This was not merely an act of aggression against Iran. It was a betrayal — of the Iranian people who had come to the table, of the constitutional system that reserves the power of war to Congress, of the international legal order that the United States itself authored, of the American people in whose name these acts were committed, and of every allied nation in the region now absorbing the direct consequences of a war they did not choose: the Gulf states managing missile threats and refugee flows, the economies destabilised by the disruption of energy markets, and the nations beyond the Middle East contending with the ripple effects of a conflict that was launched while diplomacy was winning.

But law alone has never stopped a war that enough people wanted. Millions of Americans were primed for decades to support this one, and they have reasons — or at least they believe they do. The nuclear threat. The theological mandate. The media narrative. The political calculation. Four arguments, each carrying enough surface plausibility to survive a cable news segment, each repeated often enough to feel self-evident.

This article takes each on its own terms.

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The Nuclear Threat

The nuclear argument — which Netanyahu has been pushing for decades, since before Iran even had a civilian nuclear programme — suggests that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, diplomacy had failed, and military action was the only remaining option to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. It sounds reasonable. It is also circular, and the circularity is the argument’s fatal defect.

In 2015, the United States and five other world powers negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the JCPOA, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. The agreement constrained Iran’s nuclear programme with a specificity that no military strike could match. Iran agreed to reduce its operating centrifuges by two-thirds. It accepted limits on uranium enrichment to 3.67 percent — far below the roughly 90 percent needed for a weapon. It capped its stockpile of low-enriched uranium at 300 kilograms. It redesigned the Arak heavy water reactor to close the plutonium pathway to a bomb. And it submitted to the most intrusive verification regime in the history of nuclear diplomacy, granting the International Atomic Energy Agency access to monitor compliance at every stage.⁵⁹

The JCPOA was not perfect. Critics pointed to sunset provisions — limits on centrifuges that would expire after ten years, enrichment caps after fifteen. These were legitimate concerns. But the verification regime had no sunset. And the deal’s core achievement was measurable: under the JCPOA, Iran’s breakout time — the time needed to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a single bomb — was extended to over one year. That year was not a guarantee of safety. It was a window — a window for detection, for diplomacy, for response. It was the difference between a programme that could be monitored and one that could not.⁶⁰

On the eighth of May 2018, President Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA.⁶¹

He did so while Iran was in compliance. The IAEA had confirmed it in every report since the deal’s implementation. Trump’s own Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, acknowledged that the IAEA had found no evidence of non-compliance. General Joseph Dunford, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in September 2017 that “Iran is adhering to its JCPOA obligations” and that the agreement “has delayed Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.”⁶² The intelligence community agreed. The inspectors agreed. The military agreed. The President withdrew anyway.

What followed was predictable, because it was predicted. Within fourteen months of the withdrawal, Iran had exceeded its enrichment limits. It began producing uranium at 4.5 percent, then 20 percent, then 60 percent. It installed advanced centrifuges the deal had prohibited. It restricted IAEA inspector access. By the time the IAEA issued its November 2024 report, Iran’s breakout time had collapsed from over one year to approximately one week.⁶³

Let the arithmetic speak. The deal constrained the programme. The withdrawal removed the constraints. The programme expanded. And the expansion of the programme is now cited as the justification for bombing it.

This is not an argument. It is a circle. The administration that created the conditions for Iran’s nuclear advancement now presents that advancement as the reason the war was necessary. It is like a man who burns down the fire station and then points to the ashes as proof that the neighbourhood needs better fire protection.

Laura Rockwood, who spent twenty-eight years at the IAEA and now serves as a senior fellow at the Vienna Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, stated it plainly: Iran’s nuclear advancement occurred “not because of the JCPOA, but because President Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA.” Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at Columbia University who worked as a special envoy for Iran under the Biden administration, confirmed: “Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA in 2018 had a significant accelerating effect on the program.”⁶⁴

But the circularity is only half the indictment. The other half is the negotiations.

As documented in Part One, on the twenty-fifth of February 2026, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated publicly that a deal to avert military conflict was “within reach.” On the twenty-seventh of February — one day before the strikes — Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi appeared on CBS News and disclosed that Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium, irreversible downgrading of existing stockpiles, and full IAEA verification. He called it “a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved in previous rounds of negotiations.”⁶⁵ This was not the JCPOA being reheated. This was a commitment that went beyond what the JCPOA had secured.

The President had a diplomatic victory on the table — his own diplomatic victory, achieved through his own administration’s negotiations, mediated by an ally he himself had engaged. He chose war. The strikes began on the twenty-eighth of February. The additional talks scheduled for the following Monday in Vienna never took place.

The nuclear argument for this war does not merely fail. It collapses into its own contradiction. The man who abandoned the deal that constrained the programme, who watched the programme expand as a direct and predicted consequence of that abandonment, who then had a second deal on the table that went further than the first — that man chose to bomb what diplomacy had already solved, twice, and asks us to believe there was no alternative.

There was an alternative. He was looking at it. And he turned away.

Which means the nuclear threat was never the reason. If preventing a nuclear-armed Iran were the genuine objective, then Iran’s agreement to zero stockpiling and full IAEA verification — disclosed on American television the day before the strikes — would have ended the conversation. The problem would have been solved. The bombs would have been unnecessary. But the bombs fell anyway, because the nuclear argument was the justification, not the cause. Oman’s foreign minister, the man who had spent weeks mediating between the two sides, confirmed as much after the war began: the strikes were not prompted by an imminent threat but were “solely an attempt to reorder the Middle East in Israel’s favour.”⁸⁹

The nuclear threat was the label on the box. What was inside was something else entirely.

The Faith-Based Justification

In my article “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” published on the eighteenth of March, I documented the infrastructure that made this war legible — even desirable — to tens of millions of Americans.⁶⁶ The dispensationalist theology that reads Middle Eastern conflict as biblical prophecy unfolding in real time. The Pentagon prayer services. The commanders who told their troops, with grins on their faces, that Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon.” The two hundred complaints across every branch of the military. I will not repeat that documentation here. Read it if you have not. It matters.

What I want to examine here is the specific theological narrative that the Iran war has activated — a narrative that goes beyond generic dispensationalism into something with a name, a history, and a political function. It is called the Cyrus narrative. And it is doing more work in this war than most Americans realise.

Cyrus the Great was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire — the first Persian Empire. In 539 BCE, he conquered Babylon and issued a decree permitting the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. For this, he is celebrated in Jewish tradition and is the only non-Jewish figure described as a messiah — an anointed one — in the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah 45:1 reads: “Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him.”⁶⁷

In 2015, a charismatic preacher named Lance Wallnau took that verse and built a political theology around it. Wallnau, a figure in the New Apostolic Reformation who presents more like an infomercial pitchman than a holy man, published a book positioning Donald Trump as “God’s Chaos Candidate” — an unlikely, irreligious ruler chosen by God, just as Cyrus was, to advance the divine plan. The parallel was deliberate: Cyrus was not Jewish, not devout, not particularly interested in theology. He was a conqueror who happened to serve God’s purposes. Trump, in this framework, is the same — a flawed vessel through whom prophecy moves.⁶⁸

The narrative caught fire. Benjamin Netanyahu compared Trump to Cyrus at multiple public events beginning in 2018, after Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem.⁶⁹ Evangelical leaders adopted the framing with enthusiasm. Roughly a third of white evangelicals told pollsters they believed Trump’s election reflected God’s will.⁷⁰ And in January 2026, as the war loomed, even Reza Pahlavi — the exiled crown prince of Iran — invoked the “Time of Cyrus” alongside the “Time of Trump,” envisioning a transformative alliance that would reshape the Middle East.⁷¹

The irony should not be lost. Trump is being cast as a Cyrus figure — a Persian king, the founder of the civilisation whose modern inheritor he is currently bombing. The theology that celebrates Cyrus as God’s instrument for the liberation of the Jews is being used to justify the destruction of the nation Cyrus built.

But irony is the least of the problems. The real problem is what happens when this narrative meets the machinery of war.

In the first week of the Iran strikes, the FlashPoint television programme — a major platform for charismatic evangelical media — broadcast a series of episodes that treated the war as eschatological vindication. Wallnau declared that because of Trump’s war on Iran, “Israel and the return of Jesus is back on the menu.” He called it a “Last Days-moment” with “Cyrus Trump leading the greatest gentile nation in history.” Lorenzo Sewell, a Detroit pastor who delivered a prayer at Trump’s inauguration, called Trump “our modern day Cyrus” and said the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader had turned spiritual warfare literal: “That which people have been doing in the spirit, we saw it manifest in the natural.” He celebrated the killing of another human being by spending the day in the West Wing, mingling with the president’s advisers, telling his audience he could see “the angels surrounding” the Secretary of State.⁷²

This is not fringe theology confined to anonymous social media accounts. This is broadcast media, with direct access to the White House, celebrating the killing of a head of state as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy — and doing so while thirteen American families are burying their dead.

And then there is the projection.

On the fourth of March 2026, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told the press that “crazy regimes like Iran, hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions, cannot have nuclear weapons.”⁷³ This from the man who has held monthly Christian worship services in the Pentagon since May 2025. The man whose personal mentor advocates Christian theocracy. The man whose commanders told troops the war was God’s divine plan to spark Armageddon. The man who declared at the National Prayer Breakfast that military service earns eternal life.

Hegseth accused Iran of being driven by religious delusion while presiding over a Pentagon where religious delusion was being broadcast on the department’s internal television network, posted on its official social media accounts, and preached from its podium. The accusation is not ironic. It is diagnostic. It tells you what the accuser sees when he looks in the mirror — and what he refuses to recognise as his own reflection.

The First Amendment is clear. The Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797, states that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”⁷⁴ These are not obscure historical footnotes. They are the foundational commitments of the republic in whose name this war is being fought. When foreign policy is driven by eschatology — when the decision to bomb a sovereign nation is legible to the decision-makers as the advancement of God’s prophetic timeline rather than a strategic calculation subject to rational scrutiny — it is not Iran that has a theocracy problem. It is the Pentagon.

The Media Narrative

Ask an American what Iran is and you will get one of a handful of answers. The ayatollahs. The hostage crisis. The nuclear programme. Terrorism. “Death to America.” A monolith — dark, fanatical, implacable. A nation whose more than ninety million people have been compressed into a single image: the bearded cleric, the burning flag, the chanting crowd.

There is no Iranian civil society in this picture. No women who risked their lives in the streets. No students who wrote on their university walls that the system had “taken our future hostage for forty-seven years.”⁷⁵ No poets. No filmmakers. No reformists who won elections and tried to open the country from within.

And no acknowledgment that those reformists were crushed, again and again, not only by the hardliners in Tehran but by American policy that handed those hardliners their best arguments. When George W. Bush declared Iran part of the “Axis of Evil” in January 2002, President Mohammad Khatami’s reformist government was in the middle of the most significant opening in Iranian politics since the revolution. The reformists were reaching out. They were met with a label that empowered every hardliner who had warned that America would never accept a moderate Iran.⁹⁰ The pattern has repeated for decades: every time Iranian civil society moves toward openness, American policy delivers a gift to the forces that want to shut it down.

No Mahsa Amini — the twenty-two-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman whose death in the custody of Iran’s morality police in September 2022 sparked the largest anti-regime uprising since the revolution, and whose name became synonymous with a movement the world briefly noticed and then forgot. And no mention that Iranian women graduate in STEM fields at nearly three times the rate of American women, or that Iran has ranked first in the world for female engineering enrolment⁹¹ — facts that do not fit the image of a nation reducible to bearded clerics and burning flags.

When Amini was arrested by Iran’s morality police in September 2022, she died in custody three days later. What followed was the largest anti-regime uprising since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Protests erupted in over a hundred and fifty cities across all thirty provinces. Young women stood on cars and cut their hair. The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” became a global rallying cry. The regime responded with the machinery it knows best: security forces using live ammunition, mass arrests, executions. Over five hundred people were killed. More than twenty-two thousand were detained. At least ten were executed after trials that international observers described as shams.⁷⁶

This was not a distant event. It was broadcast in real time on every social media platform in the world. The Iranian people — overwhelmingly the young, overwhelmingly women — showed the world exactly who they were and what they wanted. They wanted freedom. They wanted accountability. They wanted the regime gone. And they were willing to die for it.

And then the world moved on.

By late 2025, Iran was convulsing again. New protests erupted in December — described as the largest since 2022. Protesters chanted “Death to the Dictator.” Students at Shahid Beheshti University declared that the system “won’t be changed with reform or with false promises.” The government responded with the same playbook: live ammunition, heavy machine guns, snipers targeting heads and vital organs. A Tehran doctor reported that security forces were “shooting to kill.”⁷⁷

These are the people being bombed. Not only the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard commanders — but the people. The fourteen hundred dead in the first two weeks of Operation Epic Fury are not all regime figures. They include the women who marched under “Woman, Life, Freedom” and the men who stood beside them. They include the students and the shopkeepers and the mothers and the poets. They include the hundred and seventy-five people — most of them schoolgirls between the ages of seven and twelve — who were in the Minab girls’ school on the morning of the twenty-eighth of February and were not alive by the afternoon.⁷⁸

And if there was opposition to the regime — and there was, in the streets, in the universities, in the protests that were still burning when the first bombs fell — the hundred and seventy-five dead schoolgirls in Minab crushed it. You cannot bomb a people into revolution. You can only bomb them into solidarity with the only power that remains standing. Every parent who pulled a child’s body from the rubble of that school is not thinking about regime change. They are thinking about who dropped the bomb. The strikes did not weaken the regime. They gave it the one thing it could not manufacture on its own: a reason for the Iranian people to stop fighting their government and start fighting ours.

The failure to distinguish between regime and people is not merely a media failure. It is the precondition for the war itself. You cannot bomb more than ninety million people if you see them as people. You can only bomb them if they have been reduced to a single word — Evil — and that word has been emptied of every human particular. The media narrative that presents Iran as a monolith is not incidental to the violence. It is the anaesthesia that makes the violence possible.

And the anaesthesia was applied at precisely the moment when the antidote was available. On the twenty-seventh of February 2026, Oman’s foreign minister appeared on CBS and told the American people that a peace deal was within reach. How many Americans saw that interview? How many cable news hours were devoted to the breakthrough compared to the hours spent on the threat narrative? The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi suggested that Al Busaidi went public deliberately — “so that the American people knew that peace was within reach when Trump instead opted for war.”⁷⁹ But knowing requires someone to tell you. And the machinery of American media was not built to tell you that the enemy was ready to negotiate. It was built to tell you that the enemy was coming to harm you.

The White House’s gamification videos — Call of Duty kill scores over real explosions, SpongeBob asking “do you want to see me do it again?” — are not a separate phenomenon. They are the media narrative’s logical endpoint. Once you have erased the humanity of more than ninety million people, the next step is entertainment. The “+100” hovering over a real explosion does not inform. It confirms. There are no people on the other end. Only targets. Only content. Only fun.

But the narrative is fracturing. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll conducted in the first week of March found that fifty-five percent of Americans see Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. Fifty-six percent oppose the military action. Among eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds — the generation raised on social media, the generation that watched the Mahsa Amini protests in real time — approval of Trump’s handling of Iran stands at twenty-five percent.⁸⁰ The monolith is cracking. Not fast enough. But cracking.

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The Political Theatre

On the ninth of March, the Quinnipiac University poll reported President Trump’s overall approval at thirty-seven percent. His approval on the economy — traditionally his strongest issue — stood at thirty-nine percent, with fifty-eight percent disapproving. That was the highest economic disapproval Quinnipiac had ever recorded for this president.⁸¹ His approval on the situation with Iran was thirty-eight percent.

The war arrived at a moment when every other political metric was collapsing — and when the administration was haemorrhaging credibility on another front entirely. The Epstein files, released in waves since December 2025, had become a political crisis in their own right. By late January, the Department of Justice had published 3.5 million pages of documents in which Trump’s name appeared over three thousand times. Members of Congress who viewed the unredacted files reported content directly related to the president. On the sixth of March — one week into the war — the DOJ released additional FBI documents describing a woman’s allegations that Trump had sexually assaulted her as a teenager after being introduced to her by Epstein.⁹² The war did not make the Epstein files disappear. But it did move them off the front page.

And the question every honest observer must ask is whether the timing was coincidental.

War has always served domestic political purposes. It rallies the base. It changes the subject. It transforms the president from a politician into a commander-in-chief, and opposition from legitimate criticism into something that can be framed as disloyalty. Political scientists call it the rally-around-the-flag effect — the surge in presidential approval that typically follows the initiation of military action. George H.W. Bush saw his approval jump to eighty-nine percent at the start of the Gulf War. George W. Bush reached ninety percent after the eleventh of September. The effect is one of the most consistent findings in the study of American public opinion.⁸²

It is not working.

Nate Silver’s approval tracker, which aggregates multiple polls, found no rally-around-the-flag effect from the Iran war. Trump’s net approval moved from minus 13.5 at the start of March to minus 13.9 by the fourteenth — not a collapse, but not the surge that every modern wartime president has enjoyed. The war is not helping.⁸³ And the historical pattern — confirmed by the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq — suggests that once the initial window for a rally closes, public opinion only moves in one direction: against the war, and against the president who started it.

The fracture is visible even within Trump’s own coalition. Tucker Carlson — who was more muted after the June 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities — called the March war “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Megyn Kelly expressed “serious doubts.” Fox News host Will Cain questioned the clarity of the mission.⁸⁴ These are not Democratic operatives or academic critics. These are the voices of the American right. And while they do not represent the majority of rank-and-file Republicans — seventy-seven percent of whom still support the strikes in the most favourable polling — the erosion is measurable. A Reuters-Ipsos poll found Republican support for the Iran strikes had dropped from sixty-nine percent during the June 2025 operations to fifty-five percent in March 2026. Forty-two percent of Republicans said they would be more likely to oppose the mission if American troops were killed or injured.⁸⁵ American troops have been killed. More will be.

Even Fox News’s own polling — conducted by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company — found that fifty-one percent of voters believed Trump’s handling of Iran had made the United States less safe. Only twenty-nine percent said he had made it safer.⁸⁶

That twenty-nine percent floor is worth examining. It maps almost precisely onto the roughly quarter of the American electorate that identifies as white evangelical Christian — the same demographic whose theological framework, documented in this article and in “Holy War,” treats Middle Eastern conflict as biblical prophecy rather than policy. When the only Americans who believe the war has made them safer are the Americans who believe the war is God’s plan, the political calculation is not a calculation. It is a confession.

But if the base reveals the truth by what it celebrates, the administration reveals it by what it conceals. Trump has used the word “excursion” repeatedly to describe what is happening in Iran — the latest in a seventy-six-year tradition of creative language designed to avoid calling war what it is. Truman called Korea a “police action.” Obama called Libya “kinetic military action.” Trump calls a sustained bombing campaign that has killed over fourteen hundred people, destroyed an entire nation’s economic infrastructure, and assassinated a head of state an “excursion.”⁸⁷ The euphemism is not a verbal tic. It is a tell. It reveals that even the people waging the war understand it cannot survive contact with an honest description of itself.

The rally-around-the-flag effect depends on a precondition that no longer exists: national unity. The effect works because war, in its opening days, creates a moment of shared identity that transcends partisan division. But in a polarised electorate where everything — weather, vaccines, the shape of the earth — is contested along partisan lines, that shared identity is no longer available. There is no flag for everyone to rally around, because there is no everyone. There are only factions, each with its own media ecosystem, its own facts, its own version of the war. The rally effect requires a nation. America, at this moment, is not one.

And so the political calculation fails on its own terms. Thirteen Americans are dead. Over fourteen hundred Iranians are dead. The president who sent them to war is polling at thirty-six percent approval on his handling of Iran, fifty-four percent disapproval.⁸⁸ The war has not improved his numbers. It has not changed the subject from the economy. It has not unified the country. It has consumed the lives of American service members and Iranian civilians for a political return that is not merely diminishing — it was never there.

What Remains

Every argument for this war collapses under scrutiny. The nuclear argument is circular — the administration that abandoned the deal now bombs the programme its abandonment accelerated, while a second and better deal lay on the table. The faith-based argument is unconstitutional — a war legible to its architects as biblical prophecy is a war the First Amendment was written to prevent. The media narrative erases the people being bombed — compressing more than ninety million human beings into a target, a threat, a monolith called Evil. And the White House turned that monolith into a video game. And the political calculation treats American and Iranian lives as expendable currency in a domestic power game that is not even paying dividends.

So if the nuclear argument is circular, the theological argument is unconstitutional, the media narrative is manufactured, and the political calculation is failing — then what was this war actually for?

The answer was given to us before the first bomb fell, by the man who had spent weeks trying to prevent them. Oman’s foreign minister stated that the war was “solely an attempt to reorder the Middle East in Israel’s favour.” That assessment deserves to be taken seriously, because Al Busaidi is not a commentator. He was the mediator. He was in the room.

Israel’s interest in this war is not hidden and it is not new. Netanyahu has sought the destruction of Iran’s military capability for decades — not because Iran poses an existential nuclear threat that diplomacy cannot resolve, but because Iran is the last major regional power capable of challenging Israeli dominance in the Middle East. With Hezbollah decapitated in Lebanon, Assad toppled in Syria, and Hamas broken in Gaza, Iran was the final obstacle. The war is the capstone of a project that predates Trump, predates the JCPOA, and predates the nuclear programme itself: the reshaping of the Middle East into an architecture that guarantees Israeli supremacy from the Mediterranean to the Gulf. Netanyahu said as much himself. In his first press conference since the war began, on the twelfth of March, he listed his conquests — Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and now Iran — and declared that Israel was becoming a “global superpower.”⁹³ The mask did not slip. He took it off.

Saudi Arabia’s interest runs on a parallel track. The Kingdom’s rivalry with Iran is older than the Islamic Republic — it is a contest for regional leadership rooted in sectarian competition, oil politics, and competing visions of the Muslim world. Riyadh did not need to fire a single missile to benefit from this war. Every bomb that falls on Iranian infrastructure weakens Saudi Arabia’s primary regional competitor. The Saudis have managed the war carefully — absorbing Iranian retaliatory strikes on their territory while avoiding direct military involvement, positioning themselves to emerge from the conflict with their rival diminished and their own standing enhanced.

And waiting in the wings, as he has been for forty-seven years, is Reza Pahlavi — the exiled crown prince, son of the Shah whose dictatorship was installed by a CIA coup in 1953 and toppled by the revolution in 1979. Pahlavi is in direct contact with the Trump administration through special envoy Steve Witkoff. He has appeared on Fox News, CBS, and Lara Trump’s show. On the fourteenth of March — while the bombs were still falling — he declared himself ready to lead a “transitional system” the moment the Islamic Republic collapses. He is scheduled to speak at CPAC later this month.⁹⁴

The pattern is seventy-three years old. In 1953, Iran had a democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who nationalised Iran’s oil industry. The CIA and MI6 overthrew him and installed the Pahlavi monarchy — a compliant dictatorship backed by American arms and the SAVAK secret police for twenty-six years, until the revolution that produced the very regime now being bombed.⁹⁵ The cycle is not hidden. It is the operating logic of American policy toward Iran: undermine every internal movement toward reform, ensure that the only alternatives are the hardliners or a Western-aligned exile, and then cite the hardliners as the reason for the next intervention. Khatami’s reformists were crushed by the “Axis of Evil.” The JCPOA was abandoned. The February 2026 negotiations were bombed. And each time, the man waiting to inherit the wreckage is a Pahlavi — aligned with Israeli and Saudi interests, promising democracy for a country he has not set foot in since 1978.

“Regime change” does not mean what the American public has been led to believe it means. It does not mean democracy. It has never meant democracy — not in 1953, not now, not ever. It means the installation of a government that serves the interests of the powers that installed it. The Iranian people have been trying to change their own regime — through reform, through protest, through elections, through revolution — for decades. They have been undermined at every turn, not by the absence of American intervention but by its presence.

These are not American interests. The average American — the reservist from Iowa, the sergeant from Nebraska, the pilot from Alabama whose twins will grow up without a father — has nothing to gain from the reordering of the Middle East in Israel’s favour or the advancement of Saudi Arabia’s regional ambitions. The thirteen dead Americans did not die for American security. They died for someone else’s project, sold to the American public through decades of theological conditioning, media narrative construction, and political manipulation so thorough that the people inside it no longer recognise it as manipulation. The four arguments dismantled in this article are not independent phenomena. They are the delivery mechanism — the packaging through which Israeli and Saudi strategic interests were translated into language that American voters, American soldiers, and American taxpayers could be persuaded to accept.

What remains when every justification has been stripped away?

What remains is force without reason. The thing that law — all law, from the earliest codes to the Geneva Conventions — was built to prevent. Part One of this series made the legal case. Part Two has examined the arguments that were supposed to supply the moral case, the strategic case, the democratic case. They are empty. What we are left with is what the law says we are left with: an act of aggression, undertaken by choice, against a nation that was at the negotiating table when the first bombs fell.

The promise of “Never Again” — the principle that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War, from the death camps and the firebombed cities and the atomic craters — was never reserved for one people. That was its power. That was the entire point. “Never Again” meant that the international community would build a legal order robust enough to prevent the strong from devouring the weak whenever it suited them. It meant that the suffering of the few would be recognised as the concern of all, because the alternative — a world where sovereignty means nothing and power means everything — was a world that had already been tried, at a cost of eighty million lives, and found to be unsurvivable.

The law exists because empathy alone is not enough. Empathy can be switched off. It can be narrowed — reserved for those who look like us, speak like us, pray like us. It can be anaesthetised by distance, by euphemism, by a “+100” hovering over a real explosion. The law exists to hold the line when empathy fails. It exists to say: even when you do not feel the suffering of strangers, you may not cause it. Even when the media has erased their faces and the president has called their destruction fun, they are protected — not by your compassion, which is unreliable, but by a structure that does not depend on whether you care.

That structure is what is being dismantled. And what is lost in its dismantling is not only the protection of the Iranians being bombed today. It is the protection of everyone, everywhere, who might one day need the law to stand between them and a more powerful adversary. Including Americans. Especially Americans, who have more enemies and more to lose than any other nation on earth when the rules collapse.

A hundred and seventy-five people died in a girls’ school in Minab. Most of them were between seven and twelve years old. They were not combatants. They were not threats. They were not “enemy targets.” They were children, and they were in school, and they are dead. No nuclear argument justifies their deaths. No biblical prophecy justifies the means to this end. No media narrative can erase them, however hard it tries. No political calculation can destroy their lives and call it strategy.

They are the cost. Not of a policy disagreement. Not of a strategic miscalculation. But of the slow, incremental surrender of conscience that makes war possible when no honest argument supports it. The surrender happens in small steps. You accept the euphemism. You stop seeing the faces. You let the legal fiction pass unchallenged. You watch the gamification video and feel nothing. Each concession seems small — perhaps nothing. Perhaps even reasonable. But the arithmetic is unforgiving. What begins as a small accommodation to expedience ends as something else entirely. The word for it is old, and it is not fashionable, but it is precise: depravity. The state in which the machinery of destruction operates without resistance, because the conscience that might have resisted has been surrendered, piece by piece, until there is nothing left to resist with.

This is not only Iran’s tragedy. It is a test — of American law, of international order, of the principle that human life has a value that cannot be overridden by the calculations of the powerful. That test is being failed. And the failure reverberates — not only in the streets of Tehran and the rubble of Minab, but in the erosion of the moral authority that once made the world listen when America spoke, in the alliances fraying under the weight of a war no ally endorsed, in the economic instability that follows when the world’s reserve currency is wielded as a weapon and the world’s most powerful military is deployed without legal authority, and in the precedent — the quiet, devastating precedent — that tells every other powerful state on earth that the rules are optional, that sovereignty is a fiction, and that the strong may do as they please.

The struggle is not only for the people of Iran, though they are paying the highest price. It is for the soul of a nation that once believed it could be governed by law rather than by the will of the most powerful. It is for the idea — fragile, contested, never fully realised — that human civilisation can be organised around something better than force. And it is for each of us, individually, because the conscience that looks away today is the conscience that will not be there tomorrow, when the machinery turns in a direction we did not expect and the law we allowed to be broken is the one we needed most.

The law is not an abstraction. It is the infrastructure of a world in which Declan Coady’s family gets a phone call instead of a folded flag, in which Alex Klinner’s twins grow up knowing their father, in which a hundred and seventy-five girls in Minab finish their school day, go home, and one day complete their STEM degrees. Every argument for this war has failed. What remains is the choice: rebuild the law, or live in the ruins.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Banner image: Mass funeral for victims of US-Israeli strikes in Iran. Credit: Al Jazeera

Endnotes

⁵⁹ The JCPOA was finalised on 14 July 2015 between Iran and the P5+1 (United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Germany) plus the European Union. It was implemented on 16 January 2016 after the IAEA verified Iran’s compliance with initial commitments. For the specific constraints: enrichment limit of 3.67%, stockpile cap of 300 kg of low-enriched uranium, reduction from approximately 19,000 centrifuges to 6,104 (with only 5,060 enriching), redesign of the Arak reactor, and comprehensive IAEA monitoring. Council on Foreign Relations, “What Is the Iran Nuclear Deal?”; Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, “Fact Sheet: The Iran Deal, Then and Now,” updated June 2025; European Council, “Iran’s Nuclear Agreement — JCPOA.”

⁶⁰ Breakout time under the JCPOA estimated at over one year. Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, op. cit. The IAEA confirmed that the JCPOA verification regime provided unprecedented transparency into Iran’s nuclear programme.

⁶¹ Trump announced the withdrawal on 8 May 2018 in a speech at the White House. The White House, “President Donald J. Trump is Ending United States Participation in an Unacceptable Iran Deal,” 8 May 2018.

⁶² General Joseph Dunford, testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, 26 September 2017. Pompeo’s acknowledgment of IAEA compliance findings reported in multiple outlets. FactCheck.org, “Trump’s Claim About the Obama Nuclear Deal and Iran’s Nuclear Development,” 12 March 2026.

⁶³ Iran exceeded low-enriched uranium stockpile limits by July 2019 and began enriching beyond 3.67% by the same month. It subsequently enriched to 60% and installed advanced centrifuges. The IAEA’s November 2024 report estimated breakout time at approximately one week. Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, op. cit.; IAEA reports cited therein.

⁶⁴ Laura Rockwood, senior fellow at the Vienna Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation (28 years at the IAEA), quoted in FactCheck.org, op. cit. Richard Nephew, senior research scholar at Columbia University and former special envoy for Iran at the State Department, quoted ibid.

⁶⁵ The negotiations timeline and Al Busaidi’s CBS appearance are documented in Part One, endnotes 52–57. Araghchi’s 25 February statement: Al Jazeera, “Iran’s FM says deal with US ‘within reach,’” 25 February 2026. Al Busaidi’s 27 February CBS appearance: CBS News, “U.S.-Iran deal is ‘within our reach,’ Omani mediator says,” 27 February 2026.

⁶⁶ James S. Coates, “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” Fireline Press, 18 March 2026.

⁶⁷ Isaiah 45:1 (English Standard Version). Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BCE and issued the Cyrus Decree permitting the return of the Jewish exiles to Jerusalem. The decree is referenced in 2 Chronicles 36:22–23 and Ezra 1:1–4.

⁶⁸ Lance Wallnau, God’s Chaos Candidate (Killer Sheep Media, 2016). Wallnau is a figure in the New Apostolic Reformation. The Cyrus parallel was central to his 2015–2016 advocacy for Trump among evangelical audiences. CBS News, Charisma magazine, and multiple outlets reported Wallnau’s framing. See also Contrarian News, “Why Do Christian Nationalists Support Trump War With Iran?” March 2026, for detailed reporting on Wallnau’s FlashPoint appearances during the Iran war.

⁶⁹ Netanyahu compared Trump to Cyrus at multiple public events beginning in 2018, particularly in connection with the embassy move to Jerusalem. See CounterPunch, “Biblical Bloodlust: Huckabee, Cyrus, and the Zionist Greater Israel Fantasy Fueling the Iran War,” 6 March 2026; CBS News; Charisma magazine.

⁷⁰ Pew Research Center survey finding roughly a third of white evangelicals believed Trump’s election reflected God’s will, cited in CBS News and multiple analyses of evangelical political theology.

⁷¹ Reza Pahlavi’s invocation of the “Time of Cyrus” alongside “Time of Trump” in January 2026 statements and interviews. Wall Street Journal; Beit HaShoavah analysis, 18 January 2026.

⁷² FlashPoint TV broadcasts during the first week of Operation Epic Fury. Wallnau: “Israel and the return of Jesus is back on the menu”; “It’s about Cyrus Trump leading the greatest gentile nation in history, in a Last Days-moment.” Sewell: Trump as “our modern day Cyrus” who turned spiritual warfare literal. Documented in Contrarian News, op. cit., with detailed transcription of broadcast segments.

⁷³ Hegseth’s statement reported by Al Jazeera, “Why are the US and Israel framing the ongoing conflict as a religious war?” 4 March 2026. See also CAIR’s condemnation of the Pentagon’s “dangerous” and “anti-Muslim” rhetoric, reported in the same article.

⁷⁴ Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11, ratified unanimously by the United States Senate on 7 June 1797 and signed by President John Adams. The full text of Article 11: “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims]…”

⁷⁵ Students at Shahid Beheshti University, statement during the 2025–2026 Iranian protests. Wikipedia, “2025–2026 Iranian protests,” citing Iranian press and protest documentation. The full quote: “This criminal system has taken our future hostage for 47 years. It won’t be changed with reform or with false promises.”

⁷⁶ The Mahsa Amini protests of 2022–2023: Amini was arrested on 13 September 2022 and died on 16 September. Protests spread to over 150 cities in all 30 provinces. Casualty and detention figures from Human Rights Watch, the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, Amnesty International, and ACLED. Seven individuals were executed in connection with the protests as of spring 2023; the total reached ten by August 2024 (Amnesty International). See also UN OHCHR, “Justice and accountability: Woman, Life, Freedom protests,” April 2025, documenting crimes against humanity findings.

⁷⁷ The 2025–2026 Iranian protests began in late December 2025 and were described as the largest since 2022. Security forces used live ammunition, DShK heavy machine guns, and snipers. A Tehran doctor quoted in The Guardian (13 January 2026) reported that security forces were “shooting to kill.” The Abdorrahman Boroumand Centre cited evidence of forces targeting heads, eyes, and vital organs. Wikipedia, “2025–2026 Iranian protests,” accessed 16 March 2026, citing The Guardian, IranWire, AP, and Human Rights Watch.

⁷⁸ The Minab girls’ school strike and casualty figures are documented in Part One, endnotes 10 and 13.

⁷⁹ Trita Parsi quoted in Common Dreams, “Oman’s Foreign Minister Said US-Iran Deal Was ‘Within Our Reach.’ Then Trump Started Bombing,” 1 March 2026. See Part One, endnote 57.

⁸⁰ NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll, conducted 2–4 March 2026, n=1,591 adults, margin of error ±2.8 percentage points. Fifty-six percent oppose military action; thirty-six percent approve of Trump’s handling of Iran; fifty-five percent see Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. Approval among 18–29 year-olds at twenty-five percent. NPR, “Poll: A majority of Americans opposes U.S. military action in Iran,” 6 March 2026; Marist Poll, “War with Iran, March 2026.”

⁸¹ Quinnipiac University Poll, conducted 6–8 March 2026, n=1,002 registered voters, margin of error ±3.8 percentage points. Overall approval: 37%. Economy disapproval: 58% (described as the highest Quinnipiac had ever recorded for Trump). Iran handling: 38% approve, 57% disapprove. Quinnipiac University Poll, release 9 March 2026.

⁸² The rally-around-the-flag effect is one of the most studied phenomena in American political science. See John Mueller, “Presidential Popularity from Truman to Johnson,” American Political Science Review 64, no. 1 (1970); Marc Hetherington and Michael Nelson, “Anatomy of a Rally Effect: George W. Bush and the War on Terrorism,” PS: Political Science and Politics 36, no. 1 (2003).

⁸³ Nate Silver / Silver Bulletin, Trump approval tracker, accessed 16 March 2026. Net approval moved from −13.5 at the start of March to −13.9 by 14 March. Silver noted: “We’re no longer seeing a rally-around-the-flag effect… but Trump’s support hasn’t declined either.”

⁸⁴ Tucker Carlson quoted as calling the war “absolutely disgusting and evil” in CNN, “Analysis: How much is Trump’s base on board with war with Iran?” 3 March 2026. Megyn Kelly’s “serious doubts” and Will Cain’s questioning reported ibid.

⁸⁵ Republican support for Iran strikes dropped from 69% (June 2025 operations) to 55% (March 2026) in Reuters-Ipsos polling. Forty-two percent of Republicans said they would be more likely to oppose the mission if US troops were killed or injured. CNN, op. cit.

⁸⁶ Fox News poll conducted by Beacon Research (left-leaning) and Shaw & Company Research (right-leaning), 28 February–2 March 2026, n=1,004 registered voters, margin of error ±3 percentage points. Fifty-one percent said Trump’s handling of Iran made the US less safe; twenty-nine percent said safer. Overall foreign policy approval: 40% approve, 60% disapprove. Newsweek, “Donald Trump’s Approval Rating for Iran War Ahead by Double Digits: Poll,” 6 March 2026.

⁸⁷ Trump’s repeated use of the word “excursion” to describe the Iran war reported by NPR, “New poll shows Americans are skeptical of Trump’s Iran war,” 11 March 2026. The pattern of euphemism is documented in Part One: Truman’s “police action” (Korea), Obama’s “kinetic military action” (Libya), and previous uses of “consistent with the War Powers Resolution.”

⁸⁸ NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll, op. cit. Thirty-six percent approve, fifty-four percent disapprove, of Trump’s handling of Iran.

⁸⁹ Al Busaidi’s post-war characterisation reported in Al Jazeera, “Oman renews push for diplomacy, says ‘off-ramps available’ in Iran war,” 3 March 2026. See Part One, endnote 55.

⁹⁰ President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address, 29 January 2002, designated Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” At the time, President Mohammad Khatami’s reformist government (1997–2005) had pursued a “Dialogue Among Civilizations” initiative, recognised by the United Nations, and had cooperated with the United States on intelligence sharing after the September 11 attacks. The “Axis of Evil” designation strengthened hardliners within Iran who had argued that engagement with the United States was futile and weakened the reformist movement that had won two consecutive presidential elections.

⁹¹ UNESCO data shows women account for approximately 35% of STEM graduates in Iran, compared to 12.7% in the United States as of 2021. In engineering, Iranian female enrolment has ranked first in the world; in science fields, second globally. UNESCO Institute for Statistics Data Browser; Snopes, “Checking claims about Iran’s female literacy, STEM graduate rates,” 26 June 2025; Purdue University School of Engineering Education, “The STEM Paradox: Why are Muslim-Majority Countries Producing So Many Female Engineers?”; Parhami, B., “Women in Science and Engineering: A Tale of Two Countries,” ASEE, 2021.

⁹² The Epstein Files Transparency Act was signed into law on 19 November 2025. The DOJ released 3.5 million pages by 1 February 2026, including over 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. Trump’s name appeared over 3,000 times in the released files. DOJ, “Department of Justice Publishes 3.5 Million Responsive Pages in Compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act,” 1 February 2026. Members of Congress viewing unredacted files reported content related to Trump: Rep. Maxwell Frost stated he had only “scratched the tip of the iceberg” but that “a lot of these did relate to Donald Trump” (Wikipedia, “Epstein Files Transparency Act,” citing contemporaneous reporting). On 6 March 2026, the DOJ released additional FBI documents describing a woman’s allegations of sexual assault by Trump as a teenager after introduction by Epstein: Al Jazeera, “Epstein files with claims against Trump released by US Justice Department,” 6 March 2026. Trump’s approval on handling the Epstein case stood at 23% in a December 2025 Reuters poll.

⁹³ Netanyahu’s press conference, 12 March 2026 — his first since the war began. He listed Israel’s campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran and declared Israel was becoming a “global superpower.” Al Jazeera, “Netanyahu says Israel ‘stronger than ever’ in first speech since Iran war,” 12 March 2026; GlobalSecurity.org, “Statement by PM Netanyahu — 7 March 2026” (full translated text of his earlier address); Times of Israel, “Netanyahu says he doesn’t know if Iranians will oust regime, threatens new supreme leader,” 12 March 2026.

⁹⁴ Pahlavi’s contact with the Trump administration via Steve Witkoff: NBC News, “An exiled crown prince says he can lead Iran to democracy, but Trump hasn’t endorsed him,” 25 January 2026; The Hill, “Iran’s exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi says he’s been in contact with Trump administration,” 14 March 2026. Pahlavi’s declaration of readiness to lead a “transitional system”: Fox News, “Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi announces readiness to lead Iran’s post-regime transition,” 14 March 2026. CPAC appearance: confirmed in The Hill, op. cit. CBS appearance calling for Trump to “intervene sooner”: CBS News, “Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi urges Trump to ‘intervene sooner’ so regime ‘finally collapses,’” 12 January 2026. The Nation described Pahlavi’s alliance with “an unsavory crew of authoritarians headed by US President Donald Trump, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”: The Nation, “Trump’s Regime Change Fantasy Involves Bringing Back the Shah,” 8 August 2025.

⁹⁵ The 1953 CIA-MI6 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (Operation Ajax / Operation Boot) is extensively documented. The CIA formally acknowledged its role in 2013. See Britannica, “1953 coup in Iran”; National Security Archive, “CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup”; Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations (The New Press, 2013). Mossadegh had nationalised Iran’s oil industry in 1951. The coup installed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose dictatorship lasted until the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Just for fun.

Thirteen American service members are dead.² Six of them — reservists from Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Florida, California — were killed on the first of March when an Iranian drone struck a makeshift operations centre at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait.³ They were not combat troops storming a beachhead. They were logistics personnel, sustainment soldiers, the people who keep the machinery running. Four of them had served together in Kuwait in 2019. They knew each other’s families.⁴ Captain Cody Khork, thirty-five, from Winter Haven, Florida — his family called him “the life of the party.” Sergeant First Class Noah Tietjens, forty-two, from Bellevue, Nebraska — a mentor who “made you feel important,” whose twelve-year-old son is now growing up without a father. Sergeant Declan Coady, twenty, from West Des Moines — the youngest, promoted posthumously to a rank he will never wear, studying cybersecurity at Drake University between shifts. He had been texting his family updates every hour. When the texts stopped, his father said, “Your gut starts to get a feeling.”⁵

On the eighth of March, Sergeant Benjamin Pennington, twenty-six, from Glendale, Kentucky, died of wounds sustained at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia on the first of March. He had held on for seven days. Flags in Hardin County flew at half-staff.⁶

Then, on the twelfth of March, a KC-135 Stratotanker — call sign Zeus 95 — went down over western Iraq. Six aircrew.⁷ Major Alex Klinner, thirty-three, from Auburn, Alabama, left behind seven-month-old twins and a two-year-old son. His brother-in-law said the hardest thing to say was also the simplest: “He was just a really good dad.” Captain Ariana Savino, thirty-one, had only earned her pilot wings the year before. Technical Sergeant Tyler Simmons, twenty-eight, had what his family called a “million-dollar smile.”⁸

Thirteen families who will set one fewer place at the table. Children who will grow up knowing their mother or father only from photographs and the stories other people tell. That is the cost of this war on the American side, and it is real, and it deserves to be named.

Now turn the mirror.

Iran’s Health Ministry reports more than fourteen hundred people killed since the twenty-eighth of February. Over eighteen thousand injured. In Tehran alone, ten thousand homes have been damaged or destroyed.⁹ A school was struck — a hundred and seventy-five students and teachers killed.¹⁰ Secretary of War Hegseth boasts that more than fifteen thousand “enemy targets” have been struck.¹¹ Targets. He does not say homes. He does not say schools. He does not say the bakery on the corner where a man bought bread for his children every morning before the morning there was no bakery and no man and no children. The language of targeting does what it is designed to do: it makes people disappear before you have to look at what you did to them.

And the man who commands this machinery — who holds the power to end it or to escalate it, who bears the constitutional responsibility for every life spent in its execution — describes bombing a sovereign nation’s economic infrastructure as something he might do again “just for fun.”

This is not a policy disagreement. It is a window into something deeper. “Just for fun” is the language of a man who has never personally absorbed the cost of a single decision he has made. Not in business, where bankruptcy was a strategy and other people lost their homes. Not in politics, where cruelty is a brand and other people bear the consequences. Not in war, where the dead are props for a rally and their parents are told to be proud. When you have spent your entire adult life insulated from consequences — by money, by lawyers, by subordinates paid to absorb the damage — other people’s suffering becomes abstract. Entertainment. Content. Fun.

And it is not just the President. It is the administration. In the first two weeks of the war, the White House posted a series of videos to its official social media accounts that spliced real footage of American strikes on Iran with gameplay from Call of Duty, complete with the game’s “+100” kill score notifications superimposed over actual explosions. One video opened with a Grand Theft Auto meme — “Ah shit, here we go again” — before cutting to live strike footage. Another showed a real bombing followed by a clip from SpongeBob SquarePants in which the cartoon character asks, “do you want to see me do it again?” before showing another strike. A third flashed the word “wasted” — Grand Theft Auto’s kill confirmation — over footage of a real attack on what appeared to be an Iranian vehicle. A fourth ended with audio from Mortal Kombat: “Flawless victory.”¹² The White House posted these videos while the Department of War was investigating whether American forces had bombed an elementary school in Minab that killed a hundred and seventy-five people, most of them schoolgirls between the ages of seven and twelve.¹³

Senator Tammy Duckworth — a combat veteran who lost both legs in Iraq — responded: “War is not a f*cking video game. Six Americans are dead and thousands more are at needless risk because of your illegal, unjustified war. And you’re calling this a flawless victory.”¹⁴

She is right. And the gamification is not incidental to the pathology. It is the pathology. When a government presents the killing of human beings in the visual language of entertainment — when it borrows the reward mechanics of games designed to make violence pleasurable — it is not just failing to take the war seriously. It is actively training its own population not to feel what is being done in their name. The “+100” hovering over a real explosion does not inform. It anaesthetises. It turns the viewer into a spectator, then into a player, then into someone for whom the next strike is not a moral event but a content drop. This is what happens when a nation’s leadership has no personal connection to the cost of war. It becomes a brand exercise. A content strategy. Fun.

But “just for fun” is not merely callous. It has a legal name. Kharg Island is not a military installation. It is the economic lifeline of more than ninety million people — the terminal through which the oil revenues flow that pay for food, for medicine, for the infrastructure that keeps a nation functioning. Bombing it does not hurt the regime. The ayatollahs have bunkers and reserves and alternative supply chains. The shopkeeper in Isfahan does not. The mother in Shiraz who cannot afford bread because the economy has been severed at its artery does not. When you bomb a nation’s economic infrastructure to pressure its government, it is the population that absorbs the damage. Every time. Without exception.

This is not a novel observation. It is a pattern so consistent it should disqualify the strategy on its own merits. Sanctions on Iraq did not topple Saddam Hussein — they killed hundreds of thousands of children while the regime built palaces.¹⁵ The blockade on Gaza did not weaken Hamas — it radicalised a generation while civilians went hungry. In every case, the logic is the same: punish the population until they rise up against their rulers. In every case, the result is the opposite: a starving population does not rise up. It survives. The regime becomes the only entity with the resources to distribute what remains, the population becomes more dependent on it, not less, and whatever energy might have fuelled resistance is spent instead on finding the next meal, the next dose of medicine, the next safe place to sleep. You cannot bomb and starve a people into revolution. You can only bomb and starve them into submission — and the entity they submit to is the one you claimed to be fighting. It is not just cruel. It is strategically illiterate. And under international humanitarian law, it has a specific name: collective punishment. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits it explicitly.¹⁶ Targeting civilian economic infrastructure to coerce a population is not a grey area. It is a war crime.

Declan Coady was twenty years old. He was not fun. He was a person. Alex Klinner’s twins are seven months old. They are not content. They are children who will never know their father’s voice. And somewhere in Tehran, a mother is pulling her daughter’s school uniform from the rubble, and she is not an enemy target. She is a human being whose government and whose attackers have both failed her.

Was any of this legal?

That is the question this article exists to answer. Not whether it was popular. Not whether Iran’s regime deserved to fall. Not whether the strikes were strategically effective. Whether they were lawful — under the Constitution that every one of those thirteen service members swore to support and defend, and under the international order that the United States itself built and once claimed to lead.

The answer, on both counts, is no.

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The Constitution

The text is not ambiguous. Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution grants Congress — and Congress alone — the power to declare war. Not the President. Not the Pentagon. Not the Secretary of War. Congress. The Founders were explicit about this, and they were explicit for a reason: they had lived under a king who could send men to die on his own authority, and they designed a system to ensure that no American executive would ever hold that power unchecked. The decision to go to war — to spend the lives of citizens in organised violence against another nation — was to be made by the representatives of the people, not by one man in one room.

The last time Congress formally declared war was 1942.¹⁷

Every American conflict since — Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Iran — has been waged without a declaration of war. This is not a minor constitutional footnote. It is the single most consequential erosion of democratic authority in the history of the republic, and it has been built brick by brick, by presidents of both parties, over eighty-three years.

The erosion began in 1950, when President Truman committed American forces to Korea under a United Nations Security Council resolution and called it a “police action.” He never asked Congress for authorisation. Congress never demanded it. Thirty-six thousand, five hundred and seventy-four Americans died in a police action.¹⁸ The constitutional question went largely unasked, and the silence was read as consent.

In 1964, President Johnson persuaded Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution — an authorisation based on a naval incident that, as subsequent investigation revealed, did not happen as described.¹⁹ That resolution was used to escalate American involvement in Vietnam to the point where over five hundred thousand troops were deployed and nearly fifty-eight thousand Americans were killed. It was not a declaration of war. It functioned as one. And when it was over, Congress recognised that it had allowed a president to fight a full-scale war under authorities that looked nothing like what the Constitution required — and that the power to decide when America goes to war had been quietly stripped from the institution the Founders had entrusted with it.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was Congress’s attempt to reclaim its authority, passed over President Nixon’s veto after the revelation of secret bombings in Cambodia that Congress had never authorised.²⁰ The Resolution required the president to notify Congress within forty-eight hours of committing forces to hostilities and to withdraw those forces within sixty days unless Congress granted authorisation. It was meant to be a constraint. In practice, it became a licence. Before 1973, any military action without congressional approval was constitutionally suspect. After 1973, presidents claimed an automatic sixty-day window for any operation they chose to define as “limited.” The tool designed to check executive war-making inadvertently expanded it.

And every subsequent president tested the boundary further. Reagan deployed troops to Lebanon in 1982 without citing the War Powers Resolution and did not seek congressional authorisation until after service members had already died. Clinton bombed Kosovo in 1999 and continued the campaign for more than two weeks past the sixty-day deadline, arguing that congressional funding constituted implicit authorisation — even though the War Powers Resolution explicitly states that funding alone does not constitute authorisation. Obama bombed Libya in 2011 for seven months, calling it “kinetic military action“ rather than war and claiming American involvement was “limited“ — while the United States was conducting seventy-five percent of all aerial refuelling sorties and seventy percent of the operation’s intelligence and surveillance.²¹ In his first term, Trump struck Syria without authorisation and assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq, calling it a defensive action.²²

Each violation made the next one easier. Each congressional failure to act was read by the executive as permission. Each creative legal fiction — “police action,” “kinetic military action,” “consistent with the War Powers Resolution” — expanded the zone of presidential authority until the exception became the rule.

But what is happening in Iran is not another incremental expansion. It is the pattern’s logical endpoint.

On the twenty-eighth of February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a full-scale military campaign against a sovereign nation. The operation — designated “Epic Fury” — has included the sustained bombing of military and civilian infrastructure, the assassination of a head of state, the destruction of a nation’s economic lifeline, and the explicit pursuit of regime change. The President has stated that military operations could continue for four to five weeks or longer.²³ Thirteen American service members are dead. Over a hundred and forty have been wounded.²⁴ This is not a limited engagement. It is a war by any definition the Founders would have recognised.

And Congress did not authorise it.

Trump’s war powers report, submitted to Congress on the second of March, relies on the President’s authority under Article II of the Constitution — his power as Commander in Chief.²⁵ It does not invoke the 2001 Authorisation for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which covers al-Qaeda and the Taliban and has no application to Iran. It does not invoke the 2002 Iraq AUMF, which was repealed. It does not invoke any statutory authorisation at all, because none exists. The legal basis for this war is the President’s assertion that he has the inherent constitutional authority to launch it. Nothing more.

Constitutional scholars across the political spectrum have rejected this claim. Oona Hathaway, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and former special counsel at the Department of Defense, has called the strikes “blatantly illegal” and stated that for the president to make the decision to go to war “unilaterally, without going to the Security Council, without going to Congress, and putting U.S. troops and allies at risk is really extraordinary and clearly unlawful.”²⁶ Iran did not attack the United States. The strikes of the twenty-eighth of February were not defensive. They were offensive, pre-planned, and launched while diplomatic negotiations were still underway. Even under the most permissive reading of Article II — the Office of Legal Counsel’s own framework, which allows presidential action where it serves “sufficiently important national interests” and does not constitute a “prolonged and substantial military engagement”²⁷ — a weeks-long bombing campaign that has killed a head of state and destabilised an entire region cannot plausibly be called limited.

Congress had the tools to stop this. The War Powers Resolution provides a fast-track process for exactly this situation. On the fourth of March, the Senate voted on a resolution that would have required the President to obtain congressional authorisation for further military action in Iran. It failed, 47 to 53, along party lines.²⁸ The following day, the House voted on a similar resolution. It failed, 212 to 219.²⁹ Congress did not authorise this war. But it also refused to end it. The effect is the same as Truman’s Korea: silence read as consent, and consent treated as authorisation.

This is what eighty-three years of erosion produces. A president can now launch a full-scale war against a sovereign nation, kill its head of state, bomb its economic infrastructure, pursue regime change, and lose American service members in the process — all without a single vote of Congress authorising the action. The constitutional power to declare war has not been repealed. It has been abandoned. Not by amendment, not by judicial decision, but by the slow, bipartisan accumulation of precedents, each one a little larger than the last, until the original design is unrecognisable.

Every one of those thirteen dead service members swore an oath. The same oath every American in uniform takes: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” They kept their oath. The question is whether the government that sent them to die kept its.

International Law

The constitutional case is damning. The international case is worse.

The United States did not build the post-war international legal order by accident. It built it deliberately, after two world wars had demonstrated what happens when powerful nations treat the sovereignty of weaker nations as optional. The United Nations Charter, signed in San Francisco in 1945, was America’s answer to the catastrophe of the first half of the twentieth century. Its foundational principle is simple: states do not get to bomb other states.

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.³⁰ There are exactly two exceptions. The first is authorisation by the UN Security Council under Chapter VII.³¹ The second is self-defence under Article 51, which preserves “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs.”³²

Neither exception applies to the war in Iran.

No Security Council resolution authorised the strikes of the twenty-eighth of February. None was sought. None could have been obtained — Russia and China would have vetoed any such resolution, and the United States knew it. The multilateral framework that America itself designed to legitimise the use of force was simply bypassed.

The self-defence argument fails on its own terms. Article 51 requires an armed attack — or, under the most expansive interpretation, an imminent one. Iran did not attack the United States. Iran did not attack Israel. Iran was, at the time the strikes were launched, engaged in diplomatic negotiations with the United States through Omani mediation. The standard for anticipatory self-defence in customary international law — the Caroline Doctrine, formulated in 1837 and reaffirmed at Nuremberg — requires that the necessity of self-defence be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.”³³ A pre-planned military campaign launched two days after the most intensive round of diplomatic negotiations does not meet this standard. It does not come close.

The administration has pointed to Iran’s nuclear programme, its ballistic missile development, and its support for proxy forces as justifications for the strikes.³⁴ These are grievances. They may even be legitimate grievances. But under international law, grievances — however serious — do not authorise the use of force. If they did, any nation with a sufficiently long list of complaints about its neighbour could bomb it at will. The prohibition on the use of force exists precisely to prevent powerful states from acting as judge, jury, and executioner against weaker ones. The United States understood this in 1945. It wrote the rule.

The distinction between preventive war and pre-emptive self-defence matters here, and the administration has blurred it deliberately. Pre-emptive self-defence — striking first when an attack is genuinely imminent — has a narrow and contested legal basis. Preventive war — striking to eliminate a potential future threat — has none. The International Court of Justice has never endorsed it. The UN Charter does not permit it. The Nuremberg Tribunal, at which the United States served as chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes, classified the waging of aggressive war as “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”³⁵ That language was not directed at a hypothetical. It was directed at states that launched wars of choice against sovereign nations.

The international response has confirmed the illegality, even in unprecedented fashion among traditional allies. French President Emmanuel Macron stated on the fourth of March that the strikes were conducted “outside the framework of international law, which we cannot approve.”³⁶ Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez rejected the strikes outright, refused the use of Spanish military bases, and called the war an escalation that “contributes to a more uncertain and hostile international order.”³⁷ Trump threatened to cut off all trade with Spain in response.³⁸ British Prime Minister Keir Starmer initially refused to allow UK bases to be used for offensive operations — a decision that drew public criticism from Trump, who said it took “far too long.” Starmer reversed his position on the first of March, citing the need to protect three hundred thousand British civilians in the region and to defend allied countries under Iranian retaliation. Hours later, a drone struck RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. The UK Ministry of Defence later confirmed the drone was not launched from Iran — it was likely fired by Hezbollah from Lebanon, caused minimal damage, and produced no casualties.³⁹ Nonetheless, Starmer used the strike and the broader threat to British lives to justify opening Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford to US bombers for supposedly ‘defensive’ strikes on Iranian missile sites. Russia called the strikes “a deliberate, premeditated, and unprovoked act of armed aggression” and “a betrayal of diplomacy.”⁴⁰ China’s Foreign Ministry stated that the strikes “have no UN Security Council authorization and violate international law,” while Foreign Minister Wang Yi called it “unacceptable for the U.S. and Israel to launch attacks against Iran in the process of the ongoing Iran-U.S. negotiations, still less to blatantly attack and kill the leader of a sovereign country.”⁴¹ Switzerland accused the United States and Israel of violating international law.⁴² Norway emphasised the illegality of the war.⁴³ At the UN Security Council, China’s ambassador declared the conflict had “neither legitimacy nor legal basis.”⁴⁴ A hundred and thirty-five countries co-sponsored a Security Council resolution on the crisis — reportedly the largest number of co-sponsors in Security Council history.⁴⁵ The European Council on Foreign Relations concluded that there is “little question that the US and Israeli war against Iran is an unlawful act of aggression” and noted that “no European leader has argued the war is lawful.”⁴⁶ Professor Mohamed Arafa, writing in JURIST, described the strikes as violations of “both US constitutional law and foundational international norms, setting a dangerous precedent for unchecked executive war-making.”⁴⁷

No allied government has called this war legal. No adversarial government has called it legal. No neutral government has called it legal. Not one.

And the proportionality question compounds the illegality. Even if one were to accept — for the sake of argument — that some limited defensive action against Iranian military assets could be justified, the scope of Operation Epic Fury obliterates any proportionality defence. This is not a targeted strike on a missile launcher. It is a sustained bombing campaign that has killed over fourteen hundred people, destroyed ten thousand homes in Tehran alone, struck a girls’ school, assassinated a head of state, bombed civilian economic infrastructure, and pursued explicit regime change. The principle of proportionality under international humanitarian law requires that the harm to civilians not be excessive in relation to the concrete military advantage anticipated.⁴⁸ A campaign that bombs an oil terminal “just for fun” is not calibrating proportionality. It has abandoned the concept entirely.

The law is not ambiguous. The United States waged aggressive war against a sovereign nation without Security Council authorisation, without an armed attack to trigger self-defence, without imminence, and without proportionality. It did so while negotiations were underway. It did so against the explicit objections of its closest European allies. And it did so in violation of the legal order that the United States itself created to prevent exactly this from happening.

What is being demonstrated in Iran is not a modern exercise of power. It is a sixteenth-century mindset operating with twenty-first-century weapons — the logic of conquest dressed in the language of counterterrorism. The international legal order was built to move humanity past that logic. If it can be discarded whenever a sufficiently powerful state decides a sufficiently villainous regime deserves it, then it was never law at all. It was permission — granted by the strong to themselves, and revocable at will.

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The Precedent

There is a question that runs beneath the legal arguments — beneath the constitutional text and the UN Charter and the Caroline Doctrine and the Nuremberg judgment. It is the question that the people cheering this war have not asked, because asking it would require them to think past the next news cycle.

The question is: what happens when it is your turn?

International law is not an abstraction that exists to protect distant countries and foreign people. It is the infrastructure that protects everyone — including the nation that is currently powerful enough to ignore it.

This is not a foreign concept imposed on the United States from outside. It is the foundational American idea — taken to its logical international conclusion. Aristotle said it first: “It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens.”⁴⁹ Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, made it the cornerstone of the American revolution: “In America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”⁵⁰ John Adams enshrined it in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 as “a government of laws, and not of men” — a phrase that became one of the foundational principles of American constitutional theory.⁵¹ The post-war international legal order was nothing more than the extension of this principle beyond national borders: the belief that relations between states, like relations between citizens, should be governed by law rather than by the will of the most powerful. The United States did not merely sign that order. It authored it. And it was this — not the aircraft carriers, not the nuclear arsenal, not the size of the economy — that made the world look up to America after 1945. The idea that the most powerful nation on earth would voluntarily submit itself to the same rules it asked others to follow. That was the source of American moral authority. I still have friends in Europe who believe in this vision of America — who grew up admiring what it represented, not what it could destroy. What is happening in Iran is the author tearing up its own manuscript, and with it, the reason anyone ever looked up to it in the first place. The prohibition on aggressive war does not exist because Iran deserves protection. It exists because the alternative — a world in which any state strong enough to bomb another state may do so whenever it decides the cause is sufficient — is a world in which no state is safe. Not even the strongest one. Especially not the strongest one, because the strongest one has the most enemies and the most to lose when the rules collapse.

The person cheering the bombing of Tehran today is the person who will need international law tomorrow. They will need it when a rising power decides that American military bases on its border constitute an intolerable provocation. They will need it when an adversary concludes that American sanctions amount to economic warfare justifying a military response. They will need it when the precedent set by Operation Epic Fury — that a sufficiently powerful state may launch a war of regime change against a sovereign nation without legal authorisation, while negotiations are still underway — is cited by someone else, against someone else, in a conflict that does not serve American interests. Precedents do not belong to the nations that set them. They belong to everyone who comes after.

And there is a darker question that no one in Washington seems willing to ask. The United States has now established that a sufficiently powerful state may assassinate another nation’s head of state as part of a campaign of regime change. What happens when America is no longer the most powerful state in the room? What happens when decades of military adventurism, economic overextension, and the slow erosion of alliances have weakened the republic to the point where another power — or a coalition of powers — decides that the American government itself constitutes a threat requiring removal? The protocols exist to prevent a decapitation strike on American leadership. But protocols are technical solutions to a problem that is, at its root, political. The real protection was never the bunkers or the continuity-of-government plans. It was the norm — the international consensus that heads of state are not legitimate military targets, that sovereignty means something, that regime change by force is the one thing powerful nations agreed not to do to each other. That norm is now in ruins. The United States shattered it. And the shards do not care who picks them up.

This is not speculation. It is the lesson of every international order that has ever been dismantled by the nation that built it. Rome did not fall to barbarians at the gates. It fell because it had spent centuries treating its own rules as optional — applying them to its subjects while exempting itself — until the rules meant nothing and there was no structure left to hold the empire together. The post-war order that the United States built in 1945 was designed to prevent precisely this cycle. And it worked — imperfectly, inconsistently, with glaring failures and shameful exceptions — but it worked well enough to prevent a third world war for eighty years. What is being tested in Iran is not whether the ayatollahs survive. It is whether that order survives. And if it does not, the nation that will suffer most from its collapse is the one that is currently tearing it apart.

The people who have abandoned their respect for law — who have decided that the rules are a constraint on American power rather than a foundation of American security — have made a calculation. They have calculated that the United States will always be the strongest. That no coalition will ever form against it. That no precedent it sets will ever be turned against it. That is not a strategic assessment. It is a fantasy. And it is the same fantasy that every empire in history has entertained in the years before it discovered that the rules it broke were the ones holding it up.

And here is where the legal case and the moral case converge into something that should keep every honest observer awake at night.

On the twenty-fifth of February 2026, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated publicly that a “historic” agreement with the United States to avert military conflict was “within reach.”⁵² On the twenty-sixth of February, a third round of indirect talks took place in Geneva, mediated by Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi. On the twenty-seventh of February — one day before the strikes began — Al Busaidi appeared on CBS News and told the American people that a “peace deal is within our reach.”⁵³ He disclosed that Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium, to downgrade its existing stockpiles to the lowest level possible, and to submit to full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency. He called it “a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved in previous rounds of negotiations.”⁵⁴ This was not an Obama-era concession being reheated. This was a commitment that went beyond what the JCPOA had secured — zero stockpiling, full IAEA verification, irreversible downgrading of enriched uranium. It was, by any honest measure, a diplomatic victory for the Trump administration. The President had a win on the table. Additional talks were scheduled for the following Monday in Vienna.

They never took place. On the twenty-eighth of February, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury.

Oman’s foreign minister — the man who had spent weeks shuttling between the two sides, who had staked his country’s credibility on the negotiations — later said that the war was not prompted by an imminent threat. It was “solely an attempt to reorder the Middle East in Israel’s favour.”⁵⁵ Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesperson called the strikes “an attack on the very principle of mediation.”⁵⁶

Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, noted the unprecedented nature of Al Busaidi’s CBS appearance and suggested that the Omani foreign minister went public deliberately — “so that the American people knew that peace was within reach when Trump instead opted for war.”⁵⁷

Only twenty-one percent of Americans supported initiating an attack on Iran.⁵⁸ The negotiations were producing results that went beyond what the Obama-era JCPOA had achieved. Iran was at the table. The mediator was telling the world that a deal was close. And the President of the United States chose war anyway.

This is not a story about law in the abstract. It is a story about thirteen families who will never be whole again, about fourteen hundred Iranian dead who did not choose this war, about a school full of girls between the ages of seven and twelve who were alive on the morning of the twenty-eighth of February and dead by the afternoon. It is a story about a world that built rules to prevent exactly this, and a nation that decided the rules did not apply to it.

The law is not ambiguous. The war is illegal. The question is whether that still means anything — and if it does not, what we have become.

The legal case is clear. But law alone has never stopped a war that enough people wanted. Millions of Americans support this one, and they have reasons — the nuclear threat, the theological mandate, the media narrative, the political calculation. In Part Two, we examine each of those reasons on its own terms.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

terms.

Endnotes

¹ Trump interview with NBC News, 15 March 2026. Trump stated that US forces had struck Kharg Island and added, “we may hit it a few more times just for fun.” Reported by NPR, CNN, and others.

² As of 16 March 2026, thirteen US service members have been killed in Operation Epic Fury: seven by enemy action, six in a KC-135 crash under investigation. An additional service member, Major Sorffly Davius, 46, died of a medical incident at Camp Buehring, Kuwait. Approximately 140 have been wounded, eight severely. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell confirmed the figures to TIME on 10 March 2026.

³ US Central Command statement, 1 March 2026. The drone struck a tactical operations centre at Port Shuaiba, Kuwait. All six soldiers were assigned to the 103rd Sustainment Command, Army Reserve, Des Moines, Iowa.

⁴ Retired US Army Colonel Josef Sujet, then chief of staff of the 103rd Sustainment Command, told CNN that four of the six soldiers had previously served together in Kuwait in 2019. CNN, “Many of the six US troops killed in the war with Iran served together years earlier in Kuwait,” 6 March 2026.

⁵ Soldier identifications, biographical details, and family statements drawn from: Pentagon identification statements, 4–5 March 2026; NPR, “Iran war: Pentagon ID’s last 2 of the 6 U.S. soldiers killed in Kuwait attack,” 4 March 2026; CBS News, “Pentagon releases names of 6 U.S. Army Reserve soldiers killed during the ongoing war with Iran,” 4 March 2026; CNN, “Many of the six US troops killed in the war with Iran served together years earlier in Kuwait,” 6 March 2026; NBC News, “What we know about the U.S. service members killed in the Iran war,” 5 March 2026.

⁶ CNN, “Seventh US service member killed in Iran war is identified as Army sergeant,” 8 March 2026. Pennington was assigned to 1st Space Battalion, 1st Space Brigade, Fort Carson, Colorado. He was wounded at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia, on 1 March and died on 8 March.

⁷ US Central Command statement, 13 March 2026. The KC-135 Stratotanker crashed in western Iraq during Operation Epic Fury. Call sign: Zeus 95. The crash involved two aircraft; the second landed safely. CENTCOM stated the loss was not due to hostile or friendly fire. The incident is under investigation. An Iranian proxy group claimed responsibility but provided no evidence.

⁸ Crew identifications and biographical details drawn from: Pentagon identification statement, 14 March 2026; Air & Space Forces Magazine, “Six Airmen Dead in KC-135 Crash During Iran Ops,” 15 March 2026; CNN, “Pentagon identifies six airmen killed in plane crash in Iraq,” 14 March 2026; Military Times, “Pentagon identifies six airmen killed in KC-135 crash in Iraq,” 15 March 2026. Klinner’s family details from GoFundMe page and family statements reported by CNN and Times of Israel.

⁹ Iran’s Health Ministry figures as reported by Al Jazeera, “Iran war: What is happening on day 16 of US-Israel attacks?” 15 March 2026. Tehran damage figure from Tehran’s governor, reported in the same article.

¹⁰ The strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Hormozgan province, occurred on 28 February 2026. Iranian authorities reported 175 killed; the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights stated victims were mainly girls aged between 7 and 12. Multiple investigations — by the New York Times, NPR, BBC Verify, CNN, and Al Jazeera — concluded the United States was likely responsible, with evidence pointing to a US Tomahawk cruise missile. A preliminary Pentagon investigation determined the strike resulted from outdated targeting coordinates provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency. Sources: UN OHCHR press release, 3 March 2026; CNN, “US strike likely hit school in Minab, Iran due to outdated intelligence,” 11 March 2026; NPR, “Pentagon probe points to U.S. missile hitting Iranian school,” 11 March 2026; TIME, “More Than 100 School Children Were Killed in Iran. Evidence Points to a U.S. Missile Strike,” 11 March 2026.

¹¹ Al Jazeera, “Iran war: What is happening on day 16 of US-Israel attacks?” 15 March 2026, citing Secretary of War Hegseth’s claim that more than 15,000 “enemy targets” had been struck.

¹² White House video game footage: ABC News, “White House posts so-called ‘hype’ videos combining real Iran war footage alongside movie, video game clips,” 7 March 2026; CNN, “White House posts video about Iran strikes using ‘Call of Duty’ video game footage,” 5 March 2026; Truthout, “White House Propaganda Videos Splice Horrific Iran War Footage With Video Games,” 7 March 2026; France 24, “White House releases video montages gamifying Iran war on social media,” 7 March 2026; Courthouse News Service, “’Not on the bingo card’: Use of Call of Duty footage for Iran war hype raises eyebrows,” 5 March 2026; Axios, “How America gamified its war with Iran,” 14 March 2026.

¹³ See endnote 10. The White House videos were posted between 5 and 7 March 2026. Secretary of War Hegseth announced a formal investigation into the Minab school strike on 13 March 2026. Fox News, “Hegseth announces probe of US role in strike at girls school in Minab, Iran,” 13 March 2026.

¹⁴ Senator Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth), X post, 6 March 2026, quote-tweeting the White House account’s “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY” video.

¹⁵ UNICEF estimated that sanctions on Iraq contributed to the deaths of approximately 500,000 children under five between 1991 and 1998. The figure has been debated by scholars, but the broad consensus is that sanctions caused mass civilian suffering while the regime remained intact. See: UNICEF, “Child and Maternal Mortality Survey 1999”; Richard Garfield, “Morbidity and Mortality among Iraqi Children from 1990 through 1998,” Fourth Freedom Forum, 1999.

¹⁶ Geneva Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, 12 August 1949, Article 33: “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”

¹⁷ The United States declared war on Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania on 5 June 1942, the final formal declarations of war issued by Congress. See: National Archives, “Declarations of War and Authorizations for the Use of Military Force.”

¹⁸ Korean War casualty figures from the Department of Defense, Defense Casualty Analysis System.

¹⁹ The Gulf of Tonkin incident of 4 August 1964 — the alleged second attack on the USS Maddox — was later determined to have likely not occurred. The NSA’s own declassified internal history, published in 2005, concluded that the signals intelligence used to justify the resolution was flawed. See: Robert J. Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964,” Cryptologic Quarterly, declassified 2005.

²⁰ War Powers Resolution, 50 U.S.C. §§ 1541–1548, enacted 7 November 1973 over President Nixon’s veto.

²¹ US involvement in the 2011 Libya intervention: the seventy-five percent aerial refuelling and seventy percent intelligence figures are from congressional testimony and Department of Defense reporting, as cited in the War Powers Resolution article on Wikipedia and PBS reporting. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified in March 2011 that the administration did not need congressional authorisation. Obama’s characterisation of the operation as not constituting “hostilities” was widely reported.

²² Trump ordered airstrikes on Syria in April 2017 and April 2018 without congressional authorisation. The assassination of General Qasem Soleimani occurred on 3 January 2020 at Baghdad International Airport. Trump cited the 2002 Iraq AUMF and Article II authority. See: Oona Hathaway, “The Soleimani Strike Defied the U.S. Constitution,” The Atlantic, 4 January 2020.

²³ Trump stated on 3 March 2026 that military operations could last “four to five weeks, but we have capability to go far longer than that.” NPR, “6 U.S. soldiers have been killed as the war with Iran further engulfs the region,” 2 March 2026.

²⁴ Casualty and wounded figures confirmed by Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell to TIME, 10 March 2026. TIME, “What We Know About the U.S. Service Members Killed in the Iran War,” 10 March 2026.

²⁵ Lawfare, “The Law of Going to War with Iran, Redux,” March 2026. The article confirms that Trump’s 2 March war powers report relies on Article II authority alone, not any statutory enactment such as the 2001 AUMF. The 2002 Iraq AUMF was repealed in 2024.

²⁶ Hathaway called the strikes “blatantly illegal” in an X post on 28 February 2026, reported by FactCheck.org, “Legality of Latest Iran Attack in Question,” March 2026, and the Yale Daily News. Her extended quote — “For the president to make that decision unilaterally, without going to the Security Council, without going to Congress, and putting U.S. troops and allies at risk is really extraordinary and clearly unlawful” — from The New Republic, “Congress Won’t Act on the Iran Strikes. That Doesn’t Make Them Legal,” June 2025, addressing the earlier Twelve-Day War strikes but with legal analysis applying with greater force to the February 2026 campaign. See also: The Hill, “Trump’s murky legal landscape on attacking Iran,” March 2026.

²⁷ The Office of Legal Counsel framework — allowing presidential use of force where it serves “sufficiently important national interests” and does not constitute a “prolonged and substantial military engagement” — is discussed in Lawfare, “The Law of Going to War with Iran, Redux,” March 2026, and in FactCheck.org, “Legality of Latest Iran Attack in Question,” March 2026.

²⁸ Constitution Center, “Does the War Powers Resolution debate take on a new context in the Iran conflict?” March 2026. The Senate rejected the war powers resolution 47–53 on 4 March 2026.

²⁹ Al Jazeera, “US House narrowly rejects resolution to end Trump’s Iran war,” 5 March 2026. The House voted 219–212 against the resolution.

³⁰ Charter of the United Nations, Article 2(4): “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

³¹ Charter of the United Nations, Chapter VII, Articles 39–51.

³² Charter of the United Nations, Article 51: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”

³³ The Caroline test, formulated in diplomatic correspondence between US Secretary of State Daniel Webster and British envoy Lord Ashburton in 1842, following the destruction of the American steamboat Caroline in 1837. Webster stated that a self-defence claimant must show “a necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” The standard was reaffirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal. See: Yale Law School Avalon Project, “British-American Diplomacy: The Caroline Case.”

³⁴ Trump’s war powers report to Congress, 2 March 2026, stated that strikes were undertaken “to protect United States forces in the region, protect the United States homeland, advance vital United States national interests, including ensuring the free flow of maritime commerce through the Strait of Hormuz, and in collective self-defense of our regional allies, including Israel.” Reported by FactCheck.org, “Legality of Latest Iran Attack in Question,” March 2026.

³⁵ International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Judgment, 1 October 1946: “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

³⁶ Macron’s televised address, 4 March 2026: “The United States of America and Israel have decided to launch military operations, conducted outside of international law, which we cannot approve.” Reported by Al Jazeera, “France walks ‘fine line’ as US-Israel war on Iran escalates,” 12 March 2026; Ynet News, “Macron slams US-Israeli strikes on Iran, sends flagship aircraft carrier to Middle East,” 4 March 2026; The Telegraph via Yahoo News, “Macron: Strikes against Iran are illegal,” 4 March 2026.

³⁷ Sánchez statement on X, 28 February 2026, rejecting “the unilateral military action by the United States and Israel, which represents an escalation and contributes to a more uncertain and hostile international order.” Spain refused the use of Spanish military bases for strikes on Iran. Reported by Reuters via NewsNation, “World leaders react to Iran military strikes,” 28 February 2026; European Council on Foreign Relations, “War over law: Europe’s unforced errors over the use of force in Iran,” 12 March 2026.

³⁸ Trump stated on 4 March 2026 that he had ordered his Treasury chief to look into cutting “off all trade” with Spain. Reported by The Telegraph via Yahoo News, “Macron: Strikes against Iran are illegal,” 4 March 2026.

³⁹ Starmer initially refused to allow UK bases to be used for offensive action, a decision Trump publicly criticised. He reversed on 1 March, citing the protection of 300,000 British civilians and allied countries under attack. The drone strike on RAF Akrotiri occurred hours later, shortly after midnight on 2 March. The UK Ministry of Defence confirmed the Shahed-type drone was not launched from Iran; officials believe it was fired from Lebanon by Hezbollah. It caused minimal damage and no casualties. Sources: TIME, “British Base Hit in Cyprus, Drones Downed as Iran War Widens,” 2 March 2026; Middle East Eye, “UK says drone attack on Cyprus base was not launched from Iran,” 5 March 2026; Al Jazeera, “Starmer lets US use bases for Iran clash: UK’s military, legal quagmire,” 2 March 2026; Wikipedia, “United Kingdom involvement in the 2026 Iran war,” accessed 16 March 2026; House of Commons Library, “US-Israel strikes on Iran: February/March 2026,” research briefing, March 2026.

⁴⁰ Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia at the UN Security Council emergency session, 1 March 2026, called the strikes “a deliberate, premeditated, and unprovoked act of armed aggression against a sovereign and independent Member State, in violation of the UN Charter and international law” and “a betrayal of diplomacy.” UN News, “Iran strikes ‘squandered a chance for diplomacy’: Guterres,” 1 March 2026; Security Council Report, “Emergency Meeting on the Military Escalation in the Middle East,” 28 February 2026.

⁴¹ Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning stated on 2 March 2026 that “the U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iran have no UN Security Council authorization and violate international law.” Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated it was “unacceptable for the U.S. and Israel to launch attacks against Iran in the process of the ongoing Iran-U.S. negotiations, still less to blatantly attack and kill the leader of a sovereign country and instigate government change.” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, press conferences of 2 and 3 March 2026.

⁴² Swiss Defence Minister Martin Pfister, interview with SonntagsZeitung, 8 March 2026: “The Federal Council is of the opinion that the attack on Iran constitutes a violation of international law. In our view it constitutes a violation on the prohibition of violence.” Reuters, “Iran attacks breach international law, Swiss Defence Minister says,” 8 March 2026.

⁴³ European Council on Foreign Relations, “War over law: Europe’s unforced errors over the use of force in Iran,” 12 March 2026, noting that “Norway’s government has also emphasised the illegality of the war.”

⁴⁴ China’s Ambassador Zhang Jun at the UN Security Council, as reported by Al Jazeera, “UN Security Council adopts resolution condemning Iran’s attacks in the Gulf,” 12 March 2026: the conflict had “neither legitimacy nor legal basis.”

⁴⁵ Al Jazeera, “UN Security Council adopts resolution condemning Iran’s attacks in the Gulf,” 12 March 2026. Al Jazeera’s correspondent noted that 135 countries co-sponsored the resolution, described as “the largest number of countries ever to cosponsor a Security Council draft resolution.”

⁴⁶ European Council on Foreign Relations, “War over law: Europe’s unforced errors over the use of force in Iran,” 12 March 2026. The analysis stated: “There is little question that the US and Israeli war against Iran is an unlawful act of aggression. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force except when authorised by the Security Council or in cases of self-defence against an armed attack. There is overwhelming agreement among legal scholars that neither of those applies in this case. No European leader has argued the war is lawful.”

⁴⁷ Professor Mohamed Arafa, “No Authorization, No Imminence, No Plan: The Iran Strikes and the Rule of Law,” JURIST, March 2026.

⁴⁸ The principle of proportionality in international humanitarian law is codified in Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1977), Article 51(5)(b), which prohibits attacks “which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.”

⁴⁹ Aristotle, Politics, Book III, Chapter 16.

⁵⁰ Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776).

⁵¹ Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, Part the First, Article XXX, drafted by John Adams: “In the government of this commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

⁵² Al Jazeera, “Iran’s FM says deal with US ‘within reach’; Trump says he’s ‘not happy’ with talks,” 25 February 2026. Araghchi stated that the “historic opportunity to strike an unprecedented agreement” would depend on whether “diplomacy is given priority.”

⁵³ CBS News, “U.S.-Iran deal is ‘within our reach,’ Omani mediator says,” 27 February 2026. Al Busaidi appeared on “Face the Nation” and stated: “I can see that the peace deal is within our reach… if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there.”

⁵⁴ Ibid. Al Busaidi disclosed that Iran had committed to “never, ever have nuclear material that will create a bomb,” that existing stockpiles would be “blended to the lowest level possible” and “converted into fuel, and that fuel will be irreversible,” and that Iran would grant the IAEA “full access” for verification. He called this “something that is not in the old deal” and “a very important breakthrough.” See also: Al Jazeera, “Peace ‘within reach’ as Iran agrees no nuclear material stockpile: Oman FM,” 28 February 2026; Common Dreams, “Oman’s Foreign Minister Said US-Iran Deal Was ‘Within Our Reach.’ Then Trump Started Bombing,” 1 March 2026.

⁵⁵ Al Jazeera, “Oman renews push for diplomacy, says ‘off-ramps available’ in Iran war,” 3 March 2026. Al Busaidi pushed back on the Trump administration’s characterisation of an “imminent threat” and maintained that “significant progress” had been made before the strikes. The characterisation of the war as an attempt to reorder the Middle East in Israel’s favour is from Wikipedia, “2025–2026 Iran–United States negotiations,” citing Al Busaidi’s post-war comments, accessed 16 March 2026.

⁵⁶ Al Jazeera, “Oman renews push for diplomacy, says ‘off-ramps available’ in Iran war,” 3 March 2026. Majed al-Ansari, spokesperson for Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made the statement following Iranian retaliatory strikes on Omani territory.

⁵⁷ Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, quoted in Common Dreams, “Oman’s Foreign Minister Said US-Iran Deal Was ‘Within Our Reach.’ Then Trump Started Bombing,” 1 March 2026.

⁵⁸ Common Dreams, ibid., citing a survey released in February 2026 showing twenty-one percent support for initiating an attack on Iran “under the current circumstances.”

At thirty-six minutes past one on the morning of the twenty-third of March 2026, three masked figures approached the car park of the Machzike Hadath Synagogue on Highfield Road, Golders Green. They carried petrol. Security camera footage, later shared with media outlets worldwide, shows them dousing the vehicles methodically and without hesitation. Then they ran.

What they set on fire were ambulances.

Four ambulances belonging to Hatzola Northwest — a volunteer-led, free emergency medical service run by members of the Jewish community — erupted in flames outside the synagogue. Oxygen canisters on board exploded. Windows shattered in the adjacent block of flats. Thirty-four residents were evacuated into the March night. Six fire engines and forty firefighters responded. The blaze was brought under control by 03:06. No one was killed. But four of the organisation’s six ambulances were destroyed.¹

Hatzola is not a political organisation. It is not an arm of any government. The first Hatzola chapter in the United Kingdom was established in Stamford Hill in 1979. Hatzola Northwest — the unit whose ambulances were destroyed in Golders Green — handles over five thousand calls a year, with an average response time of under five minutes. It serves everyone, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, in a 2.5-mile radius of its base in northwest London. It is staffed entirely by volunteers, funded entirely by community donations, and receives no government money whatsoever. There are seven Hatzola chapters across the United Kingdom, with units in Manchester, Gateshead, Hertfordshire, and Canvey Island.²

The Metropolitan Police declared the attack an antisemitic hate crime. Counter-terrorism police took charge of the investigation. Three suspects are being sought. As of this writing, no arrests have been made.³

The question this article exists to answer is not who did this. The police will find that out, or they will not. The question is why. Why would anyone attack a volunteer ambulance service whose sole purpose is to save lives? If this attack was connected to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East — and while the investigation is in its earliest hours, the targeting of a Jewish institution suggests it may well have been — then a question demands answering: why would anyone destroy emergency medical equipment — equipment that might save a life tonight, any life, regardless of faith — and believe they had struck a blow for justice?

The answer is a lie. A lie told so often, reinforced so relentlessly, and defended so aggressively that it has become, for millions of people from every political persuasion and background, indistinguishable from the truth.

The lie is that the Jewish people and the State of Israel are the same thing.

They are not. And until that lie is dismantled — in law, in media, in the assumptions that people carry without examining — every Jewish institution in every country on earth will remain a proxy target for anger at a foreign government’s policies. A volunteer medic in Golders Green will be treated as though he bears personal responsibility for decisions made by politicians in Jerusalem. A community ambulance will be treated as a military asset. And the people who pay the price will be the ones who had nothing to do with it.

This is not the first time. Five months ago, on the morning of Yom Kippur — the holiest day in the Jewish calendar — a man drove a car into worshippers outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Manchester and attacked them with a knife. Two innocent men were killed: Melvin Cravitz, who was killed by the attacker, and Adrian Daulby, who was struck by police gunfire during the armed response. Three others were seriously injured. The attacker, who was shot dead by police, was wearing what appeared to be an explosive vest.⁴

The rabbi of that synagogue, Daniel Walker, said afterwards that the attacker had shouted as he stood on the steps looking through the window at the congregation: “They are killing our kids.” Rabbi Walker’s response captures the entire problem this article addresses: “The ridiculousness of suggesting that two of the nicest people you are ever going to meet would ever harm a fly, let alone kill anyone’s kids. But this accusation is on every Jew in the world, that we are somehow collectively killing kids.”⁵

Every Jew in the world. Collectively.

That is the conflation. That is the lie. And it is burning ambulances in Golders Green.

British Jews, British Institutions

The Jewish community in Britain is not a recent arrival. It is not a transplant from the Middle East. It is not an outpost of a foreign state. It is one of the oldest continuous minority communities in Western Europe, and its institutional life predates the State of Israel by centuries.

The London Beth Din — the rabbinical court of the United Synagogue — has functioned as the central religious authority for British Jewry since the early eighteenth century. It handles civil disputes, divorce, conversion, genealogical research, and the supervision of kashrut through the largest kosher certification organisation in Europe. The Sephardi Beth Din serves the UK’s Sephardi community with the same range of religious functions. The Manchester Beth Din and the Federation Beis Din operate independently alongside them. These are not shadow courts. They are religious arbitration bodies operating within and subject to British law, deriving their authority from the Arbitration Act 1996. Their rulings, where both parties have voluntarily agreed to be bound by them, are enforceable through the High Court — but the civil courts retain the right to intervene in any case where the award is considered unreasonable or contrary to public policy.⁶

This is what religious freedom looks like in a functioning democracy. A community maintains its own traditions of dispute resolution, its own dietary standards, its own processes for marriage and divorce — and does so within the framework of the law of the land, not in opposition to it.

Beyond the courts, British Jewish communal life is an ecosystem of institutions that exist for one purpose: the welfare of the community and its neighbours. Hatzola, whose ambulances were torched in Golders Green, is one example. Shomrim, the neighbourhood watch organisation that was among the first to condemn the arson attack, is another — a volunteer-run community safety group that works alongside and in cooperation with the Metropolitan Police. Jewish schools educate thousands of children across the country. Jewish welfare organisations, burial societies, and charitable foundations serve needs that have nothing to do with geopolitics and everything to do with the daily life of a religious community rooted in Britain.⁷

These institutions are not Israeli. They are not funded by Israel. They do not answer to Israel. Many of them predate the Zionist movement entirely, let alone the state it produced.

And yet they are targets.

The Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitic incidents and provides security for the Jewish community in Britain, recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents across the United Kingdom in 2025 — the second-highest annual total in its history, and more than double the 1,662 incidents recorded in 2022, before the current conflict in the Middle East began. Of those incidents, fifty-one per cent referenced or were linked to Israel, Gaza, the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, or the subsequent war. There were 1,766 incidents showing explicitly anti-Zionist motivation — instances where the terms “Zionism” or “Zionist” were used as euphemisms for “Jew” and “Jewish,” or in conjunction with other antisemitic abuse. For the first time in the CST’s history, over two hundred incidents of anti-Jewish hate were recorded in every single calendar month.⁸

The pattern is unmistakable. When the Israeli government acts, British Jews pay the price. When Israeli forces conduct military operations in Gaza, antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom spike. When the conflict dominates the news cycle, Jewish children in British schools face harassment. When politicians in Jerusalem make inflammatory statements, synagogues in Manchester and London are vandalised, threatened, and now burned.

The Yom Kippur attack in Manchester — in which Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby were killed at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue on 2 October 2025 — was the first fatal antisemitic terrorist attack on British soil since the CST began monitoring incidents in 1984. Greater Manchester Police reported that antisemitic hate crime tripled in the three weeks that followed.⁹

And now Golders Green. Ambulances. Volunteer ambulances that save lives regardless of faith, burned to shells outside a synagogue, because someone could not — or would not — distinguish between a Jewish community and a Jewish state.

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What Is a Jew?

To understand how the conflation works, it helps to understand why it works so well. And that requires engaging — carefully, respectfully, and honestly — with a question that has no clean answer: what, exactly, is a Jew?

This is not an idle question, and it is not asked here to provoke. It is asked because the conflation of Israel with the Jewish people depends entirely on the ambiguity of Jewish identity, and anyone who wants to dismantle the conflation must first understand the ambiguity it exploits.

Rabbi Morris N. Kertzer, in his widely respected introduction to Judaism, What Is a Jew?, opens with a disarmingly honest admission: “It is difficult to find a single definition of a Jew.” He then proceeds to offer not one definition but five. A Jew is one who accepts the faith of Judaism — the religious definition. A Jew is one who seeks a spiritual base in study, prayer, and daily routine dedicated to Jewish wisdom — the spiritual definition. A Jew is one who, without formal religious affiliation, regards the ethics, folkways, and literature of Judaism as his or her own — the cultural definition. A Jew may also be understood through an ethnic definition — though Kertzer notes that this definition is, in his words, “going the way of the dinosaur,” as the Jewish community increasingly includes converts and those raised with no ethnic identity in particular. And Judaism has been called a civilisation — a people linked by a common history, a common language of prayer, a vast literature, and above all a sense of common destiny. In this sense, Jews are a people, not in the national or racial sense, but in a feeling of oneness.¹⁰

Five definitions. None of them complete on its own. All of them true simultaneously. And — this is the point that matters for this article — none of them mention a state.

Kertzer is equally clear about what a Jew is not. Jews are not a race. Their history reveals, as he puts it, countless additions through marriage and conversion. There are Jews of every physical appearance, from every continent. There are black African Jews from Ethiopia, Chinese Jews from Kaifeng, Jewish communities across the Indian subcontinent. Nor are Jews a nation in the modern sense. Jewish, Muslim, and Christian citizens of Israel do constitute a nation, Kertzer acknowledges — but there are no national ties that unite all Jews throughout the world. Jews, he writes, are part and parcel of every community in which they live.¹¹

And no one speaks for all of them. Kertzer devotes an entire chapter to this point. There is no Jewish pope. No single authoritative body to which all Jews owe allegiance. Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Orthodox Jews all maintain their own synagogues and rabbinic organisations. Each congregation does what it thinks best. There is wide diversity within all synagogue groups, and no element of compulsion. The old expression captures it: “Where you find two Jews, you find three opinions.”¹²

I have a personal encounter with this complexity. Years ago, before my conversion to Islam, I attended Jewish conversion classes. I did not complete them — I needed to resolve the question of Jesus as Messiah first, and that journey led me elsewhere. But during those classes, the rabbi explained something that has stayed with me. He told me that if I completed the conversion, I would have rights as a Jew. But without a Jewish mother, I would not be considered Jewish in the fullest halakhic sense — though my children would be.¹³

I later discovered, through maternal DNA testing, that I am three per cent Ashkenazi Jewish by ancestry. That means somewhere on my mother’s side, a third to fifth great-grandparent was Jewish. By the ethnic definition, I carry Jewish heritage. By the religious definition, I am not Jewish and never was. The two frameworks do not agree, and they were never designed to. Jewish identity was not constructed to be legible to outsiders. It was constructed to maintain a covenant community across millennia of displacement, and it did so with extraordinary success — precisely because it could not be reduced to a single category.

This complexity is not a weakness. It is the defining feature of one of the most resilient identity structures in human history. But it is also the crack through which the conflation enters.

If Jewishness were purely religious, then criticism of the State of Israel would obviously be a political matter — no more connected to Jewish identity than criticism of Saudi Arabia is connected to Islam. If Jewishness were purely ethnic, then Israel’s religious claims to the land would be irrelevant, and the state would be judged as any other state is judged: by its actions. It is the fact that Jewish identity is both — and neither cleanly — that allows the conflation to operate. The ambiguity creates a space in which political criticism can be reframed as ethnic hatred, and ethnic hatred can disguise itself as political criticism. Both the defenders of Israel and its most vicious opponents exploit the same confusion. The Israeli government says: to criticise us is to attack the Jewish people. The antisemite says: the Jewish people are responsible for what Israel does. Both claims rest on the same false premise — that Israel and the Jewish people are one and the same.¹⁴

They are not. And the people who most urgently need that distinction to be made are Jewish people themselves — the ones who are being attacked in Manchester and Golders Green for a conflation they never asked for and many actively reject.

A hostile reader might object at this point: but most Jews do support Israel. Doesn’t that make the conflation natural, even if imprecise?

It does not. And the evidence comes from within the Jewish community itself.

Kertzer addresses this directly. “Almost all Jews in North America are Zionists,” he writes, “in the sense that we all support the right of Jews to have a Jewish state, even though we continue to consider ourselves an integral part of the lands in which we live.” That last clause is the one that matters. Supporting the right of a state to exist is not the same as being represented by its government. Kertzer himself acknowledges that official Israeli government policy sometimes falls short of Jewish ethical expectations, “at which time Jews may object to the Israeli government, much as Americans protested during the Vietnam War.” The analogy is precise: an American who protested the Vietnam War was not anti-American. A Jew who objects to Israeli government policy is not anti-Jewish. And neither is represented by the government they are criticising.¹⁵

Contemporary polling confirms what Kertzer observed. A 2024 J Street survey of American Jewish voters found that ninety per cent believe someone can criticise Israeli government policies and still be pro-Israel. Sixty-eight per cent disapprove of Prime Minister Netanyahu. A 2025 Washington Post poll found that sixty-one per cent of American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza — and yet seventy-six per cent still say Israel’s existence is vital to the long-term future of the Jewish people. These are not people who have abandoned Israel. Whether Israel deserves that loyalty given its conduct — a question I have addressed at length elsewhere — is not the point here. The point is that even among those who extend it, the conflation is rejected. They are people who refuse to let a government speak for them — who insist, as Kertzer insisted, that supporting a state and being represented by its leaders are entirely different things.¹⁶

The conflation does not survive contact with what Jewish people actually think. It survives only in the minds of those who have never asked them.

The Machinery of Conflation

The conflation of Israel with the Jewish people did not arise organically. It was built. It is maintained by specific mechanisms, operated by identifiable actors, and it serves identifiable interests. Understanding those mechanisms is essential to dismantling them.

The first mechanism is Israel’s claim to speak for all Jews everywhere.

In February 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “I went to Paris not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a representative of the entire Jewish people.” On 1 March 2015, preparing to address the United States Congress, he repeated the claim: “I feel that I am an emissary of the entire Jewish people.”¹⁷

The response from Jewish leaders was immediate and sharp. Senator Dianne Feinstein, herself Jewish, called the claim “arrogant” and said flatly: “He doesn’t speak for me.” The editors of The Forward, one of America’s oldest Jewish publications, wrote: “We’ve learned to find vitality and sustenance in a dynamic pluralism that resists centralisation… We wouldn’t presume to speak for all Jews. Neither should anyone else.” J Street, a liberal pro-Israel lobbying group, publicly contested the claim. Jewish members of the United States Congress boycotted the speech.¹⁸

What makes this claim extraordinary is that it contradicts Israel’s own founding commitment. In 1950, in the Ben-Gurion–Blaustein Agreement between Israel’s first Prime Minister and the president of the American Jewish Committee, David Ben-Gurion stated “without any reservation, that the State of Israel represents and speaks only on behalf of its own citizens and in no way presumes to represent or speak in the name of the Jews who are citizens of any other country.”¹⁹

That agreement was not a casual remark. It was a formal diplomatic understanding, negotiated precisely because American Jewish leaders were alarmed at the suggestion that a new foreign state might claim authority over their identity. Ben-Gurion understood the danger and disavowed it explicitly. Netanyahu reversed that disavowal. In doing so, he did not merely make a political claim. He asserted ownership over an identity that — as Rabbi Kertzer’s own analysis makes clear — has no single owner, no pope, no central authority. And he made every Jew on earth a potential proxy for his government’s actions.

The second mechanism is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

The IHRA definition, adopted in 2016 and since endorsed by dozens of governments and hundreds of institutions, defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” So far, unremarkable. But the definition is accompanied by eleven illustrative examples, seven of which relate to Israel. Among them: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.” And: “Applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” And: “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”²⁰

Read that last example again. The IHRA definition lists, as an example of antisemitism, the act of holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the State of Israel. On this point, the definition is correct — it is antisemitic to hold Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions. But the definition simultaneously creates the conceptual framework in which that collective responsibility becomes almost inevitable, because it treats the state and the people as so deeply intertwined that criticism of one is presumptively an attack on the other.

The definition includes a caveat: “Criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” But in practice, as over a hundred human rights and civil liberties organisations — including Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union — warned in a letter urging the United Nations not to adopt the definition, “the IHRA definition has often been used to wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and thus chill and sometimes suppress, non-violent protest, activism and speech critical of Israel and/or Zionism.” Even Kenneth Stern, the American Jewish Committee lawyer who was the principal drafter of the original text, has publicly objected to its institutional adoption, saying it was designed as a data-collection tool, not a speech code.²¹

The effect is circular. The definition says it is antisemitic to hold Jews responsible for Israel’s actions — but the broader framework of the definition treats Israel and the Jewish people as so deeply connected that separating them becomes an act requiring justification. The conflation is embedded in the very instrument designed to combat the hatred that the conflation produces.

The third mechanism is Christian Zionism — a force that reinforces the conflation from outside the Jewish community entirely.

This article is not the place to rehearse in full the history of the evangelical movement’s embrace of the State of Israel; I have documented it at length in “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy.”²² But the essential point bears repeating here. Evangelical theology — the theology that drives Christians United for Israel (with over ten million members), that shapes Republican foreign policy, that told American troops God anointed their president to trigger Armageddon in Iran — cannot distinguish between Jews and Israel. In its eschatological framework, they are literally the same thing. The Jewish people are prophetic instruments. The State of Israel is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy. To criticise Israel is to oppose God’s plan. To support Israel is to hasten the Second Coming — after which, in the theology’s own terms, Jews will convert or be destroyed.

Christian Zionists do not conflate Israel with the Jewish people out of ignorance. They do it because their theology requires it. And they are the most powerful external force maintaining the conflation in the Western world.

These three mechanisms — Israel’s claim to speak for all Jews, the IHRA definition’s embedding of the conflation into the language of anti-hatred policy, and Christian Zionism’s theological inability to separate a people from a state — operate together. They create a world in which a volunteer medic in Golders Green and a politician in Jerusalem are, in the minds of millions, the same thing. And when anger at the politician’s decisions reaches a certain temperature, it is the medic’s ambulance that burns.

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The Consequences

Numbers tell part of the story. The Community Security Trust’s 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025 are not an abstraction. They are 3,700 moments in which a Jewish person in Britain was harassed, threatened, assaulted, or had their property damaged because they were Jewish. They are 3,700 instances in which the conflation crossed the threshold from bad theory into lived experience.²³

But the numbers do not capture the texture of what this means for a community.

It means Jewish children walking to school past security guards. It means synagogues that cannot operate without bollards, CCTV, and community volunteers trained in threat assessment. It means a Jewish student on a university campus being asked to explain — or apologise for — the actions of a government she may never have voted for, in a country she may never have visited, on the basis of nothing more than her identity. It means a Jewish family in Golders Green waking to the sound of oxygen canisters exploding and the smell of burning ambulances drifting through their windows.

It means, in the words of one Golders Green resident who could smell the smoke from his living room: “It’s a terrible, terrible act what happened… Why is it happening to us? We’re living in scary times.”²⁴

The CST’s data reveals a direct and measurable correlation. Fifty-one per cent of the antisemitic incidents recorded in 2025 referenced or were linked to Israel, Gaza, the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, or the subsequent war. The worst month was October 2025, with 463 incidents — sixty-three per cent higher than September’s figure — driven in part by the aftermath of the Yom Kippur attack in Manchester. When Jewish communities are perceived to be vulnerable, antisemites exploit that perception. When the conflict in the Middle East intensifies, the violence follows British Jews home.²⁵

The Yom Kippur attack deserves particular attention, because it illustrates the conflation in its most lethal form. On the morning of 2 October 2025, a man drove his car into worshippers arriving at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Manchester and attacked them with a knife. Two men — Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby — were killed. Three others were seriously injured. The attacker, Jihad al-Shamie, a thirty-five-year-old British citizen born in Syria, was shot dead by police. He had been wearing what appeared to be an explosive vest, later determined to be fake.²⁶

As the attacker stood on the synagogue steps, looking through the window at the congregation inside, he shouted: “They are killing our kids.”

They. Not the Israeli government. Not the IDF. Not a named politician or a specific policy. They. The people inside a synagogue in north Manchester, gathered to observe the holiest day of their calendar — a day devoted to atonement, fasting, and prayer. In the attacker’s mind, those worshippers were not Melvin Cravitz, a man whose bravery saved lives, or Adrian Daulby, a man described by those who knew him in terms of profound affection. They were they. The Jews. The ones who are killing kids. Collectively responsible. Interchangeable with a state.²⁷

That is what the conflation produces. Not just statistics. Not just policy debates. Dead people. In Manchester. In Golders Green. In the communities where Jewish families have lived for generations, practised their faith, raised their children, and served their neighbours — and are now being made to pay for the actions of a government that does not represent them, in a conflict they did not start, on the basis of an identity they share with a state only in the minds of those who cannot or will not see the difference.

The Double Standard

There is another community in Britain that knows what it looks like when religious institutions are reframed as outposts of a foreign threat. I know this because I am part of it.

British Muslim communities operate religious institutions within the British legal framework in ways that closely parallel the structures just described. Sharia councils handle marriage, divorce, and inheritance matters in an advisory capacity, subject to British law — just as the Beth Din does. Muslim welfare organisations, schools, community centres, and charitable foundations serve the daily needs of a religious community rooted in Britain — just as their Jewish counterparts do. Muslim volunteer networks provide services to their neighbours regardless of faith — just as Hatzola does.

And these institutions are routinely treated — not as expressions of a religious community’s life in the country where it lives, but as evidence of divided loyalty, foreign infiltration, or civilisational subversion. Sharia councils are presented in tabloid headlines as parallel legal systems threatening British sovereignty. Muslim schools are subjected to suspicion that would never attach to a Jewish or Christian school operating under identical legal frameworks. The word “mosque” carries, for a significant portion of the British public, connotations of extremism that the word “synagogue” does not — though both are simply houses of worship where communities gather to pray.²⁸

The mechanism is identical. A religious community’s institutions are reframed as arms of a foreign enemy. For Jews, the foreign enemy is Israel — and the reframing turns synagogues into targets. For Muslims, the foreign enemy is variously ISIS, Iran, al-Qaida, or an imagined global caliphate — and the reframing turns mosques into suspects. In both cases, the people who suffer are British citizens practising their faith in their own country, being held responsible for the actions of actors and governments they have no connection to and no control over.

The Peacehaven mosque arson — which occurred just two days after the Manchester synagogue attack in October 2025 — illustrates the symmetry with grim precision. When Jewish communities are attacked, Muslim communities are attacked in retaliation, and vice versa. The conflation operates in both directions, and both communities bleed.²⁹

This is not a competition between communities. It is not an attempt to centre Muslim experience in an article about Jewish suffering. It is a statement of structural fact: the conflation of a religious community with a foreign state or political movement is the same error, producing the same consequences, regardless of which community it targets. And the people who maintain these conflations — whether they are antisemites who cannot distinguish a Jew from the Israeli government, or counter-Islam activists who cannot distinguish a Muslim from a terrorist — are often drawing from the same intellectual well. The counter-Islam network documented in my forthcoming article, “Antisemitism and Counter-Islamism: The Industry,” overlaps significantly with the machinery that maintains the Israel-equals-Jews equation, because both conflations serve the same political interests.³⁰

The principle at stake is simple, even if its application is contested: a religious community has the right to maintain its own institutions, its own traditions of worship, its own processes for resolving internal disputes according to its own laws — within the framework of the law of the land, not in opposition to it. The Beth Din operates this way. Sharia councils operate this way. Neither is a threat to British sovereignty. Both are expressions of the same principle: that religious freedom means the freedom to live as a community, not merely to believe as an individual.

When that principle is violated — when a community’s institutions are treated as evidence of disloyalty rather than expressions of belonging — the result is what we see in the CST’s statistics, in the charred ambulances of Golders Green, in the blood on the steps of a Manchester synagogue, and in the suspicious glances directed at every mosque in the country after an attack carried out by someone who happened to share a faith with a billion other people.

The conflation is the common enemy. And it will not be defeated by either community alone.

Back to Golders Green

Hatzola Northwest’s ambulances will be replaced. The community has already said so. Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said it plainly: “The UK Jewish community will meet the moment with strength, pride and resolve. We will replace the ambulances and continue our service to this nation that we love. We shall not be moved.” Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis called the arson “a particularly sickening assault — not only on the Jewish community, but on the values we share as a society.”³¹

The ambulances will be replaced. The volunteers will go back to work. The next time someone in Golders Green has a heart attack, or a child breaks a bone, or an elderly person falls — Hatzola will respond, as it has for nearly half a century, regardless of the patient’s faith, regardless of whatever political fury is burning through the news cycle that week. That is what they do. It is who they are.

But resilience is not a solution. Replacing burnt ambulances does not address the lie that made them a target. And the lie will keep producing the same results — in Golders Green, in Manchester, in Paris, in Brooklyn, in Melbourne — until it is confronted directly and dismantled systematically.

The lie is that Israel speaks for all Jews. It does not. Israel’s own founding prime minister said so.

The lie is that Jewish identity is inseparable from the State of Israel. It is not. Jewish identity — religious, spiritual, cultural, ethnic, civilisational — predates the state by millennia and will outlast it, whatever its future holds. Rabbi Kertzer’s five definitions do not include “citizen of Israel.” The old expression — “Where you find two Jews, you find three opinions” — does not add “unless the topic is Israeli foreign policy, in which case they all agree.” The diversity is the tradition. The tradition is not a state.

The lie is that criticising Israel is the same as hating Jews. It is not. The IHRA definition itself says so, even as its structure makes the distinction almost impossible to maintain in practice. And the people who most urgently need that distinction to hold are not the critics of Israel. They are the Jewish families in Golders Green and Manchester and every other community in this country who are being made to pay for a conflation they never endorsed.

I write this as a Muslim, as a British citizen, as someone who attended Jewish conversion classes before his own faith journey led him elsewhere, as someone who carries Ashkenazi ancestry in his DNA and one hundred per cent certainty that the people who burned those ambulances are the enemies of everything both our traditions hold sacred. I write it because the same mechanism that turns a Jew into a proxy for Israel turns a Muslim into a proxy for ISIS, and both conflations are sustained by people who profit from the confusion and have no intention of clearing it up.

The untangling is not anti-Jewish. It is the most pro-Jewish thing anyone can do. It is the insistence that a Jewish volunteer medic in Golders Green is not responsible for the actions of a government in Jerusalem. That a Beth Din in London is not an outpost of the Knesset. That Hatzola is not the IDF. That a community’s ambulances are sacred — not because of whose Star of David is painted on the side, but because they save lives, and saving lives is what both our traditions call us to do.

They are not the same. And until we stop pretending they are, the people who pay the price will be the ones who had nothing to do with it.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ Metropolitan Police statement, 23 March 2026; CNN, “Jewish volunteer ambulances set on fire outside London synagogue in antisemitic attack,” 23 March 2026; Jewish News, “Jewish community responds to Golders Green Hatzola arson attack,” 23 March 2026.

² Hatzola Northwest, hatzolanw.org; Hatzola (Stamford Hill), hatzola.org; Hatzola Manchester, hatzolamanchester.org; Gateshead Hatzola, hatzola.org.uk.

³ Detective Chief Superintendent Luke Williams, Metropolitan Police oral statement, 23 March 2026.

⁴ “Manchester synagogue attack,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, statement to Parliament, 13 October 2025; Counter Terrorism Policing, updates on Manchester attack investigation.

⁵ Rabbi Daniel Walker, quoted in Times of Israel, “’Shut the doors!’: Manchester survivors describe chaos of deadly Yom Kippur terror attack,” 21 October 2025.

⁶ London Beth Din, bethdin.org.uk; “London Beth Din,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Sephardi Beth Din, sephardi.org.uk; Manchester Beth Din, mbd.org.uk; Federation Beis Din, federation.org.uk; Arbitration Act 1996; “Use of the Beth Din as a Forum for Determining Civil Disputes,” Barrister Magazine, 20 June 2023.

⁷ Hatzola Northwest, hatzolanw.org; Shomrim, statement on X, 23 March 2026; Jewish News, “Jewish community responds to Golders Green Hatzola arson attack,” 23 March 2026.

⁸ Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025, published 11 February 2026.

⁹ “Manchester synagogue attack,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Counter Terrorism Policing, Manchester attack updates; Greater Manchester Police statements, October 2025.

¹⁰ Rabbi Morris N. Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, revised edition (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster), Chapter 1: “What Is a Jew?”, pp. 7–8.

¹¹ Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, pp. 8–9. On Jews not being a race or a nation: “The Jews are not a race. Our history reveals countless additions to our numbers through marriage and conversion.” And: “It would be equally misleading to speak of the Jews as a nation, though in antiquity they were… But there are no national ties that unite all Jews throughout the world. Jews are part and parcel of every community in which we live.”

¹² Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, Chapter 12: “Who Speaks with Authority for the Jews?”, p. 28.

¹³ Personal account of the author. For the broader context of this period, see Will Prentiss, God and Country (memoir).

¹⁴ For a comprehensive treatment of how the conflation operates theologically and politically, see James S. Coates, “The Greatest Antisemitism: How Zionism Betrays Judaism, Endangers Jews, and Dehumanises Semitic Peoples,” Fireline Press, 2026.

¹⁵ Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, Chapter 11: “What Are Zionists?”, pp. 26–27.

¹⁶ J Street, “Jewish Voters Reject Trump and Republicans, Support Diplomacy, Oppose Netanyahu Government Policies,” election survey conducted by GBAO Strategies, 30 October – 5 November 2024; Washington Post, survey of 815 American Jewish respondents, 2–9 September 2025, published 4 October 2025.

¹⁷ Netanyahu’s February 2015 statement: “I went to Paris not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a representative of the entire Jewish people,” reported in Washington Post, 12 February 2015. His 1 March 2015 statement: “I feel that I am an emissary of the entire Jewish people,” reported in Washington Times, 2 March 2015.

¹⁸ Senator Dianne Feinstein, CNN’s State of the Union, 1 March 2015; The Forward, “Who Speaks for the Jews?”, 11 February 2015; J Street public statement, February 2015. See also: “Benjamin Netanyahu’s Claim to Speak for All Jews Is Disputed, Characterized As ‘Arrogant,’” The American Council for Judaism; Times of Israel, “Sen. Feinstein pans Netanyahu over claim to speak for all Jews,” 1 March 2015.

¹⁹ The Ben-Gurion–Blaustein Agreement, 1950. Cited in Shmuel Rosner, “Does Netanyahu represent ‘the entire Jewish people’?”, Jewish Journal, 2015.

²⁰ International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” adopted 26 May 2016, holocaustremembrance.com; also available at the United States Department of State, “Defining Antisemitism,” state.gov.

²¹ Human Rights Watch et al., letter to the United Nations, 4 April 2023, signed by 104 human rights and civil society organisations including the ACLU. On Kenneth Stern’s objections to institutional adoption of the definition he drafted: see “IHRA definition of antisemitism,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026), with multiple sourced references to Stern’s public statements.

²² James S. Coates, “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” Fireline Press, 2026.

²³ Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025, published 11 February 2026.

²⁴ Gedale Weinberg, quoted in CNN, “Jewish volunteer ambulances set on fire outside London synagogue in antisemitic attack,” 23 March 2026.

²⁵ CST, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025: “The worst month was October, with 463 antisemitic incidents reported, the fifth highest monthly total ever logged by CST and 63% higher than September’s figure.”

²⁶ “Manchester synagogue attack,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, statement to Parliament, 13 October 2025; Counter Terrorism Policing, Manchester attack updates.

²⁷ Rabbi Daniel Walker, quoted in Times of Israel, “’Shut the doors!’: Manchester survivors describe chaos of deadly Yom Kippur terror attack,” 21 October 2025. Walker reflected: “The ridiculousness of suggesting that two of the nicest people you are ever going to meet would ever harm a fly, let alone kill anyone’s kids. But this accusation is on every Jew in the world, that we are somehow collectively killing kids.”

²⁸ For a detailed examination of how Jewish courts work within UK law, and the parallels with other religious arbitration bodies, see “The Beth Din: Jewish Law in the UK,” Centre for Social Cohesion / Henry Jackson Society. The Arbitration Act 1996 provides the legal framework under which both the Beth Din and Sharia councils operate.

²⁹ “Peacehaven mosque arson,” referenced in the Wikipedia article on the Manchester synagogue attack (accessed 23 March 2026). The arson attack on the Peacehaven mosque occurred on 4 October 2025, two days after the Yom Kippur attack in Manchester.

³⁰ James S. Coates, “Antisemitism and Counter-Islamism: The Industry,” Fireline Press, forthcoming April 2026.

³¹ Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, statement to CNN, 23 March 2026; Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, statement on X, 23 March 2026.

The commander, the NCO wrote, “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.” The commander told the room that President Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”¹

He had a big grin on his face when he said it.²

The NCO described the commander as a “Christian First” supporter — someone whose religious identity had always been conspicuous but who had never before crossed this particular line. The briefing shocked troops in attendance. The NCO was writing on behalf of sixteen service members: eleven Christians, one Muslim, one Jew, and three whose faith was not specified.³ They were not objecting to Christianity. They were objecting to being told, in an official military briefing, that their war was a holy one.

They were not alone. By the following evening, the MRFF had received more than 110 similar complaints. Within days, the number exceeded 200. The complaints came from every branch of the military — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force — spanning more than 40 units across at least 30 installations.⁴ Mikey Weinstein, the MRFF’s founder and a former Air Force officer, described the phenomenon as “unrestricted euphoria” among commanders who believed that the bombing of Iran represented the fulfilment of Christian prophecy.⁵

This was not one rogue officer having a bad morning. This was a pattern. And patterns do not emerge from nowhere.

To understand how a United States military officer could stand in front of his troops in 2026 and tell them — with a grin — that their president was divinely anointed to trigger the apocalypse, you have to understand the infrastructure that made that moment possible. You have to trace the theology, the money, the political alliances, and the decades of deliberate cultivation that turned a fringe eschatological belief into the operating system of American foreign policy.

That infrastructure has a name. Several names, actually. But the one that matters most is the one its architects would use themselves: Christian Zionism.

This is the story of how it captured the Pentagon.

1. The Pentagon’s Prayer Room

A note on sourcing before we proceed. The MRFF complaints are anonymised to protect service members from retaliation. No audio or video recordings of the briefings have surfaced. Snopes, in its investigation, left the claim “unrated” for this reason.⁶ What we do have is over 200 complaints from more than 40 units across 30 installations in every branch of the military, logged by an organisation with two decades of documented work on religious freedom in the armed forces. We have the specific, detailed language of the NCO’s email. And we have a context — a chain of events at the highest levels of the Department of Defense — that makes these complaints not just plausible but predictable.

That context begins with a prayer service.

In May 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held the first of what would become monthly Christian worship services in the Pentagon’s auditorium. The services were broadcast live on the Department’s internal television network.⁷ They were described as voluntary. Military.com reported that service members and defence contractors had raised concerns about feeling pressured to attend, with one contractor describing the services as “inherently discriminatory” because they provided Christians an opportunity to get face time with senior leadership that members of other faiths were denied. A retired Air Force brigadier general, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisal, told the outlet that contrary to the Pentagon’s assurances, roll call does take place — and that attendance functions as “a litmus-loyalty test for who’s in and who’s out,” with consequences for annual performance reports, promotion recommendations, and contract reviews.⁸ Mikey Weinstein of the MRFF put it more bluntly: service members were being “voluntold.”⁹

None of this surprises me. I worked with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations as an operative on their Joint Drug Enforcement Team, and I worked on base as a civilian for a number of years. I have had many officers and enlisted friends in my employment and social circles, and family members who have served across multiple branches. I know how signals travel down a chain of command, and how the boss’s preferences become the unit’s priorities. What the Pentagon calls voluntary, the rank and file experience as an expectation.

The first service was led by Brooks Potteiger, pastor of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship in Tennessee — Hegseth’s own church, and a congregation affiliated with Doug Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.¹⁰ That detail matters: Wilson’s theological network was not introduced to the Pentagon as a later escalation. It was there from the first day. Subsequent services featured Southern Baptist pastors — Chris Durkin of Colts Neck Community Church in New Jersey, who had spurred Hegseth’s renewed interest in Christianity; Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington; Garrett Kell of Del Ray Baptist Church in Virginia.¹⁰ Conservative, but within the broad mainstream of American Protestantism. What came next was not.

On February 17, 2026, Hegseth invited Doug Wilson to lead the Pentagon’s monthly worship service. Wilson is the founder of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and the co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches — a network of over 150 churches internationally.¹¹ He runs Canon Press, a publishing house with national reach, and helped build the Association of Classical Christian Schools, a network of nearly 475 schools.¹² He is, in other words, not a fringe pastor shouting into a webcam. He is an institution builder with a decades-long project and a growing sphere of influence.

His beliefs are worth stating plainly, because they are not hidden. Wilson has publicly argued that women should not have the right to vote and should submit to their husbands.¹³ Women are barred from leadership positions in his church and cannot vote in congregational decisions. He believes homosexuality should be a crime. He has described Christian enslavers in the American South as being on “firm scriptural ground” — a position that multiple outlets, including Word & Way and Religion Unplugged, have characterised not as neutral historical observation but as an approving defence of the institution.¹⁴ He advocates for a Christian theocracy in which non-Christians — explicitly including Muslims — would be barred from public worship and public office, and in which the Apostle’s Creed would be incorporated into the United States Constitution.¹⁵ He opened a church in Washington, D.C. in 2025, telling reporters it was part of his plan to make America a Christian nation.¹⁶

This is the man Pete Hegseth calls a mentor.

Hegseth is a member of a CREC-affiliated church in Tennessee. He moved his family there specifically to send his children to a school in Wilson’s classical Christian network.¹⁷ The Pentagon confirmed that the Secretary “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”¹⁸ When Wilson stood at the Pentagon podium, Hegseth stood beside him, praying with his hand on Wilson’s shoulder. The Department of War’s rapid response account on X posted a photograph of the moment with the caption: “We have gathered at the Pentagon for our monthly worship service. We are One Nation Under God.”¹⁹

Hegseth does not hide what tradition he is claiming. Tattooed on one arm is the Latin phrase “Deus Vult” — “God wills it” — the battle cry of the First Crusade. On his chest is the Jerusalem Cross, the coat of arms of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, established in 1099 after Crusader armies massacred the city’s Muslim inhabitants and burned its Jews alive in their synagogue.²⁰ The man running the American military has branded himself, permanently and literally, with the insignia of medieval Christian holy war.

Two weeks earlier, at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, Hegseth had gone further. He declared that “America was founded as a Christian nation” and that “as public officials, we have a sacred duty 250 years on to glorify him” — pointing upward as he said it.²¹ He suggested that serving in the U.S. military was a form of Christian spiritual warfare, and that the soldier willing to “lay down his life for his unit, his country, and his creator — that warrior finds eternal life.”²¹

Read that again. The Secretary of War told service members that dying in combat earns them eternal life. This is not a figure of speech. This is not a rhetorical flourish at a fundraiser. This is the civilian head of the American military telling troops that their service has soteriological weight — that it contributes to their salvation.

And then the bombs fell on Iran. And commanders, having watched the Secretary of War spend nine months building the theological infrastructure from the top, did what officers in a hierarchical system always do: they followed the signal. Whether individual commanders watched those broadcasts or read those speeches is beside the point. In a hierarchical culture, the message travels down the chain whether or not every link is aware of its origin. They took the message Hegseth had been broadcasting — that America is a Christian nation, that military service is spiritual warfare, that God’s plan is being executed through American power — and they delivered it to their troops in the only language that was left. The language of Armageddon.

The 200 complaints were not an aberration. They were a harvest.

There is an irony here that should not pass without notice. For two decades, the machinery of the war on terror has projected onto Muslims the image of a hidden theological command structure — a mastermind who radicalises foot soldiers through religious ideology until they are ready to kill and die for the cause. That projection is now a mirror. The theological command structure described in this section is not hidden. It is broadcast on the Pentagon’s internal television network, posted on official social media accounts, and delivered from the podium of the National Prayer Breakfast. The foot soldiers are not radicalised in secret — they are radicalised in uniform, during duty hours, by their chain of command. The only difference is that when the theology is Christian and the foot soldiers are American, we do not call it what it is.

Post-publication update — April 4, 2026:

On April 2, 2026 — less than three weeks after this article was published — Hegseth fired three Army officers on the same day: Gen. Randy George, the Chief of Staff of the Army; Gen. David Hodne, commander of Army Transformation and Training Command; and Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., the Army’s Chief of Chaplains. No official reason was given for any of the three dismissals. Green’s firing was the first time in the history of the United States Army that a Secretary of Defense has removed a chief of chaplains.⁶⁷

The firings came one day after Hegseth had pushed for changes to the chaplain corps, telling chaplains in a video message to be “less therapeutic and more pastoral.”⁶⁸ Green, a Baptist minister endorsed by the National Baptist Convention, had overseen religious support across all faiths in the Army. He was not an evangelical.

Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, speaking on MSNBC’s The Weekend on April 4, connected the three firings directly to the pattern described in this article. Hertling, who knew Green personally — “he was one of my chaplains when I was a brigade commander” — called Green “one of the finest officers and ministers in the army.” He said the three firings together were “much more damaging” than any single dismissal, and that the officers “were standing up for something.” Hertling connected the firings explicitly to Hegseth’s public statements that soldiers are “fighting for Jesus,” calling those remarks “despicable” — and noted the timing: Passover weekend.⁶⁹

The harvest continues.

2. The Prophetic Clock

To understand what those commanders believed they were telling their troops, you have to understand a theology that most Americans have absorbed without ever learning its name. It is called dispensationalism, and it is the engine driving everything described in this article.

Dispensationalism is not Christianity. It is a specific interpretation of Christianity — a nineteenth-century invention that has, through a combination of publishing, broadcasting, and political organising, been branded to become the dominant eschatological framework for tens of millions of American evangelicals. Its core claim is that human history is divided into a series of “dispensations” — distinct eras in which God relates to humanity under different covenants. The current dispensation, in this framework, is approaching its end. And the end has a very specific sequence.

The theology was systematised by John Nelson Darby, a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish preacher who developed a reading of biblical prophecy called premillennialism.²² Darby’s ideas crossed the Atlantic and found fertile ground among American evangelicals, amplified by figures like Dwight Moody and James Brookes.²³ But the real accelerant was a book — the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909, which embedded Darby’s dispensationalist framework directly into the margins of scripture.²⁴ For millions of readers, the interpretive notes became inseparable from the biblical text itself. The theology appeared to be what the Bible actually said.

The sequence goes like this: The Jews must return to the land of Israel. The state of Israel must be established. The Temple in Jerusalem must be rebuilt. A period of tribulation will follow, culminating in the battle of Armageddon — a literal military conflict in the Middle East. And then Christ will return.

Every step must happen in order. And every step that advances the sequence is, in this framework, doing God’s work.

This is not metaphorical for the people who hold it. A 2017 LifeWay Research poll found that 80 percent of evangelical Christians in the United States believe that the rebirth of Israel in 1948 was a fulfilment of biblical prophecy — and 73 percent said events in Israel are part of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation.²⁵ Eighty percent. That is not a fringe belief. That is a supermajority within a community that constitutes roughly a quarter of the American electorate.²⁶

The political implications are staggering. If you believe — truly believe, as an article of faith — that the state of Israel is God’s prophetic clock, then supporting Israel is not a foreign policy position. It is a religious obligation. Opposing Israeli expansion is not a strategic disagreement. It is an act of defiance against God’s plan. And war in the Middle East is not a catastrophe to be avoided. It is a prophecy to be fulfilled.

Hal Lindsey understood this before almost anyone in the modern media landscape. His 1970 book The Late, Great Planet Earth — a copy of which I was encouraged to read during my time in the Assemblies of God church — translated dispensationalist theology into popular language, selling tens of millions of copies — some estimates claim up to 35 million, including later editions — and becoming the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s.²⁷ It told ordinary Americans that the geopolitical events unfolding in the Middle East were the literal fulfilment of biblical prophecy — and that they were living in the last days. Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, launched in 1966 and still broadcasting six decades later — having outlived its founder, who died in 2023 — carried the same message into American living rooms five days a week for decades, reaching a peak audience of millions and building a media empire — the Christian Broadcasting Network — that became the launchpad for Robertson’s own presidential campaign in 1988.²⁸

Robertson understood that theology without political organisation was just talk. In 1989, he founded the Christian Coalition, installing Ralph Reed as its first executive director.²⁹ The Coalition built a grassroots political machine that, at its peak, claimed 1.7 million members and distributed 45 million voter guides in the 1996 election cycle alone.³⁰ It did not merely support candidates. It trained them, organised them, and placed them at every level of government from school boards to Congress. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, founded a decade earlier in 1979, had already demonstrated the model: take the theology out of the sanctuary and into the voting booth.³¹ The Christian Coalition refined it into a permanent political infrastructure.

This is where the theology of the prophetic clock meets the machinery of American power. Dispensationalism tells you what must happen. Organisations like the Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority, and the 700 Club tell you how to make it happen. And the Israeli government — as we will see — tells you who to call.

I know this theology from the inside. I grew up in an evangelical community in southern Illinois where the leader taught this exact eschatological framework — that Muslim nations were the “dark forces of Satan” surrounding Israel, that the End Times were imminent, and that believers had a duty to prepare. I went on to spend years in the Assemblies of God church and other evangelical congregations, and the teaching was the same everywhere. The theology described in this section is not something I encountered in a book. I absorbed it across multiple churches over many years before I left as an adult. When I hear commanders telling troops that bombing Iran is God’s divine plan, I recognise the language. I grew up in it.

The Ground Level: Toxic Christianity

Before this theology reaches the Pentagon briefing room or the halls of Congress, it lives in the pews. And before it becomes a matter of foreign policy, it starts in the pews not as concern for saving souls and trying to convince them of the best values they espouse as believers in the “God of Love,” but as contempt for other people and other religions.

Scroll through evangelical social media on any given day and you will find posts from organisations like “Operation Heal America” declaring that Allah is a “fake” god — a deity separate from and opposed to the God of Abraham.³² It is not that it is a constructive criticism of the Islamic faith, but that this claim is theologically illiterate. “Allah” is the Arabic word for God. Arab Christians — millions of them — use the word in their liturgy, their prayers, their Bibles. It is the same God. The same Abrahamic tradition. The same root.

But theological literacy is not the point. The claim is part of a pattern of theological projection that runs through this entire article — a movement that accuses Islam of holy war while tattooing Crusader holy warrior insignia on the chest of its Secretary of War, that accuses Muslims of world domination and destruction while broadcasting sermons of sparking Armageddon to troops on the Pentagon’s internal network, and that accuses Islam of hostility towards all Jews while its own history includes burning Jews alive in their synagogues and whose theology envisions that all Jews who do not accept Christ will perish in the very Armageddon they are working to bring about.

The point is not truth. The point is the construction of an enemy. And once the enemy is constructed, the rest follows: the contempt becomes policy, the policy becomes war, and the war becomes God’s will.

A movement that claims to “heal America” by slandering a fellow Abrahamic faith — one that believes in the virgin birth of Jesus, his messiahship, his ascension to heaven, and his second coming to establish God’s kingdom — is not engaged in evangelism. It is not fulfilling the Great Commission. You cannot bring people to Christ through contempt. What it is doing is something more useful to the project described in this article: it is building, at the congregational level, the same hostility toward Islam that its political allies exploit at the policy level, including the foreign nation state of Israel.

The theology of contempt scales. The social media post that calls Allah a fake god and the combat briefing that calls the Iran war God’s divine plan are not different phenomena. They are the same phenomenon at different altitudes. The post teaches the congregation that Muslims worship a false god. The briefing teaches the troops that bombing Muslims is God’s will. The distance between the two is shorter than anyone wants to admit.

3. The Strategic Alliance

The theology described in the previous section would be a curiosity — an eccentric feature of American religious life — if it had remained in the sanctuary. It did not remain in the sanctuary because it was invited out. And the invitation came from West Jerusalem.

The Israeli government’s cultivation of American Christian Zionism as a strategic asset is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented history, openly acknowledged by Israeli political figures, and in many cases celebrated by both parties to the alliance.

It began in earnest with Menachem Begin. When the Likud leader became Prime Minister of Israel in 1977, he recognised something that his Labour predecessors had not fully appreciated: American evangelicals were a vast, politically organised constituency whose theology made them unconditional supporters of the Jewish state. Begin established a special liaison for evangelical Christians and cultivated personal relationships with American religious leaders — most notably Jerry Falwell, who became one of Israel’s most vocal advocates in the United States.³³

The alliance was built on a pragmatic bargain that both sides understood without stating openly. Danny Ayalon, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, described an agreement between Begin and Pat Robertson: “We are both waiting for the Messiah. When the Messiah comes, we will ask him. And according to his answer we will know who is right.”³⁴ The eschatological disagreement — evangelicals believe Jesus will return; Jews do not — was set aside because the short-term political interests aligned perfectly. Evangelicals wanted Israel supported, defended, and expanded. The Israeli right wanted American political cover, military aid, and unconditional diplomatic backing. The deal was struck.

Ronald Reagan brought Christian Zionists into the White House with enthusiasm, hosting discussion groups that gave figures like Falwell, Robertson, and Hal Lindsey direct access to Congressional and national leaders.³⁵ The relationship cooled somewhat under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but the structural alliance remained intact — maintained by organisations like AIPAC that understood the value of the evangelical voting bloc even when the president himself was less receptive.

The decisive moment came in 1995, at AIPAC’s annual policy conference. Until that point, many evangelicals had been wary of Jewish organisations, and the feeling was mutual. But at that conference, AIPAC invited Ralph Reed — the executive director of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition — to join the proceedings. The two movements discovered they could reach a concurrence of views on the basis of promoting the welfare of Israel.³⁶ Robertson, who had previously publicly decried Jewish influence in America, declared he would stand with Israel and oppose the creation of a Palestinian state. The alliance between the pro-Israel lobby and the evangelical right was formalised, and it has only deepened since.

The numbers tell the story. Christians United for Israel, founded by San Antonio megachurch pastor John Hagee in 2006, now claims over 10 million members.³⁷ That is nearly double the entire American Jewish adult population of approximately 5.8 million.³⁸ The largest Zionist organisation in the United States is not Jewish. It is evangelical Christian. CUFI’s annual summits draw thousands of attendees and feature direct addresses from Israeli political leaders. At CUFI’s 2017 conference, Benjamin Netanyahu declared that evangelical Christians were “one of Israel’s greatest allies.”³⁹

Evangelical Christians now constitute roughly a third of the Republican Party base.⁴⁰ Christian Zionism has become a central plank of the Republican platform — not because Republican strategists are dispensationalists, but because dispensationalists are reliable voters whose single-issue loyalty to Israel aligns with the party’s broader geopolitical commitments. The theology provides the passion. The party provides the power. And Israel provides the strategic direction.

This brings us to February 2026, and a moment that crystallised the entire arrangement in a single exchange.

Mike Huckabee — former Arkansas governor, former Baptist minister, and the United States Ambassador to Israel — sat down for a podcast interview with Tucker Carlson. Carlson asked Huckabee about a Bible verse in which God promises Abraham that his descendants will receive land stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates — a territory encompassing modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Carlson pointed out that this was, in effect, “basically the entire Middle East.”

Huckabee’s response: “It would be fine if they took it all.”⁴¹

He later attempted to walk the statement back, calling it “somewhat of a hyperbolic statement.”⁴² But the damage — or, from the perspective of the project, the signal — was sent. Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry described the remarks as “extremist rhetoric.” Egypt called them a “flagrant breach” of international law. The State Department declined to comment.⁴³

The Israeli right and American evangelicals are running the same play from different playbooks. One reads the Torah, the other the Book of Revelation. Both arrive at the same conclusion: the land is promised, the borders must expand, and anyone in the way is an obstacle to prophecy.

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich — who gave a speech in 2023 at a podium displaying a map that showed Jordan as part of Israel — appeared to welcome Huckabee’s remarks.⁴⁴ This is the convergence in action: the theological claim and the territorial ambition reinforcing each other, each providing the other with legitimacy it could not sustain alone.

Huckabee was not freelancing. The Likud Party — Netanyahu’s own party, Israel’s governing party — has stated since its founding platform in 1977 that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”⁴⁵ The platform has never been rescinded. When Palestinians use the phrase “from the river to the sea” — a phrase that for many describes freedom from occupation, however contested its interpretation — they are censured, expelled from universities, and accused of calling for genocide. When Likud puts the same territorial claim in its founding charter, it is called policy — and underwritten with American tax dollars.

4. The Convergence Point

There is a place where all of this converges — where dispensationalist theology, Israeli territorial ambition, American evangelical money, and global geopolitical risk meet on a single hilltop in Jerusalem. It is called the Temple Mount by Jews, Haram al-Sharif — the Noble Sanctuary — by Muslims. And it may be the most dangerous thirty-five acres on Earth.

For dispensationalists, the prophetic sequence requires a Third Temple to be built in Jerusalem before the Tribulation can begin. The first two temples — Solomon’s, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and Herod’s, destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE — stood on what some believe is, though no archaeological verification has proven, the same site where the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock have stood for over a thousand years. Al-Aqsa is the third holiest site in Islam, the place from which the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have ascended to heaven. Nearly 2 billion Muslims understand any threat to it as an existential provocation.

The Third Temple movement is not hypothetical. It is organised, funded, and politically connected.

The Temple Institute, based in Jerusalem, has spent decades preparing for the construction of a Third Temple — fabricating priestly garments, recreating ritual vessels, and training descendants of the priestly caste in sacrificial procedures.⁴⁶ Boneh Israel, an evangelical Christian organisation, has imported red heifers from Texas to Israel and raised them under strict ritual conditions required for a purification ceremony that is considered a prerequisite for Temple construction. Israel’s Ministry of Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage has funded development of the site where the ceremony is planned.⁴⁷

There is an irony here that Christian theology cannot easily absorb. The central claim of Christianity is that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was the final sacrifice — the one that rendered all animal sacrifice obsolete. Evangelical organisations funding the restoration of Temple sacrifice are financing the reversal of the very act their faith considers the most important event in human history.

Yehuda Glick, a former Likud member of the Knesset, has led a growing movement calling for Jewish prayer rights on the Temple Mount — a direct challenge to the status quo that has governed the site since Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967. Under that arrangement, Israel controls access to the compound but the Islamic Waqf administers the religious sites. The movement to erode this arrangement has gained momentum, with increasing numbers of Jewish visitors ascending the Mount under police escort.⁴⁸

Christian Zionist organisations provide both financial and political support for these efforts. The alliance between dispensationalist evangelicals and Orthodox Jewish Temple activists is, like the broader Christian Zionist alliance, built on a shared short-term objective concealing incompatible long-term theologies. The evangelicals want the Temple built because it triggers Armageddon and the return of Christ. The Orthodox activists want it built because it inaugurates the Messianic Age. Both sides know the other’s endgame. Both sides have decided it doesn’t matter yet.

Hamas understood the explosive power of this convergence. When it launched its attack on October 7, 2023, it named the operation “Al-Aqsa Storm” — and explicitly cited the increasing Jewish incursions into the compound as a provocation.⁴⁹ Whatever else October 7 was, it was a reminder that the Temple Mount is not an abstraction. It is a detonator. And the people who are most actively working to set it off believe the resulting explosion is not a risk to be managed but a prophecy to be fulfilled.

This is the point that most Western commentary misses entirely. When American evangelicals send money to Temple preparation organisations, when Israeli politicians campaign on Jewish sovereignty over the Mount, when red heifers are raised in the Judean hills according to ancient ritual specifications — these are not curiosities. They are operational steps in a project whose architects believe they are building toward the end of the world. And they have the political connections, the financial resources, and the theological conviction to keep building.

The question is not whether they will succeed in constructing a Third Temple. The question is how much damage the attempt will cause — to the Middle East, to interfaith relations, and to the hundreds of millions of people who will interpret any move against Al-Aqsa as a declaration of civilisational war.

There is a theological problem at the heart of this project that its architects never address. Prophecy, by definition, is God’s work. If it requires political lobbying, congressional funding, and cattle breeding programmes to advance, it is not prophecy — it is a construction project with a biblical veneer. To engineer the fulfilment of God’s plan is to declare, in practice, that God cannot or will not fulfil it himself. That is not faith. It is its opposite. And the Christians driving this project might consider a warning from the teacher they claim to follow: “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? And I will tell them plainly, I never knew you. Away from me.” The full theological case against self-fulfilling prophecy — and what the Christian tradition’s own texts say about those who appoint themselves as God’s architects — is a subject that deserves its own treatment, and will receive it.

5. From 9/11 to Iran

The evangelical capture of American foreign policy did not begin on September 11, 2001. But 9/11 was the accelerant that turned a slow-burning theological project into a five-alarm fire.

Within hours of the attacks, a framing was available — the “clash of civilizations,” borrowed from Samuel Huntington’s 1996 thesis and already embedded in the evangelical worldview.⁵⁰ Five days later, President Bush used the word “crusade” in remarks to the press, then retracted it.⁵¹ But the retraction was for the press. In a 2003 meeting with Palestinian leaders, Bush reportedly told them: “I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did. And then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq. And I did.”⁵² The White House denied it. The Palestinian foreign minister who was present stood by the account. The framing had already been received by the audience that mattered most: the tens of millions of Americans who already believed that Islam was a prophetic enemy and that conflict with the Muslim world was both inevitable and divinely ordained.

The Iraq War was the proving ground. But it is worth remembering what came before it. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, American evangelicals were enthusiastic supporters of the mujahideen — on the grounds that they were God-fearing fighters resisting godless communism, a system of the devil. Muslims were allies when the enemy was atheism. They became prophetic enemies the moment the Cold War ended and a new narrative was required. The underlying dispensationalist hostility toward Islam had always been there — but during the Cold War it took a back seat to the greater enemy of godless communism. Back then, Allah was not a “fake god.” Back then, Muslims who believed in the God of Abraham were useful. Once that enemy fell, Islam moved from ally to adversary almost overnight, and the God that Muslims had always worshipped became, conveniently, a false one. The 9/11 attacks — carried out by men from the same broader movement the West had armed, funded, and then abandoned in Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew — only reinforced the new narrative. The blowback became the justification.

The Iraq war had no connection to 9/11 — a fact that was established at the time and has been confirmed exhaustively since — but it had the support of the evangelical base because it advanced the broader project: reshaping the Middle East in ways that served both American strategic interests and the dispensationalist prophetic timeline. Evangelical leaders provided moral cover for a war of choice. Congregations provided the political base that made the war sustainable even as public support eroded. The alliance between the national security establishment and the evangelical right, forged in the Reagan years, was battle-tested in Iraq and found reliable.

Meanwhile, a new infrastructure was being built — one that bridged the gap between evangelical theology and national security policy. Organisations like Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT for America, and Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum built a counter-Islamism network that translated theological hostility toward Islam into the language of threat assessment and national security.⁵³ These were not evangelical organisations in the traditional sense. They were policy shops. But they served the same function: they provided a secular-sounding justification for the civilisational conflict that dispensationalist theology had already declared.

The pattern continued through the Obama years — when evangelical opposition to the Iran nuclear deal was ferocious and theologically motivated — and accelerated dramatically under Trump. From the moment he was elected in 2016, evangelical leaders christened Trump as “God’s anointed” — a vulgar, thrice-married casino mogul who could not name a favourite Bible verse, recast as a divine instrument chosen to restore Christian America.⁵⁴ The embassy move to Jerusalem in 2018 was celebrated by evangelical leaders as prophecy fulfilled. Netanyahu himself compared Trump to Cyrus the Great — the Persian king who freed the Jews from Babylonian exile and enabled the rebuilding of the Temple.⁵⁵ Banners appeared in Israel proclaiming “Cyrus the Great is alive!” The comparison was not casual. It positioned Trump within the prophetic narrative as a divinely appointed instrument — a non-believer chosen by God to advance the Jewish return, just as Cyrus had been.

The Abraham Accords of 2020 normalised relations between Israel and several Arab states while bypassing the Palestinian question entirely — a restructuring of the regional order that served both American and Israeli strategic interests and that evangelical leaders embraced as further evidence of prophetic momentum.

Then came the wars. The June 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities — the 12-Day War — established the precedent: the United States would use military force against Iran. The March 2026 full-scale joint operation with Israel, which killed Supreme Leader Khamenei and launched sustained bombing campaigns across Iranian territory, was the culmination.⁵⁶

Each step looks like geopolitics from the outside. The intelligence assessments, the diplomatic cables, the military planning — all of it conducted in the language of national security, threat assessment, and strategic necessity. But among the people in the room when these decisions are made are men and women who believe, with absolute sincerity, that serving God’s timeline is serving America’s national interest — that Armageddon is in America’s interest, that Christ’s return and all the death and destruction that must precede it is in America’s interest, that innocent lives lost are a means to an end that serves America’s interests, and that any war that advances the prophetic sequence is not a cost to be weighed but a duty to be fulfilled. The language of security is the vehicle. The theology is the driver.

When Pete Hegseth stood at the National Prayer Breakfast and told military personnel that the warrior who lays down his life “finds eternal life,” he was not speaking metaphorically. When commanders across thirty installations told their troops that Trump was anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire for Armageddon, they were not freelancing. They were delivering, in explicit terms, the message that the Secretary of War had been transmitting either behind closed doors or in coded terms for nine months.

The capture is complete. The question is what to do about it.

6. The Constitutional Betrayal

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States begins with ten words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The Establishment Clause. It is the first freedom named in the first amendment — the thing the founders considered so important that they put it before speech, before the press, before assembly, before the right to petition the government.

What Pete Hegseth has built at the Pentagon — monthly Christian worship services broadcast on the Department’s internal network, led by a pastor who advocates theocracy, attended by service members in a hierarchical culture where the boss’s invitation carries the weight of an order — is not a celebration of religious freedom. It is the establishment of a de facto state religion within the most powerful military on Earth.

Fred Wellman, a twenty-year Army combat veteran, called it “an unconstitutional and extreme attack on the 1st Amendment going completely unchecked by Congress.” He wrote: “Hegseth is using his official position to make his religion the official one of the Department of Defense using official facilities, communications channels and personnel.”⁵⁷

Consider who serves in that military. Roughly 20 percent of the U.S. armed forces identify as Catholic.⁵⁸ Doug Wilson — the man Hegseth invited to preach at the Pentagon — has described the Catholic Mass as “idolatry” and Catholic devotion to Mary as “Mariolatry.” In his vision of a Christian America, Catholic public processions would be outlawed as “public displays of idolatry.”⁵⁹ A fifth of the force Hegseth commands practices a faith that his personal pastor considers heretical and would suppress by law.

Then there are the Muslim service members. The Jewish service members. The Buddhists, the Hindus, the atheists, the agnostics — all of them watching their chain of command declare, from the podium of the Pentagon, that this is a Christian nation waging a Christian war.

The Myth of the Christian Founding

When defenders of this arrangement invoke “Judeo-Christian values” as the foundation of the American republic, they are telling a story that the founders themselves rejected.

The founders were not Christians in any sense Pete Hegseth or Doug Wilson would recognise. Thomas Jefferson took a razor to the Bible, physically cutting out every miracle, every supernatural claim, every reference to the divinity of Christ — producing what is now known as the Jefferson Bible, held today by the Smithsonian Institution.⁶⁰ Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and George Washington were Deists at best, ambiguous on orthodox Christianity at a minimum. The Constitution does not mention God. Not once. The First Amendment explicitly prohibits the establishment of religion. These are not obscure historical footnotes. They are the foundational documents of the nation Hegseth claims to be defending.

And then there is the Treaty of Tripoli. Drafted under George Washington, signed by John Adams, ratified unanimously by the United States Senate in 1797. Article 11 states, in plain English: “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”⁶¹ Unanimously. Not a dissenting vote. The founders were explicit.

When Hegseth declares that “America was founded as a Christian nation,” he is not offering an interpretation of history. He is contradicting the founders in their own words, ratified by their own Senate, in a treaty they wrote themselves.

The United States may be a nation populated by Christians, but it was founded as a nation for everyone equally, regardless of the religious make-up of the country. That is what the founders intended. That is what they wrote into law. The demographic composition of the population does not override the constitutional framework that governs it.

What “Christian Morality” Built

But let us take the claim on its own terms for a moment. Suppose we accept the premise that Christian morality shaped the American project. What did it build?

It built a country on the graves of indigenous peoples. Sand Creek. Wounded Knee. The Trail of Tears. The systematic destruction of nations that had inhabited this continent for millennia, justified by a theological doctrine — the Doctrine of Discovery — that was explicitly Christian.

The papal bull Inter Caetera, issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, granted European Christian powers the right to claim lands inhabited by non-Christians — a doctrine that drove the colonisation of the Americas for three centuries before the United States existed. The papal bull carried no authority in the Protestant republic that eventually emerged — but the legal principle it established did. In 1823, the Supreme Court adopted the Doctrine of Discovery as the foundation of American land title in Johnson v. M’Intosh, ruling that indigenous peoples held rights of occupancy but not ownership because Christian discovery took precedence.⁶² That ruling has never been fully overturned. Protestant America rejected the Pope’s theology but embraced his permission to take the land.

The Vatican did not formally repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery until March 2023.⁶³ It took five hundred and thirty years to say it was wrong.

It built a country on the backs of enslaved Africans — kidnapped, transported, sold, beaten, worked to death, and bred like livestock for generations. And here is a fact that the “Christian nation” narrative systematically erases: scholars estimate that between 15 and 30 percent of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Muslim.⁶⁴ They carried their faith with them in chains. They prayed in secret. They built this country — its agriculture, its infrastructure, its wealth — in bondage. When Wilson and Hegseth declare America a Christian nation, they are not merely wrong constitutionally. They are erasing the forced labour of Muslim people from the nation’s founding story.

The first Muslims in America did not arrive as immigrants or refugees. They arrived as property. And slaveholding was not a contradiction of Christian values at the time — it was entirely consistent with them, defended from the pulpit, justified with scripture, and practised by the faithful for centuries. It took a civil war that killed over 600,000 Americans to change that theology. The values evolved. But they did not evolve on their own.

The defenders of Christian civilisation would do well to read the history they claim to own — in order.

When Omar ibn al-Khattab conquered Jerusalem for Islam in 637, the Christian Patriarch invited him to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Omar refused — not out of contempt, but out of respect: he feared that if a caliph prayed there, future Muslims would claim it as a mosque. He prayed outside instead. The mosque built on that spot still stands, across from the church he chose to protect.

When the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they burned Jews alive in their synagogue and massacred the Muslim inhabitants until, by the accounts of their own chroniclers, blood ran through the streets.

The Crusaders did not limit their violence to Muslims and Jews. The Fourth Crusade of 1204 never reached the Holy Land at all — instead, the armies sacked Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world, looting its churches, destroying its relics, and massacring its Christian inhabitants. Fellow believers were plundered when they stood in the way of the project. That pattern has not changed. Today, Doug Wilson calls the Catholic Mass idolatry. Hegseth’s Pentagon services exclude non-evangelical Christians from the vision of the nation they serve. The new Crusade, like the old ones, devours its own.

When Saladin retook the city in 1187, he spared the Christian population, kept the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Christian hands, and invited the Jews to return — earning comparisons, in the Jewish world, to Cyrus the Great.

The Ottoman Empire governed Jerusalem for four hundred years, and throughout that period Christian holy sites were preserved under a system of religious governance that guaranteed their protection.

Today, under Israeli governance, Christian clergy are spat on and pepper-sprayed in the streets of Jerusalem, churches are vandalised, and Arab Christians have had their homes and land destroyed and confiscated. The Christian population of Jerusalem has fallen from 25 percent a century ago to less than one percent.⁶⁵

David J. Wasserstein, Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, wrote in the Jewish Chronicle: “Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth.”⁶⁶ His words, not mine. The history they tell people to read is the history that refutes them.

The line from the Crusades to the Pentagon prayer service is shorter than most people realise, because it was never broken. Between 1096 and 1272, nine Crusades sent Christian armies to conquer the Holy Land, massacre its inhabitants, and establish kingdoms in the name of God. The battle cry was “Deus Vult” — God wills it. The symbol was the Jerusalem Cross. Nearly two centuries of holy war, launched by popes and sustained by the doctrine that killing for Christ earned salvation. The motivation was not merely territorial. The Crusaders believed that Christ would not return until the Holy Land was under Christian control — that the Second Coming required Jerusalem in Christian hands. The theology driving the original Crusades was, at its core, the same eschatology that drives the dispensationalist project today: take the land, fulfil the conditions, trigger the return.

When the formal Crusades ended, the project did not. It continued through the Doctrine of Discovery, which extended the Crusader logic to the entire non-Christian world. It continued through the colonisation of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. It continued through forced conversions, residential schools where indigenous children were taken from their families and forced to adopt Christianity, and the theological architecture of empire. And it continues now — in the Pentagon prayer services, in the Secretary of War’s Crusader tattoos, in the commanders telling troops that bombing Iran is God’s divine plan.

If the nine traditional Crusades ended in 1272, what Hegseth and the Christian nationalist movement are building is the tenth. Though it might be more accurate to say the Crusades never ended. They just changed uniforms. If the current wave began with the establishment of Israel in 1948 — the event dispensationalists treat as the prophetic starting gun — then we are nearly eighty years into the tenth.

7. What This Means for What Comes Next

This article has traced a line from a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish preacher to a twenty-first-century Pentagon prayer service. From John Nelson Darby’s dispensations to Pete Hegseth’s hand on Doug Wilson’s shoulder. From the Scofield Reference Bible to over 200 complaints filed by service members who were told their war was God’s plan.

The line is not metaphorical. It is institutional. It runs through specific organisations — the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, the 700 Club, Christians United for Israel — and specific alliances: Begin and Falwell, Reed and AIPAC, Huckabee and Netanyahu. It runs through specific moments: the 1995 conference where evangelicals and the pro-Israel lobby formalised their partnership, the 2018 embassy move that was celebrated as prophecy, the February 2026 prayer service where a pastor who would bar Muslims from public life preached to the most powerful military on Earth.

And it runs through Iran. Through the 12-Day War of June 2025 and the full-scale operation of March 2026. Through the strikes that killed a head of state, the bombing campaigns that continue as this article is published, and the commanders who told their troops — in official briefings, in every branch of the military, across thirty installations — that all of it was God’s divine plan.

This is not an article about one rogue officer, or one controversial pastor, or one overzealous Secretary of War. This is an article about a capture so complete that the people inside it no longer recognise it as capture. They think it is faith. They think it is patriotism. They think it is destiny.

The Iran war is not only a moral failure. It is a legal one. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Article 51 permits military action only in self-defence against an armed attack — not as a preventive strike, not as a theological project, and not because a movement believes God requires it. The United States ratified the UN Charter in 1945, and under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, ratified treaties are the supreme law of the land. The Geneva Conventions, which the United States also ratified, govern the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners and civilians. These are not aspirational documents. They are binding American law. The Iran war violates them.

And it is not the first time. Vietnam — where villages were burned and civilians massacred at My Lai. The Bay of Pigs. Iraq — launched on fabricated evidence, producing Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers tortured and sexually humiliated prisoners in a war their president said God told him to fight. Guantánamo, where men were held without charge and subjected to interrogation techniques that the Red Cross called torture. Afghanistan — where prisoners were stuffed into shipping containers and left to suffocate while soldiers watched. Libya. Syria. In conflict after conflict, the United States has waged wars that violate the laws it signed and the values it claims — and in war after war, religious conviction has provided the moral cover for a secular republic to behave as though the law does not apply to it.

This is the final betrayal, and it is not constitutional but theological. The movement that has captured American foreign policy does not merely violate the laws of the republic it claims to defend. It violates the demands of the faith it claims to follow. The Sermon on the Mount says “Blessed are the peacemakers.” The Geneva Conventions say protect the wounded and the prisoner. The UN Charter says do not attack a nation that has not attacked you. The Constitution says do not establish a state religion. This movement has broken every one of those commitments — secular and sacred alike — and called it obedience to God. In any other context, a movement that had infiltrated the highest levels of a nation’s military and intelligence apparatus, that operated in service of an ideology its own government’s laws prohibited, and that directed foreign policy toward objectives incompatible with the national interest, would be called what it is: a fifth column.

They have the most powerful military on Earth at their disposal. They have a theology that interprets every escalation as progress toward salvation. They have a political infrastructure that has been decades in the making and is now more deeply embedded in the machinery of American power than at any point in the nation’s history.

And they have one more thing: the absolute, sincere, unshakeable conviction that they are right. That God is with them. That the fire they are lighting in the Middle East is the signal fire for the return of Christ.

The rest of us — Christians, Muslims, Jews, and everyone else who will live with the consequences of this conviction — do not have the luxury of treating this as someone else’s problem. The evangelical capture of American foreign policy is not a culture war story. It is not a religious liberty debate. It is a national security crisis dressed in vestments.

And unless it is named, understood, and confronted with the same seriousness its architects bring to the project, it will not stop with Iran.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that's how the fire spreads.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Banner image: DOW Rapid Response (@DOWResponse), X/Twitter, February 17, 2026

Endnotes

¹ Jonathan Larsen, “U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for ‘Armageddon,’ Return of Jesus,” Substack, March 2, 2026. Original NCO complaint email reproduced in full.

² Ibid. The NCO’s exact words: “He had a big grin on his face when he said all of this which made his message seem even more crazy.”

³ Ibid. The NCO specified writing “on behalf of 15 fellow troops” plus themselves. The Mirror US (March 5, 2026) reported the breakdown as including 11 Christians, one Muslim, and one Jew.

⁴ Middle East Eye, “US troops told Iran war is ‘anointed by Jesus’ to bring on Armageddon, watchdog says,” March 4, 2026. The MRFF reported over 200 complaints. Military.com confirmed the figures independently (March 3, 2026).

⁵ “US commander said Trump ‘anointed by Jesus’ to attack Iran: Report,” Newsweek, March 4, 2026. Weinstein’s “unrestricted euphoria” characterisation.

⁶ Snopes, “Investigating claim US troops were told Iran war is for ‘Armageddon,’ return of Jesus,” March 3, 2026. Left “unrated” due to anonymity of complainants and absence of audio/video evidence.

⁷ Reuters, “US Defense Chief Hegseth Leads Christian Prayer Service at Pentagon,” May 21, 2025.

⁸ Military.com, “Defense Contractors Report Invite to Pentagon’s Christian Prayer Service,” January 2026. Contractor described services as “inherently discriminatory”; retired Air Force brigadier general confirmed roll call and described attendance as “a litmus-loyalty test.”

⁹ Mikey Weinstein, Military Religious Freedom Foundation, quoted in The Spokesman-Review, December 2025. “Voluntold” characterisation of Pentagon prayer service attendance.

¹⁰ Baptist News Global, “Hegseth promotes Christian America at Pentagon and NRB,” February 27, 2026. Lists the pastors who led prior services.

¹¹ CNN, “Hegseth invited pastor who calls for Christian theocracy to lead Pentagon prayer service,” February 19, 2026.

¹² Baptist News Global, op. cit. Reports Wilson’s network includes nearly 475 schools through the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

¹³ The Wall Street Journal, September 2025 profile of Wilson (cited in MSNBC coverage). Wilson endorses repealing the 19th Amendment and supports a patriarchal society.

¹⁴ The Hill, “Hegseth invited controversial Christian nationalist to preach at Pentagon,” February 19, 2026. Wilson’s published position on slavery.

¹⁵ People For the American Way / Right Wing Watch, “Hegseth Invites Christian Nationalist Extremist Doug Wilson to Lead Pentagon Worship Service,” February 2026. Details Wilson’s theocratic vision.

¹⁶ Associated Press report cited in MSNBC, February 2026. Wilson’s D.C. church planted in 2025.

¹⁷ The Spokesman-Review, “Hegseth invites controversial Idaho pastor and self-described Christian nationalist to lead Pentagon’s monthly prayer meeting,” February 18, 2026.

¹⁸ Pentagon press secretary statement, reported by Military Times, February 20, 2026.

¹⁹ DOW Rapid Response (@DOWResponse), X/Twitter, February 17, 2026.

²⁰ Hegseth’s tattoos documented by Religion Unplugged, Word & Way, and National Catholic Reporter. “Deus Vult” on his arm; Jerusalem Cross on his chest.

²¹ Baptist News Global, op. cit. Hegseth’s National Prayer Breakfast remarks, February 5, 2026. Also reported by People For the American Way.

²² Britannica, “Christian Zionism.” Darby’s development of dispensationalism and its transmission to America.

²³ The Impact of Christian Zionism on American Policy, by William N. Dale, American Diplomacy journal. Notes Darby’s influence on Moody and Brookes.

²⁴ The Scofield Reference Bible (1909) is widely documented as the primary vehicle for popularising dispensationalism in America. See also Timothy Weber, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend (Baker Academic, 2004).

²⁵ LifeWay Research, 2017 poll. Reported in multiple sources including the LSE Undergraduate Political Review, “The Politics of Apocalypse: The Rise of American Evangelical Zionism,” February 2025.

²⁶ Evangelical share of the American electorate estimated at roughly 25 percent. Pew Research Center data.

²⁷ Hal Lindsey, The Late, Great Planet Earth (Zondervan, 1970). Sales figures widely documented; named the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s by the New York Times.

²⁸ The 700 Club premiered in 1966. Christian Broadcasting Network audience and reach documented in multiple media profiles.

²⁹ The Christian Coalition was founded in 1989 by Pat Robertson with Ralph Reed as executive director. See Ralph Reed, Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics (Free Press, 1996).

³⁰ Christian Coalition voter guide distribution figures from contemporaneous reporting and Reed’s own accounts.

³¹ Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979. Disbanded 1989. See Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell (Princeton University Press, 2000).

³² Operation Heal America (@OperHealAmerica), X/Twitter posts. July 25, 2025: “Allah is NOT the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (230K views). March 12, 2026: “Allah, the fake monotheistic god of the Koran, is NOT the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” September 29, 2025: “Don’t be fooled! Allah, the fake ‘god,’ is not the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Screenshots held by author.

³³ Foreign Policy, “The Fall of Netanyahu Costs American Christian Zionists Their Greatest Ally in Israel,” July 19, 2021. Details Begin’s cultivation of evangelical leaders.

³⁴ Ibid. Danny Ayalon’s account of the Begin-Robertson agreement.

³⁵ William N. Dale, “The Impact of Christian Zionism on American Policy,” American Diplomacy. Reagan’s hosting of Christian Zionist leaders.

³⁶ Ibid. The 1995 AIPAC conference and Ralph Reed’s invitation.

³⁷ Christians United for Israel membership figures from CUFI’s own public statements and multiple media reports. LSE analysis (February 2025) confirms 10 million+.

³⁸ American Jewish adult population figure from Pew Research Center, “Jewish Americans in 2020.”

³⁹ Netanyahu’s remarks at CUFI’s 2017 conference, reported by LSE Undergraduate Political Review, op. cit.

⁴⁰ Evangelical share of the Republican base from Britannica’s Christian Zionism entry and Pew Research data.

⁴¹ NBC News, “Outcry after Ambassador Mike Huckabee suggests Israel has God-given right to Middle East land,” February 22, 2026. Video of the Tucker Carlson interview.

⁴² Ibid. Huckabee’s subsequent characterisation of the statement as “somewhat of a hyperbolic statement.”

⁴³ Ibid. Saudi and Egyptian reactions. State Department non-response confirmed by Al Jazeera, February 22, 2026.

⁴⁴ Al Jazeera, “What is Greater Israel, and how popular is it among Israelis?” February 26, 2026. Smotrich’s 2023 map incident and response to Huckabee.

⁴⁵ Likud Party original platform, 1977: “Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Documented via Jewish Virtual Library, Wikipedia, Responsible Statecraft, The Nation, and NPR.

⁴⁶ Al Jazeera, “What do Texan red heifers have to do with Al-Aqsa and a Jewish temple?” April 9, 2024. Details Temple Institute preparations.

⁴⁷ Ibid. Boneh Israel’s role and Israeli government funding.

⁴⁸ The Daily Beast, “A Christian Group Is Building a Movement That Could Destabilize Jerusalem’s Most Explosive Holy Site,” September 2024. Yehuda Glick and the movement for Jewish prayer rights.

⁴⁹ Hamas named the October 7, 2023 operation “Al-Aqsa Storm.” Ayin Press, “What are we praying for?: Reimagining the Third Temple in Jewish Thought and Politics,” February 2024, documents the connection between Temple Mount incursions and Palestinian responses.

⁵⁰ Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1996).

⁵¹ President George W. Bush used the word “crusade” on September 16, 2001. The White House subsequently walked back the language.

⁵² Nabil Shaath, former Palestinian Foreign Minister, quoted in BBC documentary Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, broadcast October 2005. Bush’s remarks at June 2003 meeting with Palestinian leaders. Corroborated by Palestinian minutes reported in Haaretz.

⁵³ The Center for Security Policy (Frank Gaffney), ACT for America (Brigitte Gabriel), and the Middle East Forum (Daniel Pipes) are documented in multiple investigations of the counter-Islamism network, including the Center for American Progress report “Fear, Inc.” (2011) and subsequent reporting.

⁵⁴ Lance Wallnau declared Trump “God’s anointed” using Isaiah 45/Cyrus parallel, 2015-2016. CBS News, Charisma magazine. Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Rick Perry used similar “ordained by God” language. Pew Research found roughly a third of white evangelicals believed Trump’s election reflected God’s will.

⁵⁵ Netanyahu compared Trump to Cyrus at multiple public events beginning in 2018. See also CounterPunch, “Biblical Bloodlust: Huckabee, Cyrus, and the Zionist Greater Israel Fantasy Fueling the Iran War,” March 6, 2026.

⁵⁶ The Mirror US, “US commanders tell troops Trump ‘anointed by Jesus’ to start Iran war,” March 5, 2026. Timeline of the June 2025 12-Day War and March 2026 operations.

⁵⁷ Fred Wellman’s statement posted on X/Twitter and reported by The Hill, February 19, 2026.

⁵⁸ Catholic share of U.S. military estimated at approximately 20 percent. 2019 DoD data reported by Congressional Research Service; also cited in Letters from Leo, “Pete Hegseth’s Pastor Wants to Ban Catholic Processions in America,” March 2026.

⁵⁹ Ibid. Wilson’s characterisation of the Mass as “idolatry” and his vision for outlawing Catholic public processions.

⁶⁰ The Jefferson Bible (formally The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth) is held by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

⁶¹ Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11, ratified unanimously by the United States Senate, June 7, 1797. Signed by President John Adams.

⁶² The Doctrine of Discovery, based on papal bulls including Inter Caetera (1493), influenced American law through Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) and subsequent rulings. See Robert J. Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny (Praeger, 2006).

⁶³ The Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery on March 30, 2023.

⁶⁴ Estimates of the Muslim proportion of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas vary. Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (NYU Press, 1998), is the standard academic reference. Estimates range from 15 to 30 percent depending on region and period.

⁶⁵ Rossing Center Jerusalem, 2024 report: 111 documented anti-Christian incidents. Jerusalem Story, National Catholic Reporter, Arab News, and Armenian Weekly have reported attacks on Christian clergy. Christian population statistics from multiple demographic sources.

⁶⁶ David J. Wasserstein, “So, what did the Muslims do for the Jews?” Jewish Chronicle, May 24, 2012.

⁶⁷ CNN, Reuters, AP, NBC, CBS, ABC, Al Jazeera, Military.com, TIME, Baptist News Global, The Hill, Axios, Stars and Stripes — all confirmed the firings on April 2-3, 2026. Baptist News Global confirmed Green’s dismissal was the first of its kind in Army history.

⁶⁸ AP, “Hegseth asks the Army’s top uniformed officer to step down while US wages war against Iran,” April 3, 2026. Hegseth’s video message telling chaplains to be “less therapeutic and more pastoral.”

⁶⁹ Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, MSNBC, The Weekend, April 4, 2026.

I know that’s not what you expected to read. You clicked on this because the title confirmed something you already believed — that something about Islam isn’t right, that someone’s running a game, that you’re being played. You’re correct on all three counts. You’re just wrong about who’s doing the playing.

My name is James Coates. I’m a white American, born Catholic, raised in Illinois. I served as a Joint Drugs Enforcement Team operative for the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations and later an undercover counterterrorism operative for the FBI. In 2004, when I learned that members of an Islamic group I was embedded with were plotting to travel to Iraq and join Al-Qaida’s insurgency against American forces, I acted on it. I wore a wire to their weekly meetings. I ran firearms training at their jihad camp while federal agents watched from the treeline and snipers held positions in the surrounding woods. I did this for two years. When it was over, all four men were convicted. The media called them the “Houston Taliban.”

I am also a published author and expert on Islam who trained officers at the Houston Police Academy on Islamic extremism in America. I have spent decades studying its theology, its legal traditions, its internal fractures, and the way it is exploited by people on every side. I have written publicly about the tribalism in Muslim communities, the ethnic hierarchies, the organisational cowardice that refuses to confront radicalism when it surfaces in their own ranks. I have named these problems and paid for naming them. If you want someone who will tell you everything is fine, you’re reading the wrong article.

But I didn’t write this to tell you what’s wrong with Muslims. I wrote this because your anger — which is real, and in many cases justified — is being exploited by people you haven’t identified yet, for purposes that have nothing to do with your safety or your country. Someone is profiting, and they need you never to find out who.

Let me show you.

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The Industry

There is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States whose product is your anger toward Muslims. It has an organisational structure, a revenue model, donor networks, legislative infrastructure, and a well-documented track record. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is conspiracy fact. The financial trail is public record for anyone who cares to look. Mainstream American charities have been caught unknowingly funneling millions of dollars to counter-Islam advocacy groups through a financial mechanism called donor-advised funds, which allow wealthy donors to give anonymously through reputable institutions. The money flows from names you’d recognise — household charitable foundations — into organisations you’ve never looked into, run by people who’ve made careers out of your concern. The only people who haven’t told you about it are the people cashing the cheques.

Between 2014 and 2016 alone, auditors identified 1,096 charitable organisations funneling money to 39 counter-Islam groups, with a combined revenue capacity of at least $1.5 billion. Since 2010, over 230 counter-Islam, Muslim ban and counter-sharia bills have been introduced or enacted in state legislatures across the country. This isn’t grassroots concern. This is an industry.

The ecosystem has clearly defined roles. ACT for America — the largest counter-Islam organisation in the country, with chapters in every state and a direct pipeline to legislators — provides the grassroots muscle. The Center for Security Policy serves as the think tank, churning out reports raising the spectre of Shariah law. The David Horowitz Freedom Center operates as the content factory, publishing FrontPage Magazine and funding Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch blog. Spencer has been barred from entering the United Kingdom for his views. In my decades of studying Islam, I can tell you that much of what he publishes wouldn’t survive five minutes of scrutiny from anyone who’s actually done the fieldwork. But accuracy was never the point. Outrage was.

The funding flows through channels designed for anonymity. Mainstream charitable foundations — commercial, community, and religious organisations — have been exploited as vehicles for funneling anonymous donations from wealthy donors into this network. A donor gives to a credible institution through a donor-advised fund, and that money quietly is siphoned away to organisations whose entire business model depends on keeping the outrage machine running.

And then there’s the political infrastructure. On December 18, 2025, Representatives Chip Roy and Keith Self launched the Sharia Free America Caucus. It now claims 55 members from 22 states, including the House Majority Whip. The caucus has introduced seven bills. The Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act would make advocacy for Shariah law grounds for deportation. Another bill would give Congress the power to designate organisations as terrorist groups through legislation — not through courts, not through evidence, but through a vote.

If that doesn’t concern you, it should. The Patriot Act was sold as a tool to fight Al-Qaida. It was used to surveil American citizens. The TSA was sold as airport security. It became a permanent bureaucracy that hasn’t caught a single terrorist. Every expansion of government power gets sold on the target you agree with and used on the target you didn’t see coming. That’s not a left-wing talking point. That’s American history. Politicians prey on our concerns, stoking fear. Organisations profit off of our concern. And we find that the freedoms we enjoy become less and less over time.

Here’s what none of these 55 members will tell you: every one of those seven bills is a fundraising engine. Every press release generates donor emails. Every media hit drives campaign contributions. They aren’t solving a problem. They’re fundraising off one. And the last thing any of them want is for the issue to actually get resolved — because the moment it does, the donations stop.

You may already be familiar with what the members of this caucus say when they think you’re on their side.

Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee — whose district includes over 40,000 Muslim Americans — posted on X: “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.” That post received 2.6 million views. The next day he wrote: “Paperwork doesn’t magically make you American. Muslims are unable to assimilate; they all have to go back.” When challenged, his response was: “My comments wouldn’t even be a news story if I had said this about Christians. Cry harder. Christ is King.”

Representative Randy Fine of Florida posted: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” That post received 45.6 million views. Forty-five million. When asked about Ogles’s comments, House Speaker Mike Johnson refused to condemn them, saying there’s “a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem” — validating the lie while pretending to distance himself from its language.

Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project and former Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee — a man with 475,000 followers and direct access to power — posted a timeline of what he imagines a Muslim’s evening looks like: “6 pm: pray to their pedophile god. 7 pm: eat on the floor like dogs. 8 pm: like posts of Jewish women and their babies getting raped and slaughtered. 9 pm: build dirty bombs. 10 pm: pray to their pedophile god.”

Conservative commentator Benny Johnson, with over 2.5 million followers, posted: “A Muslim flag was raised at Newark City Hall as people chanted ‘Allahu Akbar.’ Mamdani sat on the floor and ate with his hands at New York City Hall. This isn’t assimilation. This is takeover.” That post received 215,000 views. Here’s what Johnson left out: the Newark flag raising was part of New Jersey’s official Muslim Heritage Month, enacted through bipartisan state law in 2022. The US flag flew alongside it, as required by state law. “Allahu Akbar” translates to “God is great.” Sitting on the floor to eat is a cultural tradition older than the United States. Johnson stripped the context, manufactured a threat, and a quarter of a million people absorbed it without checking a single fact. That’s not journalism. That’s a business model.

The popular account Libs of TikTok described a man performing the tawhid gesture — a raised index finger signifying monotheism, used in every daily prayer by every Muslim on earth — as “a Muslim doing the ISIS symbol.” That post received 426,000 views. Major international news outlets have had to issue formal corrections and apologies for making the same false claim. The gesture predates ISIS by fourteen centuries. But 426,000 people now associate a prayer gesture with terrorism, because an account with millions of followers told them to.

Political commentator Stacy Ruth declared: “Buddhism is a religion. Hinduism is a religion. Judaism is a religion. Christianity is a religion. Islam is a political ideology masquerading as a religion.” Representative Mary Miller said she was “proud to stand firmly against this radical ideology that seeks to uproot the constitutional principles and Christian values on which our nation was founded.”

These aren’t backbenchers. These are powerful voices with audiences in the tens of millions. But ask yourself — what has any of them actually done about the problem they keep telling you exists? Have any of those seven bills passed? Has a single one of those posts made your community safer? Or did they just make someone’s follower count bigger and someone’s campaign fund fatter? The question isn’t whether they believe what they’re saying. The question is who else benefits when they say it.

You thought you were forming your own opinion. You were consuming a product. And the product is our anger.

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The Foreign Hand

Before I continue, I need to make a distinction that the people profiting from this deliberately blur, because keeping it blurred protects them from scrutiny.

Some of the most devout Jewish communities in the world — groups like Neturei Karta, the Satmar Hasidim, True Torah Jews — have opposed Zionism on religious grounds since the ideology was founded in the 1890s. They argue that it hijacked Jewish identity for a political project that had no basis in Jewish theology before the nineteenth century. For this, they are called self-hating Jews. They are told they are not real Jews. They are marginalised, smeared, and shut out — by the very apparatus that claims to speak for all Jews everywhere. Ask yourself why. These communities don’t raise money for Israel. They don’t lobby Congress. They don’t fit the model. And when the most religiously observant Jews on the planet tell you that the Israeli government doesn’t represent them or their faith, and get attacked for saying it, that should tell you everything about the operation I’m about to describe. What follows is about the Israeli government’s cash cow, its lobbying apparatus, and where our money is going.

The Israeli government spends enormous sums to shape how we think about Muslims. In 2025, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs signed a $6 million contract with the US-based firm Clock Tower X LLC to produce digital content and influence how artificial intelligence systems — including tools like ChatGPT — respond to topics involving Israel. The 2025 budget allocated an additional $150 million to the Foreign Ministry for influence operations — a twenty-fold increase over previous years. These funds target American college campuses, social media platforms, and international media.

Then there’s TikTok. In September 2025, Netanyahu sat down with a group of American influencers at Israel’s Consulate General in New York — and the meeting was recorded. His words were not ambiguous. He called social media “the most important weapon to secure our base in the US.” He identified the TikTok sale as “the most important purchase going on right now. Number one. Number one.” He then said of Elon Musk and X: “We have to talk to Elon. He’s not an enemy, he’s a friend. If we can get these two things, we will get a lot.”

Days later, the TikTok deal went through. The US operations were transferred to a consortium led by Oracle, whose co-founder Larry Ellison is a longtime Netanyahu ally and major donor to the Israeli military. Ellison has hosted Netanyahu on his private island. The consortium includes Rupert Murdoch and Michael Dell — Dell posted a photo with the Israeli president captioned “It’s an honor to stand with Israel” and is a major donor to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.

A foreign head of state went on camera, called our social media platforms weapons, celebrated their purchase by his allies, and told a room full of influencers that controlling these platforms would allow Israel to “get a lot.” Again, that’s not a conspiracy theory. That is a PsyOp by a foreign government on our minds.

The strategic logic is straightforward. Our concern about Islam serves Israeli foreign policy by reframing the conflict as civilisational — the West versus Islam — rather than what it actually is: a political conflict over occupation, dispossession, and the rights of the Palestinian Arabs. The more focused we are on Islam as a threat at home, worrying about what our neighbour is up to, the less likely we are to question what is being done with our tax money overseas.

And it is our money. The United States has provided Israel with over $317 billion in US taxpayer funded aid since 1951, adjusted for inflation, making it the largest cumulative recipient of American foreign aid since World War II. In the two years since October 2023 alone, the US has spent $21.7 billion in direct military aid to Israel, with an additional $9 to $12 billion on related military operations in the region. The Israeli Defense Ministry confirmed that since October 2023, the United States delivered ninety thousand tons of arms and equipment on eight hundred transport planes and one hundred and forty ships.

Israel receives its annual aid in the first thirty days of the fiscal year — no other country gets this treatment. Unlike any other recipient, Israel is not required to account for how it spends US aid, including on settlements that violate stated US policy. Meanwhile, Israel maintains free universal healthcare and free education for its citizens. We are subsidising another country’s social safety net while our own crumbles, and the people telling us to be angry about Muslims are making sure we never connect those dots.

Ask yourself why the conversation is always steered toward Islam and never toward the cheque our government writes every year. Someone doesn’t want us connecting those dots.

The same infrastructure extends into technology — and this is where it comes home. The tech companies taking billions in defence contracts with Israel, paid for by our tax dollars, are the same ones building the surveillance systems being deployed on American soil. Google’s $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract provides cloud and AI services to the Israeli military. Microsoft’s Azure powers Israeli government operations. Amazon Web Services enables intelligence gathering overseas. These are the same companies providing facial recognition to American police departments, predictive policing algorithms to American cities, and cloud infrastructure to American intelligence agencies. The technology gets tested on someone else’s population, AI designed for warfare, and then deployed on ours. If you think the AI tools being built for foreign military operations won’t eventually be pointed at American citizens, you haven’t been paying attention to how this works. It’s already coming home while we are distracted by the political sleight of hand of our politicians.

Our tax dollars fund the bombs. Our anger provides the political cover. And the people telling us to be angry about Muslims are the same people making sure we never ask why. The road to truth always lies at the end of a money trail.

The Intel

Now let’s look at some of the claims we’ve all heard repeated. Some of them don’t hold up when you check the source.

Shariah is one of the most misunderstood words in this debate. There is no single book of Shariah — you cannot walk into a bookshop and buy one, the way you can buy a Bible or a Qur’an. There are books about Shariah, and there are law books in Muslim-majority countries that reflect local cultural norms — sometimes with an Islamic flavour. But that’s no different from Western nations whose laws carry a Christian influence without being based on the Bible, or Israel, where Jewish identity shapes the state but not every law of the Torah is practised. Shariah is not a legal code waiting to be imposed. It’s a tradition of thinking that different countries apply differently — or not at all. Shariah is a science of interpretation practised across five major schools of thought, each reaching different conclusions on issues ranging from prayer posture to commercial law. Over ninety percent of Shariah has nothing to do with criminal law. It covers prayer, fasting, charity, personal hygiene, inheritance, and business ethics. When politicians ban Shariah, they won’t be banning a book — they will be banning a way of thinking. And once the government can ban one way of thinking, yours is next.

Shariah courts in Western countries — including the United States and United Kingdom — operate identically to Jewish Halakha courts, known as Beth Din. Both handle civil matters on an opt-in basis: divorce, inheritance, contract disputes. Neither imposes religious law on non-adherents. Neither has jurisdiction over criminal matters. The Beth Din system has operated in America for decades without a single “Ban the Beth Din” bill. The forty-seven members of the Sharia Free America Caucus could not define what they are trying to ban — and have never proposed banning its Jewish equivalent. The inconsistency tells you everything about who’s running the game.

In fact, Israel itself — the country our tax dollars subsidise to the tune of $317 billion to expand, operate influence campaigns against us — operates Shariah courts for its Muslim citizens, handling matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The politicians who vote to send that money to a country with Shariah courts are the same ones telling you that Shariah in America is an existential threat. Let that sink in.

The claim that Muhammad was a pedophile is a commonly debunked claim Mike Davis recently shared with 475,000 followers. It is built on a contested hadith — a recorded oral tradition written down two to three centuries after the events it describes. What no one sharing this claim tells you is that the hadith literature contains multiple contradictory accounts, and the weight of the evidence — drawn from independent chronological records, biographical sources, and battlefield participation logs that prohibited anyone under fifteen from military expeditions — places Aisha in her late teens to early twenties at the time of marriage. The single account claiming she was nine requires ignoring all of it. No contemporary of the Prophet — not even his bitterest enemies, who accused him of everything from insanity to sorcery — ever accused him of marrying a girl too young. Meanwhile, US state laws as recently as today permit marriages as young as twelve with parental consent. Before condemning seventh-century Arabia, examine your own legal codes. The person who told you this was counting on you never looking it up.

Halal slaughter requires that an animal be humanely raised throughout its life, removed from the sight of other animals before slaughter, and killed with a single clean cut to the jugular using a razor-sharp knife, with a short prayer said beforehand. This is virtually identical in principle to Jewish kosher slaughter, known as shechita. Both traditions mandate humane treatment and the rapid draining of blood. The “ban halal” crowd has never proposed banning kosher. Ask yourself why. When politicians target one practice and protect an identical one, they’re not legislating food safety or concern for animal cruelty. They’re picking a target and hoping you don’t notice the double standard. Remember the political sleight of hand and who benefits from the outrage.

The idea that Islam is incompatible with democracy or trying to take over isn’t new — and it didn’t convince the founding fathers of our great nation. Thomas Jefferson hosted the first White House iftar dinner in 1805, rearranging the time of a state dinner to accommodate the Ramadan fast of the Tunisian ambassador, Sidi Soliman Mellimelli. Jefferson owned a copy of the Qur’an. And the author of this article served as a counterterrorism operative protecting American democracy — and helped bring to justice people who were plotting against it.

In a nation of many religions — and we often forget that different denominations of Christianity were once treated as separate and rival faiths — this is where we should be most concerned. Article VI of the United States Constitution states: “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law regardless of religion. Every bill introduced by the Sharia Free America Caucus — from making Shariah advocacy grounds for deportation to designating organisations as terrorists by legislative vote — violates the foundational principles of the country these legislators claim to defend.

And here’s where it gets personal. What happens when Evangelicals set religious tests for Catholics? Or Protestants for Mormons? Setting the precedent by banning Islam — a religion that believes Jesus is the Christ, that he ascended to Heaven, and that he will return in his second coming — brings it home on just how easy it would be to ban any denomination the group in power deems undesirable or a threat to what they believe is the real religion of the nation. The person who told you Islam is incompatible with America was counting on you never reading your own Constitution. Or just not caring. Benjamin Franklin warned us: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” He wasn’t talking about Islam. He was talking about us.

The Exit

The people profiting from our anger don’t live in our neighbourhoods. They’ve never set foot in the communities they talk about. They have constructed, for profit and for political power, an image of 1.8 billion people based on the worst acts of a fraction of a fraction — and they’ve made a very comfortable living doing it.

And it isn’t just domestic profiteers. AIPAC and the Israeli government benefit directly from every ounce of our outrage. It is the political cover for a foreign policy that costs thousands of American lives and American treasure — $317 billion and counting — while the recipients enjoy the social programmes we can’t afford. The outrage machine keeps our eyes on Islam so we never look at the line item in the federal budget.

We were never stupid. We were targeted. The same psychological machinery that radicalises a young Muslim man watching jihadi recruitment videos in his bedroom is the same machinery being used on us: curated content selected for maximum emotional impact, an in-group that rewards escalation, an algorithm that serves us more of what makes us angry, and an industry that profits from our inability to see past the noise. The mechanism is identical. Only the content differs.

I know this because I’ve watched radicalisation from every angle a person can watch it from. I was radicalised myself, as a teenager, in a Christian cult that beat me with oak table legs and broomstick handles in the name of God’s authority — I know what it feels like to have a worldview constructed for you by people who profit from keeping you captive. I watched people I was close to get radicalised by online propaganda until they were ready to fly to Iraq and kill American soldiers. I trained them at a jihad camp while wearing a wire, and I helped put them away. And now I watch ordinary, decent Americans get radicalised by a billion-dollar industry that needs our outrage more than it needs the truth.

The machinery is the same every time. A curated feed. An authority figure who profits from our outrage. A community that polices doubt — where questioning the narrative gets you branded a traitor or a sympathiser. And a set of claims that fall apart the moment you verify them independently. The men I helped convict had their Anwar al-Awlaki recordings and their Baghdad Sniper videos. We have our Benny Johnson posts and our Libs of TikTok screenshots. The emotional architecture is identical: select the most inflammatory content, strip it of context, serve it to people who are already angry, and watch the radicalisation compound.

The real-world consequences are already here. In 2024, monitors recorded 8,658 complaints about incidents targeting Muslims across the United States — the highest number ever documented. That’s not a sign of a country getting safer. That’s a sign of a population being manipulated into attacking their own neighbours while the people running the operation cash cheques and win elections. Every incident is a data point in someone’s fundraising deck. Every headline is a donation driver. The outrage isn’t a side effect of the industry. It is the industry.

The exit starts with checking what we’ve been told — and not by asking the people who told us, because they have a financial interest in keeping us in the dark. Not by retreating into our own curated content to reinforce what we already believe. Step out. Challenge the beliefs we’ve been carrying. Beliefs aren’t permanent — they change as we grow, and changing them is a sign of strength, not weakness. Look up the donor-advised fund filings. Read the actual text of the bills being proposed in our name. Search the names I’ve given you and follow the money. See who’s getting paid, and ask yourself whether the people getting rich off our anger have ever done a single thing to make our lives better.

I told you about my work for the USAF Office of Special Investigations and my counterterrorism work for the Federal Bureau of Investigations, I told you about being raised Catholic, my time in a Christian cult and after becoming an Evangelical Christian, but there’s one more thing you should know about the man who wrote this article.

I’ve been Muslim nearly thirty years. But I didn’t abandon Christianity — I grew into Islam through it. I spent years studying the Bible, the Jewish scriptures, and eventually the Qur’an. What I found was that Islam didn’t ask me to reject Jesus — it asked me to revere him, as the Christ, born of a virgin, who ascended to Heaven and will return. My faith deepened. It didn’t break. The men I helped convict didn’t just betray their country — they betrayed a faith that teaches the same reverence for Jesus that your church taught you.

Everything I told you about the profiteers, the foreign influence operations, the manufactured outrage, the claims that fall apart when you check them — I told you as a man who knows Islam from the inside, who has lived it, bled for it, and been exiled for defending it honestly.

Christ himself told us: “You cannot serve God and money.” Every politician, every lobbying group, every influencer, every organisation I have named in this article — ask yourself which one they are serving. The answer has been staring us in the face the entire time.

You just read an entire article by a Muslim and didn’t throw it in the bin. You evaluated the evidence on its merits. You followed the facts where they led. That is the version of you that the hate industry cannot afford to exist — because a person who evaluates evidence is a person who can’t be hustled.

The most radical thing you can do right now is verify.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

The Inversion

There is a claim so audacious, so contrary to mainstream discourse, that most people dismiss it before examining the evidence. The claim is this: the State of Israel is the single most antisemitic entity currently operating on the planet. This is not the position of fringe activists or hostile outsiders. It is the stated, theologically grounded conviction of Torah-observant Jewish communities who have opposed Zionism since its inception — communities like Neturei Karta, the Satmar Hasidim, True Torah Jews (Natruna), and organisations such as Torah Jews and Voice of Rabbis.

Their argument is not emotional. It is systematic. It rests on theology, history, documented policy, and observable consequences. And it demands to be heard in full, because the stakes — for Jews, for Palestinians, and for the integrity of the word “antisemitism” itself — could not be higher.

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The Theological Betrayal: Zionism as the Negation of Judaism

Judaism, as understood by Torah-observant Jews for millennia, is a covenantal faith. It is defined by the relationship between God and the Jewish people, expressed through Torah, mitzvot, and the prophetic tradition. Jewish identity is fundamentally spiritual and religious.

Political Zionism, founded by Theodor Herzl in the 1890s, performed a radical act of redefinition. It took a religious identity rooted in divine covenant and transformed it into an ethnic-nationalist political project. Herzl and many of the founding Zionists were secular, some openly contemptuous of religious Judaism. The movement’s foundational premise was not that Jews are a people in covenant with God, but that Jews are a nation without a state — and that the “problem” of Jewish existence could be solved through sovereignty and military power.

This, anti-Zionist rabbis argue, is itself an acceptance of the antisemitic premise. The antisemite says: Jews do not belong among the nations. Herzl agreed — he simply proposed a different solution. Rather than challenging hatred, Zionism internalised it.

The Talmud (Ketubot 111a) records the Three Oaths, which anti-Zionist Jews interpret as divine prohibitions: that Jews shall not ascend to the Land of Israel en masse by force; that they shall not rebel against the nations; and that the nations shall not oppress Israel excessively. The establishment of the State of Israel through political manoeuvre and military conquest, in this reading, constitutes a direct violation of sacred law. It is not merely a political disagreement. It is, in the vocabulary of Jewish theology, an act of rebellion against God.

Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe and one of the most respected Talmudic authorities of the twentieth century, devoted an entire work — Vayoel Moshe — to this argument. His was not a marginal voice. Before Zionism reshaped the landscape, opposition to Jewish political sovereignty prior to the messianic era was the mainstream rabbinic position. Zionism did not fulfil Judaism. It displaced it.

Replacing God with a Flag: Zionism as Idolatry

Anti-Zionist Torah Jews go further. They argue that Zionism constitutes a form of avodah zarah — idolatry — the gravest sin in Jewish theology. The state replaces the covenant. The flag replaces Torah. Military power replaces the messianic hope. The obligation to be “a light unto the nations” is replaced with ethnic nationalism and territorial expansion.

When a Jew pledges allegiance to the State of Israel, when the state becomes the locus of identity and the object of ultimate loyalty, something sacred has been substituted with something profane. The prophetic tradition of Isaiah, Amos, and Jeremiah warned repeatedly and explicitly that sovereignty without justice leads to destruction, that God desires mercy and righteousness, not sacrifices and national power. Anti-Zionist Jews argue that modern Israel is repeating precisely the pattern the prophets condemned — and that fidelity to the Jewish tradition requires saying so.

Manufacturing the Danger: How Israel Produces Antisemitism

Perhaps the most strategically devastating argument is this: Israel claims to be the solution to antisemitism, but it is the primary engine generating it.

By claiming to act and speak in the name of all Jews everywhere, the State of Israel makes every Jewish person on earth a potential target. When Israeli forces carry out airstrikes, enforce occupation, expand settlements, or enact policies that provoke international outrage, the backlash lands not only on the state but on Jewish communities globally. Synagogues are vandalised. Jewish individuals are harassed. Antisemitic incidents spike in direct correlation with Israeli military operations.

This is not a bug. Anti-Zionist Jews argue it is a feature. The entire architecture of Zionism depends on the premise that Jews can never be safe among the nations. Rising antisemitism validates the Zionist project. It drives aliyah — Jewish immigration to Israel. It silences critics. It justifies the security state. Israel needs antisemitism the way an arms dealer needs conflict.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, now adopted by numerous governments, illustrates the mechanism. By including criticism of Israel as a potential form of antisemitism, it achieves two things simultaneously: it shields the state from accountability, and it collapses the distinction between Jewish people and Israeli state policy — which is exactly what genuine antisemites do. The conflation is the point.

“You Don’t Belong Here”: Zionism’s Shared Premise with Classical Antisemitism

There is a message that has echoed through centuries of anti-Jewish persecution, from medieval expulsions to Nazi ideology to modern neo-Nazism. The message is: Jews do not belong here. Jews are foreign. Jews should leave.

Zionism does not challenge this message. It affirms it.

When Israeli leaders respond to an attack on a synagogue in Paris by calling on French Jews to “come home to Israel,” they are completing a sentence that the antisemite began. The antisemite says: you don’t belong in France. The Zionist agrees — and offers a destination. The underlying premise is identical: that Jews are fundamentally alien wherever they live outside of Israel, that coexistence among the nations is impossible, that the only answer is separation.

This is not a rhetorical parallel. It is a structural alignment of ideology. And it has a historical pedigree that cannot be ignored.

The Haavara Agreement of 1933 stands as the most documented example. This was a formal arrangement negotiated between the Zionist Organisation and the Nazi regime — Adolf Hitler’s government — to facilitate the transfer of German Jewish assets and the emigration of Jews to Palestine. The agreement was designed to work in tandem with Nazi persecution. The Nazis wanted Jews out of Germany. The Zionists wanted Jews in Palestine. The interests converged. The mechanism was transactional: persecution created the pressure, and the Zionist movement provided the pipeline.

This was not a desperate rescue operation. It was a strategic partnership between a movement that wanted to remove Jews from Europe and a movement that wanted to collect them in Palestine. The Jews themselves — their safety, their agency, their right to remain in their own countries — were secondary to both parties’ objectives.

The pattern continues today. Every act of fearmongering, every declaration that Jews in Europe or America are living on borrowed time, every campaign designed to make diaspora Jews feel unsafe in their own homelands serves the same function the Haavara Agreement served: it creates the conditions under which Jews feel they must leave. The method has evolved from formal agreements with persecutors to sophisticated media campaigns and political pressure, but the logic is unchanged.

Jewish communities have lived in France for over a thousand years. Jews have been part of British life since the Norman era. American Jewish communities are woven into the fabric of the nation. To tell these people that their homes are not truly their homes, that their citizenship is conditional, that they should uproot their lives and relocate to a state in the Middle East — this is not protection. It is displacement. And it echoes, with uncomfortable precision, what every antisemitic movement in history has demanded.

Torah-observant anti-Zionist Jews make this point with particular force. The divine exile — the galut — is, in their theology, ordained by God. Jews are meant to live among the nations until the messianic era. Their homes in London, Paris, New York, and Buenos Aires are not temporary arrangements to be abandoned at the first sign of trouble. They are where God has placed them. To tell a Jew that their divinely ordained home is illegitimate and that they must relocate to a state that violates divine law is, in this framework, a double act of spiritual violence.

The convergence between Zionist rhetoric and neo-Nazi ideology on this point is not coincidental. White nationalist movements in Europe and America have openly praised the concept of Israel as an ethno-state, seeing it as a model and a convenient destination for the Jews they wish to expel. When Richard Spencer called himself a “white Zionist,” he was not being ironic. He was identifying a genuine ideological kinship: the shared belief that ethnic groups should be separated into their own territories, and that Jews living among non-Jews is a problem to be solved.

That Zionism finds its logic validated by white supremacists should give pause to anyone who claims it is a defence against antisemitism. A movement whose core premise — that Jews cannot and should not live among other peoples — is affirmed by the very forces it claims to oppose has not defeated antisemitism. It has absorbed it.

Instrumentalising the Holocaust

The exploitation of Holocaust memory is central to the Zionist project, and it is one of the charges anti-Zionist Jews make most forcefully.

The Holocaust — the Shoah — is sacred memory. Six million Jews were murdered. Anti-Zionist Jews honour this with absolute solemnity. What they refuse to accept is the weaponisation of that memory to justify a political state and silence dissent.

They go further. Historians and anti-Zionist scholars have documented troubling evidence that Zionist leadership during the 1930s and 1940s prioritised the state-building project over the rescue of European Jews. There were documented instances of selectivity — prioritising young, healthy, secular, productive Jews for immigration to Palestine while showing indifference to rescue efforts that did not serve the Zionist goal. The Haavara Agreement, as discussed above, was the earliest and most formal manifestation of this, but the pattern extended throughout the war years. When rescue routes existed that would have taken Jews to destinations other than Palestine, Zionist leadership was at times indifferent or actively obstructive.

The charge is stark: Zionism did not arise to save Jews from the Holocaust. It arose before the Holocaust, negotiated with its perpetrators, and then used the catastrophe retroactively as its ultimate justification. Anti-Zionist Jews consider this a desecration of the highest order.

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The Erasure of Anti-Zionist Jews

If Israel is the guardian of Jewish identity, what happens to Jews who reject it?

They are erased. Delegitimised. Excommunicated from their own faith.

Anti-Zionist Jews are routinely labelled “self-hating,” “kapos,” and traitors. Their voices are dismissed as inauthentic. Their Judaism is questioned. They are told, in effect, that they are not real Jews — that their millennia-old theological tradition does not count unless it aligns with a political ideology barely 130 years old.

This is not a minor rhetorical tactic. It is an act of violence against Jewish identity itself. When Benjamin Netanyahu claims to speak for “the Jewish people,” he is asserting ownership over an identity that predates his state by three thousand years. When anti-Zionist rabbis — men who have devoted their lives to Torah study, who observe every mitzvah, who trace their scholarship through unbroken chains of transmission — are dismissed as irrelevant, something deeply antisemitic has occurred. A secular political project has appointed itself the gatekeeper of who qualifies as a Jew.

The Zionist message to anti-Zionist Jews is unambiguous: your Torah does not count. Your rabbis do not count. Your reading of Jewish law does not count. Only loyalty to the state counts. This is, by any reasonable measure, the suppression of Jewish religious freedom by a political ideology.

Persecution Within: Israel’s War on Religious Jews

The persecution is not merely rhetorical. Within Israel itself, anti-Zionist Orthodox communities face harassment, social ostracism, and in some cases violence. Members of Neturei Karta and allied groups have been physically attacked for their views.

The early Zionist project was explicitly hostile to traditional Jewish life. Yiddish — the living language of Ashkenazi Jewry — was actively suppressed in favour of Modern Hebrew, which the Zionists fashioned into a nationalist tool. Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews — Jews from the Middle East and North Africa — faced systematic discrimination upon arrival in Israel. The Ringworm Affair, in which thousands of Mizrahi children were subjected to dangerous radiation treatments, remains one of the darkest chapters. Yemeni Jewish families experienced the alleged disappearance of their children, a trauma that has never been fully resolved.

The ongoing battle over military conscription of ultra-Orthodox men crystallises the conflict. For yeshiva students whose lives are devoted to Torah study, being forced into military service for a state they consider religiously illegitimate — to fight in wars they believe violate divine law — is not a policy disagreement. It is coercion of religious conscience.

A state that persecutes its own religious Jewish citizens for refusing to violate their interpretation of God’s law is not a Jewish state. It is, in the eyes of these communities, a state at war with Judaism.

Stealing the Name: “Israel” Is Not a Country

The very name “Israel” is contested. In Torah, Israel is not a political entity. It is a spiritual designation — the name given to Jacob after his encounter with the divine, signifying the people who wrestle with God. It refers to a covenant community defined by its relationship with the Creator, not to a modern nation-state with borders, an army, and a seat at the United Nations.

By appropriating this name, the Zionist state has achieved a profound act of theological identity theft. Every time the word “Israel” is spoken in a news broadcast, it reinforces the conflation of a spiritual reality with a political project. Every time a scripture that speaks of “Israel” is cited to justify settlements or military operations, the sacred text is being conscripted into the service of nationalism. Anti-Zionist Jews argue this is a desecration — a violation of what the name means and has always meant in Jewish theology.

The Corruption of Global Jewish Life

The damage extends far beyond Israel’s borders. Anti-Zionist Jews argue that the Zionist project has corrupted Jewish communal life worldwide.

Synagogues, community organisations, schools, and charitable institutions that might otherwise focus on Torah study, acts of justice, prayer, and spiritual growth have been conscripted into defending or justifying the policies of a foreign government. Communal resources are redirected toward Israel advocacy. Internal dissent is policed. Young Jews who raise moral objections to Israeli policy find themselves marginalised, shunned, or expelled from their communities.

The result is a hollowing out of diaspora Judaism. The faith tradition becomes secondary to the political project. The question “What does Torah teach?” is replaced by “What is good for Israel?” And Jews who insist on asking the first question are treated as enemies.

This, anti-Zionist Jews argue, constitutes a spiritual catastrophe — an internal erosion of Jewish life carried out in the name of Jewish survival. It is antisemitism wearing a Star of David.

The Semitic Question: Who Are the Real Antisemites?

There is a final dimension to this argument that challenges the very language of the debate.

The term “antisemitism” was coined in the 1870s by Wilhelm Marr as a self-applied label for his anti-Jewish movement. It was always, in practice, about hostility toward Jews. But the etymology tells a different story. “Semitic” refers to the descendants of Shem — a broad family of peoples that includes not only Jews but Arabs, Palestinians, and other Middle Eastern populations.

If we take the word at its root, then the systematic dehumanisation, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and violence visited upon the Palestinian people — a Semitic people with ancient roots in the land — constitutes antisemitism in its most literal and expansive sense. The denial of Palestinian identity, the erasure of their history, the destruction of their homes, the killing of their children — this is hatred directed at a Semitic people, carried out by a state that claims to be the antidote to such hatred.

The irony is not subtle. It is staggering. A state founded in the name of fighting antisemitism practises it — in the original, etymological sense of the word — as a matter of daily policy. It wages war on Semitic peoples while claiming a monopoly on the word used to describe such acts.

Linguists will note that words derive meaning from usage, not etymology. That is a fair technical point. But the moral argument transcends linguistics. A state cannot claim to oppose hatred of Semitic peoples while systematically destroying the lives, homes, culture, and future of another Semitic people. The contradiction is not semantic. It is existential.

The Prophetic Warning

The Hebrew prophets spoke to this moment with terrifying clarity.

Amos declared: “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies... But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Isaiah warned that God rejects worship offered by hands stained with blood. Jeremiah told the people of Judah not to trust in the deceptive words “The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord” — as though the mere invocation of sacred identity could substitute for actual justice.

Anti-Zionist Jews hear in these words a direct indictment of the modern state that bears the name Israel. A state that invokes Jewish identity while practising oppression. A state that uses sacred language to cover profane acts. A state that says “Never again” while enacting the very patterns of dispossession and dehumanisation that the prophets condemned.

The prophetic tradition does not offer comfort to the powerful. It offers warning. And the warning, Torah Jews insist, has never been more urgent.

The Most Dangerous Antisemitism Comes from Within

External antisemitism — the hatred of Jews by those outside the community — is visible, identifiable, and resistible. It can be named, confronted, and fought.

What Zionism represents, according to Torah-observant anti-Zionist Jews, is something far more insidious. It is an antisemitism that wears Jewish symbols, speaks Hebrew, quotes scripture, and claims to be the fulfilment of Jewish destiny. It redefines Judaism to serve a political agenda. It endangers Jews worldwide by making them complicit in actions they may abhor. It tells Jews their homes are not their homes, echoing the oldest antisemitic demand in history. It negotiated with Nazis and today finds its logic affirmed by white supremacists. It excommunicates Jews who object. It persecutes religious communities within its own borders. It instrumentalises the Holocaust. It corrupts diaspora Jewish life. And it wages war on a fellow Semitic people while claiming a monopoly on the language of anti-Semitic victimhood.

This is why Torah Jews, Voice of Rabbis, Neturei Karta, and the broader anti-Zionist Orthodox movement call Israel the most antisemitic entity on earth. Not because they are indifferent to Jewish welfare. Precisely because they are not.

They speak because they believe Judaism is worth more than a flag, a state, or a military apparatus. They speak because they believe Jewish identity is defined by God, not by a government. They speak because the prophetic tradition demands it.

And they speak because silence, in the face of what is being done in their name, would be the greatest betrayal of all.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that's how the fire spreads.

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If you found this valuable, please support me with a like, share, or Subscribe.

James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press