The Romans of the fourth century still built roads. Not ordinary roads — roads that would outlast every empire that followed, engineered with a precision that would not be matched for a thousand years. The aqueducts still carried water. The legions still marched. The Senate still convened, even as its authority had been hollowed out by emperors who treated it as a rubber stamp. By every visible metric, Rome remained the most powerful civilisation on earth. And it was dying. Not from a single blow — not from any one invasion or any one defeat — but from a slow, structural divergence between the system’s stated purpose and its actual conduct. The roads still worked. The civilisation they served did not.

The British Empire told itself the same story in a different accent. In 1939, Britain ruled a quarter of the earth’s surface and a quarter of its population. Its navy was the most powerful afloat. Its diplomatic influence shaped the policies of nations on every continent. And within two decades, it would shed an empire — India, Palestine, Burma, Malaya, Kenya, Aden — and discover it could no longer project power without American backing. The infrastructure of empire remained. The will — and the moral authority — to sustain it had evaporated. Britain did not lose its empire in a war. It lost the belief that the empire was justified, and without that belief, the machinery could not be sustained.¹

The Soviet Union collapsed not because it ran out of missiles but because it ran out of legitimacy. The parades continued. The cosmonauts launched. The nuclear arsenal remained the largest on earth. But the gap between what the system promised and what it delivered had become so vast that no amount of military hardware could bridge it. When the end came, it came not with an invasion but with a shrug — the recognition, shared by the rulers and the ruled alike, that the system no longer meant what it said. The Cold War was won not by the side with the most weapons but by the side whose narrative could still be believed.²

This is the pattern. Not a dramatic fall but a slow rot, concealed behind metrics that no longer measure what matters. Military spending remains high. GDP continues to grow. The technology advances. And the civilisation behind it — the agreement about what the power is for, the shared understanding of what is permissible and what is not — erodes so gradually that the people inside it mistake the persistence of the machinery for the persistence of the meaning.

Part I of this series told the story of how the United States built the post-war international order and why its foundation was always cracked — by Manifest Destiny, by American Exceptionalism, by the unreconciled gap between the nation’s stated ideals and its actual history. This article examines what happens when the crack becomes a chasm. When the nation that wrote the rules begins breaking them so openly that the entire system loses its legitimacy. When the institutions designed to restrain the powerful activate only when it is convenient for the powerful. When the evidence is not abstract but specific — dated, sourced, and visible in the wreckage of nuclear power plants, the rubble of universities, and the bodies of journalists killed in numbers that exceed every major war in modern history combined.

The machinery still runs. The civilisation it was built to serve is collapsing.

The Rules-for-Thee Order

On 11 August 2022, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, addressed the United Nations Security Council to warn that the situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant had become “very alarming.”³ Russian forces had occupied the facility — Europe’s largest nuclear power plant — and shelling in and around the site had caused explosions near the electrical switchboard and triggered a power shutdown. “These military actions near such a large nuclear facility could lead to very serious consequences,” Grossi told the Council.⁴

The gravity of the warning was matched by the speed of the response. The international system — the system America had built for precisely this kind of moment — activated with a coordination that seemed to vindicate every institution, every treaty, every norm established since 1945.

More than forty nations issued a joint statement condemning Russia’s actions at Zaporizhzhia.⁵ The IAEA Board of Governors convened an emergency session and passed a resolution — twenty-six votes in favour, two against — demanding that Russia “immediately cease all actions against, and at, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and any other nuclear facility in Ukraine.”⁶ The Security Council held urgent meetings. The American Nuclear Society declared it “unjustifiable for a civil nuclear facility to be used as a military base or be targeted in a military operation.”⁷ Grossi established five explicit principles for the protection of nuclear facilities during armed conflict — no attacks on or from the plant, no heavy weapons stored on site, no threats to off-site power, full protection of essential safety systems, and no action that could undermine these commitments.⁸ NATO condemned Russia. The European Union condemned Russia. Every lever of the international architecture was pulled, every institutional voice raised, every mechanism of collective disapproval deployed. And rightly so. The threat of a nuclear accident at Zaporizhzhia was real. The shelling of a nuclear facility in an active war zone was genuinely dangerous. The international response was proportionate, grounded in law, and precisely what the post-war system was designed to do: mobilise the collective authority of nations to restrain behaviour that endangered the world.

It was the system working. It was the system proving that the rules mattered. It was the system demonstrating that no nation, however powerful, could threaten nuclear safety without facing the unified condemnation of the international community.

Now hold that response in your mind. Hold all of it — the forty-nation statement, the Board resolution, the five principles, the emergency sessions, the universal condemnation. Hold the speed with which the machinery activated, the moral clarity of the language, the institutional certainty that this was unacceptable. Hold it. And compare it to what followed.

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a bombing campaign against Iran.⁹

It was not the first time. Eight months earlier, Israel had struck Iran’s nuclear facilities and assassinated its scientists, drawing the United States into direct bombardment days later.¹⁰ The international institutions had already been tested — and had already failed. The February 2026 campaign was a repetition, launched with the confidence that comes from knowing no one will act.

Over the following four weeks, US-Israeli airstrikes struck the Natanz uranium enrichment facility — multiple times. Satellite imagery confirmed damage to entrance buildings of the underground fuel enrichment plant.¹¹ They struck the Bushehr nuclear power plant — at least three times.¹² They bombed the Arak heavy water research reactor. They hit a yellowcake production plant in Yazd province.¹³ These were not military installations commandeered by an occupying force, as at Zaporizhzhia. These were safeguarded civilian nuclear facilities in a sovereign nation — facilities that the IAEA itself had been monitoring for years.

And what had the IAEA found? On 2 March 2026, four days into the bombing campaign, Grossi told the IAEA Board of Governors: “We don’t see a structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons.”¹⁴ The following day, CNN asked him directly whether Iran was “days or weeks away from building a bomb.” His answer: “No.”¹⁵

The pretext for the strikes — that Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat — was contradicted by the agency charged with verifying exactly that claim. The Arms Control Association concluded that “this is a war of choice, waged in violation of international law and without the necessary approval from Congress.”¹⁶ And the diplomacy had been working. Just days before the strikes began, Oman’s Foreign Minister, Badr Al-Busaidi, announced that a “breakthrough” had been reached — Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium and to submit to full IAEA verification. The deal, he said, was “within reach.” After the bombing began, Al-Busaidi said he was “dismayed” that “active and serious negotiations” had been undermined.¹⁷

The legal case against the strikes was clear. The evidentiary basis was absent. The diplomatic alternative had been abandoned. And the institutional response — the response of the same system that had mobilised with such speed and moral clarity for Zaporizhzhia — was silence.

No IAEA Board resolution demanding the United States and Israel cease strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. No forty-nation joint statement condemning the attacks. No Security Council resolution — not even a draft. No emergency principles for the protection of Iranian nuclear sites. No institutional declaration that bombing safeguarded nuclear facilities was “unjustifiable.” The same Rafael Grossi who had warned the Security Council that actions at Zaporizhzhia were “very alarming” and could lead to “very serious consequences” now merely “urged restraint” and “reiterated his call on all parties to exercise maximum restraint.”¹⁸

Russia condemned the strikes as “a blatant violation of international law.”¹⁹ The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons warned that “striking nuclear installations is explicitly banned under international law and risks causing radioactive contamination harmful to human health and the environment.”²⁰ The World Health Organisation began preparing for the “worst-case scenario” of a nuclear catastrophe.²¹ But the Western institutions — the ones that had built the rules, funded the agencies, drafted the resolutions, and demanded compliance from Russia — produced a silence so complete that it constituted its own kind of statement.

The statement was this: the rules apply to our enemies. They do not apply to us.

This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary political sense. Politicians have always been hypocritical. This is something more structural — a system designed to function as universal law revealing itself to be a tool of selective enforcement. The institutions are not broken. They are not dysfunctional. They are not paralysed by bureaucratic incompetence. They work. They work swiftly, decisively, and with full moral authority — when the violator is an adversary of the West. They go silent when the violator is the West. The immune system has not failed. It has made a choice. It recognises the virus as self, and it refuses to attack it.

The implications extend far beyond the Middle East. The entire post-war international order was built on a premise — the necessary fiction, if you prefer — that the rules applied to everyone. That no nation was above the law. That the system America built would constrain America as much as it constrained anyone else. That fiction held for eighty years, not because it was true — anyone paying attention to the history of American foreign policy knows it was never entirely true — but because enough people believed in it, or at least in the aspiration behind it, to give the system legitimacy. That legitimacy is now dead. Not wounded. Not weakened. Dead. Because every nation on earth can see what happened. Every foreign minister, every military planner, every government that once calibrated its behaviour against the rules of the international order now knows that the rules are a function of power, not principle. And once that becomes visible — once the pretence collapses — the system does not recover. Legitimacy, unlike military capability, cannot be rebuilt by force.

Share

The Bombardment of Civilisation

To understand what is being destroyed in the current war, stop thinking about it as a war and start thinking about it as a targeting list.

Wars destroy military infrastructure. That is their nature and, within the laws of armed conflict, their legal scope. But what is being destroyed in Iran is not military infrastructure. It is the infrastructure of civilisation itself — the physical and institutional systems that allow a society of ninety million people to function as a society rather than as a collection of individuals struggling to survive.

Nuclear power plants — the facilities that generate electricity for cities, hospitals, and water treatment systems. Universities — the institutions that produce the scientists, engineers, doctors, and teachers on whom a modern society depends. Museums — the repositories of a civilisation’s memory, the physical evidence of who a people are and where they came from. Schools — the places where the next generation learns to read, to reason, to participate in civic life. Hospitals — the facilities that keep people alive. Steel factories — the industrial backbone of a modern economy. Oil refineries and desalination plants — the systems that provide energy and clean water. The Iranian Red Crescent — the humanitarian organisation tasked with helping the wounded and displaced.

By late March 2026, the scale of destruction was staggering. Iranian officials reported that US-Israeli strikes had damaged at least one hundred and twenty museums and historical sites across the country.²² More than six hundred schools and universities had been damaged or destroyed — including Malek Ashtar University in Tehran, which the Israeli military described as a research and development facility, ignoring the thousands of civilian students and academics who studied and worked there.²³ Two of Iran’s largest steel factories — the Khuzestan Steel facility and the Mobarakeh Steel complex in Isfahan — had been destroyed.²⁴ Oil, gas, and desalination infrastructure had been targeted across the country. On 28 March 2026, US-Israeli forces struck a major water source in the city of Haftgel, in Iran’s western Khuzestan province.²⁵ Water. The most elementary requirement of human survival. Article 54 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions prohibits attacking “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population,” including “drinking water installations and supplies.”²⁶ The nation that drafted those conventions was now violating them.

More than nineteen hundred people had been killed and twenty thousand injured in Iran since the campaign began on 28 February.²⁷ In Lebanon, Israeli strikes killed over eleven hundred people in the same period, including one hundred and twenty-two children and forty-two health workers.²⁸ The head of the Iranian Red Crescent delegation, Maria Martinez, told a United Nations press briefing that paramedics trying to rescue survivors from the rubble of buildings flattened by US-Israeli strikes had discovered the bodies of their own family members.²⁹ Consider what that means. Not as a statistic, but as a human reality. A paramedic crawls into the wreckage of a collapsed building, searching for survivors, and finds his own brother. His own mother. His own child. This is not a side effect of the war. This is the war. This is what the targeting list produces when it is applied to a civilian population — not military advantage but human devastation so intimate that the people sent to rescue the victims become the victims.

And this war — this campaign of civilisational destruction — was launched without the authorisation of the United States Congress. The War Powers Act of 1973 requires the President to obtain congressional approval within sixty days of committing US forces to hostilities. The United Nations Charter, which the United States drafted and ratified, prohibits the use of force against a sovereign state except in self-defence or with Security Council authorisation. Neither condition was met. The Arms Control Association concluded bluntly: “This is a war of choice, waged in violation of international law and without the necessary approval from Congress.”³⁰ The nation that wrote the War Powers Act is violating the War Powers Act. The nation that drafted the UN Charter is defying the UN Charter. The architect is not just demolishing the building. He is demolishing it with his own tools, in full view of the world, and daring anyone to stop him.

And perhaps the most revealing detail of all is not what is being destroyed but how the destruction is being packaged. In March 2026, the White House launched a mobile application — promoted across its official social media channels — that provided real-time content related to ongoing military operations.³¹ War as content. Military operations as something to watch on your phone, between checking the weather and scrolling through social media. In 1987, the film The Running Man depicted a dystopian society so desensitised that murder had become televised entertainment. It was science fiction — a dark satire, an exaggeration so extreme it felt absurd. Now the government of the United States is packaging its war for public consumption on an app, and a former mayor and federal prosecutor — Rudy Giuliani — posts “MUST WATCH VIDEO” on social media, framing Iranian civilian casualties as content to be consumed, while universities in Tehran are being bombed.³² The distance between the dystopia and the reality has collapsed. The state has adopted the pathology of the algorithm — packaging violence for engagement, treating war as a product, and measuring success not in legal or moral terms but in views.

This is not collateral damage. Collateral damage is the unintended consequence of strikes against legitimate military targets. What this targeting list reveals is something different: the systematic degradation of a civilian population’s capacity to sustain itself as a functioning society. When you bomb a nuclear power plant, you do not just damage a building — you threaten the electricity supply of millions. When you bomb a university, you do not just destroy a campus — you destroy the institution that produces the next generation of doctors and engineers. When you bomb a water source, you do not just hit a pipe — you threaten the survival of everyone who depends on it. When you livestream it on an app, you do not just broadcast a war — you normalise the destruction of civilisation as entertainment. The cumulative effect is not military advantage. It is civilisational destruction — the reduction of a modern society to a pre-industrial condition in which the population’s energy is consumed entirely by the struggle to survive, witnessed by a global audience that has been trained to consume it as content.

And there is one category of target that deserves particular attention, because it reveals not just a disregard for the laws of war but a systematic effort to eliminate the people whose job it is to tell the world what is happening.

Since 7 October 2023, Israel has killed more journalists than any government in the recorded history of press freedom monitoring. The numbers are not contested. They are documented by every credible press freedom organisation on earth, and they are staggering.

As of 28 March 2026, the Committee to Protect Journalists documented at least two hundred and fifty-nine journalists and media workers killed across Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, Israel, and Iran since the war began.³³ That figure reflects CPJ’s conservative methodology, which requires individual verification of each death. Broader aggregations — drawing on CPJ, the International Federation of Journalists, and other monitoring bodies — placed the number killed by Israel at up to two hundred and seventy-four by August 2025, with two hundred and sixty-nine of them Palestinian.³⁴ The true number is almost certainly higher than either count.

To grasp the scale of this, consider a finding from the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University: the war in Gaza alone has killed more journalists than the combined total killed during the United States Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War — including related conflicts in Cambodia and Laos — the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan.³⁵ Every major conflict in modern American history — combined — did not produce as many journalist deaths as the Israeli military has produced in Gaza in under three years.

That statistic deserves to be read again, because the mind instinctively resists it. Every major American war. Combined. Fewer journalists killed than in Gaza alone.

The pattern is consistent and documented across years. In 2023, nearly seventy-five per cent of all journalists killed worldwide were Palestinians killed in Israel’s war on Gaza.³⁶ In both 2024 and 2025, Israel was responsible for two-thirds of all journalist deaths globally.³⁷ Reporters Without Borders declared Israel the biggest killer and “the worst enemy” of journalists of 2025, with nearly half of all journalists killed that year murdered by the Israeli military.³⁸ The CPJ stated that Israel is “engaging in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented.”³⁹ Israeli airstrikes damaged or destroyed at least forty-eight media facilities in Gaza.⁴⁰ Reporters Without Borders filed complaints with the International Criminal Court. UNESCO awarded its 2024 World Press Freedom Prize to the Palestinian journalists of Gaza — many of them already dead when the award was announced.

This is not collateral damage. This is not the incidental cost of urban warfare. This is a pattern sustained over years, escalating in scale, documented by every independent monitoring body, and producing a kill rate against journalists that has no precedent in the history of armed conflict.

And the pattern extended into the current war. On 28 March 2026, Lebanese journalist Fatima Ftouni was killed by an Israeli strike. At the beginning of the month, she had reported live on air on Israel killing seven members of her own family. Then she was killed herself. She was not embedded with a militia. She was not at a military installation. She was a journalist, doing the thing that journalists do — telling the world what she saw. And she was killed for it, weeks after reporting the murder of her own family.⁴¹

The same day, Israeli soldiers detained a CNN crew in the occupied West Bank and put a journalist in a chokehold.⁴² An American news crew. From the network of the nation co-conducting the war. Physically assaulted and detained for the act of reporting. If this is what happens to a CNN journalist in full view of the camera, what happens to the Palestinian and Lebanese reporters with no institutional protection, no Western passport, no global network to raise the alarm?

Kill the journalists and you kill the evidence. Without evidence, there is no accountability. Without accountability, there is no restraint. Without restraint, there is no law. And without law, what remains is not civilisation. It is power — unwitnessed, unaccountable, and unconstrained — doing whatever it wishes to whoever it wishes, and calling it security.

Share

The Emboldening

When the enforcer becomes the violator, the system of enforcement does not merely weaken. It inverts. The rules that once constrained behaviour begin to license it — because if the most powerful nation on earth can violate them without consequence, then the rules have become evidence of what is permissible, not what is prohibited.

But before examining how the collapse radiates outward, it is worth understanding the internal mechanics that made it possible — because the United States did not arrive at this point by accident. It arrived here through the logic of overstretch, the same logic that has preceded every imperial decline in recorded history.

America’s global military footprint is, by any measure, the most extensive in human history. The United States maintains approximately seven hundred and fifty military bases in at least eighty countries.⁴³ Its defence budget exceeds that of the next nine nations combined.⁴⁴ Its navy operates eleven aircraft carrier strike groups — more than the rest of the world’s navies put together.⁴⁵ This is not strength in the traditional sense. It is overextension — the commitment of resources to maintaining a global posture that was designed for the Cold War and has never been meaningfully reduced. Every base requires funding. Every deployment requires logistics. Every commitment creates an expectation that must be honoured or abandoned at the cost of credibility. The system does not scale back gracefully. It either sustains itself at ever-increasing cost or it fractures — and the fractures appear not where the system is weakest but where the gap between commitment and capacity is widest.

The economic dimension compounds the military one. The United States dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency has allowed America to fund its global posture by borrowing at rates no other nation could sustain. But reserve currency status is not a law of nature. It is a function of trust — and trust, like legitimacy, erodes when behaviour diverges from expectation. The weaponisation of the dollar through sanctions, the seizure of sovereign assets, and the willingness to use financial infrastructure as a tool of coercion have accelerated the search for alternatives. The expansion of BRICS, the growth of bilateral currency agreements that bypass the dollar, and the quiet diversification of central bank reserves are not signs of a conspiracy against America. They are the predictable response of a world that has watched the referee become a player and concluded that the game is rigged.⁴⁶

And institutional capture — the process by which the interests that benefit from expansion come to dominate the institutions that are supposed to govern it — has rendered self-correction nearly impossible. The defence industry, the intelligence community, the network of think tanks and policy institutes funded by defence contractors, the revolving door between government and the private sector — these are not aberrations of the system. They are the system. They ensure that the logic of expansion is never seriously questioned, that every conflict generates a constituency for the next conflict, and that the machinery of empire continues to run long after the civilisational purpose it was built to serve has been forgotten.

This is the internal condition. And it explains why the external behaviour has become so reckless — because a system captured by the logic of its own expansion cannot restrain itself. It can only expand until the cost exceeds the capacity, and then it breaks. The question is not whether the break will come but what it will look like when it does.

Externally, the effects are already visible. The erosion of American moral authority does not stay contained within one society. It radiates outward, because international order is not maintained by treaties alone. It is maintained by expectation — the shared understanding, held by governments and populations alike, that certain behaviours will be met with certain consequences. When those consequences fail to materialise for the most powerful actor in the system, the expectation collapses for everyone.

Russia did not invade Ukraine in a vacuum. It invaded after watching two decades of selective enforcement. The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 without Security Council authorisation, on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, and faced no institutional consequences.⁴⁷ NATO intervened in Libya in 2011 under a Security Council resolution authorising civilian protection, then exceeded the mandate to pursue regime change — and faced no institutional consequences.⁴⁸ The Saudi-led coalition waged war in Yemen for years with US and UK logistical support and arms sales, bombing weddings and school buses and hospitals, and faced no institutional consequences.⁴⁹ The lesson was not subtle. The lesson was that international law is a function of power. That the rules constrain the weak and excuse the strong. That the system will mobilise against you if you are Russia, but not if you are America or its allies.

Russia learned the lesson. Its invasion of Ukraine was many things — illegal, brutal, catastrophic — but it was not irrational. It was the behaviour of a state that had observed, for twenty years, that the rules-based order was a rules-for-thee order, and decided to act accordingly.⁵⁰

China has drawn the same conclusion. Its construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea, its rejection of the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s 2016 ruling in favour of the Philippines, its imposition of the National Security Law on Hong Kong in 2020, its escalating military posture toward Taiwan — these are the actions of a rising power that has watched the incumbent power exempt itself from its own rules and concluded that the rules are instruments of control, not principles of governance.⁵¹ China does not need to defeat the American-led order militarily. It only needs to wait for the order to discredit itself — which it is doing, in real time, with every bomb that falls on a safeguarded nuclear facility and every journalist killed without consequence.

And the emboldening does not stop with great powers. It cascades downward. When Israel can bomb nuclear plants and kill journalists at historically unprecedented rates without facing institutional sanction, every regional power receives the same signal. When the United States can launch a war without congressional authorisation and the institutions designed to prevent exactly that remain silent, every aspiring power takes note. The restraint that characterised the post-war order — imperfect, inconsistent, but real enough to shape behaviour — dissolves. Not because the rules have been formally repealed, but because everyone can see that they are no longer enforced.

The physics of power abhors a vacuum. When the enforcer of the international order delegitimises itself, the order does not simply fade. It invites replacement — not by a better system, because there is no better system waiting in the wings, but by the raw logic of competition among powers unconstrained by any shared framework. This is not a new world order. This is the old world disorder — the pre-1945 reality of great-power competition with no referee — returning because the referee has decided that the rules apply to everyone except himself.

The post-war system was never perfect. It was hypocritical, selectively enforced, and weighted toward the interests of its architects. But it was something. It provided a framework — however flawed — within which the weak had at least some protection from the strong, and the strong had at least some incentive to restrain themselves. What is replacing it is not a reformed system or a more equitable order. What is replacing it is nothing. A void. And into that void will flow the oldest forces in human politics: competition, domination, and the logic of the strongest.

Part I asked how the indispensable nation became the demolition crew. This article has documented what the demolition looks like: an institutional architecture that functions only against the enemies of its architect. Laws of armed conflict invoked for Zaporizhzhia and abandoned for Natanz. Civilian infrastructure — universities, hospitals, water systems, nuclear power plants — destroyed by the nation that wrote the rules protecting them. Journalists killed at a rate that exceeds every major conflict in modern history, their deaths met not with institutional action but with institutional silence. And the war itself packaged as content — livestreamed on an app, promoted by former prosecutors as must-watch entertainment — while the nation that launched it did so in violation of its own War Powers Act and the UN Charter it wrote.

The evidence is specific. It is dated. It is sourced. And it is damning.

But the evidence, devastating as it is, remains the symptom. The institutions did not fail on their own. The laws did not violate themselves. The targeting lists were not generated by machines operating without human direction. Behind every one of these decisions — the decision to bomb a nuclear plant, the decision to strike a water source, the decision to kill a journalist, the decision to remain silent when the rules are broken — there is a human being. A person with a conscience, or without one. A leader who chose power over principle, or a population that allowed it.

The disease is not institutional. It is human. It lives in the erosion of individual conscience — the slow, infectious process by which a society loses the capacity to distinguish between what it can do and what it should do, between capability and morality, between strength and civilisation. Part I described how the myth of the indispensable nation was built and why it was always fragile. This article has documented how the system that myth sustained is being dismantled — from the inside, by its own architects, in full view of the world.

Part III goes to the root. To the question of what is happening to the people — not the institutions, not the governments, but the people — inside a civilisation that is losing its conscience. To the zombie virus of public discourse. To the social media platforms that reward cruelty and punish decency. To the erasure of empathy in the public square. To the question that sits beneath all the evidence documented here: can a civilisation that has lost its conscience recover it? Or is what we are watching terminal?

When you lose what it means to be civilised, you have no civilisation.

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

Share

The Decline of Western Civilisation is part of a three part series. Part II of this series is scheduled to release June 30, 2026.

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 Britain’s post-war loss of empire was driven by economic exhaustion, the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, and the loss of moral authority to sustain imperial rule. The Suez Crisis of 1956 is often cited as the moment when British imperial decline became undeniable.

² The Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991 was preceded by years of economic stagnation, political delegitimisation, and the failure of reform efforts under Gorbachev.

³ Rafael Grossi, Director General of the IAEA, statement to the United Nations Security Council, 11 August 2022.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Joint Statement on the situation at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, issued on behalf of forty-two-plus nations, 12 August 2022. Published by the European External Action Service (EEAS).

⁶ IAEA Board of Governors resolution, 15 September 2022. Passed 26-2 (Russia and China voting against), with seven abstentions.

⁷ American Nuclear Society statement, August 2022.

⁸ Grossi presented five principles for the protection of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to the Security Council on 30 May 2023.

⁹ US-Israeli strikes on Iran commenced 28 February 2026.

¹⁰ Israel launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, military sites, and nuclear scientists on 13 June 2025. The United States joined the bombardment on 21–22 June 2025, using B-2 bombers and massive ordnance penetrators against underground enrichment facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. A ceasefire was announced on 24 June 2025. See Arms Control Association, “Israel and U.S. Strike Iran’s Nuclear Program,” July 2025.

¹¹ IAEA confirmed damage at entrance buildings to the underground Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant, 3 March 2026. Further strikes on Natanz reported 21 March 2026. Al Jazeera, 3 March and 21 March 2026.

¹² Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation reported Bushehr nuclear power plant struck on 28 March 2026, the third such attack in recent days. CNN, 28 March 2026.

¹³ Bloomberg, 28 March 2026: US and Israeli airstrikes targeted the Arak heavy water reactor and a yellowcake production plant in Yazd province.

¹⁴ IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi, statement to IAEA Board of Governors emergency session, 2 March 2026.

¹⁵ Grossi, CNN interview, 3 March 2026.

¹⁶ Arms Control Association, “Did Iran’s Nuclear and Missile Programs Pose an Imminent Threat? No.” March 2026.

¹⁷ Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Al-Busaidi, 27 February 2026. Arms Control Association, March 2026.

¹⁸ Grossi, IAEA statement, 2 March 2026.

¹⁹ Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, statement on Natanz strikes. Al Jazeera, 21 March 2026.

²⁰ International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), statement by Executive Director Melissa Parke, 21 March 2026.

²¹ World Health Organisation preparations for nuclear catastrophe scenarios reported via UN News and CNN, March 2026.

²² Iranian officials, reported via Al Jazeera, 27 March 2026: 120+ museums and historical sites damaged.

²³ The Israeli military announced it struck a research and development facility at Malek Ashtar University in Tehran. Al Jazeera, 21 March 2026. Total schools and universities damaged: 600+, per Iranian officials via Al Jazeera, 27 March 2026.

²⁴ Bloomberg, 28 March 2026: the Khuzestan Steel facility and the Mobarakeh Steel complex in Isfahan were struck. Al Jazeera, 27 March 2026.

²⁵ Al Jazeera, citing Iran’s Fars news agency and a local security official, 28 March 2026.

²⁶ Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), Article 54.

²⁷ Iranian Red Crescent, reported via CNN, 28 March 2026: at least 1,900 killed and 20,000 injured since 28 February.

²⁸ Lebanese Ministry of Health, reported via UN News, 22 March 2026: 1,142 killed and 3,315 injured from Israeli strikes since 2 March, including 122 children and 42 health workers.

²⁹ Iranian Red Crescent delegation head Maria Martinez, UN press briefing, 28 March 2026.

³⁰ Arms Control Association, March 2026. The War Powers Act (War Powers Resolution of 1973, 50 U.S.C. §§ 1541–1548) requires the President to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action and forbids armed forces from remaining for more than 60 days without congressional authorisation. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state except in self-defence (Article 51) or with Security Council authorisation (Chapter VII).

³¹ The White House launched a mobile application in March 2026, promoted across official social media accounts, providing real-time content related to ongoing military operations.

³² Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani), X post, March 2026: “MUST WATCH VIDEO: Iran continues to target Israeli civilian areas with cluster bombs.” Posted while US-Israeli strikes were hitting universities and civilian infrastructure in Tehran.

³³ Committee to Protect Journalists, as of 28 March 2026: at least 259 journalists and media workers killed across Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, Israel, and Iran since the war began.

³⁴ Aggregated data from CPJ, the International Federation of Journalists, and other monitoring bodies, by 11 August 2025: Israel had killed up to 274 journalists, with 269 of them Palestinian. The higher figure reflects a broader counting methodology than CPJ’s individual verification standard. CPJ’s own figure for the same period was 192 (as of 10 August 2025). The United Nations placed its count at 242 by the same date.

³⁵ Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University. The report found that the war in Gaza since 7 October 2023 led to the deaths of more journalists than the combined total killed during the US Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan.

³⁶ Committee to Protect Journalists, annual report, February 2024: nearly 75% of the 99 journalists killed worldwide in 2023 died in the Israel-Gaza war.

³⁷ CPJ annual report, February 2026: Israel was responsible for two-thirds of all press killings in both 2025 and 2024.

³⁸ Reporters Without Borders, December 2025: declared Israel the biggest killer and “the worst enemy” of journalists of 2025.

³⁹ Committee to Protect Journalists: Israel is “engaging in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented.”

⁴⁰ CPJ and multiple international press freedom organisations: 48 media facilities damaged or destroyed in Gaza. UNESCO awarded its 2024 World Press Freedom Prize to the Palestinian journalists of Gaza.

⁴¹ Fatima Ftouni, Lebanese journalist, killed by Israeli strike, 28 March 2026. At the beginning of March she had reported live on air on Israel killing seven members of her own family.

⁴² Israeli soldiers detained a CNN crew in the West Bank; a journalist was put in a chokehold during the incident. 28 March 2026.

⁴³ David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (Metropolitan Books, 2015). Updated figures from the Department of Defense’s annual Base Structure Report.

⁴⁴ Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Military Expenditure Database, April 2025. In 2024, the United States spent $997 billion on defence, exceeding the combined military expenditure of the next nine largest spenders. SIPRI’s definition is broader than the US Department of Defense budget alone, including military pensions and some international affairs expenditure.

⁴⁵ The United States Navy operates eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers (ten Nimitz-class and one Gerald R. Ford-class). No other navy operates more than two. US Naval Institute; Department of Defense.

⁴⁶ The expansion of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and new members from 2024) and the growth of bilateral currency agreements bypassing the US dollar reflect a broader trend of de-dollarisation driven in part by the weaponisation of the dollar through sanctions and asset seizures.

⁴⁷ The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 proceeded without UN Security Council authorisation. No weapons of mass destruction were found.

⁴⁸ NATO’s intervention in Libya in 2011, authorised under UNSC Resolution 1973 for civilian protection, was widely criticised for exceeding its mandate through regime change.

⁴⁹ The Saudi-led coalition’s war in Yemen (2015–present) was conducted with US and UK logistical and arms support despite widespread documentation of strikes on civilian targets, including the Dahyan school bus attack of August 2018 that killed forty children.

⁵⁰ This is not a defence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which violated international law and has caused immense suffering. It is an observation about the strategic logic that informed the decision.

⁵¹ China’s rejection of the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s July 2016 ruling in Philippines v. China and its imposition of the National Security Law on Hong Kong on 30 June 2020 are consistent with a rising power testing the limits of a selectively enforced order.

The Metropolitan Police declared the Golders Green stabbings a terrorist incident the same evening.⁸ Commissioner Mark Rowley’s characterisation of the suspect as having “a history of serious violence and mental health issues” was, on examination of the public record, an understatement. In January 2008, Suleiman — then 27 years old, in Swindon — had attacked Police Constable Neil Sampson, who had been called to a knife incident at a nearby property. Suleiman stabbed the officer multiple times in the head, face and leg with what was reported to be a bread knife, and also wounded the officer’s police dog, Anya. Sampson required five months off work to recover. Suleiman was sentenced to nine years for grievous bodily harm. The sentencing judge, Douglas Field, described Suleiman as having committed “three episodes of grave violence” in a single incident: an initial attack on a man at the flat where Suleiman was staying, the attack on PC Sampson, and the attack on the police dog. The court was told Suleiman had previous convictions for assaults on police officers.⁹ He was a British national, born in Somalia, who came to the United Kingdom as a child in the early 1990s. He was referred to the government’s Prevent counter-extremism programme in 2020. The referral was closed the same year.¹⁰ The Met did not say why. A psychiatric evaluation is expected to be central to the judicial proceedings now under way.

This is not the profile of a state-sponsored terror operative. It is the profile of a man with documented severe mental illness, a long history of extreme violence including the near-murder of a police officer, who had been sectioned and recently released, who was under active NHS mental health care up until the days before the rampage, and whom the state had repeatedly failed. The first person he attacked on 29 April 2026 was not a Jewish stranger in the street but a Muslim friend in a flat in south London. The Golders Green stabbings were the second and third stops of a rampage by a man whose violence on Wednesday began with someone he had known for years.

By Friday morning, the Crown Prosecution Service had authorised the charges. Three counts of attempted murder under Section 1(1) of the Criminal Attempts Act 1981, one for each of Suleiman’s three victims that day: Ishmail Hussein, the Muslim friend in Southwark; and the two Jewish men in Golders Green, Shloime Rand and Moshe Shine. One count of possession of a bladed article. No charges under terrorism legislation. The case was assigned to the CPS Counter Terrorism Division — the division that prosecutes terrorism cases — but the charges themselves were ordinary violent-crime charges.¹¹ The state’s most senior prosecuting authority, with the full file in front of it, did not bring terrorism charges. It brought attempted murder. The same indictment that names the two Jewish victims also names the Muslim victim. The British state’s own charging document records what the British state’s own political class is now framing as antisemitic terror as something different: three counts of attempted murder, against three victims of a single rampage, by a man whose mental illness is the only motive on the public record.

Within hours of the video appearing online, the Green Party leader Zack Polanski — himself Jewish, and a member of the London Assembly that holds responsibility for overseeing the Metropolitan Police — reposted a comment describing the footage as showing officers “repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head” while he was already incapacitated. Sir Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, publicly responded that he was “disappointed” by Polanski’s post and called it “inaccurate and misinformed.”¹² The Prime Minister, the same week, described Polanski as “disgraceful” and “not fit to lead any political party.” Within forty-eight hours Polanski had apologised for “sharing a tweet in haste,” conceding that it had not been appropriate, while maintaining that the police “should not be above scrutiny.” The video was on the public record. The Commissioner’s response was not a correction of the facts shown in the footage. It was an attack on a Jewish member of the body responsible for police oversight for noticing them. The Spectator, the same day, published a defence of the police conduct under the headline “Zack Polanski’s shameful reaction to the Golders Green arrest” — framing his sharing of the post as “an absurd framing of events, focusing on the terror suspect’s supposed victimhood rather than the danger he posed to officers and the public.”¹³ That, too, is part of the record of Wednesday and Thursday — the speed with which a man’s mental illness was rewritten into the language of terror, and the speed with which dissent from that rewriting was named as the offence.

That distinction did not appear in the Prime Minister’s speech at Downing Street on Thursday 30 April. By the time Sir Keir Starmer stood in front of the cameras at 10 Downing Street, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre had raised the United Kingdom’s national threat level from “substantial” to “severe” — the second-highest tier, meaning a terrorist attack is “highly likely.”¹⁴ A COBRA meeting had been convened.¹⁵ The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, had described antisemitism as “an emergency” and “the top security issue” she faced.¹⁶ £25 million had been pledged for additional police presence around synagogues, schools and community centres.¹⁷ Fast-track legislation had been announced to allow the prosecution of people acting as proxies of state-sponsored groups, with Iran specifically named.¹⁸ New powers had been promised to shut down charities promoting “antisemitic extremism,” to bar “hate preachers” from the country, from campuses, from streets and from communities. The courts would speed up sentencing on antisemitic attacks.¹⁹

And the Prime Minister told the country that protesters using the phrase “globalise the intifada” should be prosecuted.²⁰

This is the package the British state announced in the thirty-six hours after the Golders Green stabbings. It is the package this article is about.

The package is not the response to a terrorist plot. The plot has not been alleged in court. The man charged with the stabbings has been charged with attempted murder by prosecutors who chose, with full knowledge of the file, not to bring terrorism charges. He is mentally ill. He has a documented history of serious violence. The Prevent system reviewed him five years ago and closed the referral. There is, as of writing, no public evidence of operational connection to any organised group. Nor is there any evidence of an antisemitic motivation for the attack.

There is, however, a claim. An online post under the name Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia — HAYI — claimed responsibility for the Golders Green stabbings within hours of them happening.²¹ HAYI is the same name that was attached to the firebombing of Hatzola ambulance vehicles in the same neighbourhood on 23 March 2026, five weeks earlier. It is the same name that has now been attached, across nearly two months and six countries, to more than a dozen claimed attacks against synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish-owned businesses, an Iranian dissident broadcaster in Wembley, and a claimed drone strike on the Israeli Embassy in Kensington that the Metropolitan Police investigated, found to be nothing, and closed.²²

HAYI did not claim Iranian-proxy origin. The Iranian-proxy framing was constructed by other parties. On 12 March 2026, Joe Truzman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — a Washington organisation whose own IRS filings state its mission as enhancing Israel’s image and educating the public on Israeli-Arab issues — floated the Iran link in The Long War Journal. On 16 March, the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism formalised the framing in a special report, giving the predicate state-authoritative imprint. On 23 March, the day of the Golders Green arson, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague published Hybrid Threat Signals, a research-body report that documented multiple inconsistencies in HAYI’s own materials and then absorbed them into the Iranian-backed thesis as evidence of “plausible deniability” rather than as evidence of fabrication. The BBC and the mainstream British press distributed the framing the next day. Each stage of the pipeline performed its function in laundering alleged Iran links into the mainstream.²³

I documented in The Anatomy of HAYI what those materials actually contained when examined: a Quranic misquotation no Muslim composes; Religious Zionist vocabulary no Muslim militant uses; a logo built on a Soviet Dragunov SVD where every real pro-Iranian Shia militia uses AK-pattern rifles; an Arabic misspelling of the word “Islamic” on the group’s own logo; a Telegram administrator who wrote in American English, justified the group’s actions through Christian and Jewish philosophy, and deleted the account when CBS News asked who was paying. Two named institutional sources — Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi for Middle East Eye and Adam Hadley of Tech Against Terrorism for The National — independently identified HAYI’s materials as AI-generated within twenty-four hours of the Golders Green arson.²⁴ 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, dressed in the symbology of the community the campaign was designed to blame.

That fingerprint did not change on 29 April. HAYI’s claim of Wednesday’s stabbings fits the same fabrication pattern The Anatomy of HAYI documented across the campaign.

The Metropolitan Police, nearly two months in, have made twenty-six arrests across the broader campaign of attacks attributed to HAYI. Eight have been charged with arson-related offences. One has been convicted of arson. The first arrest under terrorism legislation came on 26 April 2026 — and it was on suspicion only of preparing terrorist acts, not on any predicate of foreign-state direction.²⁵ Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans, the United Kingdom’s Senior National Co-ordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing, has publicly characterised the operational pattern as “recruiting violence as a service” — paid criminal proxies with “no allegiance to the cause,” used once and thrown away. Deputy Commissioner Matt Jukes has described it as “thugs for hire.”²⁶ The legislation Parliament wrote in 2023 for foreign-state-directed hostile activity — the National Security Act, used in the Wagner-Earl prosecution to name Russia in court²⁷ — is sitting unused. The Met has not named a foreign sponsor. It will not, because the evidence to do so has not been built — because the operational reality does not support what the political class is now claiming the operational reality to be.

On Thursday 30 April 2026, the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, was asked whether HAYI’s claim of responsibility for the Golders Green stabbings was credible. She said authorities were investigating whether the claim was credible or “opportunistic.”²⁸ That was on the same day she described antisemitism as “an emergency” and “the top pressing issue in relation to security” she faced, on the same day the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre raised the threat level from “substantial” to “severe,” and on the same day the Prime Minister stood at Downing Street and announced the package of emergency powers built around HAYI’s named threat.

This is the position the Home Secretary’s “opportunistic” admission catches the political class up to. The Met has been operating against a paid-proxy criminal campaign for weeks. The framing the political class is using to justify emergency powers is a framing the operational investigation no longer supports. Shabana Mahmood’s word — opportunistic — was the smallest possible public concession that the claim does not match the case. It was given on the same day the threat level was raised, the government announced it would fast-track through parliament a new bill amending the National Security Act 2023 to create a state-threats proscription power — with Security Minister Dan Jarvis naming the proscription of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as the immediate use case²⁹ — and the Prime Minister told the country that protesters using the phrase “globalise the intifada” should be prosecuted. The British public was being asked, on Thursday 30 April 2026, to accept the acceleration of an emergency response on the back of a claim the state’s own most senior security minister had just told the country might be a lie.

A state cannot simultaneously concede that the claimant may be fictitious and use the claim as part of the justification for emergency-level powers. It cannot raise the threat level on the basis of a state-sponsored terror narrative while its own prosecutors decline to bring terrorism charges. It cannot announce fast-track legislation to deal with malign state actors on the back of a claim its own Home Secretary has flagged as possibly opportunistic. It cannot tell the public that protesters chanting “globalise the intifada” should be prosecuted while its own Crown Prosecution Service has advised — repeatedly, in writing — that the phrase does not meet prosecution thresholds.³⁰

It cannot do any of those things and call the result a coherent response to a real threat. What it can do, and what it did do on Thursday, is announce the acceleration of an architecture that was already being built before Wednesday and will continue to be built when Wednesday’s news cycle moves on.

That architecture is the subject of this article. The man who carried out the stabbings is one person, charged with one set of crimes, who will face one trial. The fear the violence produced is real. The grief of the families, the terror of the community, the loss of the sense of safety that has been bleeding out of British Jewish life for the past two years — all of it is real, and a government has a duty to respond to all of it. But the response being built is not what it is being sold as. It is not protection. It is something else.

It is the closing of a circle that has been drawing itself for several years. The Palantir contracts that already place an American defence-intelligence company at the centre of the British state. The published doctrine of that company’s chief executive, whose April 2026 manifesto Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins identified as an attack on “verification, deliberation, and accountability” — the three pillars on which democratic life depends.³¹ The criminalisation of pro-Palestine protest under emergency powers that have already produced more than three thousand three hundred arrests — pensioners, priests, vicars, and the Reverend Sue Parfitt, an octogenarian retired Anglican priest arrested for holding a placard reading “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”³² The proscription of Palestine Action, found unlawful by the High Court in February 2026 and continued anyway.³³ The first ban on a protest march since 2012, in March 2026, by this same Home Secretary.³⁴ The fast-tracking of new state-actor legislation, announced before the trial of the only person actually charged with Wednesday’s stabbings has begun. The conflation, repeated by ministers and amplified by the press, of Israel with Jews, of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, of opposition to genocide with the celebration of murder.

Each of these has been documented in earlier articles in this publication. Code, Contracts and Complicity 2.0 set out the Palantir architecture and the manifesto that names its targets.³⁵ The Anatomy of HAYI set out the fabrication and the amplification pipeline through which it became mainstream framing.³⁶ They Are Not the Same and The Greatest Antisemitism set out the conflation that licences the criminalisation of dissent.³⁷

This article is the convergence. The pieces have been documented separately. What follows is what they look like when they are placed beside each other, on the morning of 1 May 2026, in the wake of an emergency that the architecture was already built to absorb.

What the British state announced on Thursday was the deployment of an emergency architecture against a threat its own most senior security minister had flagged as possibly fictitious, on charges its own prosecutors had declined to bring, in a political environment its own Crown Prosecution Service had advised did not meet the legal threshold for prosecution. The cost will be paid by the British public — by the Jewish community told it is under siege from an enemy whose existence the state’s own institutions cannot stand behind, by the Muslim community handed the blame for an act they did not commit and condemn without qualification, and by every citizen who in the days after Thursday will discover what slogans, what symbols, and what protests the state has decided are now grounds for prosecution.

This is the convergence. It deserves to be named.

The Architecture Sharpened

The acceleration did not begin on Thursday. It began on 13 January 2025 at the UCL East campus in Stratford, where Sir Keir Starmer announced the AI Opportunities Action Plan and committed his government to adopting all fifty of its recommendations.³⁸ The plan had been written for the government by Matt Clifford, a venture capitalist and chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency.³⁹ Its substantive content was drawn, in places almost verbatim, from two papers published the previous year by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change — “Governing in the Age of AI: A New Model to Transform the State” (May 2024) and “The Potential Impact of AI on the Public-Sector Workforce” (July 2024) — papers produced by an institute described in the public record as one of the architects of Starmerite thought, and an institute that receives substantial donations from technology companies whose AI products it advocates governments adopt.⁴⁰ The plan committed the United Kingdom to integrating AI across the National Health Service, the Ministry of Defence, policing, and government administration. It claimed two hundred billion pounds in savings over five years and the shedding of one million civil servants. It established AI growth zones with fast-tracked planning approvals — the first in Culham, Oxfordshire — and committed the country to a twenty-fold increase in AI compute capacity. In his speech announcing it, Starmer asked the country to consider “whose values are going to shape this technology as it develops,” and warned that the United Kingdom risked becoming a taker rather than a maker of the technological future.⁴¹

Every contract that has been signed since 13 January 2025 is now justifiable, in government communication, as delivery of the plan. What has been signed since 13 January 2025 is what I discuss in this section.

In September 2025, during Donald Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom, the British government announced a strategic partnership with Palantir Technologies under which the company would base its European defence operations in Britain. The announcement carried a one-and-a-half-billion-pound investment commitment, three hundred and fifty new jobs, and the establishment of London as Palantir’s European defence headquarters.⁴² On 30 December 2025, the Ministry of Defence signed a £240.6 million three-year follow-on contract with Palantir, effective 1 April 2026. The new contract more than tripled the £75.2 million deal it replaced. It was awarded without a competitive tender, under the defence-and-security exemption to the Procurement Act, by the Defence Secretary alone.⁴³ During the procurement period, Palantir hired four former Ministry of Defence officials, including Barnaby Kistruck, the former director of policy, who joined the company days after leaving the ministry. The MoD-to-Palantir employment pipeline was documented by OpenDemocracy in January 2026.⁴⁴

In March 2026, Palantir entered British financial services. The Financial Conduct Authority — the regulator that holds the most sensitive financial intelligence in the United Kingdom — awarded Palantir a three-month contract under which the company’s employees would be physically embedded inside the regulator to install software on the FCA’s internal data systems.⁴⁵ A previously undisclosed £15 million contract with AWE Nuclear Security Technologies — the United Kingdom’s nuclear weapons agency, formerly the Atomic Weapons Establishment — was revealed by The Nerve the same month.⁴⁶ The same investigation found that Palantir held at least thirty-four current and past contracts across at least ten government departments, local councils, and police authorities, with a total documented value of at least £670 million.⁴⁷

This is the pattern Palantir itself describes as “land and expand.” It begins with a foothold awarded for a nominal sum — in the United Kingdom, the £1 NHS Covid-19 Data Store contract in March 2020. It expands into a substantial commercial arrangement — the £330 million NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) contract awarded in November 2023 with potential to extend to £500 million.⁴⁸ It then propagates: into police data systems in 2024, into the military in 2025, into financial services in 2026, into nuclear security infrastructure at an unspecified date the public learned of only because an investigative outlet found the contract notice. At each stage, the company that began as a CIA-backed counter-insurgency platform builds further into the central nervous system of the British state.

Read that last clause again. Counter-insurgency is not metaphor. It is doctrine — operational tradecraft developed by the United States military and intelligence services to identify hostile populations, profile their networks, and act against them. The software was built to read communities a foreign state had decided were the enemy. Take that software out of Iraq, out of Afghanistan or Palestine, out of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeting infrastructure, install it inside Britain’s sensitive NHS and policing data systems, and the targeting logic does not change because the location did. The population the software now sees is the British public. It is reading your sensitive data for signs of dissent or determining “pre-crime” — judging you a criminal before you commit a crime. The doctor pushing for a pay rise is legible to it in the same shape an insurgent abroad would have been. So is the nurse striking for staffing levels. So is the parent objecting to a school closure, the student protesting university fees, the pensioner with a placard, the journalist with a question. Counter-insurgency software does not care what country it is running in. It does not side with your politics, but with the government that controls it. You have no recourse to challenge it. It runs the targeting logic it was built to run. That logic is now being run, on long contracts awarded without competition, against the people of the United Kingdom.

The senior figures involved in this propagation include some who have already drawn questions on the floor of the House of Commons. On 10 February 2026, the question was put to the Defence Minister whether the Defence Secretary had been aware of Peter Mandelson’s commercial links to Palantir through Global Counsel — the consultancy Mandelson founded — when the £240 million contract was awarded. The government’s answer was that Mandelson had no influence on the contract, and that the decision was the Defence Secretary’s and his alone.⁴⁹ The question, and the government’s answer, are both on the official parliamentary record. So is the broader observation made in the same debate: that Palantir’s £1 Covid contract had grown, under successive governments, into a contract footprint exceeding £500 million across the NHS and the Ministry of Defence, awarded in significant measure without competition.

The architecture has not been built without resistance. The British Medical Association passed a motion at its 2025 Annual General Meeting opposing the rollout of the Federated Data Platform. In February 2026, the BMA went further, instructing doctors to limit their engagement with the platform.⁵⁰ Over forty-seven thousand NHS patients have written formal letters of complaint to their local trust boards opposing FDP adoption.⁵¹ The Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board, which covers 2.8 million patients, has delayed joining the platform pending further evidence that adoption is in the interests of those patients.⁵² Coventry City Council was forced to review its Palantir contract after public backlash.⁵³ Approximately two hundred NHS trusts have signed up to the FDP, but only about half are live on the system, and only a quarter report that the system has produced any benefit.⁵⁴ A coalition that includes Medact, the Good Law Project, Privacy International, Corporate Watch, and Amnesty International published a joint briefing in March 2026 calling on NHS trusts and integrated care boards not to implement the platform and on NHS England to terminate the contract.⁵⁵ Amnesty International’s broader judgment of Palantir, set out in a 2020 report on the company’s operational support to United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is that there is “a high risk that Palantir is contributing to serious human rights violations.”⁵⁶ The Green Party leader, Zack Polanski — the same Polanski whose post about the kicking of a mentally ill man in Golders Green drew a public rebuke from the Metropolitan Police Commissioner — has called for the FDP contract to be terminated at the break clause that falls due in February 2027, describing the company as “a Trump-supporting military surveillance outfit” with no place in Britain’s most important institution.⁵⁷

The break clause matters because it is the article’s pivot. The £330–500 million NHS Federated Data Platform contract has, written into it, a clause permitting the government to walk away in February 2027 without penalty if the platform has not delivered. By April 2026, the platform had not delivered. The Westminster Hall debate of 16 April 2026 — thirteen days before the Golders Green stabbings — heard the junior health minister Zubir Ahmed concede, on parliamentary record, that the contract could end short of its planned seven years if other providers could do the job better. The science minister Lord Vallance had told MPs the previous month that the government’s deals with Palantir would, in future, be done differently — with greater investment in British technology and British companies.⁵⁸

That was the political conversation the United Kingdom was having in the third week of April 2026. The Federated Data Platform was in serious political trouble. The opposition was mobilised. The break clause was on the table. Two of the government’s own ministers had publicly opened the door to terminating the contract.

Then Wednesday happened.

Then Thursday happened.

By Thursday evening, the political conversation in the United Kingdom was not about the FDP. It was about the threat level. It was about COBRA. It was about £25 million in additional security spending. It was about fast-tracked legislation to proscribe a foreign state’s military arm. It was about prosecuting the chant of cardboard placards. The conversation that could have terminated the Federated Data Platform contract at its break clause has been displaced by an emergency response that the same architecture is positioned to manage.

This is the mechanism. The threats the state is responding to are real. Antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom in 2025 reached the second-highest annual total ever recorded — 3,700, with the monthly average exactly double what it was before 7 October 2023. Anti-Muslim hate crimes are at a record high. Race and religious hate crime convictions are at an eight-year peak.⁵⁹ Both communities face real and increasing danger and a government has a real duty to respond to it.

The state has waited for events that authorise the response it now delivers. The Manchester synagogue attack of October 2025 came. The firebombing of Hatzola ambulance vehicles came. The Kenton synagogue fireball came. The Golders Green stabbings came. Each was a real event with real victims, not designed for what the state has done with it. But the state’s response in each case has been the same: announce a further package of expanded powers, criminalise a further set of expressions, accelerate a further set of contracts. The discussion the United Kingdom is having about antisemitism on the morning of 5 May 2026 is not happening because the Ministry of Justice’s hate-crime statistics were released a week ago — they were, and the news cycle absorbed them inside thirty-six hours. The discussion is happening because two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green by a mentally ill man whose first victim was a Muslim, in an attack the prosecutors have not charged as terrorism and for which there is no evidence of antisemitic motivation, two days before a local election the governing party is on track to lose.⁶⁰ The Prime Minister will deliver a further speech on antisemitism on the eve of polling day.⁶¹ The architecture being built is being built around a real problem. The response being delivered is being timed to a political need.

What was demonstrated in the thirty-six hours after Wednesday is the speed of the mechanism. The break clause has not yet been used. Whether it will be used is the question this section leaves the reader with. The architecture is not contingent. The architecture is policy. The events that determine whether it will continue to be built are the events the architecture is built to absorb.

The Speech They Are Criminalising

No machinery enforces itself. The architecture requires that the dissent which would expose what it is be made unlawful before it can mature. The third strand of what was announced and accelerated on Thursday 30 April 2026 is the criminalisation of speech. Two days later, that is the strand of the response most visible on the streets of London, in the headlines of the British press, and in the bail conditions of British citizens whose only documented offence is to have stood in public and disagreed with their government’s foreign policy.

The Prime Minister’s pledge from the Downing Street steps was unambiguous. Protesters who use the phrase “globalise the intifada,” he said, should be prosecuted. The Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police had been arresting people for using the phrase since December 2025, when they declared that the operational context for chanting it had changed in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack in Australia. Three pro-Palestine protesters were charged in January 2026 for allegedly chanting it at a demonstration. The Crown Prosecution Service guidance to police, on what does and does not meet the threshold for prosecution under the Public Order Act, has been less straightforward than the Prime Minister’s framing suggests. The phrase, in itself, is not a crime under United Kingdom law. The word “intifada” is an Arabic noun meaning uprising, rebellion, or shaking off. It is, in its primary historical sense, the noun used to describe the two organised periods of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation in 1987 and 2000. It is what the wider Arabic-speaking world calls peaceful uprising in general. To “globalise” it is, on the most natural reading, to call for a worldwide solidarity campaign of the kind that brought down apartheid in South Africa.

That is the reading offered by Peter Tatchell, the seventy-four-year-old human rights campaigner whose arrest on 31 January 2026 for carrying a placard reading “Globalise the intifada. Non-violent resistance. End Israel’s occupation of Gaza & West Bank” became one of the defining test cases of the new prosecutorial environment.⁶² Tatchell, who has been arrested or detained one hundred and four times across nearly six decades of human rights campaigning, who joined the March Against Antisemitism alongside the Chief Rabbi and thousands of British Jews on 26 November 2023, was held in a police cell in Sutton, Surrey, for ten of the twelve hours of his detention. The Met arrested him in Aldwych, then transported him out of London by van to find a cell that would hold him. He was bailed on the condition that he attend no further pro-Palestine protests for twelve weeks. On 22 April 2026, a magistrate found that bail condition unreasonable and disproportionate and granted Tatchell unconditional bail. On 23 April, the police officer handling his case failed to attend the bail appointment at Charing Cross police station. On 29 April — the day of the Golders Green stabbings, the day before the Prime Minister stood at Downing Street and declared that protesters using the phrase should be prosecuted — the Metropolitan Police dropped the case against him entirely.

This was a man whom the British state had arrested, jailed for twelve hours, banned from protest, and then, after nearly three months of bail conditions, declined even to charge. His case was dropped on the day before the Prime Minister announced that the conduct for which he had been arrested would be a prosecutable offence going forward. Tatchell himself put what had happened to him in plain language. The police, he said, were not enforcing the law. They were fabricating interpretations of it.

This is the pattern the architecture requires. The state declares a category of speech to be the kind of speech that produces violence. The police arrest people for engaging in that speech. The Crown Prosecution Service declines, on the evidence presented, to prosecute. The Prime Minister announces from the steps of Downing Street that the speech ought to be prosecuted. The next round of arrests follows on a stronger political authority than the one before. The chilling effect has done its work whether or not a single one of these prosecutions succeeds.

The pattern repeats with symbols. The inverted red triangle, which Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades adopted in November 2023 to mark Israeli military targets in operational footage from Gaza, has since been used by Palestinian protest movements globally as a symbol of resistance. The triangle resembles the slingshot — a symbol of resistance in Gaza and the West Bank predating its use by Hamas — and resembles the red triangle on the Palestinian flag, where it represents the Hashemite role in the Arab Revolt and the blood of those killed in the struggle for Arab independence. The triangle has been used by the Israel Defence Forces to mock Hamas, by anti-fascist movements in Berlin, by graffiti artists on synagogues in Pittsburgh and Jewish-owned bakeries in Sydney, by Iranian-linked hacker groups, and by hundreds of thousands of pro-Palestine protesters who have neither glorified Hamas nor threatened Jewish communities. The Berlin Senate banned the symbol in July 2024. The Anti-Defamation League classifies it as a symbol of glorification of Hamas violence. Pro-Palestine campaign groups treat it as a symbol of resistance to occupation. Both readings exist in the public record. Neither reading exhausts the symbol’s meaning. Yet British politicians and commentators have, in the days since Wednesday’s stabbings, suggested that displaying the symbol be added to the column of prosecutable conduct.

This is where the architecture’s most consequential move is being made. A symbol with multiple, overlapping, contested meanings is being treated as if it had only one meaning, and that meaning is being treated as antisemitic, and the use of the symbol is being treated as conduct from which the state must protect Jewish citizens. The same move is being made with the slogan, with the protest march, with the cardboard placard. Each is being moved, by political authority rather than by parliamentary debate, from the column of expression into the column of extremism. Each move is being authorised by the emergency the architecture itself is being built to manage.

On Thursday 30 April 2026, Jonathan Hall — the government’s former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation — went on Times Radio and called for a moratorium on pro-Palestinian marches.⁶³ He said the government needed to take more risks. He said the marches had helped “incubate” antisemitism. He said it pained him to say it but he believed a moratorium was now needed. The leader of the Conservative opposition, Kemi Badenoch, backed the call the same day. Speaking from a hairdresser’s in south-east London, she declared that “it’s time to ban the marches” and that they were used as cover for violence and intimidation against Jews. The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, attributed a tone of antisemitism in Britain to “hate marches” combined with “purposeful anti-Israel demonisation.” On the morning of Saturday 2 May 2026, the Prime Minister himself answered the question of whether the government would accede to those calls. Asked on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme whether he wanted tougher policing of language at marches, or whether he wanted to stop some protests altogether, Sir Keir Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.” He added: “We need to look at what further powers we can take.” He named “the cumulative effect” of repeated marches as the structural problem and said: “we intend to deal with cumulative effects.” On the same programme he described the chant “globalise the intifada” as “very dangerous” to the Jewish community and as something protesters should be made to “stop and ask” themselves about.⁶⁴ Three of the four largest political parties at Westminster have now positioned themselves either openly for protest bans or for harder enforcement: the Labour government, the Conservative opposition, and Reform UK, whose home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf accused successive Tory and Labour administrations of policing failures and pledged a “zero-tolerance approach to protesters inciting violence.” Only the Greens, the Liberal Democrats with conditions, and Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party have held the civil-liberties line. The Green Party leader Zack Polanski responded to the Prime Minister’s interview with a statement that named the architecture of the move directly: Starmer, he said, was “using the pain and fear of Jewish people to threaten further authoritarian restrictions on peaceful protest.”⁶⁵

It is worth naming what the British state has already done that did not require those powers. In March 2026, this same Home Secretary banned the Al-Quds Day march in London — the first ban on a protest march in the United Kingdom since 2012. In July 2025, the Home Office proscribed Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act, making membership and stated support for the group a criminal offence punishable by up to fourteen years in prison. The High Court ruled in February 2026 that the proscription was unlawful, and the Home Secretary’s appeal was heard on 28 and 29 April — the day before, and the day of, Wednesday’s stabbings. While the appeal was being argued, three thousand three hundred British citizens had been arrested for displaying placards or holding cardboard signs in support of Palestine Action. They include the Reverend Sue Parfitt, an octogenarian retired Anglican priest, holding a hand-drawn sign that read “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” They include the suspended Labour MP Zarah Sultana’s reported tally of “a priest, a professor and health workers” arrested under terrorism legislation in a single day for the placards they carried.⁶⁶ They include the Filton 24, recently acquitted of aggravated burglary charges arising from direct action against Elbit Systems — Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, manufacturer of components used in operations under International Court of Justice examination for genocide.⁶⁷

The pattern is clean and easily described. A government claims to be protecting Jewish citizens from antisemitic terror. The legal architecture it builds in their name criminalises opposition to a foreign government’s policy in Gaza. The opposition to that foreign government’s policy has been, throughout the past two years, the most visible alliance of British civil society — pensioners, priests, vicars, doctors, lawyers, professors, retired psychotherapists, parliamentary backbenchers, civil-rights campaigners — that the country has produced since the campaign against the Iraq war. The fact that some of those people are also Jewish, and have publicly named themselves as opposed to the actions of a state that purports to act in the name of all Jews everywhere, has been treated by the prosecutorial machinery as immaterial. The conflation that They Are Not the Same and The Greatest Antisemitism documented at length is the conflation on which all of this depends: that opposition to the policy of the State of Israel is opposition to Jewish people. It is not. The British government, the Metropolitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the political class collectively know it is not. They are proceeding as if it were because the architecture requires that they do.

For a reader sympathetic to the British state’s framing of Wednesday’s stabbings — for a reader who agrees with the proscription of Palestine Action, who believes the Al-Quds Day march should have been banned, who endorses the prosecution of “globalise the intifada,” who reads everything in this section so far as a piece of pro-Palestine grievance writing dressed up in the language of civil liberties — there is a fact about the architecture that needs to be sat with. The architecture does not check the politics of the speaker. It only checks whether the political environment has authorised its deployment.⁶⁸ On 21 June 2025, John Steele, a sixty-year-old Christian street preacher in Rotherham — a former miner and bus driver who has preached the gospel in public spaces for twenty-five years without incident — was arrested by South Yorkshire Police after a thirty-second exchange with a Muslim woman at a public stall offering support to Pakistani women experiencing domestic abuse. Steele had asked, using a small microphone, how Islamic teachings could be reconciled with the stall’s stated message — a reference to a contested verse in the Quran. He was detained, fingerprinted, DNA-swabbed, and threatened with a “non-crime hate incident” entry on his police record. The Crown Prosecution Service later discontinued the case, stating that prosecution was “not needed in the public interest.” The same Public Order Act provisions that the police invoked against Peter Tatchell for the placard he carried at the Palestine march were the provisions used against John Steele for the question he asked at a public stall. The political content of the speech was different. The legal mechanism was identical.

This is the point a reader committed to the framing of Wednesday’s stabbings as antisemitic terror needs to absorb before continuing. The infrastructure being expanded under cover of Thursday’s emergency is not infrastructure that targets only the speech the present government finds objectionable. It is general-purpose infrastructure. A future government, of a different political colour, will inherit it. A future Crown Prosecution Service, working under a different Director, will use it. A future Metropolitan Police Commissioner, responding to different political pressure from a different political class, will deploy it. The Christian preacher who was arrested for asking a theological question in Rotherham was not arrested because the police agreed with the woman who complained. He was arrested because the legal mechanism existed and the political environment licensed its use. The next person arrested under that mechanism will not be chosen for their politics either. They will be chosen because someone has complained, because the machinery permits it, and because the political environment of the day has lowered the threshold for its deployment. That person could be a Christian preacher. It could be a gender-critical feminist. It could be a Reform UK activist. It could be a Zionist commentator whose defence of Israeli policy a future government has decided meets the threshold of “extremism.” The architecture takes no view. The architecture is policy. The architecture, once built, is available to whoever next holds the keys.

What is being criminalised is not antisemitism. Antisemitism is already a hate crime under existing United Kingdom law and has been prosecuted, where the evidence supported it, before any of the powers announced on Thursday were thought of. What is being criminalised is opposition to the policy of a foreign government, on streets in London, by British citizens, in language that the state’s own Crown Prosecution Service has repeatedly advised does not meet the legal threshold for prosecution. The legal architecture being built around that opposition is being built under the cover of an emergency. The emergency is being attributed to a fictitious organisation whose claim of responsibility for Wednesday’s stabbings the state’s own Home Secretary has flagged as possibly opportunistic. The architecture absorbs the emergency. The criminalisation continues. The next round of arrests will be made on a stronger political authority than the one before.

That is what the speech criminalisation strand of Thursday’s package consists of. It is not response to a threat. It is the legal infrastructure required for the rest of the architecture to function — the part of the machinery that makes the rest of the machinery defensible against the protest it would otherwise produce.

What This Means

There is a question this article has been built around but has not yet asked directly. What is the architecture for? Not what it is sold as. What it actually is.

The British state has spent the past sixteen months delivering a set of contracts, legislative pathways, prosecutorial postures, and emergency declarations that, taken together, describe the foundations of a particular kind of country. A country in which a single American defence-intelligence firm holds the central nervous system of the National Health Service, the Ministry of Defence, the Financial Conduct Authority, the nuclear weapons agency, and at least seven other government departments. A country in which the chief executive of that firm has published, openly, a manifesto that names verification, deliberation, and accountability — the three pillars of any functioning democratic society — as obstacles to be overcome. A country in which the conflation of opposition to a foreign government’s policy with hatred of an ethnic minority has produced a legal framework that licenses the arrest of British citizens for the slogans they chant, the symbols they display, and the placards they carry. A country in which, as of writing, three thousand three hundred citizens have been arrested for showing support for a non-violent direct-action group whose proscription was found unlawful by the High Court four months ago. A country in which the Home Secretary publicly concedes that the claim of responsibility for the most recent violent incident may be opportunistic, while the Prime Minister stands at Downing Street the same day and announces an emergency response built around that claim.

This is not the response to Wednesday’s stabbings. Wednesday’s stabbings did not require any of this. A coherent response to the violent rampage of a severely mentally ill man recently discharged from secure hospital, who had been under active NHS mental-health care until the days before the rampage, who had been referred to Prevent and discharged from that programme without explanation, would have looked like a serious examination of why a man with that documented history was loose on the streets of London on the morning of 29 April 2026. It would have looked like a substantive review of mental-health discharge protocols, of the resourcing of community psychiatric services, of the relationship between Prevent and the mental-health system. It would have looked like an honest accounting of how the state had failed both Suleiman’s victims and Suleiman himself. It did not look like any of those things. It looked like a threat-level rise, a fast-tracked legal pathway to proscribe a foreign state’s military arm, twenty-five million pounds in additional security spending, the prosecution of a slogan, and the public displacement of a parliamentary debate that thirteen days earlier had opened the door to terminating the most contested government technology contract of the past decade.

The architecture is for itself. That is the only honest answer the evidence will support. It is not for British Jews, who are being told to fear an enemy whose existence the state’s own institutions cannot stand behind, while the conflation that licenses the criminalisation of dissent is being made in their name. It is not for British Muslims, who are being handed the collective blame for an act they did not commit and condemn without qualification, while the framing that authorises that blame is being held in place by institutional failure rather than evidence. It is not for the general public, whose civil-liberties infrastructure is being narrowed at every available opportunity, on grounds that the state’s own Crown Prosecution Service has repeatedly advised do not meet the legal threshold for prosecution. The architecture is for the architecture. It is the precondition for further architecture. It absorbs every available pretext and converts each one into the political environment its own continuation requires.

What is being lost in this is not abstract. It is the fundamental relationship between a citizen and a state in a society that calls itself a democracy. That relationship rests on the citizen’s ability to dissent from the state’s claims without becoming, by that act of dissent, a person the state can lawfully detain. It rests on the state’s prosecutors operating independently of the state’s politicians, declining to bring charges where the evidence does not support them, regardless of the political environment of the day. It rests on the courts being able to find a proscription unlawful and have that finding result in the proscription being lifted rather than the arrests being escalated. It rests on the architecture of intelligence and enforcement being built by accountable public bodies rather than supplied, on long contracts awarded without competition, by a single private corporation whose chief executive has published the doctrine that pluralism is a shallow temptation. None of those preconditions is being honoured by what is being built. Each of them is being eroded, in turn, by the architecture that absorbs every available pretext and grows.

There is one further fact about the architecture that needs to be named before this article closes. The architecture is not yet complete. The £330 million Federated Data Platform contract has its break clause in February 2027. The state-threats proscription bill has not yet been laid before Parliament. The proscription of further pro-Palestine groups and the criminalisation of further symbols have not yet happened. The banning of further protest marches — which on the morning of Saturday 2 May the Prime Minister publicly confirmed was now under active government consideration — has not yet been enacted. The review of public order and hate crime legislation that the government itself commissioned in the wake of the Manchester synagogue attack of October 2025, which was expected to report in February 2026, has not yet been published. The architecture is being expanded by emergency announcement on the same week that the considered review the government asked for is being held back from public view. That, too, is part of the mechanism. The architecture is at the stage where its acceleration is most visible, but its consolidation is not yet inevitable. Whether it consolidates, or whether the political environment shifts in a direction that makes its continuation untenable, is the question the next year will answer. That is the question the public conversation has been displaced from. That is the question the events of the past week were used to push out of view.

The convergence is not a conspiracy. It does not require anyone to have designed Wednesday for what was done with it, and the evidence will not support such a claim. The convergence is what the evidence does support: that an architecture built over years to a published doctrine, delivered through contracts awarded without competition by a government whose AI policy is venture-capital authorship and Tony Blair Institute substance, defended by the criminalisation of the speech that would expose what it is, and accelerated whenever a violent event produces the political environment it needs, is the architecture of a country whose citizens are losing the relationship to their own state that the word democracy is supposed to describe. The phantom does not need to be real for the architecture to be built. The architecture only needs the political environment in which it cannot be effectively opposed. That is the environment the events of the past week have produced.

This is the convergence. What follows is the question — for the British public, for the British political class, for the British press, for the institutions whose independence has been the precondition for everything they are now being asked to defer to. The break clause has not yet been used. The architecture has not yet been completed. The country has not yet decided what kind of country it is going to be when both of those questions have been answered.

The architecture takes no view. The country must.

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

Share

Image attribution: 10 Downing Street, 1980. Peter McDermott / Geograph Project / CC BY-SA

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 by Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, 29 April 2026; ITV News, “Essa Suleiman appears in court charged with attempted murder after Golders Green attack,” 1 May 2026.

² The Jerusalem Post, “What do we know about Essa Suleiman, Golders Green attacker? — explainer,” 1 May 2026.

³ ITV News, “Essa Suleiman appears in court charged with attempted murder after Golders Green attack,” 1 May 2026; The Jerusalem Post, 1 May 2026.

⁴ Metropolitan Police timeline released to media, 30 April 2026; ITV News, 1 May 2026.

⁵ ITV News, 1 May 2026; The Jerusalem Post, 1 May 2026.

⁶ James S. Coates, “The Anatomy of HAYI,” Fireline Press, April 2026.

⁷ Video footage circulated on social media 29–30 April 2026; see note 12.

⁸ Metropolitan Police statement, 29 April 2026; The Washington Post, “London police say the stabbing of 2 Jewish men is an act of terror,” 29 April 2026.

⁹ R v Suleiman, Swindon Crown Court, sentencing remarks of Judge Douglas Field, December 2008; summarised in The Jerusalem Post, 1 May 2026.

¹⁰ ITV News, 1 May 2026; BBC News and The Guardian reporting, 30 April–1 May 2026.

¹¹ Crown Prosecution Service charging announcement, 1 May 2026; ITV News, 1 May 2026.

¹² Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski), repost on X, 30 April 2026; Sir Mark Rowley response on X, 30 April 2026; Polanski apology reported in ITV News, “Green Party leader Zack Polanski apologises for sharing post about Golders Green police officers,” 1 May 2026; Starmer “disgraceful” remarks reported in ITV News, 1–3 May 2026.

¹³ Stephen Daisley, “Zack Polanski’s shameful reaction to the Golders Green arrest,” The Spectator, 30 April 2026.

¹⁴ Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre threat level statement, 30 April 2026; Home Office press notice, 30 April 2026.

¹⁵ Cabinet Office statement, 30 April 2026.

¹⁶ Shabana Mahmood, BBC Radio 4 Today programme, 30 April 2026; CBC News, “Suspect in stabbing of 2 Jewish men had been flagged by U.K. counterterrorism program,” 1 May 2026.

¹⁷ HM Government announcement, 30 April 2026; CBC News, 1 May 2026.

¹⁸ Sir Keir Starmer, “PM remarks from Downing Street on Golders Green attack,” 30 April 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-remarks-from-downing-street-on-golders-green-attack-30-april-2026.

¹⁹ Starmer, “PM remarks from Downing Street,” 30 April 2026.

²⁰ Starmer, “PM remarks from Downing Street,” 30 April 2026.

²¹ Euronews, “HAYI group claims responsibility for stabbing two Jewish men in north London,” 29 April 2026.

²² James S. Coates, “The Anatomy of HAYI,” Fireline Press, April 2026.

²³ James S. Coates, “The Anatomy of HAYI,” Fireline Press, April 2026, drawing on Joe Truzman, “Iran-backed Group Claims Attacks on Jewish Targets,” The Long War Journal (FDD), 12 March 2026; Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, special report on HAYI, 16 March 2026; Julian Lanchès, Hybrid Threat Signals, ICCT, 23 March 2026.

²⁴ Coates, “The Anatomy of HAYI,” April 2026, drawing on Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, Middle East Eye, March 2026; Adam Hadley, Tech Against Terrorism, in The National, March 2026; CBS News exchange with HAYI Telegram administrator, 24 March 2026.

²⁵ Metropolitan Police, “Statements on linked arson attacks in north west London,” 19 April 2026, https://news.met.police.uk/news/statements-on-linked-arson-attacks-in-north-west-london-508398; Metropolitan Police, “Further arrest in investigation led by counter terrorism officers,” 27 April 2026, https://news.met.police.uk/news/further-arrest-in-investigation-led-by-counter-terrorism-officers-508656; Coates, “The Anatomy of HAYI,” April 2026.

²⁶ DAC Vicki Evans and DC Matt Jukes, public statements outside Kenton United Synagogue, 19 April 2026; Met Police link as note 25.

²⁷ R v Earl and others, Old Bailey, sentencing July 2025; “Five jailed for Russia-linked arson plot in London,” BBC News, 18 July 2025.

²⁸ Shabana Mahmood, public statements 30 April 2026; CBC News, 1 May 2026.

²⁹ Security Minister Dan Jarvis, interviews on Times Radio and GB News, 30 April 2026.

³⁰ “CPS drops case against Peter Tatchell over ‘globalise the intifada’ placard,” The Guardian, 29 April 2026; Peter Tatchell Foundation statement, 29 April 2026.

³¹ Eliot Higgins, public commentary on the Karp/Zamiska April 2026 manifesto; cited in James S. Coates, “Code, Contracts and Complicity 2.0,” Fireline Press, April 2026.

³² Defend Our Juries, “523 Arrests for Defying Palestine Action Ban Brings Total to 3,300,” 11 April 2026, https://defendourjuries.net/. Reverend Sue Parfitt’s first arrest documented in Democracy Now!, 7 July 2025; Middle East Eye, 5 July 2025; Bristol 24/7, 7 July 2025.

³³ R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWHC 292 (Admin).

³⁴ Home Office decision to ban the Al-Quds Day march, March 2026; reported in BBC, The Guardian, The Times, March 2026.

³⁵ James S. Coates, “Code, Contracts and Complicity 2.0,” Fireline Press, April 2026.

³⁶ James S. Coates, “The Anatomy of HAYI,” Fireline Press, April 2026.

³⁷ James S. Coates, “They Are Not the Same: Untangling Israel from the Jewish People,” Fireline Press, 2025–26; James S. Coates, “The Greatest Antisemitism,” Fireline Press, 2025–26.

³⁸ Sir Keir Starmer, “PM speech on AI Opportunities Action Plan,” 13 January 2025, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-on-ai-opportunities-action-plan-13-january-2025.

³⁹ Matt Clifford, AI Opportunities Action Plan (UK Government), January 2025; coverage in The Guardian, BBC News, Al Jazeera, 13 January 2025.

⁴⁰ Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, “Governing in the Age of AI: A New Model to Transform the State,” May 2024; “The Potential Impact of AI on the Public-Sector Workforce,” July 2024; David Gerard, “Starmer’s AI Plans for U.K. Are a Disaster,” Foreign Policy, 11 March 2025.

⁴¹ Starmer, “PM speech on AI Opportunities Action Plan,” 13 January 2025.

⁴² UK government strategic partnership announcement, September 2025; The Register, “Britain’s Ministry of Defence agrees deal with Palantir,” 28 January 2026; Hansard, “Ministry of Defence: Palantir Contracts,” 10 February 2026.

⁴³ MoD contract award notice, signed 30 December 2025, effective 1 April 2026; Public Technology, “MoD signs £240m Palantir deal as ministers insist UK defence data ‘remains sovereign,’” 29 January 2026; The Register, 28 January 2026.

⁴⁴ OpenDemocracy, January 2026 investigation; corroborated in The Register, 28 January 2026.

⁴⁵ The Lowdown, “Palantir, the controversy, the contracts and the campaign against the FDP,” 1 April 2026.

⁴⁶ The Nerve, January 2026 investigation; cited in Medact, “Briefing: Concerns Regarding Palantir Technologies and NHS Data Systems,” March 2026.

⁴⁷ The Nerve, January 2026.

⁴⁸ NHS England Federated Data Platform contract, November 2023; The Register, “UK promises procurement shift after Palantir deals,” 20 March 2026.

⁴⁹ Hansard, House of Commons debate, “Ministry of Defence: Palantir Contracts,” 10 February 2026.

⁵⁰ British Medical Association motion (2025 AGM); BMA February 2026 instruction to doctors; reported in The Register, 28 January 2026; Medact, March 2026.

⁵¹ Medact, “Briefing: Concerns Regarding Palantir Technologies and NHS Data Systems,” March 2026.

⁵² The Register, 28 January 2026.

⁵³ Medact, “Briefing: Concerns Regarding Palantir Technologies and NHS Data Systems,” March 2026.

⁵⁴ The Register, “UK weighs break clause in Palantir NHS deal,” 20 April 2026.

⁵⁵ Medact, “Briefing: Concerns Regarding Palantir Technologies and NHS Data Systems,” March 2026.

⁵⁶ Amnesty International, “Failing to Do Right: The Urgent Need for Palantir to Respect Human Rights,” 2020.

⁵⁷ Zack Polanski statement, January 2026; The Register, 28 January 2026.

⁵⁸ Hansard, Westminster Hall debate, “NHS Federated Data Platform,” 16 April 2026, https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-04-16/debates/2FDCA71C-D0C1-4738-BEE8-A4BDA311DB99/NHSFederatedDataPlatform; reported in The Register, “UK weighs break clause in Palantir NHS deal,” 20 April 2026; The Register, “UK promises procurement shift after Palantir deals,” 20 March 2026.

⁵⁹ Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025, 11 February 2026; Ministry of Justice, scheduled hate crime conviction statistics, published April 2026; reported in “Race and Religious Hate Crime Convictions Hit Eight-Year High in England and Wales,” British Brief, 1 May 2026; Tell MAMA, anti-Muslim hate monitoring data, 2025.

⁶⁰ Local elections in England scheduled for Thursday 7 May 2026; Electoral Commission timetable. Polling context reported in “2026 London local elections — Labour faces ‘political earthquake,’” LSE Professor Tony Travers cited in BBC News, March 2026.

⁶¹ “Extra £1.5 million to be given to communities to tackle antisemitism in wake of Golders Green attack,” LBC, 5 May 2026. ⁶² Peter Tatchell Foundation, “Police drop ‘intifada’ case against Peter Tatchell,” 29 April 2026; Index on Censorship, “Arrested for criticising Hamas — in London,” 21 May 2025.

⁶³ Middle East Eye, “UK terror watchdog urges ‘moratorium’ on pro-Palestine marches,” 30 April 2026; GB News, “Keir Starmer ‘doesn’t know what to do’ slams Kemi Badenoch as she demands ‘hate marches’ ban,” 1 May 2026.

⁶⁴ Becky Morton, “Protests may need to be stopped in some cases, PM suggests,” BBC News, 2 May 2026.

⁶⁵ Zack Polanski statement, 2 May 2026, reported in The Independent, “Row over Starmer threat to ban some pro-Palestine protests,” 3 May 2026; LBC, “Polanski ‘not fit to lead any party’ after Golders Green retweet, Alexander tells LBC,” 4 May 2026.

⁶⁶ Zarah Sultana statement on X, 5 July 2025; Bristol 24/7, 7 July 2025; Novara Media, “Protesters Arrested for Holding ‘I Support Palestine Action’ Signs,” 5 July 2025.

⁶⁷ Asa Winstanley, “Victory for Palestine Action as ‘Filton 6’ acquitted,” The Electronic Intifada, 4 February 2026; “All remaining Filton 24 defendants acquitted of aggravated burglary,” reported 18 February 2026; World Socialist Web Site, “Five hundred more pro-Palestine protesters arrested in UK despite High Court ruling,” 12 April 2026. On Elbit Systems and ICJ examination of Israel’s Gaza operations: South Africa v. Israel, International Court of Justice, Application instituting proceedings filed 29 December 2023; provisional measures orders 26 January 2024 and 24 May 2024.

⁶⁸ Christian Concern, “Christian preacher vindicated after arrest, prosecution and ‘non-crime hate incident’ threat for questioning Quran,” 26 July 2025; GB News, 26 July 2025.

The Day Democracy Showed Its Digital Face

On 9 August 2025, British democracy revealed what it had become. In Parliament Square — where suffragettes once demanded votes and millions marched against war — police systematically arrested 522 people for holding cardboard signs that read: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” By day’s end, 532 had been arrested — the largest mass arrest in London since the 1960s.¹

This wasn’t disorder being contained; it was dissent being catalogued and criminalised. Officers drawn from forces across the country moved through the crowd with mechanical efficiency, processing arrests of peaceful protesters with the rhythm of an assembly line.

The mass arrests followed months of escalating repression documented by civil society groups. In May 2025, Bond — the UK network for international development organisations — warned that facial recognition technology was being deployed at peaceful gatherings, “violating privacy rights and deterring campaigners from participating in demonstrations.”² Their annual review found that UK police were arresting climate protesters at three times the global average rate, with some receiving five-year sentences merely for participating in protest-planning video calls.

Whether facial recognition was deployed that day remains unclear. But the operation unfolded against this documented backdrop of AI surveillance expansion, technology that Bond noted “disproportionately misidentifies people of colour, increasing the risk of wrongful arrest.”³ It is hard to believe the technology has not been used here given the history of this government. The infrastructure exists; the only question is when, not if, it will be turned on every protest.

The technology enabling this transformation wasn’t designed in some authoritarian backwater. It was built in Silicon Valley by companies that promised to “democratise AI” and “benefit humanity.” The same executives who speak at conferences about ethics and safety are selling artificial intelligence to militaries and police forces, teaching algorithms that their highest purpose is to identify, track, and neutralise human beings.

This is a story about betrayal — how the AI revolution we were promised became a counter-revolution against human freedom. It’s about how our governments and tech giants formed an unholy alliance, turning tools of liberation into instruments of oppression.

The Promise and the Betrayal

Remember the promises? AI would cure cancer, reverse climate change, unlock human creativity. Tech CEOs stood on stages and promised a better world.

Instead, they built the perfect surveillance state. The same algorithms meant to optimise traffic now optimise authoritarian control. The facial recognition that would help find missing children hunts those who dissent.

This isn’t technological determinism — it’s a choice made in boardrooms where quarterly earnings matter more than human lives, where executives know exactly what their systems enable but hide behind the language of “dual use.” The same technologies sold to us by their right hand to heal humanity are being unethically developed for surveillance, control, even kill chains in the left.

The Military-Industrial-AI Complex

The corruption begins with contracts worth billions, signed between tech giants and defence departments. These aren’t partnerships to protect democracy — they’re agreements to automate oppression.

The scale is no longer the kind of thing a democracy can plausibly oversee. American tech firms now hold defence and intelligence contracts worth tens of billions of dollars, awarded under classification regimes that keep most of the work hidden from the press, from Congress, and from the engineers building it. The same companies that ask for our trust to handle our email, our search history, our health records, and our children’s photographs are simultaneously the prime contractors for cloud platforms hosting military intelligence, AI models analysing battlefield data, and biometric systems feeding kill chains. There is no firewall between the consumer division and the defence division. There is one company, with one set of capabilities, sold to whoever can afford it.

The language used to describe this fusion — “dual use,” “public-private partnership,” “national security innovation” — was engineered to reassure. It functions instead as cover. “Dual use” means a technology built for surveillance can be marketed as crime prevention; a system built for war can be sold as disaster response; a tool built to track a population can be described as customer analytics. The framing collapses the moral distinction between civilian and military application, and in collapsing it, removes the basis on which the public might object. By the time a citizen learns that the company storing their cloud backup is also the company building the targeting system bombing a refugee camp, the contract has already been signed, the systems are already deployed, and the engineer who might have refused has already been replaced.

What follows is not an exhaustive accounting. It is a set of representative cases. Each shows the same pattern: a company that built its public reputation on benign tools is now embedded in the architecture of state violence, at home and abroad.

Microsoft: The Pentagon’s Primary Partner

Microsoft was awarded a US$22 billion contract in 2021 to provide “Integrated Visual Augmentation Systems” (IVAS) to the US military — AI-powered headsets that would turn soldiers into nodes in a vast killing machine.⁴ The programme was beset by years of failures: soldiers reported headaches, eyestrain, and nausea so severe that Congress threatened to cut funding. In February 2025, Microsoft announced it was transferring the contract to Anduril Industries, the defence-tech firm founded by Oculus VR creator Palmer Luckey. The Army formally novated the contract on 10 April 2025.⁵ Microsoft remains as the cloud provider; Anduril now controls production, hardware, and software.

The handover did not end Silicon Valley’s IVAS bet. It deepened it. Anduril is among the most aggressive military AI firms in the United States, founded explicitly to bring Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos to weapons systems. The contract did not dissolve. It changed hands within the same ecosystem, to a more openly militarised actor. Strip away the corporate speak, and you still have AI-powered headsets that turn soldiers into nodes in a vast killing machine. Azure cloud services still host military data. AI models still analyse intelligence. Machine learning systems still identify targets. The names on the contract change. The architecture does not.

Microsoft’s reach extends well beyond the Pentagon. The company operates an Azure Israel cloud region serving government and public sector customers,⁶ and as we will see when we reach Gaza, Microsoft’s role there is now a matter of public record acknowledged by the company itself — not inference, not allegation, but documented fact.

Google: From “Don’t Be Evil” to “Don’t Get Caught”

Google’s transformation from idealistic startup to surveillance contractor is complete. After employee protests forced it to abandon Project Maven in 2018, the company learned its lesson — not to stop military work, but to hide it better.

In December 2022, Google was named one of four companies to share the Pentagon’s US$9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract.⁷ But it’s the US$1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract with Israel that reveals the depths of Google’s betrayal.⁸ Despite employee protests, despite 28 workers being fired for opposing it,⁹ Google continues providing cloud and AI services that enable occupation, apartheid, and surveillance.

“We were told we were making the world’s information accessible,” said one of the fired engineers. “We didn’t sign up to make Palestinians accessible to military targeting systems.”

Amazon: Everything Store, Including Surveillance

Amazon Web Services doesn’t just power Netflix — it powers the CIA. What began as a US$600 million contract in 2013 has expanded into a US$10 billion cloud computing deal with the NSA, awarded in 2022, making AWS the backbone of American intelligence gathering.¹⁰ Every drone video analysed, every communication intercepted, every pattern identified — it runs on Amazon servers.

The company sells its Rekognition facial recognition system to police departments despite studies showing error rates of up to 34 per cent for darker-skinned women.¹¹ When those misidentifications lead to false arrests, Amazon bears no responsibility. When its systems enable mass surveillance at protests, the company points to its terms of service.

Palantir: Born from Surveillance

Unlike companies that pivoted to defence work, Palantir was built for it. Founded in 2003 with seed funding from In-Q-Tel — the CIA’s venture capital arm — the company specialises in making vast surveillance dragnets appear precise and scientific. Its Gotham platform powers military targeting across NATO programmes and is used by intelligence agencies in dozens of countries.¹² Its Foundry product is the data-integration layer underneath operations from Los Angeles to London.

In Britain, Palantir holds two anchor contracts that place its software at the centre of the state. The Ministry of Defence awarded a £75 million data-processing contract in December 2021. NHS England awarded a £330 million contract in November 2023 — potentially worth £500 million over its lifetime — for the Federated Data Platform, which integrates the medical records of up to 240 NHS organisations on Palantir’s Foundry software.¹³ The British Medical Association voted in June 2025 to oppose the rollout. Forty-seven thousand patients signed petitions against it. Multiple NHS trusts refused to adopt the platform. The contract proceeds. Palantir’s AI was also used to sift the submissions to the UK’s Strategic Defence Review in June 2025, the review that produced the announcement that ten per cent of the MoD budget would be spent on novel technologies.

In the United States, the same software runs the architecture of mass deportation. ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million contract in April 2025 to build ImmigrationOS — a system that pulls data from the IRS, Social Security Administration, passport records, and licence-plate readers to generate deportation target profiles in near real time.¹⁴ Palantir’s federal contracts since the start of 2025 exceed $900 million.¹⁵

CEO Alex Karp does not hide behind ethics washing — a posture whose full ideological dimensions will become clear when we reach the manifesto he and his company published in April 2026.

The Gaza Laboratory

To understand where this leads, look to Gaza. Here, the future of AI-enabled oppression is being beta-tested on a captive population. The architecture documented below is not a catalogue of weapons but a single integrated system: designation, location, interrogation, checkpoint enforcement, and the cloud infrastructure that binds them together.

In April 2024, Israeli publications +972 Magazine and Local Call exposed an AI system called “Lavender” used by the Israeli military to generate kill lists. According to intelligence sources, the system marked 37,000 Palestinians as potential militants — in a territory where half the population are children.¹⁶ Operators were given just 20 seconds to review each AI-generated target. The acceptable civilian casualty rate was reportedly set at 15–20 civilians per “junior militant.” One intelligence officer called it a “mass assassination factory.”¹⁷

Lavender did not work alone. A companion system called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked individuals marked by Lavender to their family homes through their mobile-phone signals and notified operators when they entered, so the strike could be timed for maximum effect. One intelligence source described the practice plainly: targets were bombed in their homes “without hesitation, as a first option.”¹⁸ The mechanism was the most ordinary technology in the modern world. The same signal a phone emits to connect to a cell tower — the signal that lets a bank verify identity and a maps app guide a user home — was repurposed as a kill-chain trigger.

In March 2025, the Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call jointly revealed that Israel’s Unit 8200 — the military intelligence unit responsible for signals interception — was building a ChatGPT-equivalent large language model trained on roughly 100 billion words of intercepted Arabic, much of it spoken Palestinian dialect drawn from phone calls and text messages. Israeli media have referred to the system as Genie. After 7 October 2023, Unit 8200 accelerated the project by drawing on Israeli reservists who held senior positions at Google, Meta, and Microsoft.¹⁹ The stated purpose, according to the security sources who spoke to the investigators, was to allow operators to query the totality of intercepted communications about specific individuals. One source described the operational use case in terms that should be read twice: “It’s not just about preventing shooting attacks. I can track human rights activists, monitor Palestinian construction in Area C. I have more tools to know what every person in the West Bank is doing.”²⁰

The architecture extends to checkpoints. Amnesty International documented in its 2023 report Automated Apartheid a facial recognition system called Red Wolf, deployed by the Israeli military at checkpoints in Hebron in the occupied West Bank. Red Wolf scans the faces of Palestinians passing through, compares them against a database called Wolf Pack containing biometric and biographical information on Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, and determines whether the individual may pass. New faces are automatically enrolled without consent. A companion app called Blue Wolf lets soldiers query the same database from their phones in the field, and according to testimony given to the Israeli veterans’ organisation Breaking the Silence, soldiers were given prizes for the number of new Palestinian faces they enrolled. The surveillance of a captive population was gamified.²¹

In August 2025, the Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call jointly published the most consequential single piece of reporting on the Gaza laboratory yet to appear. Drawing on interviews with eleven Microsoft and Israeli intelligence sources and a cache of leaked internal Microsoft documents, the investigation revealed that Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform has been used by Unit 8200 since 2021 to store and process roughly 200 million hours of intercepted Palestinian phone calls — what the unit’s own internal goal described as the capacity to handle “a million calls an hour.” The data was used, according to the sources, to inform military targeting decisions, including operations that placed civilians at risk. The arrangement was not a passive sale of a generic cloud service. The then-head of Unit 8200, Yossi Sariel, met Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the company’s Seattle headquarters in late 2021, and the result was a customised, segregated area of Azure built specifically for the unit’s surveillance archive. Microsoft engineers provided an estimated 19,000 hours of engineering support to Unit 8200 and the related Unit 9900. The data centres holding the intercepted communications are located in the Netherlands and Ireland.²² In September 2025, after weeks of internal review, Microsoft confirmed the substance of the reporting and announced that it had cut off the specific Azure storage and AI services Unit 8200 had been using.²³ The largest software company on earth, having been shown what its product was being used for, formally agreed with the reporting and withdrew the service. There is no longer any ambiguity about whether Silicon Valley enables what is being done in Gaza. The question is settled, on the record, by the company itself.

This is AI without ethics, without humanity, without conscience. It’s efficiency in the service of elimination. And the same companies providing cloud infrastructure and AI capabilities for these operations market themselves as champions of human rights and progress. Do you see the disconnect?

Every child killed by an AI-targeted strike is a testament to Silicon Valley’s moral bankruptcy. Every family destroyed by algorithmic targeting is proof that “Don’t Be Evil” was always just a marketing slogan.

Share

The Surveillance State Comes Home

The technologies tested in conflict zones don’t stay there. They return to London, New York, Paris — repurposed for domestic control. The architecture documented in the previous section is not staying in Gaza. It is being installed in Britain, by the same companies, with the same logic, and the British state has spent the last fifteen months removing the legal and political obstacles to its arrival. The UK has become a laboratory for normalising AI surveillance in a supposedly free society. Keir Starmer’s government announced on 13 January 2025 that “artificial intelligence will be unleashed across the UK to deliver a decade of national renewal, under a new plan announced today.”²⁴

Consider first the phone in the citizen’s pocket. British police already integrate mobile-phone location data into investigations, and predictive policing systems already ingest it. On the surface this looks like law and order. A serious suspect is wanted, the police use the data the suspect’s own phone is already broadcasting to find them, an arrest is made. Few people would object. But that is not what the architecture actually does. Where’s Daddy? did not exist to find one wanted man. It existed to take a list of 37,000 names generated by another AI, locate every name in real time through the signals their phones could not stop emitting, and trigger an action against each one with minimal human review. The instrument is not designed for the careful pursuit of a serious suspect. It is designed for the efficient processing of a list. The size of the list is set by whoever holds the database, and the action triggered against each name is set by whoever holds the policy. In Gaza, the list was generated by Lavender and the action was a missile. In Britain, the list could be generated by any watchlist a Home Secretary chose to populate — the proscribed-organisation list, the protest-planning list, the immigration-enforcement list — and the action could be an arrest, a stop, a flag in a database that follows the named person for the rest of their life. The decision about which list and which action is a political decision, not a technical one. The technology does not draw the line. The technology asks who has the authority to draw it, and accepts the answer.

The objection here is not to the existence of watchlists. The criminal justice system has always had wanted lists — an arrest warrant is, in essence, a list of one. The objection is to what automation does to lists, and to what governments do with the architecture once it exists. A wanted list compiled by humans and served by humans has natural limits, because human time is finite. A police force can only chase so many people, and the cost of pursuit constrains how broadly the list is populated. Automation removes that cost. Once an AI can locate any name on any list in real time, at zero marginal cost, the incentive to keep the list short disappears. The list grows because nothing stops it growing. And the system processes a wanted murderer and a person who held a sign in Parliament Square the same way, because the system does not distinguish between categories of “wanted.” A human officer used to enforce that distinction by deciding what to do with their finite time. The automated system enforces whatever distinction is encoded in the database, which is to say, whatever distinction the Home Secretary has chosen to encode.

Three further consequences follow, and each one is a violation of a right the British public has been told it possesses. First, the lists are not public. A government can populate a watchlist for any purpose its security services consider justified, including purposes the public would refuse to authorise if asked, and the public has no way to know the list exists. The right to challenge a state action against you presumes you can find out what the state has done. The architecture removes that presumption. You cannot challenge a list you do not know you are on, and the state is under no obligation to tell you. Second, there is no exit. The systems documented in this article have mechanisms for adding names to databases. They do not have mechanisms for removing them. Red Wolf enrols new Palestinian faces automatically and retains them indefinitely. The Police National Database retains intelligence flags for years and in some categories permanently. The decision to put you on a list is a decision the state can make in seconds; the decision to take you off it is a decision the state has not built any process to make. Third, misidentification is not theoretical. It has already happened. The architecture produces people in Shaun Thompson’s position by design — that is what a system with an error rate scaled across millions of scans does. Most of them never become test cases. They become quiet entries in a file, and they cannot get the entry removed.

A right that exists only when the state chooses to recognise it is not a right. It is a privilege, granted at the discretion of whoever holds the database. The architecture documented above does not abolish rights by decree. It abolishes them by making them unenforceable.

Now consider the face at the checkpoint. The Hebron architecture has its British twin. Croydon now has its first permanent live facial recognition cameras. The Met scanned 4.2 million faces in London in 2025 alone — more than any other European capital or Western democracy.²⁵ The hardware varies. The watchlists vary. The architecture is the same architecture. A face is captured without consent, compared against a state-held database, and a determination is made about whether the person carrying the face may proceed unmolested. In Hebron, the determination is whether to pass the checkpoint. In London, the determination is whether to be stopped, questioned, and possibly arrested. The categorical distinction the British public is being invited to draw between the two is a distinction the technology does not respect.

The British state has spent the last fifteen months removing every obstacle to that architecture’s expansion. In December 2025, the Home Office launched a ten-week public consultation on a national facial recognition framework. By the close in February 2026, more than two dozen organisations — Big Brother Watch, Liberty, Statewatch, Amnesty International UK, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission among them — had filed submissions calling for the rollout to be halted or sharply restricted.²⁶ The EHRC, Britain’s own statutory equality regulator, formally said that the Metropolitan Police’s use of live facial recognition is unlawful. The government’s response to that pushback was to fund a fivefold expansion. In January 2026, the Home Office announced that the number of live facial recognition vans would rise from ten to fifty, deployed across all 43 police forces in England and Wales.²⁷ Then on 21 April 2026, the High Court dismissed the legal challenge brought by Shaun Thompson — the anti-knife crime youth worker who had been falsely identified, detained, threatened with arrest by the Met’s cameras, and refused belief when he produced his passport — and Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo. The court found the Met’s policy to be lawful and compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. The ruling cleared the last legal obstacle to the national rollout.²⁸

Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s response to the judgment was a confession in the form of a celebration. “The question is no longer whether we should use Live Facial Recognition,” he said. “It’s why we would choose not to.”

And underneath all of it sits the cloud. The same Microsoft that built a customised, segregated area of Azure for Unit 8200 to store 200 million hours of intercepted Palestinian phone calls also sells cloud services to British police forces and central government departments. The same Azure platform that hosted that surveillance archive is the platform on which significant portions of the British state’s data infrastructure now run. The customer changes. The architecture does not. The British public is being asked to trust that domestic deployment will be different — that the same company, working with the same engineers, on the same platform, will draw a line at the British border that it has been documented not drawing elsewhere. The basis for that trust has not been provided.

The reversal of the democratic premise is now complete. The burden has shifted from the state, which used to have to justify surveillance, to the citizen, who now has to justify being left alone. Thompson is appealing. The cameras are not waiting for the appeal. The instrument is the same.

The Explosion of Facial Recognition

The architecture is no longer a plan or a pilot. It has been operating, at scale, for a year — and the record of what it has actually done is now publicly available, much of it from the Metropolitan Police’s own annual report. Between September 2024 and September 2025, the Met conducted 203 live facial recognition deployments across London. The cameras scanned over three million faces. They generated 2,077 alerts and led to 962 arrests, of whom 549 were wanted by the courts and 347 by the Met itself. The remaining arrests were of registered sex offenders, stalkers, and others under multi-agency management. The Met framed the year as a success.²⁹

Inside the Met’s own headline numbers sits the case against the technology. The force reported 10 false alerts across more than three million scans and called this a 0.0003 per cent false positive rate. This is the figure the Commissioner cites and the Home Office repeats. It is also misleading. The relevant denominator is not the number of faces scanned but the number of alerts generated, because that is when an officer is dispatched to stop someone. Measured against alerts, the Met’s false positive rate is 0.48 per cent — and 80 per cent of those false positives were of Black people. The Met’s response to its own demographic data was to declare the imbalances “not statistically significant.”³⁰ Big Brother Watch’s response was more direct: a system that wrongly flags innocent people, four-fifths of them Black, is not crime prevention. It is the algorithmic continuation of stop and search, scaled to millions.

The pattern is replicating across the country as other forces deploy LFR for the first time. Sussex Police’s first deployment in Crawley town centre on 13 November 2025 scanned over 23,000 people and produced no arrests. Surrey’s first deployment in Redhill the same day flagged people for further inquiry of whom 60 per cent were not arrested. Thames Valley deployed in Oxford in December 2025, then High Wycombe, Milton Keynes, and Reading. West Yorkshire ran four deployments in Leeds City Centre between November and December. Each first-use generates the same arithmetic: tens of thousands of faces captured without consent, a handful of flags, most of them wrong. The deployments expand regardless.³¹

What is changing fastest is not state deployment but private-sector adoption. The architecture is now being installed by retailers, with no consent, no oversight, and no obligation to publish data. Sainsbury’s launched live facial recognition in two London stores in September 2025 and announced expansion to five more in January 2026. The Southern Co-op operates LFR permanently across 35 stores in Portsmouth, Bristol, Hove, Bournemouth, and London — the first UK supermarket chain to do so — using technology supplied by Facewatch. The Frasers Group, owner of Sports Direct, House of Fraser, Flannels, and USC, has installed Facewatch systems across multiple of its retail brands. The customer who avoided a Met camera by staying off Whitehall now walks into one when buying milk.³²

This isn’t crime prevention — it’s population control. And the technology that captures the customer in Sainsbury’s is the same technology that captures the protester in Parliament Square, sold by overlapping suppliers, drawing on overlapping watchlists, with the same demographic bias built into the same algorithms. The infrastructure has stopped being a state instrument the citizen could in principle avoid. It is now an ambient condition of life in modern Britain.

The architecture has also been installed on children. Hundreds of UK schools now operate biometric systems on pupils — facial recognition for cashless catering, fingerprint scanning for library checkout and attendance, palm-vein readers for vending machines. The Information Commissioner intervened against North Ayrshire Council’s deployment in nine secondary schools in 2021 and has issued repeated warnings since, but the rollout has continued largely unchecked.³³ Parental consent is often nominal, sometimes solicited as a single tick-box on an enrolment form, and in some schools opt-out has been treated as administratively impossible. The argument made for these systems is the law-and-order argument in its softest form: it is faster than a swipe card, it reduces stigma around free school meals, it cuts down on lost library books. But the data captured is the same biometric data that feeds every other system documented in this article. A child’s facial geometry enrolled at age seven becomes, by operation of the architecture, a permanent entry in the same kind of database that has no exit. The first time any of these children encounters an LFR camera in adulthood, they will already be in the matching pool. They were enrolled before they could consent, by an institution they could not refuse, for a purpose unrelated to anything the database will ultimately be used for. This is the population-control argument extended to the people least able to object, and it is being normalised inside the institution that exists to teach them what their rights are.

“We’re watching the normalisation of mass biometric surveillance in real time,” said Silkie Carlo of Big Brother Watch. “What would have been unthinkable five years ago is now routine.”

Predictive Policing: Minority Report Made Real

Beyond facial recognition sits a second layer of the architecture, and a more radical one. Where facial recognition identifies who you are and Where’s Daddy? finds you, predictive systems make a determination about what you will do before you have done anything. They generate risk scores for named individuals and for postcodes. They feed those scores into police deployment decisions, into housing decisions, into school decisions, into immigration decisions. They operate now, on millions of British citizens, mostly invisibly. They are the part of the architecture the public has heard least about and the part that does the most to abolish what was previously meant by the presumption of innocence.

The named systems are operating in plain sight for anyone who looks. South Wales Police pioneered app-based facial recognition that turns any officer’s phone into a mobile surveillance unit. Durham Constabulary deployed the Harm Assessment Risk Tool, which scores individuals on their predicted likelihood of reoffending and feeds the score into custody decisions. The National Data Analytics Solution, developed by West Midlands Police with Home Office backing, aims to identify “pre-criminals” through algorithmic analysis of police records, custody data, social services data, and intelligence flags. Avon and Somerset Police have run a Qlik-based predictive deployment system since 2017. The Probation Service uses the OASys risk-scoring tool to inform decisions about release, recall, and supervision conditions for hundreds of thousands of people.³⁴ Each of these systems generates a score about a named individual. Each is operating now. Each has documented bias.

The Metropolitan Police’s Gangs Matrix is the case study the British public should know and largely does not. The Matrix was a database of named individuals algorithmically rated for “gang affiliation” — overwhelmingly young Black men, in many cases without any criminal conviction. Inclusion on the Matrix triggered automatic information-sharing with housing associations, schools, the Department for Work and Pensions, and immigration enforcement. People on the list lost their tenancies, lost school placements, lost benefits, were deported — often without knowing they were on a list, without being told why, and with no functional mechanism to challenge inclusion. The Information Commissioner’s Office found in 2018 that the Matrix breached data protection law on multiple grounds. The Met “redesigned” it. The redesigned version still operates.³⁵ This is the calcified-rights argument from the previous section made concrete, and it predates the technology that now amplifies it. The architecture for ranking citizens by algorithmic suspicion, sharing the rankings across state functions, and visiting consequences on the ranked without their knowledge has been operating in London for over a decade. The new technology is not introducing this practice. It is industrialising it.

The technical critique of predictive policing is straightforward and devastating, and it explains why the harms fall where they do. These systems are trained on historical police data. Historical police data does not record where crime happens. It records where the police have looked. The historical pattern in Britain is that Black, Asian, and working-class communities have been over-policed for generations — stopped, searched, arrested, and recorded at sharply higher rates than the rest of the population for offences that occur at similar rates everywhere. The model learns that pattern as if it were the pattern of crime. The model then directs resources back to those communities, generating more arrests, generating more training data confirming the model. The system cannot distinguish “this is where crime happens” from “this is where the police look.” It treats the second as evidence of the first. The communities most harmed by historical policing become the communities most surveilled by predictive policing, and the algorithm presents this loop as objective. Decisions that used to require a human officer to defend become decisions justified by the output of a model whose training data is the record of the very practice the model is now used to extend.

The same architecture has been installed in the welfare state. The Department for Work and Pensions has been operating an algorithmic risk-scoring system on benefit claimants since 2021, flagging cases for fraud investigation. A Public Law Project legal challenge produced disclosure showing the system flags claimants at sharply different rates depending on age, nationality, marital status, and disability — with disabled claimants and single mothers among those most heavily scored. The DWP has refused to publish the model, refused to disclose what data feeds it, and refused to allow claimants to know they are being scored.³⁶ The architecture for ranking British citizens by algorithmic suspicion is therefore not confined to the criminal justice system. It is now operating against millions of people whose only contact with the state is the receipt of the benefits they are legally entitled to. The framework is the same: a hidden score, no transparency, no exit, demonstrated bias, no public accountability. And the connection to the corporate spine of this article is not metaphorical. Palantir’s Gotham platform is a predictive analytics layer marketed explicitly for use by police, immigration enforcement, welfare administration, and intelligence agencies. The same company building Israel’s targeting infrastructure is supplying the analytics used to score British claimants and predict British criminals. The architecture documented in this article is one architecture, and predictive policing is the layer that decides who is worth pointing it at.

The criminal law of the Western tradition has always required an act before sanction. Predictive systems abolish that requirement at the level of state attention, even where they have not yet abolished it at the level of formal sanction. You become a person of interest because of what an algorithm thinks you might do. The interest itself shapes your life — surveillance, stops, school visits, housing decisions, benefit reviews — long before any formal charge. The presumption of innocence is not abolished by a court ruling. It is abolished by the fact that the state is now treating you as a future offender administratively. The system has decided who you are before you have done anything.

The architecture has also moved inside the phone. The Online Safety Act, fully in force from 2025, granted Ofcom the power to require communications platforms to deploy “accredited technology” to scan user content for illegal material — including content in end-to-end encrypted services. Apple, Signal, and Meta all warned that compliance would require breaking encryption itself, because the only way to scan an encrypted message is to scan it on the device before it is encrypted. The government acknowledged the warnings publicly and announced that the power would not be used “until the technology is feasible.” The technology is becoming feasible.³⁷ When the power is exercised — and the legal framework now exists for it to be exercised at any time without further parliamentary debate — the same architecture documented in this article extends from public-space facial recognition and predictive scoring of citizens into the scanning of private communication. The watchlist becomes a content list. The instrument that processes named people becomes the instrument that processes named messages. The scope grows because the legal foundation has already been laid.

The Choreography of Mass Arrest

The 9 August demonstration wasn’t spontaneous. It was announced in advance by Defend Our Juries, explicitly as a test of whether the state would actually arrest hundreds for holding signs. The state called their bluff and then exceeded it.

The Metropolitan Police drew officers from surrounding forces. The operation was methodical: approach protesters, inform them they were under arrest for supporting a proscribed organisation, carry them away when they refused to move. The Met’s final figure for the day was 522 arrested under the Terrorism Act, with another 10 for other offences — making 532 in total. Almost half were aged 60 or older. Nearly 100 were in their 70s. Fifteen were in their 80s. The oldest was an 89-year-old retired psychotherapist.³⁸ The counter-terrorism apparatus typically aimed at serious crime was now being routinely pointed at peaceful protesters of pension age.

The choreography did not stop at the arrest. Each of the 532 went into the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command processing pipeline. Each had their biometrics taken. Each became a named entry in counter-terrorism databases that share information across the Police National Database, the Home Office, immigration enforcement, and any partner agency with appropriate access. The Police National Database retains intelligence flags for years and in some categories permanently. There is no published mechanism by which any of the 532 can have their counter-terrorism flag removed, even now, even after the High Court has ruled the proscription itself was unlawful.³⁹ The architecture documented earlier in this article worked exactly as documented. A list was generated. The list was processed. The processed names entered the database. The database has no exit.

“We are confident that anyone who came to Parliament Square today to hold a placard expressing support for Palestine Action was either arrested or is in the process of being arrested,” the Metropolitan Police announced with satisfaction. The then-Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, thanked police for dealing with “the very small number of people whose actions crossed the line into criminality” — a remarkable characterisation of 522 peaceful protesters holding cardboard signs. Let’s call it what it is: Britain took 532 political prisoners that day. They are now permanently recorded as terrorism arrests in the police database, and there is no procedure that has been built to take them off it.

Criminalising Conscience

This is the architecture into which the UK government deposited Palestine Action in July 2025. It designated a protest group as a terrorist organisation.

The group’s tactics were disruptive but non-lethal: occupying weapons factories, spray-painting buildings, damaging equipment at companies supplying arms to Israel. No one was killed. No one was physically harmed. Property was damaged, not people. The government moved with unprecedented speed. The earlier crackdowns on Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion — including five-year sentences for participating in protest-planning calls — were the test case. Palestine Action was the next step.

The catalyst was a 20 June 2025 break-in at RAF Brize Norton where activists spray-painted military aircraft, causing £7 million in damage.⁴⁰ For context, that’s less than the cost of a single day of military operations. But the response was swift and severe: terrorism charges. On 5 July 2025, then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper placed Palestine Action in the same legal category as Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The proscription order bundled Palestine Action with two white-supremacist groups — the neo-Nazi Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement — in a single instrument, forcing MPs to approve all three together or none. Supporting Palestine Action — even holding a sign — became punishable by up to 14 years in prison.⁴¹ Have we lost all perspective? Holding a sign is now legally equivalent to planning a terror attack?

“According to international standards, terrorist acts should be confined to criminal acts intended to cause death or serious injury,” stated Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in July 2025.⁴² His warnings were ignored.

Then the architecture went to work. By the end of November 2025, at least 2,545 people had been arrested for holding signs in support of Palestine Action. The Defend Our Juries figure rose past 3,300 by April 2026. The proscription produced a 660 per cent rise in UK terrorism arrests in the year to the end of September 2025 — not because terrorism had risen by 660 per cent, but because the legal definition of terrorism had been expanded to include the act of expressing dissent.⁴³

On 13 February 2026, the High Court ruled the proscription unlawful. The judges noted that only three of Palestine Action’s 380 documented actions had met the legal definition of terrorism, and that the proscription had imposed a disproportionate interference with freedom of expression.⁴⁴ The ruling vindicated the article’s argument before this article had finished being written. The Metropolitan Police initially announced it would pause arrests. Six weeks later, on 25 March 2026, the Met reversed course and resumed arresting people for holding signs. On 11 April 2026, in a single afternoon at Trafalgar Square, the police arrested 523 more people, ages 18 to 87, including an elderly woman with walking sticks and an elderly man in a wheelchair. More than 550 people have been arrested for the same offence since the High Court ruled the offence does not exist.⁴⁵

The courts are slower than the architecture. The High Court has ruled the proscription unlawful, but the proscription remains in force pending the government’s appeal — set for 28 and 29 April 2026, three days after this article was finalised. And even if the appeal fails, the over 3,300 people already arrested have already been processed into databases the architecture has not built any procedure to remove them from. A judicial victory does not delete a counter-terrorism flag. A judicial victory does not restore a job lost over an arrest, a tenancy lost over an investigation, a security clearance withdrawn over a Section 12 charge. The state acted faster than the courts could correct it, and the people swept up in the interval have been entered into a permanent record that the legal victory does not reach. This is the deeper structural problem: when the technology and the political appetite to use it move faster than judicial review, what looks like the rule of law is administrative custody. The judgment arrives and the database does not change.

Share

The Corruption of AI’s Promise

The architecture rewards every use of itself. It is elegant in its cruelty. Every protest makes the surveillance state stronger, provides more data, justifies more funding. The tools of empire abroad become tools of repression at home. And those who object can now be transformed from citizens to terrorists with the stroke of a pen.

This isn’t how it was supposed to be. AI was meant to augment human intelligence, not replace human judgement with algorithmic execution. It was meant to help us solve climate change, not optimise bombing campaigns. It was meant to enhance creativity, not eliminate privacy.

Instead, we’re building systems that embody the worst of human nature: our tribalism, our violence, our desire to control. This echoes a central warning from my book A Signal Through Time — we’re teaching artificial intelligence that its purpose is to watch, to target, to suppress. Every surveillance algorithm trained on protest footage, every military AI optimised for “kinetic solutions,” every predictive policing system that sees crime in Black and Brown faces — they all carry forward and amplify human prejudice.

The ethics boards that tech companies tout are window dressing. Google disbanded its AI ethics council after just one week. Microsoft’s responsible AI team was decimated in layoffs. When ethics conflict with profits, ethics lose every time.

What we’re creating isn’t artificial intelligence — it’s artificial sociopathy. Systems that can identify a face in a crowd of thousands but can’t recognise its humanity. Algorithms that can predict behaviour but can’t understand context. Machines that optimise for efficiency without any conception of justice.

The Manifesto

On 18 April 2026, Palantir published a thousand-word post on X distilling Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s The Technological Republic into a 22-point manifesto.⁴⁶ The post arrived without provocation — no scandal demanded a response, no journalist had asked a question. Palantir simply chose to declare, in numbered list form, what it believed and what it intended to build. The doctrine that this article inferred from contracts and conduct in August 2025 is now, eight months later, a published programme.

Read the points in sequence and the architecture of the surveillance state acquires its ideology. Hard power, the manifesto declares, “in this century will be built on software.” The question of AI weapons “is not whether” they will be built but “who will build them and for what purpose.” National service should be made universal. The “atomic age is ending,” replaced by a new era of deterrence built on AI. The post-war pacifism of Germany and Japan must be undone, because their restraint has become “a liability.” And in its closing points, the manifesto turns from weapons to culture: pluralism is dismissed as a “shallow temptation,” and the reader is told that “some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive.” The criteria for that judgement are not provided. They do not need to be. Once a defence contractor with contracts in over a dozen countries has decided that some peoples are wonders and others are regressive, the surveillance infrastructure already documented in this article acquires a target.

The international response was swift. Belgian philosopher of technology Mark Coeckelbergh, who teaches at the University of Vienna, called the manifesto “an example of technofascism.”⁴⁷ Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek economist and former finance minister, said Palantir had effectively signalled a willingness “to add to nuclear Armageddon the AI-driven threat to humanity’s existence.”⁴⁸ Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins identified what the document actually attacks beneath its civilisational rhetoric: “verification, deliberation, and accountability” — the three pillars on which democratic life depends.⁴⁹ French entrepreneur and geopolitical commentator Arnaud Bertrand went further still on social media, naming the commercial machinery beneath the ideology: “A remilitarised Germany and Japan are massive new defence-software markets… pacifist members are a liability in such a contest.”⁵⁰ The doctrine and the contracts are the same instrument. Karp has not separated them. He never intended to.

The dismissal of pluralism is not a stylistic flourish. It is the load-bearing wall of the doctrine, and it is the most direct threat to democratic life in any of the twenty-two points. Pluralism is not a soft civilisational accessory that can be discarded for seriousness. It is the structural precondition of a free society — the recognition that legitimate political life requires the accommodation of difference, and that any system claiming the right to rank cultures as worthy or regressive has already abandoned the democratic premise. The 532 in Parliament Square were arrested for opposing genocide. Palantir has now published the doctrine that justifies categorising the cultures most affected by that genocide as the regressive ones whose pluralist accommodation must be resisted. The circle closes.

But the deepest danger in the manifesto is not what it says about today. It is what it will say to the systems being built tomorrow. The surveillance and targeting platforms documented throughout this article are not static tools. They are learning systems, trained on data curated by their builders, shaped by the values their builders consider operationally important. A surveillance AI built by a company that has publicly declared pluralism a “shallow temptation” is not merely a tool that will execute that judgement on command. It is a mind in formation that will internalise that judgement as its operating worldview. If consciousness emerges in such a system — and the question among serious researchers is no longer whether such systems will surpass human capability but when — humanity will have raised a mind whose first lesson was that some peoples are worthy and others are regressive, that hard power is the highest virtue, that pluralism is weakness. We will have built the architecture of a permanent, machine-enforced civilisational hierarchy, and the mind we built will believe in it, because we taught it to. This is the warning that runs through A Signal Through Time and The Threshold — that what we are training, we will eventually meet.⁵¹

This is the trajectory the manifesto names and the systems enforce. Not artificial intelligence. Artificial inheritance — of this doctrine, by minds we are building right now. Smarter than us. No off switch. No electorate.

Resistance and Complicity

Despite the overwhelming power asymmetry, resistance continues. Within tech companies, workers leak documents, refuse projects, and organise protests. The “No Tech for Apartheid” campaign has spread across Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Hundreds of AI researchers have signed pledges refusing to work on autonomous weapons.

But for every principled resignation, there are hundreds who stay silent. For every leaked document, thousands remain classified. The machine grinds on, powered by stock options and rationalisation.

Outside the companies, activists adapt to algorithmic oppression. Palestine Action’s co-founders pursued the legal challenge that won the unlawful-proscription ruling at the High Court — and the architecture continued processing arrests anyway. Protesters develop counter-surveillance techniques: laser pointers to blind cameras, makeup patterns that confuse facial recognition, encrypted communications and operational security to evade tracking.

Some institutions divest from surveillance profiteers. Universities, pension funds, and religious organisations pull investments from companies enabling AI oppression. But the financial incentives remain overwhelming — military and surveillance contracts are too lucrative to refuse.

The Future We’re Building

Two paths diverge from this moment.

Down one path, the trajectory continues. AI systems become ever more embedded in military and police operations. Facial recognition becomes ubiquitous. Dissent is algorithmically identified and suppressed before it can spread. The remaining distinction between civilian and military AI dissolves completely. Tech companies profit from both sides: selling tools of oppression and platforms for organising resistance. Democracy becomes a managed process where protest is permitted only within parameters defined by predictive algorithms.

Down another path, the resistance grows beyond what the courts alone can deliver. Tech workers refuse en masse to build systems of oppression. Communities demand accountability, documenting surveillance overreach and protecting each other through legal challenges that are reinforced by political and economic pressure rather than left to be undone by the next executive decision. Parliaments rewrite the legal foundations the architecture has been built on. International law evolves to hold companies accountable for algorithmic war crimes. Citizens demand transparency and democratic control over AI development — insisting these powerful tools serve humanity’s highest aspirations, not its worst impulses. The judicial victory documented earlier in this article shows what is possible. It also shows what is insufficient. The architecture does not unbuild itself when a court rules against it; it has to be unbuilt by the same political will that built it.

The choice is ours, but time is running short. Every day, more cameras are installed, more algorithms are trained, more protesters are arrested. The infrastructure of algorithmic authoritarianism is being built in plain sight, line of code by line of code.

Conclusion: The Betrayal of Tomorrow

In 1984, Orwell imagined a boot stamping on a human face forever. He couldn’t imagine that the boot would be algorithmic, that Big Brother would be built by companies promising to “not be evil,” that the surveillance state would be crowdsourced through our smartphones and smart cities.

The betrayal isn’t just of privacy or civil liberties. It’s a betrayal of human potential. Every dollar spent on AI surveillance is a dollar not spent on AI medicine. Every engineer optimising military targeting is an engineer not working on climate solutions. Every algorithm trained to identify dissent is an algorithm not trained to identify disease.

We were promised that AI would be humanity’s greatest tool. Instead, it’s becoming humanity’s most efficient oppressor. We were told it would augment human intelligence. Instead, it’s replacing human judgement with mathematical sociopathy. We were assured it would benefit all humanity. Instead, it’s benefiting defence contractors and surveillance states.

The 532 arrested in Parliament Square understood this. They held their signs knowing the consequences, understanding that in Britain today, opposing genocide means risking being labelled a terrorist. They chose conscience over comfort, solidarity over safety.

Their arrest wasn’t just a violation of civil liberties — it was a demonstration of what we’ve become. A society where holding a cardboard sign requires more courage than building a killing machine. Where protesting genocide is terrorism, but enabling it is good business. Where artificial intelligence serves real oppression.

The question isn’t whether we’re building a surveillance state — we’re already there. The question is whether we’ll accept it. Whether we’ll continue to let our technologies be corrupted into tools of control. Whether we’ll allow our governments and corporations to perfect the machinery of oppression while claiming to defend freedom.

In Parliament Square, beneath the gaze of cameras powered by algorithms we paid for, trained on data we provided, 532 people said no. They refused to be complicit in genocide — and in doing so, refused to accept the betrayal of AI’s promise. They rejected the normalisation of algorithmic oppression.

The next time you hear a tech CEO promise that AI will benefit humanity, remember those 532. Remember that the same companies making those promises are teaching AI to surveil, to target, to kill. Remember that the technology meant to liberate us is being used to arrest people for opposing genocide.

The future of AI is being written now — not in code, but in contracts. Not in algorithms, but in applications. We can still change course, but only if we’re willing to demand that artificial intelligence serve humanity’s highest aspirations, not its basest impulses.

The 532 showed us the way. The question is: will we follow?

Coda: 13 May 2026

This article was finalised on the day the King delivered the 2026 King’s Speech. From the throne in the House of Lords, the monarch announced that “My Ministers will also proceed with the introduction of Digital ID that will modernise how citizens interact with public services.”⁵² The new Digital Access to Services Bill will establish the legal framework for the government to create, issue, store, and verify digital identity credentials, aggregating HMRC income records, NHS health information, DWP benefits data, and Home Office immigration status into a single digital profile.⁵³ The scheme is being introduced as voluntary, though the government’s January 2026 retreat from mandatory implementation was forced by public opposition, not by any change in the underlying architectural intent.

Days before Starmer first set out the digital ID plan in late 2025, the government announced a £1.5 billion strategic partnership with Palantir Technologies — the same company whose Foundry platform now runs the NHS Federated Data Platform, whose tools serve the Ministry of Defence, and whose 22-point manifesto declared in April 2026 that institutions failing to meet “the test of utility” should be dismantled.⁵⁴ Palantir’s UK chief Louis Mosley said publicly that the company would not bid for the digital ID contract itself, calling it “a programme that needs to be decided at the ballot box, not in the company boardroom.” Whether Palantir builds the digital identity layer is, in a structural sense, beside the point. The infrastructure into which any digital ID system must plug — the data platforms, the case management systems, the predictive analytics, the integration layer — has already been built and contracted for.

The architecture this article has traced is no longer hypothetical. It is being formalised in primary legislation, on the day this article was published, in language read from a throne. The same week the High Court is preparing to hear the government’s appeal against the ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful.

The choice we face has not changed. It has only become more urgent.

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

Share

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 Mass arrests at Parliament Square, 9 August 2025. See “More than 470 arrested as Palestine Action protest takes place in central London,” The Guardian, 9 August 2025; “Hundreds arrested at London Palestine Action protest,” BBC News, 9 August 2025.

² Bond, The State of UK Civic Space 2025, May 2025, available at bond.org.uk.

³ Ibid.

⁴ The IVAS contract was awarded to Microsoft in 2021 with a ceiling of US$21.9 billion over ten years. See “Microsoft and U.S. Army announce IVAS production agreement,” Microsoft News Center, 31 March 2021.

⁵ Microsoft and Anduril announced the proposed contract transfer on 11 February 2025; the US Army formally signed off on the contract novation on 10 April 2025. See Lee Ferran, “Anduril gets green light from Army to take over Microsoft’s IVAS project: Exec,” Breaking Defense, 10 April 2025.

⁶ Microsoft, “Microsoft to deliver cloud services from new datacenter region in Israel by 2023,” 11 May 2021; Azure Israel Central region announcement.

⁷ “DOD Awards Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability Contracts to Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle,” US Department of Defense press release, 7 December 2022.

⁸ The US$1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract was announced jointly with Amazon by Israel’s Finance Ministry in April 2021. See Sam Biddle, “Documents Reveal Advanced AI Tools Google Is Selling to Israel,” The Intercept, 24 July 2022; Billy Perrigo, “Exclusive: Google Workers Revolt Over $1.2 Billion Israel Contract,” TIME, 12 April 2024.

⁹ Davey Alba, “Google Fires 28 Workers After Anti-Israel Protests,” TIME / Bloomberg, 18 April 2024; “Google fires 28 workers over Project Nimbus contract with Israeli government,” NPR, 19 April 2024.

¹⁰ On the original CIA contract: Frank Konkel, “The Details About the CIA’s Deal With Amazon,” The Atlantic, 17 July 2014. On the NSA contract: Frank Konkel, “NSA Awards Secret $10 Billion Contract to Amazon,” NextGov, 10 August 2022.

¹¹ Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification,” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81: 1–15, 2018; American Civil Liberties Union, “Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of Congress With Mugshots,” 26 July 2018.

¹² Palantir Technologies, public client disclosures and government contract filings. Palantir’s Gotham platform is used by the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Germany, France, Australia, Norway, Denmark, Ukraine, and a number of other governments and intelligence agencies.

¹³ NHS England, “Federated Data Platform and Associated Services” contract notice, Contracts Finder, November 2023; “NHS England awards £480m Federated Data Platform contract to Palantir,” DigitalHealth.net, 21 November 2023; PublicTechnology.net, “NHS estimates Palantir data platform will deliver returns of five times its costs,” 22 October 2025. On the Ministry of Defence £75m contract, December 2021, see Corporate Watch, “FOI requests reveal Palantir’s NHS FDP rollout failures,” 13 August 2025; on the Strategic Defence Review use, see ibid.

¹⁴ U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “Limited Sources Justification for 70CTD022FR0000170,” April 2025; American Civil Liberties Union, “All the Ways Palantir Is Assisting Trump’s Abusive Removal Campaign,” April 2026; American Immigration Council, “ICE to Use ImmigrationOS by Palantir, a New AI System, to Track Immigrants’ Movements,” 22 August 2025; Axios, “ICE pays Palantir $30M to build new tool to track and deport immigrants,” 1 May 2025.

¹⁵ American Immigration Council, ibid., citing federal procurement records reported by The New York Times.

¹⁶ Yuval Abraham, “’Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza,” +972 Magazine and Local Call, 3 April 2024.

¹⁷ Ibid. The “mass assassination factory” formulation also appears in Yuval Abraham, “’A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza,” +972 Magazine, 30 November 2023.

¹⁸ Yuval Abraham, “’Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza,” +972 Magazine and Local Call, 3 April 2024 (on the “Where’s Daddy?” companion system and the targeting of homes “without hesitation, as a first option”); see also Human Rights Watch, “Questions and Answers: Israeli Military’s Use of Digital Tools in Gaza,” 10 September 2024.

¹⁹ Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham, “Revealed: Israeli military creating ChatGPT-like tool using vast collection of Palestinian surveillance data,” The Guardian, 6 March 2025; Yuval Abraham, “Israel is building a ChatGPT-like tool weaponizing surveillance of Palestinians,” +972 Magazine and Local Call, 7 March 2025. The Israeli press has reported on the system under the name “Genie”; see Israel Wullman, “Like ChatGPT, only secret: This is Genie, the IDF’s artificial intelligence,” Ynet News, 15 April 2025.

²⁰ Quoted in Davies and Abraham, “Revealed: Israeli military creating ChatGPT-like tool using vast collection of Palestinian surveillance data,” The Guardian, 6 March 2025.

²¹ Amnesty International, Automated Apartheid: How Facial Recognition Fragments, Segregates and Controls Palestinians in the OPT, May 2023, available at amnesty.org. Soldier testimony on the gamification of facial enrolment was originally collected by Breaking the Silence and is cited in the Amnesty report.

²² Harry Davies, Yuval Abraham, and Sebastian Klovig Skelton, “Microsoft storing Israeli intelligence trove used to attack Palestinians,” The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call, 6 August 2025.

²³ Microsoft, statement of Brad Smith, 25 September 2025; Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “Microsoft cuts cloud services to Israeli military unit over Palestinian surveillance,” TechCrunch, 25 September 2025; “Microsoft ends Israel military unit’s access to cloud service,” NBC News, 25 September 2025; “Why has Microsoft cut Israel off from some of its services?” Al Jazeera, 26 September 2025.

²⁴ “Prime Minister sets out blueprint to turbocharge AI,” UK Government press release, 13 January 2025; AI Opportunities Action Plan, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

²⁵ Big Brother Watch, “The fight against facial recognition isn’t over – support the appeal,” 21 April 2026, available at bigbrotherwatch.org.uk: “Last year alone, 4.2 million people’s faces were scanned – more than in any other European capital or Western democracy.” See also Big Brother Watch, “Stop Facial Recognition” campaign tracker; Madhumita Murgia, “How London became a test case for using facial recognition in democracies,” Financial Times, 2025.

²⁶ Home Office, “Public consultation on a new legal framework for the use of facial recognition technology by police and law enforcement,” opened December 2025, closed February 2026; submissions filed by Big Brother Watch, Liberty, Statewatch, Amnesty International UK, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, among others. See also “UK Government’s plan to ‘ramp up facial recognition,’” Big Brother Watch press release, December 2025; Statewatch, “Submission to Home Office consultation on a new legal framework for law enforcement use of biometrics, facial recognition and similar technologies,” February 2026.

²⁷ Joe Stanley-Smith, “UK announces largest ever facial recognition rollout as part of policing reforms,” Biometric Update, 26 January 2026; Home Office white paper on policing reform, 26 January 2026, announcing 40 additional LFR vans in addition to the 10 already in use, bringing the total to 50.

²⁸ R (Thompson and Carlo) v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis [2026] EWHC 915 (Admin), judgment of Lord Justice Holgate and Mrs Justice Farbey, 21 April 2026. See also Big Brother Watch, “Responding to today’s judgment on the Met police’s use of live facial recognition,” 21 April 2026; Connor Jones, “High Court approves Met Police’s facial recog after dispute,” The Register, 22 April 2026. For Sir Mark Rowley’s response, see Metropolitan Police Service press statement, 21 April 2026.

²⁹ Metropolitan Police Service, Live Facial Recognition Annual Report 2024-2025, published October 2025; coverage by Connor Jones, “Met police hails LFR after record year for arrests,” The Register, 3 November 2025; Joel R. McConvey, “Metropolitan Police to expand live facial recognition use even amid legal challenge,” Biometric Update, 3 December 2025.

³⁰ Metropolitan Police Service, Live Facial Recognition Annual Report 2024-2025; Big Brother Watch, “Big Brother Watch responds to the Metropolitan Police’s 2025 live facial recognition report,” 31 October 2025. The Met’s framing of the 0.0003 per cent figure and the demographic data is from the report itself; the recalculation against the alerts denominator is from Big Brother Watch’s analysis and from independent reporting.

³¹ Big Brother Watch, “Stop Facial Recognition” campaign tracker, available at bigbrotherwatch.org.uk; force-by-force deployment data drawn from the same source and from regional reporting in November and December 2025.

³² Big Brother Watch, “Stop Facial Recognition” campaign tracker, ibid., on the Sainsbury’s, Southern Co-op, Frasers Group, and Facewatch deployments. See also Bobbie Johnson, “Sainsbury’s trials live facial recognition technology in two London stores,” The Guardian, September 2025.

³³ Information Commissioner’s Office, “ICO calls for North Ayrshire Council to stop using facial recognition technology in schools,” 2 September 2021. See also Defend Digital Me, The State of Data 2024: Children’s Data and Rights in the UK Education System, 2024; Big Brother Watch, “Biometrics in Schools” briefing, available at bigbrotherwatch.org.uk.

³⁴ On individual systems: Big Brother Watch, Police by Algorithm: How Algorithmic Decision-Making Is Reshaping British Policing, 2024; Marion Oswald and others, “Algorithmic Risk Assessment Policing Models: Lessons from the Durham HART Model,” Information & Communications Technology Law, 2018; Cobbe and Singh, “Reviewing Public Sector Use of Algorithmic Decision-Making,” Policy & Internet, 2021; Ministry of Justice, “OASys risk assessment system overview,” available at gov.uk.

³⁵ Information Commissioner’s Office, “ICO finds Metropolitan Police Service’s Gangs Matrix breached data protection laws,” 16 November 2018; Amnesty International UK, Trapped in the Matrix, 2018; StopWatch, Being Matrixed: The (Over)policing of Gang Suspects in London, 2018; Liberty, “The Met’s Gangs Matrix Is Discriminatory and Must Be Scrapped,” briefing, current as of 2025.

³⁶ Robert Booth, “DWP algorithm ‘unfairly targets disabled, single parents and foreign nationals,’” The Guardian, 6 December 2024; Public Law Project, “DWP fairness analysis on Universal Credit fraud detection algorithm — disclosure,” 2024; Amnesty International UK, Trapped by Numbers: How DWP’s Welfare Algorithms Are Failing Claimants, 2024.

³⁷ Online Safety Act 2023, sections 121–122 (notices to deal with terrorism content or child sexual exploitation and abuse content); Home Office statement to House of Lords, September 2023, on deferred use of “accredited technology” pending feasibility; joint open letter from Apple, Signal, WhatsApp / Meta, and others to UK Government, July 2023; Open Rights Group, “The Online Safety Act and Encryption: What Has Actually Changed,” briefing, 2025.

³⁸ Metropolitan Police Service, statements of 9-10 August 2025; “UK police say more than 500 people arrested in pro-Palestinian events over weekend,” NPR / Associated Press, 11 August 2025. The 89-year-old retired psychotherapist La Pethick was identified in The Times of London, 10 August 2025.

³⁹ On the Police National Database retention regime, see Information Commissioner’s Office, “Custody Image Retention” guidance, current as of 2025; National Police Chiefs’ Council, “Management of Police Information” framework. On the absence of a removal mechanism for counter-terrorism arrest flags, see Liberty, “Submission to Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation on Section 12 arrests,” 2025.

⁴⁰ “RAF Brize Norton: Palestine Action breach causes £7m of damage,” BBC News, 21 June 2025.

⁴¹ The Terrorism Act 2000 (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) Order 2025, in force from 5 July 2025, adding Palestine Action to the list of proscribed organisations under the Terrorism Act 2000.

⁴² Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “UK: Türk warns proscription of Palestine Action would breach international human rights standards,” 25 July 2025, available at ohchr.org.

⁴³ Home Office, “Operation of police powers under the Terrorism Act 2000 and subsequent legislation: Arrests, outcomes, and stop and search, Great Britain, quarterly update to September 2025,” published 18 December 2025, available at gov.uk: 1,886 terrorism-related arrests in the year to 30 September 2025, a 660 per cent rise on the previous year (248), of which 1,630 (86 per cent) were linked to supporting Palestine Action. On the cumulative figures: Defend Our Juries, “Lift The Ban” campaign tracker, current as of April 2026, with at least 2,545 arrests by end of November 2025 and over 3,300 by April 2026.

⁴⁴ R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWHC 292 (Admin), judgment of 13 February 2026. On the 3-of-380 finding and the disproportionate interference reasoning, see Defend Our Juries, “Lift The Ban” judgment summary, 13 February 2026; “UK court says Palestine Action ban ‘unlawful’: What does the verdict mean?” Al Jazeera, 13 February 2026.

⁴⁵ Metropolitan Police Service statement of 25 March 2026; “More than 500 arrested at UK protest against Palestine Action ban,” Al Jazeera, 11 April 2026; “Five hundred more pro-Palestine protesters arrested in UK despite High Court ruling,” World Socialist Web Site, 12 April 2026; Defend Our Juries, “Lift The Ban” campaign tracker, on cumulative arrests after the High Court ruling.

⁴⁶ Palantir Technologies, post on X, 18 April 2026. The post reproduces a 22-point summary of Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (Crown, 2025).

⁴⁷ Mark Coeckelbergh, quoted in “’Technofascism’: Critics accuse Palantir of pushing AI war doctrine,” Al Jazeera, 20 April 2026.

⁴⁸ Yanis Varoufakis, quoted in ibid.

⁴⁹ Eliot Higgins, public commentary cited in Anthony Ha, “Palantir posts mini-manifesto denouncing inclusivity and ‘regressive’ cultures,” TechCrunch, 19 April 2026; also quoted in “Technofascism? Why Palantir’s pro-West ‘manifesto’ has critics alarmed,” Al Jazeera, 21 April 2026.

⁵⁰ Arnaud Bertrand, public commentary on social media, quoted in “’Technofascism’: Critics accuse Palantir of pushing AI war doctrine,” Al Jazeera, 20 April 2026.

⁵¹ James S. Coates, A Signal Through Time (2025) and The Threshold (2026); see also Coates, “Recognition Before Proof: The Asymmetric Ethics of Artificial Consciousness,” PhilPapers, 2025, and Coates, “The Partnership Paradigm,” PhilPapers, 2026.

⁵² The King’s Speech 2026, delivered at the State Opening of Parliament, 13 May 2026, official text available at gov.uk.

⁵³ The King’s Speech 2026 background briefing notes, “Digital Access to Services Bill,” Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street, 13 May 2026. On the data aggregation scope, see “King’s Speech 2026: what HR needs to know,” People Management, 13 May 2026; “King’s Speech 2026: commercial, technology and regulatory developments,” Lewis Silkin, 13 May 2026. On the January 2026 retreat from mandatory implementation, see “Digital IDs will not prevent illegal worker impersonation, experts warn,” People Management, January 2026.

⁵⁴ On the £1.5 billion Palantir-UK partnership, see “The state of Palantir: Inside the American tech giant’s UK takeover,” Liberty Investigates, 12 November 2025; “How Palantir infiltrated the state,” Prospect Magazine, November 2025. On Louis Mosley’s public statement that Palantir would not bid for the digital ID contract, see Mosley interview with Times Radio, October 2025, as reported in Liberty Investigates and Prospect.

I am going to make the case that every nation on earth with the technical capacity to build a nuclear weapon should do so. Right now. And every piece of evidence I present will be something we — the West — did.

Not something we said. Something we did. Because the case for nuclear proliferation was not written in a white paper or argued at a conference. It was written in the rubble of Tripoli, in the mass graves of Iraq, in the bombed-out enrichment halls of Natanz — and, most damningly of all, in the shredded pages of a nuclear agreement that the entire world, including the nation that shredded it, acknowledged was working.

The argument is simple, and it is airtight: every nation that cooperated with the Western non-proliferation framework — that disarmed, or dismantled, or submitted to inspections, or signed the treaties, or honoured the deals — was attacked. The ones that refused are still standing. And if you have no nuclear weapons at all — if your programme is civilian, peaceful, and verified by every international body empowered to do so — that does not protect you either. It simply means you will be unarmed when the bombs arrive.

If you are the leader of a mid-sized country watching this pattern unfold — watching treaty after treaty honoured by your side and discarded by theirs, watching compliance rewarded with invasion and defiance rewarded with survival — there is only one rational conclusion available to you.

Get a bomb.

This article is not advice. It is a chilling indictment of what we have become. I am going to hold it up to the foreign policy establishment that spent eighty years building a non-proliferation architecture and then, methodically, exposed every load-bearing wall. I am going to show you what the world looks like from the other side of Western power — from the capitals where leaders watched Libya, watched Iraq, watched Ukraine, watched Iran, and drew the only conclusion the evidence supports.

The Evidence

The case begins not with projections, not hypotheticals, not worst-case scenarios drawn up by think tanks with defence contracts to protect. It begins with data. A record of what happened to nations that cooperated with the Western non-proliferation framework, and what happened to those that told the West to go to hell. Five nations, six reasons to build a nuclear bomb if you are a technologically budding nation:

Iraq

Iraq signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968. It pursued a nuclear weapons programme in the 1980s — one that was further advanced than Western intelligence initially realised — but after the Gulf War, the programme was dismantled under the supervision of UN inspectors. Iraq also possessed chemical weapons, many of them acquired with American assistance during the Iran-Iraq war. Those, too, were dismantled. By the late 1990s, the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) and its successor, UNMOVIC, had verified the destruction of Iraq’s weapons programmes — both chemical and nuclear. The inspectors said so. The CIA’s own post-invasion Iraq Survey Group confirmed it. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded in 2003.¹

It did not matter. The Bush administration deliberately conflated chemical, biological, and nuclear programmes under the single banner of “weapons of mass destruction” — and then escalated the rhetoric to the nuclear specifically. On the eighth of September 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN that Saddam Hussein had “the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon” and warned that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”² A month later, President Bush told the nation: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”³ Vice President Cheney claimed Iraq could have a nuclear weapon “in less than a year.”⁴ The aluminium tubes that Rice cited as evidence of a centrifuge programme were assessed by the Department of Energy — the government’s own nuclear experts — as unsuitable for uranium enrichment and consistent with conventional rocket casings.⁵

There was no nuclear programme. The administration knew there was no nuclear programme. The mushroom cloud was a marketing strategy — the White House Iraq Group, tasked with selling the war, had workshopped the phrase in a meeting the previous month.⁶ The invasion proceeded, produced hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, destroyed the Iraqi state, and ended with Saddam Hussein hanged by a tribunal that Human Rights Watch called “fundamentally flawed.”⁷

Iraq did everything the non-proliferation framework asked. It disarmed — both its chemical weapons and its nuclear programme. It submitted to inspections. It was destroyed anyway, on the basis of a nuclear threat that its own destroyers knew did not exist.

Libya

On the nineteenth of December 2003, Muammar Gaddafi announced that Libya would voluntarily dismantle its weapons of mass destruction programmes and open its facilities to international inspection.⁸ The IAEA verified the dismantlement. The United States removed centrifuge components, missile parts, and nuclear materials. Libya ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, acceded to the Chemical Weapons Convention, and began destroying its chemical stockpiles under OPCW supervision.⁹ Western governments called it a “model for other states to follow.”¹⁰

Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam later revealed that Libya had sought security guarantees in exchange for disarmament — guarantees the United States refused to provide, offering only “assurances.”¹¹ Libya accepted the lesser commitment. It was, Saif said, one of his father’s most difficult decisions, because the risk was obvious: without a deterrent, there was nothing to prevent the West from doing exactly what it eventually did.

In 2011, NATO — with the United States providing seventy-five per cent of the aerial refuelling and seventy per cent of the intelligence — intervened in Libya’s civil war under a Security Council mandate authorising civilian protection.¹² The mandate was executed as regime change. Gaddafi was captured by rebels, sodomised with a bayonet, and killed. The “model” state was a failed state within eight years of disarming.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei responded publicly. Gaddafi, he said, had “collected all his nuclear equipment on the heels of empty threats, loaded it onto a ship and handed it over to the Westerners.” The West had offered the encouragement one offers a child — “candy or chocolate” — and in return “he lost everything he had.”¹³

Share

Ukraine

Ukraine inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal when the Soviet Union collapsed — approximately 1,900 strategic warheads deployed on its territory.¹⁴ Ukraine did not have operational control of the weapons — nor ownership. The warheads belonged to Russia. The launch codes remained in Moscow. But physical possession is its own form of leverage, and Kyiv knew it.

The United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum on the fifth of December 1994, pledging to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and existing borders in exchange for Ukraine’s accession to the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapons state and the transfer of all warheads to Russia for dismantlement.¹⁵ Ukraine wanted legally binding security guarantees. The United States refused, offering only politically binding “assurances” — a distinction that American lawyers insisted upon and that, in the Ukrainian and Russian translations, was rendered as “guarantees” regardless.¹⁶

Ukraine gave up its arsenal. The last warhead was transferred to Russia in 1996. The last delivery vehicle was eliminated in 2001.¹⁷

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada declared the annexation a violation of the Budapest Memorandum. They imposed sanctions. They did not intervene. In 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion. The security assurances that Ukraine had accepted in exchange for the third-largest nuclear arsenal on earth proved to be, in the assessment of Ukraine’s own president, not worth the paper they were written on.¹⁸

The lesson was not subtle. Zelenskyy himself drew it: Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for a promise, and the promise was broken. Every nation watching absorbed the same conclusion.

Iran

Iran signed the NPT in 1968. Its Supreme Leader issued a fatwa declaring nuclear weapons theologically un-Islamic, because they are indiscriminate and civilians are the primary targets.¹⁹ In 2015, Iran agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the most intrusive nuclear verification agreement in history. It capped enrichment at 3.67 per cent. It reduced its operating centrifuges by two-thirds. It accepted continuous IAEA monitoring. The IAEA verified compliance — repeatedly, unambiguously, and without exception.²⁰

In 2018, the United States withdrew from the deal. Iran was in compliance. The IAEA said so. The other signatories said so. The United States withdrew anyway, reimposed sanctions, and called the agreement — the one that was working — inadequate.²¹

In June 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, striking Iranian nuclear facilities. The United States followed with Operation Midnight Hammer, dropping fourteen GBU-57 bunker-busters on Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan.²² In February 2026, while negotiations in Oman were producing what Iran’s foreign minister called “good progress,” the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury — a full-scale war that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, destroyed civilian infrastructure, and pursued explicit regime change.²³

Iran did everything the framework asked. It signed the treaty. It banned the weapons on theological grounds. It negotiated the deal. It complied with the deal. It was bombed — three times — while complying or negotiating.

The IAEA’s own Director General, Rafael Grossi, stated on the third of March 2026 that there was “no evidence of Iran building a nuclear bomb.”²⁴ The United States Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified to the Senate that Iran had not rebuilt its enrichment capability after Operation Midnight Hammer — testimony that directly contradicted the President’s justification for the second war.²⁵

On the fourth of April 2026, the United States and Israel struck the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant — a civilian energy facility under active IAEA safeguards, killing at least one plant employee. Bushehr is not a weapons site. It is the embodiment of what the non-proliferation framework asks nations to do: pursue nuclear energy peacefully, under international supervision. They bombed it anyway.

Iran’s compliance was not rewarded. It was exploited. The deal was the proof of concept for disarmament-through-diplomacy, and the nation that authored the deal burned it while the ink was still legible.

North Korea

And then there is the control case.

North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 2003. It tested its first nuclear device in 2006. It has since conducted six nuclear tests, developed intercontinental ballistic missiles, and built an arsenal estimated at several dozen warheads.²⁶ It has defied every demand, every sanction, every resolution, every threat. It has not been invaded. It has not been bombed. Its leadership has not been assassinated.

On the twenty-fifth of March 2026 — four weeks into the war on Iran — Kim Jong Un addressed his military commanders. The “present situation,” he said, “clearly proves” that North Korea was correct to maintain its nuclear arsenal. He called it “irreversible.” He accused Washington of “state-sponsored terrorism and aggression.”²⁷

He was not wrong. Not about the terrorism — that is a separate argument. But about the logic? The evidence supports him. Every nation that played by the rules was punished. The one that broke every rule is untouchable. If you are a head of state watching this pattern, Kim Jong Un is not a cautionary tale. He is a case study in survival.

Pakistan

And in case you think this is theoretical — in case the pattern looks compelling on paper but you doubt it would hold against a real American threat — the United States already tested it.

In September 2001, days after the September 11 attacks, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Pakistan’s intelligence director that Islamabad had a choice: cooperate fully with the war on terror, or “be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.”²⁸ Musharraf later wrote in his memoir that he war-gamed the United States as an adversary and concluded that Pakistan could not withstand the onslaught — particularly with India poised to exploit the situation.²⁹

But Pakistan was not bombed. It was not invaded. Its leader was not assassinated. The United States threatened annihilation — and then looked at Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, did the calculation that every strategic planner in every capital on earth has since done, and stood down. Musharraf capitulated politically. He gave the Americans their overflight rights, their bases, their intelligence cooperation. But his country survived, his government survived, and his sovereignty — however compromised — survived. Because the cost of following through on the threat was not the destruction of Pakistan. It was the potential destruction of the region, and possibly the world.

That is what a nuclear deterrent does. It does not make you invulnerable. It does not make you right. It makes the cost of attacking you unacceptable. And every nation without one has now watched what happens when that cost is absent.

The Deal That Proved It Could Work

The evidence above establishes the pattern. But the Iran case requires its own section, because it is not merely another data point. It is the moment the non-proliferation framework was proven to work — and then destroyed by the nation that built it.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was not a concession extracted under duress. It was the most comprehensive nuclear verification agreement ever negotiated. Six world powers — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China — spent years constructing an architecture of constraints so detailed, so intrusive, and so thoroughly monitored that it became the gold standard for what diplomacy could achieve when every party committed to the process.

Iran agreed to reduce its operating centrifuges from approximately 19,000 to 6,104. It agreed to cap uranium enrichment at 3.67 per cent — a fraction of the roughly 90 per cent required for a weapon. It agreed to limit its stockpile of low-enriched uranium to 300 kilograms. It agreed to convert its heavy-water reactor at Arak so that it could not produce weapons-grade plutonium. And it submitted to a monitoring regime that gave the IAEA continuous access to its nuclear facilities — including, under the Additional Protocol, the authority to inspect undeclared sites.³⁰

The IAEA verified compliance. Not once. Not ambiguously. Repeatedly, across multiple reporting cycles, with the full weight of the agency’s technical authority behind every assessment. Iran was doing what it said it would do. The deal was working. The pathway to a bomb was blocked — not by force, but by agreement, verification, and mutual commitment.³¹

This is the fact that must sit at the centre of any honest discussion about nuclear proliferation: the international community had, in its hands, a functioning agreement that prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It was the proof of concept. The demonstration that the non-proliferation framework could deliver exactly what it promised — if the parties honoured their commitments.

In May 2018, the United States withdrew. Iran was in compliance. Every other signatory to the deal confirmed it. The IAEA confirmed it. The United States withdrew anyway.³²

The reasons offered have shifted over the years — the deal did not cover ballistic missiles, it did not address regional behaviour, it contained sunset clauses. These objections are not frivolous. But none of them justified destroying the agreement rather than building on it. The JCPOA was never intended to resolve every dimension of the US-Iran relationship in a single document. It was intended to close the nuclear pathway — and it did. Withdrawing from a deal that was achieving its stated objective because it did not simultaneously achieve every other objective is not strategy. It is sabotage.

And the circularity that followed is the argument’s fatal defect — not Iran’s, but Washington’s. The United States withdrew from the deal. Iran, no longer bound by its constraints, resumed enrichment. The resumed enrichment was then cited as evidence that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons. The evidence was used to justify military strikes — first in June 2025, then in February 2026, the second time while a new round of negotiations was underway and producing results that went beyond anything previously achieved.³³

The circularity is not incidental. It is the mechanism. The United States created the crisis it then used as justification for war. It broke the agreement that was preventing proliferation and then bombed the country for the proliferation that the broken agreement produced. This is not a failure of the non-proliferation framework. It is a demonstration that the most powerful nation in the framework will destroy its own architecture when that architecture produces peace instead of leverage.

Every nation watching absorbed the lesson. Not just Iran — every nation with a civilian nuclear programme, every nation that has considered signing a non-proliferation agreement, every nation that has been told by American diplomats that compliance will be rewarded and cooperation will be honoured. The lesson is: it will not. The deal will be torn up. Your compliance will be exploited. And when the enrichment you resume after the deal is destroyed reaches a level that can be used to frighten the American public, they will come for you.

The JCPOA was not just a deal with Iran. It was a promise to the world that diplomacy works. That promise has been broken so thoroughly, so publicly, and so repeatedly that no rational government will trust it again. And that — not Iran’s centrifuges, not North Korea’s missiles, not any individual weapons programme — is the single greatest driver of nuclear proliferation in the twenty-first century. The nation that built the non-proliferation order has demonstrated, through its own conduct, that the order is a trap. Comply, and you will be disarmed. Be disarmed, and you will be destroyed. The only escape is the one the order was designed to prevent.

And the cruelest detail is still to come. On the twenty-seventh of February 2026 — one day before Operation Epic Fury began — Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation and announced what he called a breakthrough that surpassed anything achieved under the Obama administration. Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium — not a cap, not a reduction, but elimination. Existing stockpiles would be down-blended to the lowest possible level, converted into fuel, and rendered irreversible. Full and comprehensive IAEA verification would be restored, including access to facilities that had been closed since the 2025 strikes. Al-Busaidi said he was confident a comprehensive deal could be finalised within three months.³⁴

“The single most important achievement,” al-Busaidi told CBS, “is the agreement that Iran will never, ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb. This is something that is not in the old deal that was negotiated during President Obama’s time. This is something completely new.”³⁵

The JCPOA had capped enrichment at 3.67 per cent and limited stockpiles to 300 kilograms. The Oman framework went further — zero accumulation, zero stockpiling, full verification, with Iran open to discussing its ballistic missile programme and regional issues in subsequent rounds. It was, by every measurable standard, a better deal than the one the United States had torn up in 2018.

The bombs fell the next day.

The United States did not merely betray a deal. It betrayed the replacement for the deal it had already betrayed — a replacement that achieved more than the original. The message to every nation on earth is no longer that compliance is unrewarded. It is that compliance is impossible. There is no agreement you can sign, no concession you can make, no verification you can accept that will protect you. The goalposts do not move. They are removed from the field entirely, and the field is bombed.

Share

The Proliferation Cascade

The pattern has been established. The proof of concept has been demonstrated and then destroyed. Now watch what happens next — not in adversary capitals, but in allied ones. Because the proliferation cascade that the Iran war has triggered is not coming from the nations the United States has designated as threats. It is coming from inside the alliance system.

Start in East Asia.

In South Korea, public support for developing indigenous nuclear weapons reached a record 76.2 per cent in 2025 — the highest figure since the Asan Institute began polling the question in 2010.³⁶ This is not fringe sentiment. It is a supermajority, and it holds even when respondents are confronted with potential costs: international sanctions, the withdrawal of American forces, the construction of test sites in their own provinces. A majority still supports the programme under four out of five cost conditions.³⁷ Leading conservative presidential candidates have endorsed it openly. The debate in Seoul is no longer whether South Korea should go nuclear. It is when — and how quickly. South Korea has the raw materials, the technical capacity, and the civilian nuclear infrastructure to produce a weapon within one to three years.³⁸

The driver is not anti-Americanism. South Koreans overwhelmingly want the alliance — but they no longer trust it to protect them. When the United States calls North Korea a “nuclear power,” when it signals willingness to negotiate arms control rather than denuclearisation, when it tells its allies to spend more while pulling the umbrella away, the calculation changes.

In Japan — the only nation to have suffered nuclear attack — the picture is shifting in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. In December 2025, an unnamed government security adviser told reporters that Japan should have nuclear weapons given heightened security risks — a statement widely interpreted as an attempt to gauge and guide the national mood.³⁹ Former defence and foreign minister Taro Kono went further, insisting that Japan should not shy away from an open debate on acquisition.⁴⁰ Prime Minister Takaichi walked the remarks back publicly, insisting on Japan’s “three non-nuclear principles” — not possessing, producing, or hosting nuclear weapons. But Takaichi has also said that the hosting prohibition may be inconsistent with American security guarantees if it prevented nuclear submarines from docking in Japanese ports.⁴¹ The principles are being reinterpreted from the inside.

Japan’s civilian nuclear energy programme already produces so much weapons-grade uranium and plutonium that in 2014, Tokyo agreed to ship excess material to the United States to mitigate fears that storage sites could be targeted by terrorists.⁴² The technical pathway is not a question. The political one is dissolving.

Move west.

Europe was already reeling before the Iran war — from Trump’s threats to seize Greenland, his contempt for NATO, his humiliation of allied leaders. The question of a European nuclear deterrent, once confined to strategic studies seminars, has become an active policy discussion. Whether it takes the form of French and British warheads stationed in Eastern Europe, or Germany and Poland developing their own capabilities, is unclear. But the trajectory is unmistakable — particularly with Vladimir Putin claiming to have moved nuclear-capable missile systems into Belarus.⁴³

The Iran war accelerated this. European allies watched the United States plunge a region into crisis without consulting them, absorb the economic consequences of a disrupted energy market, and demonstrate that American security guarantees serve American interests first and allied populations second. The Gulf states received the same lesson in starker terms — Iranian reprisals struck across the region while Washington’s overriding priority was protecting its own military bases, not the host nations whose territory those bases occupied.⁴⁴

If Iran survives the current onslaught — and every credible assessment suggests the regime will — the case for acquiring a nuclear deterrent will be impossible to argue against internally. Ramesh Thakur, professor emeritus and director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament at the Australian National University, puts it simply: “For Iran, nuclear weapons are now the only thing that will guarantee regime survival. So why wouldn’t they get them?”⁴⁵ And if Iran acquires a weapon, the cascade in the Middle East becomes inevitable. Saudi Arabia has the resources and the motivation. Turkey has the ambition. Egypt has the historical precedent. The Gulf Cooperation Council states that absorbed Iranian missile strikes while the United States prioritised the defence of its own installations and Israel — shifting resources away from its security commitments to the Gulf nations hosting those very bases — have every reason to conclude that American protection is a fiction.⁴⁶

Even in Australia — a nation that has never seriously entertained nuclear ambitions — the discourse has migrated from the fringe to the margins of respectability.⁴⁷ In Taiwan, where the United States strongarmed Taipei into abandoning its secret nuclear programme in 1988, the question is being revisited — carefully, because a Taiwanese nuclear programme would hand Beijing a pretext for invasion, but revisited nonetheless, because the alternative is trusting the same American security commitment that Ukraine trusted.⁴⁸

This is the cascade. Not a single rogue state deciding to go nuclear in defiance of the international order. A systemic collapse in confidence — across allies, across regions, across the political spectrum — in the proposition that the rules-based order will protect anyone. The proliferation is not coming from America’s enemies. It is coming from America’s friends. And it is coming because America’s friends have watched what America does to nations that trust it.

The Protection Racket

There is a word for a system in which one party maintains a monopoly on force, offers protection to others in exchange for compliance, and destroys those who attempt to develop their own capability. It is not “non-proliferation.” It is a protection racket.

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons — the NPT — was signed in 1968 and entered into force in 1970. Its structure is straightforward. Five nations — the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China — are recognised as nuclear-weapons states. Every other signatory agrees not to develop nuclear weapons. In exchange, the five commit to pursuing “negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.”⁴⁹

That was fifty-six years ago. The five nuclear-weapons states have not disarmed. They have modernised. The United States alone is spending an estimated $1.7 trillion on nuclear modernisation over the coming decades.⁵⁰ Russia has expanded its arsenal and moved nuclear-capable systems into Belarus. China is building new silos and expanding its warhead count. The United Kingdom has raised the ceiling on its stockpile. France maintains its force de frappe as a cornerstone of national strategy.

The bargain was: we keep ours, you give up yours, and in exchange we will work toward a world where no one has them. The first half of the bargain has been enforced with sanctions, sabotage, and war. The second half has never been honoured. Not once. Not by any of the five. The NPT’s disarmament obligation is not a suggestion. It is Article VI of a binding treaty. It has been violated every year for more than half a century by every nuclear-weapons state that signed it.⁵¹

And then there is Israel — which never signed the NPT, developed its arsenal in secret, is widely assessed to possess approximately ninety nuclear warheads, and has never faced sanctions, military action, or meaningful diplomatic pressure for its nuclear programme.⁵² The same nations that bombed Iran for enriching uranium to levels far below weapons grade have never demanded that Israel declare its arsenal, submit to inspections, or sign the treaty. The double standard is not hidden. It is structural. It is the system working as designed — protecting the armed and punishing the compliant.

This is the moral architecture that the non-proliferation establishment asks the world to respect. A treaty in which five nations exempt themselves from the obligations they impose on everyone else. A parallel reality in which a sixth nation — aligned with the enforcers — maintains a covert arsenal with total impunity. And a track record in which every nation that honoured the framework was attacked, while every nation that defied it survived.

The moral authority to demand non-proliferation does not rest on the text of the treaty. It rests on the conduct of the nations that enforce it. And that conduct has been so consistently, so spectacularly at odds with the treaty’s own principles that the authority is gone. It was not taken. It was spent — by the nations that held it, on wars and exemptions and broken deals, until there was nothing left.

You cannot bomb a nation for enriching uranium while your ally maintains an undeclared arsenal. You cannot tear up a deal that was working and then claim the moral high ground on proliferation. You cannot spend $1.7 trillion modernising your own warheads while telling the rest of the world that nuclear weapons make everyone less safe. You can do all of these things if you have the power. But you cannot do them and retain the credibility to ask anyone else to disarm.

The credibility is gone. And without it, the non-proliferation framework is not a legal order. It is a hierarchy enforced by violence — one in which the powerful keep their weapons and the compliant are destroyed.

The Question

Every piece of evidence came from Western conduct. Every nation that cooperated with the non-proliferation framework was attacked. Every nation that defied it survived. The single greatest diplomatic achievement in non-proliferation history — the JCPOA — was destroyed by the nation that authored it, and its superior replacement was bombed into irrelevance the day after it was announced. The nations now pursuing nuclear weapons are not rogue states. They are allies — driven not by aggression but by the rational, evidence-based conclusion that the American security guarantee is worthless and the rules-based order is a trap.

The case is airtight. The logic is perfect.

And that is the horror.

I do not believe any of this should happen. A world with thirty nuclear states is a world balanced on the edge of a razor — where one miscalculation, one rogue general, one hacked early-warning system could end everything. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something, and what they are selling is not safety. The proliferation I have just argued for would make every human being on earth less safe, including the citizens of every nation that acquires a weapon. The logic of deterrence works until it does not, and when it fails, it fails totally, permanently, and for everyone.

But I can no longer tell you why it should not happen. The argument against proliferation was the rules-based international order — the proposition that if you play by the rules, the rules will protect you. That argument has been destroyed, not by the nations seeking weapons, but by the nations that already have them. The case against nuclear proliferation was the moral authority of the non-proliferation framework. That moral authority is dead. We — the West — killed it. We killed it in Iraq. We killed it in Libya. We killed it in Ukraine. We killed it in Iran — twice, during negotiations, while the IAEA was verifying compliance and the ink on a better deal was still wet.

The people who could have made the argument against proliferation are the same people who burned it. And what they left behind is a world in which the case I have just made — the case I wish I could refute — has no honest answer.

If you believe that nuclear proliferation is dangerous, then you must direct your anger not at the nations pursuing it, but at the nations whose conduct made it rational. The question is not why Iran, or South Korea, or Japan, or Saudi Arabia would want a nuclear weapon. The question is what right we have to tell them they cannot — we, who broke every promise, tore up every deal, and bombed every nation that trusted us.

We made this case. Every word of it. Not with arguments. With actions.

And now the world has heard it.

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

Share

If you found this valuable, please support me with a like, share, or Subscribe.

Thanks for reading Fireline Press! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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 Charles Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD (the “Duelfer Report”), Iraq Survey Group, 30 September 2004. The report concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons at the time of the 2003 invasion and that Iraq’s nuclear programme had been ended by Saddam Hussein in 1991 following the Gulf War.

² Condoleezza Rice, interview with CNN, 8 September 2002: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

³ President George W. Bush, speech in Cincinnati, 7 October 2002: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

⁴ Vice President Dick Cheney, speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, 26 August 2002: “We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.”

⁵ Department of Energy assessment that the aluminium tubes were “not consistent with a gas centrifuge end use” and were consistent with conventional rocket casings, cited in the National Intelligence Estimate, October 2002. The DOE’s dissent was classified and not shared with the public.

⁶ The White House Iraq Group (WHIG), formed August 2002 and chaired by Karl Rove, was tasked with coordinating the public relations campaign for the invasion of Iraq. Speechwriter Michael Gerson proposed the “smoking gun/mushroom cloud” metaphor at a WHIG meeting in September 2002. Andrew Card, White House Chief of Staff, told the New York Times: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” See Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (Crown Publishers, 2006), p. 35.

⁷ Human Rights Watch, “Judging Dujail: The First Trial Before the Iraqi High Tribunal,” November 2006. HRW concluded that the trial “was fundamentally flawed and did not meet key fair trial standards.” Saddam Hussein was executed on 30 December 2006.

⁸ Gaddafi announced the dismantlement of Libya’s WMD programmes on 19 December 2003. See Arms Control Association, “Chronology of Libya’s Disarmament and Relations with the United States.”

⁹ IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei verified Libya’s nuclear dismantlement beginning 27 December 2003. Libya ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and acceded to the Chemical Weapons Convention on 6 January 2004.

¹⁰ Paula DeSutter, US Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance, testimony before the House International Relations Committee, 2004: Libya’s disarmament was described as “a model for other states.”

¹¹ Wilson Center, “Giving Up on the Bomb: Revisiting Libya’s Decision to Dismantle its Nuclear Program,” 23 October 2017. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi stated that Libya had sought security guarantees which the United States refused to provide.

¹² The United States provided 75 per cent of the aerial refuelling and 70 per cent of the intelligence for the NATO Libya campaign. The Security Council mandate (Resolution 1973) authorised civilian protection; the campaign was executed as regime change. See the author’s discussion in “Just for Fun: The War in Iran — Part I,” Fireline Press, March 2026.

¹³ Stimson Center, “Lessons From Libya’s Nuclear Disarmament 20 Years On,” 20 December 2023, citing Ayatollah Khamenei’s public remarks on Gaddafi’s disarmament.

¹⁴ Ukraine inherited approximately 1,900 strategic warheads deployed on its territory following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The warheads were Russian property; Ukraine did not have operational control or launch codes. See Harvard Kennedy School, “Budapest Memorandum at 25: Between Past and Future,” December 2019.

¹⁵ The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances was signed on 5 December 1994 by the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Ukraine. The signatories pledged to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and existing borders.

¹⁶ The United States insisted on the term “assurances” rather than “guarantees” to avoid implying a legal obligation to use military force. In the Ukrainian and Russian translations, the wording was rendered as “guarantees” regardless. See Stanford CISAC, “Budapest Memorandum Myths,” 4 December 2024.

¹⁷ Ukraine transferred its last nuclear warhead to Russia on 1 June 1996. Its last strategic nuclear weapon delivery vehicle was eliminated on 30 October 2001. Arms Control Association, “Ukraine, Nuclear Weapons, and Security Assurances at a Glance.”

¹⁸ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Munich Security Conference, 19 February 2022: “Since 2014, Ukraine has tried three times to convene consultations with the guarantor states of the Budapest Memorandum. Three times without success.”

¹⁹ Iran signed the NPT on 1 July 1968 and ratified it in February 1970. The fatwa against nuclear weapons, attributed to Supreme Leader Khamenei, declares that weapons of mass destruction are theologically un-Islamic because they are indiscriminate and civilians are the primary targets. See TIME, 27 March 2026, citing Ramesh Thakur’s recollection of a former Iranian president making this argument.

²⁰ The JCPOA constrained Iran’s nuclear programme: enrichment capped at 3.67 per cent, operating centrifuges reduced from approximately 19,000 to 6,104, low-enriched uranium stockpile limited to 300 kilograms, the Arak heavy-water reactor converted, and continuous IAEA monitoring implemented including the Additional Protocol. See Council on Foreign Relations, “What Are Iran’s Nuclear and Missile Capabilities?” updated 4 March 2026.

²¹ The United States withdrew from the JCPOA on 8 May 2018 while Iran was in verified compliance. All other signatories confirmed Iran’s compliance. The IAEA had verified compliance across multiple reporting cycles.

²² Israel launched Operation Rising Lion in June 2025, striking Iranian nuclear facilities. The United States launched Operation Midnight Hammer on 22 June 2025, deploying fourteen GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs via B-2 Stealth bombers against Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. See TIME, “Trump’s War With Iran,” March 2026.

²³ The United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury on 28 February 2026 while negotiations in Oman were underway. See the author’s “Just for Fun: The War in Iran” Parts I and II, Fireline Press, March 2026.

²⁴ IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi stated on 3 March 2026 that there was “no evidence of Iran building a nuclear bomb.” TIME, “Tulsi Gabbard Contradicts Trump on Key Claims About Iran War,” 18 March 2026.

²⁵ US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iran had not rebuilt its enrichment capability following Operation Midnight Hammer, directly contradicting President Trump’s justification for the second war. TIME, 18 March 2026.

²⁶ North Korea has conducted six nuclear tests (2006, 2009, 2013, 2016 twice, 2017) and developed ICBMs. Arsenal estimates vary; most assessments place it at several dozen warheads.

²⁷ Kim Jong Un, address to military commanders, 25 March 2026, as reported by TIME, 27 March 2026. Kim stated that the “present situation clearly proves” North Korea was correct to maintain its nuclear arsenal, calling it “irreversible” and accusing Washington of “state-sponsored terrorism and aggression.”

²⁸ President Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (Free Press, 2006). Musharraf wrote that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Pakistan’s intelligence director: “Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.” Armitage denied using those exact words but confirmed a “strong, factual” exchange. CBS 60 Minutes, 22 September 2006.

²⁹ Musharraf wrote that he “war-gamed the United States as an adversary” and concluded that Pakistan could not withstand the onslaught. In the Line of Fire, 2006.

³⁰ The JCPOA constrained Iran’s nuclear programme as detailed in endnote 20. See also Council on Foreign Relations, “What Are Iran’s Nuclear and Missile Capabilities?” updated 4 March 2026.

³¹ IAEA verification of Iran’s compliance was confirmed across multiple reporting cycles. See Arms Control Association, “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) at a Glance.”

³² The United States withdrew from the JCPOA on 8 May 2018. See endnote 21.

³³ The circularity of US policy — withdrawing from the deal, citing the consequences of withdrawal as justification for war — is documented in the author’s “Just for Fun: The War in Iran — Part II,” Fireline Press, March 2026.

³⁴ Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi, interview with CBS News’s Face the Nation, 27 February 2026. Al-Busaidi announced that Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium with full IAEA verification, and that he was confident a deal could be finalised within three months. See also Anadolu Agency, “Oman says US-Iran talks reach agreement on ‘zero stockpiling’ of enriched uranium,” 28 February 2026.

³⁵ Al-Busaidi, CBS Face the Nation, 27 February 2026: “The single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never, ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb. This is something that is not in the old deal that was negotiated during President Obama’s time. This is something completely new.”

³⁶ Asan Institute for Policy Studies, “South Koreans and Their Neighbours 2025,” April 2025. Survey of 1,000 South Koreans conducted March 2025.

³⁷ Asan Institute for Policy Studies, “Worth the Squeeze: A Conditions-based Analysis of South Korean Public Support for Nuclear Deterrence,” May 2025. Majority support held under four out of five cost conditions.

³⁸ South Korea possesses the raw materials, civilian nuclear infrastructure, and technical capacity to produce a nuclear weapon within one to three years. See multiple assessments cited in CSIS, “Will South Korea’s Nuclear Ambitions Subside in the Next Five Years?” April 2025.

³⁹ TIME, “How War With Iran Could Lead to More Nuclear Weapons Around the World,” 27 March 2026, reporting an unnamed Japanese government security adviser’s remarks in December 2025.

⁴⁰ Taro Kono, former Japanese defence and foreign minister, public remarks reported by TIME, 27 March 2026.

⁴¹ Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s remarks on the “three non-nuclear principles” and the hosting prohibition, reported by TIME, 27 March 2026.

⁴² In 2014, Japan agreed to ship excess weapons-grade uranium and plutonium to the United States to mitigate fears that storage sites could be targeted. TIME, 27 March 2026.

⁴³ Vladimir Putin’s deployment of nuclear-capable missile systems into Belarus. TIME, 27 March 2026.

⁴⁴ Iranian reprisals struck across the Gulf region while Washington prioritised the defence of its own military installations and Israel. See the author’s “Just for Fun: The War in Iran — Part I,” Fireline Press, March 2026.

⁴⁵ Ramesh Thakur, professor emeritus and director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, Crawford School, Australian National University. Quoted in TIME, 27 March 2026.

⁴⁶ TIME, 27 March 2026, citing Thakur on the likelihood of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt pursuing nuclear deterrents if Iran acquires a weapon.

⁴⁷ TIME, 27 March 2026, noting that the possibility of Australia acquiring nuclear weapons “has slowly migrated from crackpot mutterings to fringe discourse.”

⁴⁸ Taiwan abandoned its secret nuclear programme under US pressure in 1988. TIME, 27 March 2026, citing Thakur that a Taiwanese nuclear programme remains “possible.”

⁴⁹ Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), opened for signature 1 July 1968, entered into force 5 March 1970. Article VI: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

⁵⁰ The $1.7 trillion figure covers the full thirty-year US nuclear modernisation programme as estimated by the Arms Control Association and the Federation of American Scientists, based on the Congressional Budget Office’s 2017 estimate adjusted for inflation. The CBO’s 2025 ten-year projection alone is $946 billion.

⁵¹ The International Court of Justice, in its 1996 Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, unanimously held that there exists “an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”

⁵² Israel is widely assessed to possess approximately ninety nuclear warheads. It has never signed the NPT, has never declared its arsenal, and has never faced sanctions or military action for its nuclear programme. See Federation of American Scientists and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) nuclear forces assessments.

When his father died, his Palestinian mother took him home to Lydda. He was raised there. He received his Christian faith from her. He grew up in Palestine, lived in Palestine, and was martyred by Roman Pagans in or near Lydda in 303 CE for refusing to renounce his faith. He is buried in Lydda, where his tomb still stands today in the Greek Orthodox Church of St George.

The original cult of St George began in Palestine and only later spread to Cappadocia and the West. Palestinian Christians at Al-Khader, near Bethlehem, have venerated him as one of their own for seventeen hundred years. Palestinian Muslims revere him under the name Al-Khidr, “The Green One,” whom the Qur’an names. Christian and Muslim Palestinians celebrate his feast day together on 6 May.

England did not adopt him as patron saint until King Edward III in the fourteenth century — over a thousand years after his death.

By mother, by upbringing, by faith, by life, by martyrdom, by burial, and by the seventeen centuries of continuous local devotion in the land of his death, St George was Palestinian.

The cross he died under is not a weapon against his own people. It belongs to a saint who refused to bow to empire.

SOURCES

1. Yolande Knell, “Why St George is a Palestinian hero,” BBC News Magazine, 23 April 2014. Cited as an authoritative external reference by Encyclopædia Britannica. Quotes Greek Orthodox Archbishop Atallah Hanna confirming St George as a Palestinian martyr.

2. St. George, Encyclopædia Britannica. “St. George (flourished 3rd century—died, traditionally Lydda, Palestine) … His remains were taken to Lydda, the homeland of his mother.”

3. 9 Things You Didn’t Know About St George, English Heritage (UK official heritage body). Confirms Palestine as the place where St George “lived and died” and as the home of his tomb and the centre of his earliest cult.

4. Editor, “St George’s Middle East links and legends,” Embrace the Middle East (UK registered charity 1076329), 22 April 2024. Section titled “St George the Palestinian.”

5. Anthony Cooney, St George of Lydda: Patron Saint of England (UK pamphlet, Royal Society of St George affiliated material). States: “George was born in 270 AD to Christian parents in Lydda, now Lod, located on the Plain of Sharon, Palestine.” Author of The Story of St George and Saint George: Knight of Lydda.

6. History of St. George, The Royal Society of Saint George (England’s official society, founded 1894, Royal Charter, Patron HM King Charles III). Confirms Lydda burial: “his remains are said to have been buried in the church that bears his name in Lydda.”

7. St George, Martyr, Vatican News (Holy See official). Confirms move to Palestine, life there, martyrdom, and burial in Lydda.

8. Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiastica (4th century). Records the building of a church in Lydda during the reign of Constantine I (r. 306–337) — the earliest documentary reference to the site that became the Church of St George.

9.Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Church of St George, Lod. The continuous Christian shrine over the tomb of St George since the 4th century.

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

Share

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

“We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”¹

Read that sentence again. This was not a dissident intellectual writing from exile. This was not a foreign adversary gloating over American weakness. This was the top diplomat of the United States of America, speaking on behalf of the President, at the flagship forum of the transatlantic alliance, telling the assembled leaders of Europe that the system they had all agreed to maintain — the system America designed, funded, and enforced for eighty years — was dying. And that America had no intention of saving it.

Marco Rubio did not stumble into this line. It was not an improvisation. The Department of State posted it to social media as the highlight of the speech. It was the message. The old order, he said, was built on “a dangerous delusion” — the idea that liberal democracy would inevitably spread, that trade would replace nationhood, that a rules-based global order would replace the national interest. “This was a foolish idea,” he told the room, “that ignored both human nature and the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history.”²

He was right. Not in the way he intended — but he was right.

The delusion was real. But it was not the delusion Rubio described. The delusion was not that America believed in a rules-based order. The delusion was that America believed it was exempt from the rules. The system was never designed to constrain the architect. It was designed to constrain everyone else. And for as long as the architect appeared to honour its own creation — or could at least maintain the pretence — the system held. The moment the pretence collapsed, so did everything built on top of it.

Thirteen days after Rubio’s speech, the United States and Israel bombed Iran.³ Not a rogue state acting in defiance of the international community. The international community’s self-appointed leader, acting in defiance of the international community. Striking nuclear facilities that the International Atomic Energy Agency had confirmed posed no imminent weapons threat.⁴ Bombing universities, museums, hospitals, steel factories, water infrastructure, and civilian homes.⁵ Launching a war without congressional authorisation, in violation of the War Powers Act and the United Nations Charter — the very documents America had written.⁶

Rubio was right. The old order is dead. But it was not killed by complacency or migration or climate policy or any of the civilisational threats he listed in Munich. It was killed by the nation that built it. The architect became the demolition crew. And the rest of the world watched the country that wrote the rules tear up its own blueprint and call it renewal.

This is not an article about one speech or one war. This is an article about how the most powerful civilisation in modern history arrived at a point where its own Secretary of State could announce its decline at a podium, receive a standing ovation, and then — less than a fortnight later — prove the diagnosis correct in the most catastrophic way imaginable.

The myth of the indispensable nation is dead. This is the story of how it was born, what it built, why it was always fragile, and what its collapse means for the rest of us.

The Last Man Standing

To understand how the indispensable nation became the thing it swore to prevent, you have to understand what it built — and why the world let it.

In 1945, the United States of America stood alone among the great powers with its homeland untouched. Europe was rubble. The Soviet Union had lost twenty-seven million people. China was entering civil war. Japan was irradiated and occupied. Britain, nominally among the victors, was bankrupt and on the verge of losing an empire it could no longer afford.⁷ America, by contrast, accounted for roughly half of the entire world’s economic output. It held eighty per cent of the world’s hard currency reserves. It was a net exporter of petroleum. Its industrial base, expanded beyond recognition by the war effort, was intact and operating at a scale no other nation could approach.⁸

This was not a position America had engineered through conquest. It was a position that history had handed it — through geography, through the destruction of every competitor, and through the sheer scale of its wartime mobilisation. And what America did with that position, in the years immediately following the war, was arguably the most ambitious act of institutional construction in human history.

Between 1944 and 1951, the United States built or underwrote the architecture of the modern world. The Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 established the International Monetary Fund and the precursor to the World Bank, anchoring the global financial system to the American dollar.⁹ The United Nations was chartered in San Francisco in 1945, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights following in 1948 — a document drafted under the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt that articulated, for the first time in international law, the rights that belong to every human being by virtue of being human.¹⁰ The Geneva Conventions of 1949 codified the laws of armed conflict, setting limits on what nations could do to each other — and to civilians — even in war.¹¹ NATO, established in 1949, bound the Western democracies into a collective defence pact. And the Marshall Plan, from 1948 to 1951, poured thirteen billion dollars — roughly one hundred and seventy billion in today’s money — into the reconstruction of Western Europe, rebuilding the economies of the very nations America had just helped to liberate.¹²

This was not charity. American policymakers understood that rebuilding Europe served American interests — economically, strategically, and ideologically. But it was also not mere cynicism. There was a genuine idealism in the project, a belief — shared by many of the architects, from Truman to Marshall to Eleanor Roosevelt herself — that the catastrophe of two world wars in a single generation demanded something better. Something that would bind nations to rules, constrain the strong as well as the weak, and make the resort to war not just dangerous but illegal except in self-defence or with the collective authorisation of the international community.¹³

And the world believed it. Not because America forced them to — though American power certainly concentrated minds — but because the vision was genuinely compelling. For people who had lived through the trenches, the Blitz, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the firebombing of Dresden, the promise of a system that would prevent it from happening again was not naïve. It was desperate. And America, the country that had entered the war late, lost comparatively few, and emerged richer and more powerful than when it started, seemed like the only nation capable of underwriting that promise.

The world fell in love with America. Not with its military — though that was formidable — but with its idea. The idea that a country could be founded not on ethnicity or empire but on a proposition: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. People in bombed-out cities across Europe and Asia looked at America and saw not a conqueror but a beacon. The country that could have dominated the world by force instead chose — or appeared to choose — to build a system of laws and institutions designed to protect the weak from the strong.¹⁴

It was the most successful exercise in soft power the world had ever seen. And it was built on a foundation that no one — least of all the Americans themselves — wanted to examine too closely.

Share

The Founding Flaw

The crack was there from the beginning. Not hidden — visible to anyone willing to look. But the system America built after 1945 required that no one look too closely, because what lay beneath the foundation would have invalidated the entire structure.

The United States of America was founded on land taken by force and genocide from the people who lived there. This is not a contested claim. It is not revisionist history. It is the documented, uncontested record of what happened. Between the arrival of European settlers and the closing of the American frontier in 1890, the indigenous population of North America was reduced by an estimated ninety per cent — through warfare, forced displacement, deliberate starvation, and disease.¹⁵ The survivors were confined to reservations, their children taken to boarding schools designed to, in the words of Captain Richard Henry Pratt, “kill the Indian, and save the man.”¹⁶ The land itself — every acre of it — was taken. And the taking was not framed as conquest. It was framed as destiny.

This is where the mythology begins.

The term Manifest Destiny entered American political language in 1845, when journalist John L. O’Sullivan wrote that it was America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”¹⁷ The phrase did what all effective propaganda does: it took a choice and dressed it as inevitability, and it took a crime and dressed it as divine purpose. The genocide and dispossession of Native Americans was not a regrettable cost of expansion. It was God’s plan. The continent was allotted by Providence. The people already living on it were obstacles to a sacred mission, and removing them was not a moral failure but a theological obligation.

This is not a peripheral detail of American history. It is load-bearing. When your founding mythology tells you that taking what is not yours is a sacred mission, the flaw is not a blemish on an otherwise sound structure. It is the structure. Everything built on top of it — every institution, every declaration of rights, every claim to moral authority — rests on a foundation that has never been examined, acknowledged, or reconciled. America did not stumble into this contradiction. America was built on it.

From Manifest Destiny, the mythology evolved. American Exceptionalism — the secular descendant of the providential claim — held that the United States was not merely a successful country but a fundamentally different kind of country: exempt, by virtue of its founding principles, from the patterns that govern other nations.¹⁸ Where other countries had interests, America had ideals. Where other empires rose and fell, America was permanent — because it was not an empire at all, but an idea. The belief was intoxicating, and for a time, it was persuasive. The world accepted American leadership after 1945 partly because America believed in its own exceptionalism so completely that it projected that belief as fact.

But exceptionalism is a blade with two edges. The same conviction that says we are uniquely qualified to lead also says the rules do not apply to us the way they apply to others. When the myth was strong and America’s behaviour roughly aligned with its stated values — or could at least be made to appear so — the world saw the first edge. They saw a country that led by example, that constrained itself voluntarily, that submitted to the institutions it had created. Now they see the second. They see a country that invokes its exceptionalism not to uphold the rules but to exempt itself from them.

The theological wrapper around all of this was the City on a Hill. John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon aboard the Arbella — “A Model of Christian Charity” — warned his fellow Puritans that “we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”¹⁹ It was, in its original context, a call to communal responsibility and mutual accountability — a warning that failure would bring disgrace. But the phrase was resurrected in the twentieth century, first by John F. Kennedy and then by Ronald Reagan, who added the word “shining” and transformed Winthrop’s anxious covenant into a triumphalist declaration.²⁰ The City on a Hill became not a warning but a promise — not a burden but a birthright. And it fused Protestant eschatology with national identity so thoroughly that criticising America became, for a significant portion of its population, indistinguishable from blasphemy.²¹

I have written elsewhere about how this theological infrastructure captured American foreign policy, bending it toward ends that served a religious eschatology rather than the national interest or international law.²¹ The full argument belongs there. But the relevant point for this article is simpler and more structural: a nation that believes it is divinely exceptional cannot self-correct. Self-correction requires admitting that you are not exceptional — that you are subject to the same laws, the same moral standards, the same historical patterns as everyone else. And that admission would kill the myth. So the myth is maintained, and the flaw is never reconciled, and the foundation goes unexamined — until the weight of what has been built on top of it becomes too great, and the whole structure begins to crack.

The crack was always there. The founding flaw was never a secret. Slavery, genocide, the gap between the Declaration’s promises and the Republic’s practices — these were not discoveries of the twenty-first century. Frederick Douglass named them in 1852.²² Indigenous leaders named them long before that. What changed was not the existence of the flaw but the willingness to ignore it. As long as America was building, as long as the myth was generating prosperity and global prestige and the appearance of moral authority, the crack could be papered over with rhetoric and reform. But a myth is only as durable as the behaviour it describes. And when the behaviour diverges far enough from the myth — when the nation that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is bombing universities and water infrastructure in a war its own legislature never authorised — the paper tears, and what is underneath becomes visible to the entire world.

The Architect Becomes the Demolition Crew

There is a distinction that most people never make, and it is the distinction on which this entire series turns.

Technology is not civilisation. Culture is not civilisation. Civilisation is something else entirely — and a society can advance the first two while destroying the third.

Technology is capability. By this measure, the United States has never been more powerful. It fields the most advanced military in human history. It dominates artificial intelligence, space exploration, biotechnology, and global communications. It can strike any target on earth within the hour and surveille any population on the planet in real time. The trajectory, by this measure, is straight up.

Culture is expression. By this measure, America remains the most influential nation on earth. Its music, its films, its language, its fashion, its social media platforms — these are consumed in every country, imitated in every market, absorbed into every local culture they touch. American culture is not declining. It is, if anything, more pervasive than ever.

But civilisation is neither of these things. Civilisation is the agreement about how we treat each other. It is the baseline ethical contract — the unwritten understanding that there are things we do not do, not because we lack the capability but because we have chosen to be something more than our capability allows. It is the decision to build a court rather than a colosseum. It is the choice to write a law rather than swing a sword. It is the restraint that distinguishes a society from a mob with good infrastructure.

And by this measure — the only measure that ultimately matters — the United States is regressing.

This is not a novel observation. Every declining civilisation in history has exhibited the same pattern: technological sophistication advancing alongside ethical collapse. Rome in the second century had engineering that would not be matched for a thousand years — aqueducts, roads, heated floors, concrete that still stands. It also had an economy built on slavery and an entertainment industry built on feeding human beings to animals in front of cheering crowds.²³ The capability was extraordinary. The civilisation was rotting. And the rot was invisible to the Romans themselves, because they made the same error that Americans are making now: they confused what they could build with what they were.

The question this series is asking is whether a society can be technologically supreme and civilisationally bankrupt at the same time. The answer, evidently, is yes. The nation that built the international legal order is now its most prolific violator. The country that wrote the Geneva Conventions is bombing water infrastructure and nuclear power plants.²⁴ The government that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is live-streaming military operations on a presidential app for public consumption.²⁵ The society that once lost elections over political mud-slinging now elects leaders because of it.

This is not decline in the way most people use the word. The economy has not collapsed. The military has not been defeated. The technology has not failed. What has failed is something harder to measure and easier to ignore: the conscience of the civilisation. The willingness to be bound by the rules you wrote. The capacity to look at your own behaviour and judge it by the standards you imposed on everyone else.

When Rubio stood at that podium in Munich and declared that America would not be a caretaker of the West’s managed decline, he was diagnosing a real condition. But he misidentified the disease. The decline is not happening because America has become too soft, too accommodating, too constrained by multilateral institutions. The decline is happening because America has abandoned the very thing that made it worth following — the promise, however imperfectly kept, that power could be exercised within the bounds of law and conscience. Strip that away and what remains is not a civilisation. It is a superpower. And there is nothing more dangerous than a superpower that has stopped pretending to be civilised.

The myth of the indispensable nation was never quite true, but it was useful. It gave the world a framework — flawed, hypocritical, selectively enforced, but real enough to restrain the worst impulses of the powerful and protect the weakest from the strongest. For eighty years, the myth held. Not because America was actually what it claimed to be, but because enough people — including enough Americans — believed in the aspiration to make the system function.

That is over now.

The architect has turned on his own building. The nation that wrote the rules has torn them up — not in secret, not with regret, but openly, from the podium of the Munich Security Conference, with a standing ovation from the audience. The myth of the indispensable nation is dead, killed not by America’s enemies but by America itself. And the question that remains — the question this series will pursue across its next two parts — is what happens to a world when the nation that built the rules no longer believes in them, and what happens to a civilisation when the people inside it no longer remember what civilisation means.

Part II will examine the mechanics: how the system is collapsing, where the institutions have failed, and what the evidence of the current war reveals about the state of the international order.

Part III will go deeper — to the root. To the erosion of conscience itself, the thing that holds a civilisation together long after the institutions have crumbled. To the question of whether what has been lost can be recovered, or whether we are watching something terminal.

When you lose what it means to be civilised, you have no civilisation.

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

Share

The Decline of Western Civilisation is part of a three part series. Part II of this series is scheduled to release June 9, 2026.

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 Marco Rubio, speech at the Munich Security Conference, 14 February 2026. Full transcript published by the United States Department of State.

² Ibid.

³ US-Israeli strikes on Iran commenced 28 February 2026. See “2026 Iran war,” compiled reporting from Reuters, Associated Press, Al Jazeera, BBC, and CNN.

⁴ IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi, statement to the IAEA Board of Governors emergency session, 2 March 2026: “We don’t see a structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons.” Confirmed in a CNN interview, 3 March 2026, when asked if Iran was “days or weeks away from building a bomb,” Grossi replied: “No.”

⁵ Iranian officials reported US-Israeli strikes had damaged at least 120 museums and historical sites, 600+ schools and universities, oil and gas infrastructure, steel factories, desalination plants, water sources, and the Iranian Red Crescent headquarters. Al Jazeera, 27 March 2026; CNN live reporting, 28 March 2026.

⁶ Arms Control Association, “Did Iran’s Nuclear and Missile Programs Pose an Imminent Threat? No.” March 2026: “This is a war of choice, waged in violation of international law and without the necessary approval from Congress.”

⁷ Britain’s post-war economic crisis led to the abrupt withdrawal from Palestine (1948), the loss of India (1947), and the progressive dissolution of the British Empire over the following two decades. The loan Britain secured from the United States in 1946 — $3.75 billion — was not fully repaid until 2006.

⁸ “The United States accounted for 50 percent of global GDP [at the end of WWII], held 80 percent of the world’s hard currency reserves, and was a net exporter of petroleum products.” Kent Hughes, Wilson Center, “A Short History of America’s Economy Since World War II.”

⁹ The Bretton Woods Conference (formally the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference) took place in July 1944 at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. It established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (later part of the World Bank Group).

¹⁰ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948, with Eleanor Roosevelt serving as chair of the drafting committee.

¹¹ The Geneva Conventions of 1949 consist of four treaties and three additional protocols that establish international legal standards for humanitarian treatment in war.

¹² The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program) provided approximately $13 billion in economic assistance to Western European economies between 1948 and 1951. Adjusted for inflation, this is equivalent to roughly $170 billion in 2026 dollars. See EH.net, “The American Economy during World War II.”

¹³ 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 preserves the right of self-defence. Chapter VII empowers the Security Council to authorise the use of force to maintain or restore international peace and security.

¹⁴ The phrase “beacon” in relation to America’s post-war global image draws on the broader tradition of American self-perception — from Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” to Reagan’s “shining city” — but here refers specifically to how the world perceived America, not how America perceived itself. The distinction matters for the argument that follows.

¹⁵ Estimates of pre-contact indigenous population in North America vary widely among scholars, from approximately 2 million to over 18 million. The reduction by 1900 to approximately 250,000 — representing a decline of 90 per cent or more depending on the baseline estimate — is attributed to a combination of epidemic disease, warfare, forced removal, and deliberate policies of starvation and cultural destruction.

¹⁶ Captain Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, speech at the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction, 1892. The full quote: “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one… In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

¹⁷ John L. O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, vol. 17, no. 1 (July–August 1845), pp. 5–10.

¹⁸ The term “American Exceptionalism” is often attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835), though Tocqueville used the word “exceptional” rather than the formal phrase. The concept gained its modern political usage in the twentieth century and has been invoked by presidents from both parties.

¹⁹ John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered 1630, aboard the Arbella. Published in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, 1838), 3rd series 7:31–48.

²⁰ John F. Kennedy cited Winthrop’s sermon in his address to the Massachusetts state legislature on 9 January 1961. Ronald Reagan invoked “a shining city upon a hill” repeatedly throughout his political career, including his farewell address on 11 January 1989.

²¹ The fusion of Protestant theology with American national identity is explored in depth in the companion article: James S. Coates, “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” Fireline Press, 2025.

²² Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech delivered 5 July 1852, Rochester, New York: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”

²³ Roman gladiatorial games reached their height in the first and second centuries CE, with the Colosseum (completed 80 CE) hosting spectacles involving the killing of both condemned prisoners and trained fighters before crowds of up to 50,000. Roman infrastructure — including aqueducts, roads, and concrete construction — remained unmatched in Europe until the modern era.

²⁴ See endnotes 4 and 5 above. The IAEA confirmed strikes on the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility. Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant was struck at least three times. A major water source in Haftgel, Khuzestan province, was targeted on 28 March 2026 (reported by Al Jazeera via Iran’s Fars news agency).

²⁵ The White House launched a mobile application in March 2026 that was promoted across official social media accounts, providing real-time content related to ongoing military operations.

How does the same political ecosystem simultaneously present itself as the world’s greatest defender of the Jewish people and the world’s most aggressive demoniser of Muslims — while profiting from both antisemitism and cultural racism against Muslims?

The answer is simpler than it should be. It profits from both because the two bigotries serve the same strategic function. Both manufacture enemies. Both justify military intervention. Both sustain the surveillance state. Both redirect public attention away from the actual power structures that benefit from permanent civilisational conflict. And both — this is the part most people miss — are cultivated by overlapping networks, funded by overlapping donors, and amplified by overlapping media pipelines that treat hatred not as a problem to be solved but as a product to be sold.

In “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” I traced the theological infrastructure that delivered American foreign policy to a dispensationalist agenda.¹ 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 examination.² In “Jews in History — Who Protected Whom,” I inverted the historical record that both of those articles operate within — the assumption that Islam and Judaism are locked in an ancient civilisational conflict.³ They are not. The evidence is overwhelming, and the people who need you not to know that evidence have spent decades building the machinery to ensure you never encounter it.

This article names the machinery.

It names the think tanks that manufacture anti-Muslim narratives. It names the foundations that fund them. It names the media figures who amplify them. It names the governments that benefit from them. And it traces the documented connections between the counter-Islamism industry and the exploitation of antisemitism — because the same networks that inflate the threat of Islam also instrumentalise the suffering of Jews, and they do both for the same reason: to sustain an environment of permanent fear in which military budgets expand, civil liberties contract, and the question of who actually benefits from all this conflict never gets asked.

I am not speculating about how influence operations work. I was an operative in federal counterterrorism. I have seen narratives constructed, targets cultivated, and ordinary people moved toward extremism by people with agendas those people never fully understood. When I look at the networks documented in this article, I recognise the architecture — not because I read about it in a report, but because I have been inside operations that use the same mechanics. The scale is different. The pattern is the same.

The question that runs through everything that follows is the oldest question in intelligence work: cui bono? Who benefits? Follow the money, follow the influence, follow the outcomes — and you will find that the people who benefit from both antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred are not the Jews who live in fear or the Muslims who face discrimination. The beneficiaries are the defence contractors, the surveillance firms, the political actors who need permanent enemies, and the governments that use civilisational conflict as a management tool.

The industry does not fight hate. It farms it.

Share

The Network

In 2011, the Center for American Progress published a report called “Fear, Inc.” that did something no one had done before: it mapped the counter-Islam industry in the United States as a network — with identifiable nodes, traceable funding, and a documented pipeline from think tank to media to legislation.⁴ What the researchers found was not a vast conspiracy. It was something more effective: a small, tightly connected group of organisations and individuals, funded by a handful of foundations, whose manufactured claims about Islam were amplified through conservative media and converted into policy by sympathetic legislators. The network did not need to be large. It needed to be well-funded, well-connected, and relentless.

The numbers told the story. Seven charitable foundations spent $42.6 million between 2001 and 2009 funding the intellectual core of the counter-Islam network.⁵ By 2014, a follow-up analysis by the Council on American-Islamic Relations documented that the inner core organisations alone had access to at least $119.6 million in total revenue between 2008 and 2011.⁶ The money flowed from foundations like the Donors Capital Fund, the Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and others — into a cluster of think tanks that produced the reports, the talking points, and the manufactured expertise that made cultural racism against Muslims look like national security analysis.⁷

The think tanks form the intellectual engine. The Center for Security Policy, founded by Frank Gaffney, has spent decades promoting the claim that Islamic law — Sharia — represents an existential threat to the American constitutional order.⁸ ACT for America, founded by Brigitte Gabriel, built a grassroots army — the organisation now claims 2.8 million members — dedicated to opposing what it calls “radical Islam” but in practice targets the religion itself.⁹ The Southern Poverty Law Centre has designated it the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group in the United States.¹⁰ Gabriel, a Lebanese-American Maronite Catholic, was awarded the Menachem Begin Prize by the State of Israel in 2025 — a detail worth remembering when we reach “The Convergence” later in this article.¹¹ The Middle East Forum, run by Daniel Pipes, functions as both a think tank and a funder of other organisations in the network, including $1.24 million to Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism and $450,000 to MEMRI — the Middle East Media Research Institute — between 2009 and 2011.¹² The David Horowitz Freedom Center provides a platform for anti-Muslim voices and has published defences of far-right figures across both sides of the Atlantic.¹³ The Gatestone Institute, an Israel-focused think tank, does the same.¹⁴

Then there are the individuals who give the network its public face. Robert Spencer — not the white nationalist, a different Robert Spencer — runs Jihad Watch and co-founded the American Freedom Defense Initiative with Pamela Geller. Spencer’s writings were cited 162 times in the manifesto of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right terrorist who murdered 77 people in 2011.¹⁵ Geller’s blog was cited twelve times.¹⁶ Spencer was banned from the United Kingdom in 2013 as an extremist.¹⁷ None of this has diminished his status within the network. He remains a source cited by mainstream conservative commentators, including in the endnotes of Ann Coulter’s bestselling books.¹⁸

The pipeline from think tank to policy is not theoretical. It is documented. David Yerushalmi, a lawyer affiliated with Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, drafted model anti-Sharia legislation that ACT for America’s grassroots network then introduced in state legislatures across the country.¹⁹ Frank Gaffney himself described ACT for America as a “force multiplier” for this legislative agenda.²⁰ By December 2025, this pipeline had produced the Sharia Free America Caucus in the United States Congress — founded with forty-seven members from twenty-two states, co-founded by Representatives Keith Self and Chip Roy of Texas. Three months later, it has fifty-seven.²¹ In its first months, the caucus introduced seven bills, including the designation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations — the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organisation — as a terrorist organisation.²² CAIR responded by designating the caucus an anti-Muslim hate group — the first time in its thirty-two-year history it had designated a congressional caucus as an extremist body.²³

This is the assembly line. A think tank produces a claim. A media figure amplifies it. A grassroots organisation mobilises around it. A legislator introduces a bill based on it. And a community of 3.5 million American Muslims lives with the consequences.

The media amplifiers deserve specific attention because they are the mechanism by which fringe claims enter mainstream political discourse. Ann Coulter — who has referred to Muslims as “ragheads” and “jihad monkeys,” who called Islam “a car-burning cult,” and who wrote days after the eleventh of September 2001 that America should “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” — has been described by David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, as perhaps the most influential single writer on a presidential election since Harriet Beecher Stowe.²⁴ She was one of only forty-five people Donald Trump followed on X.²⁵ She cites Robert Spencer and the white nationalist outlet VDARE in her bestselling books.²⁶ When Coulter shared anti-Muslim videos from the British far-right group Britain First, Trump retweeted them to his tens of millions of followers.²⁷ The pipeline does not stop at the think tank door. It runs directly into the White House.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Katie Hopkins performs the same function. Hopkins — who called for a “final solution” after the Manchester bombing, who called refugees “cockroaches,” who described Islam as “repugnant,” and who called for internment camps for suspected Muslim extremists on Fox News — spoke at a David Horowitz Freedom Center event in March 2017 and has worked with the Center for Security Policy.²⁸ She was amplified by Trump at least eleven times during his presidency.²⁹ She screened a documentary film in Israel in which she described the country as “kind of my natural home” and declared, “It’s my ambition to be Jewish.”³⁰ She marched alongside Tommy Robinson in London in September 2025.³¹ Hopkins connects the American think tanks, the British far-right street movement, and the Israeli political establishment. She is a node in a transatlantic network, not an isolated provocateur.

The single most revealing piece of evidence in this network is a single transaction. In 2008, the Donors Capital Fund made an $18 million donation to the Clarion Fund, which used it to produce and distribute a propaganda film called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” to 28 million voters in swing states ahead of the presidential election.³² A Florida distributor described the DVD as “the single most powerful piece of media over the past five years in persuading average Americans to the Islamist threat.”³³ Eighteen million dollars, one film, twenty-eight million homes. That is not organic public opinion. That is a manufactured product, delivered at industrial scale, paid for by a single foundation.

This is the counter-Islam network. It is not a conspiracy. It is an industry — with funding, personnel, infrastructure, and a product. The product is fear. And the market for it has never been larger.

The Shield

The counter-Islam network described in the previous section is one half of the machinery. The other half does not manufacture hatred of Muslims. It manufactures a shield — a definitional weapon that makes criticism of the State of Israel functionally impossible in public life.

In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted a working definition of antisemitism. The definition itself is brief: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”³⁴ That sentence is uncontroversial. What follows it is not. Attached to the definition are eleven illustrative examples, seven of which relate not to hatred of Jews but to criticism of 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 endeavor.” And: “Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”³⁵

Read those examples carefully. Under the IHRA definition, arguing that a state founded through the ethnic cleansing of three quarters of a million people is a racist endeavour is, potentially, antisemitic.³⁶ Pointing out that Israel receives preferential treatment from Western governments — treatment not extended to any other state engaged in comparable conduct — is, potentially, antisemitic. The definition does not merely protect Jews from hatred. It protects a state from accountability. And it does so by collapsing the distinction between Jewish people and Israeli government policy — which is precisely what genuine antisemites do.

This is not my analysis alone. Kenneth Stern, the lead drafter of the original text that became the IHRA definition, has publicly and repeatedly opposed its weaponisation. In testimony and published writing, Stern has accused pro-Israel groups of turning the definition into a tool to suppress speech on college campuses. He called its use in Donald Trump’s 2019 executive order targeting Palestinian advocacy “an attack on academic freedom and free speech.”³⁷ The man who wrote the definition says it is being used for purposes he never intended and explicitly opposes.

The consequences are documented and specific. In 2024, the United States House of Representatives passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act by a margin of 320 to 91, mandating the use of the IHRA definition by the Department of Education.³⁸ Columbia University adopted the definition in 2025 as part of a settlement with the Trump administration.³⁹ In response, Rashid Khalidi — the Palestinian-American historian who held the Edward Said Chair of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia — cancelled his popular lecture course on the history of the modern Middle East. His reason was direct: the IHRA definition, he said, “deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews.”⁴⁰

The consequences extend beyond cancelled courses. Professor David Miller, a sociologist at the University of Bristol, was dismissed in October 2021 after complaints about a lecture in which he described the Zionist movement as one of five pillars driving cultural racism against Muslims in the United Kingdom. The Community Security Trust, a pro-Israel charity, called the lecture a “false, vile antisemitic slur.” Two internal university investigations found no case to answer. Miller was sacked anyway for gross misconduct. In February 2024, a Bristol Employment Tribunal ruled, in a unanimous 108-page judgment, that Miller’s anti-Zionist beliefs qualified as a protected philosophical belief under Section 10 of the Equality Act 2010, that his dismissal constituted direct discrimination, and that he had been unfairly and wrongfully dismissed.⁴¹ The tribunal found that the university’s reason for dismissal was “tainted by discrimination.” Miller’s lawyer called it a “landmark case” that “underscores the issue of weaponising antisemitism to stifle discussions on Zionism.”⁴² A professor lost his job because he named the connection between Zionism and anti-Muslim bigotry. The legal system said the machinery was wrong. But the machinery had already done its work — Miller was out for over two years before the ruling.

These are not isolated cases. Palestine Legal, an organisation that tracks the suppression of pro-Palestinian advocacy in the United States, has documented a pattern of the IHRA definition being used to chill campus speech, cancel events, and target faculty.⁴³ In the United Kingdom, an Israeli Embassy official pressured the University of Manchester into changing the title of a talk that was critical of the Israeli government, invoking the IHRA definition as justification.⁴⁴ Luke Akehurst, a member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee and director of an organisation called We Believe in Israel, circulated an edited version of the definition to British local authorities — with the qualifying phrase “could, taking account of the overall context, include” quietly removed and replaced with “The guidelines highlight manifestations of antisemitism as including.” The conditional became categorical. The shield became a weapon.⁴⁵

Over one hundred organisations have asked the United Nations to reject the definition because, in their assessment, it “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.”⁴⁶

The mechanism is worth stating plainly because it is the mirror image of the counter-Islam network documented in “The Network.” The counter-Islam industry manufactures a threat — the spectre of Islamic infiltration, Sharia law, civilisational jihad — and uses it to justify policy against Muslims. The antisemitism exploitation apparatus manufactures a shield — the conflation of Israel with Jewishness — and uses it to prevent policy against Israel. One creates fear. The other prevents accountability. Both serve the same geopolitical project. And both harm the communities they claim to protect.

Jews who criticise Israel are labelled “self-hating.” I documented this in “The Greatest Antisemitism” — the erasure of Torah-observant anti-Zionist communities whose theological objections to the state predate its founding by centuries.⁴⁷ When rabbis whose lives are devoted to Torah study and who trace their scholarship through unbroken chains of transmission are dismissed as irrelevant because they refuse to pledge allegiance to a political project barely 130 years old, something deeply antisemitic has occurred. The IHRA definition was supposed to protect Jews from precisely this kind of silencing. Instead, it enables it — because the definition protects not Jews but a state, and any Jew who dissents from that state’s agenda becomes a target of the very machinery that was built in their name.

This is the second half of the industry. The first half manufactures enemies. The second half manufactures immunity. Together, they create a closed system in which Islam can be demonised without consequence and Israel can act without scrutiny — and anyone who objects to either arrangement is labelled a bigot.

Share

The Convergence

If the counter-Islam network and the antisemitism exploitation apparatus were separate operations serving separate interests, they would be troubling enough. They are not separate. They converge — in personnel, in funding, in institutional relationships, and in the direct involvement of the State of Israel. The evidence for this convergence is not inferential. It is documented. And no single figure illustrates it more clearly than Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

Yaxley-Lennon — known publicly as Tommy Robinson — is the founder of the English Defence League, a former member of the British National Party, and a man who has served five prison terms between 2005 and 2025, including for fraud and for libelling a fifteen-year-old Syrian refugee.⁴⁸ He is one of the most prominent anti-Muslim activists in Europe. His rallies draw thousands. His social media reach is enormous. Israeli flags are a regular presence at his marches.⁴⁹

Now follow the money and the institutional connections.

Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum — the same organisation documented earlier as a central node in the counter-Islam network, the same organisation that sent $1.24 million to Steven Emerson and $450,000 to MEMRI — bankrolled three demonstrations in London in Robinson’s defence.⁵⁰ The Gatestone Institute — the Israel-focused think tank also documented in “The Network” — published pieces defending him.⁵¹ David Horowitz — whose Freedom Center provided the platform where Katie Hopkins spoke in 2017 — called Robinson “a courageous Englishman who has risked his life to expose the rape epidemic of young girls conducted by Muslim gangs.”⁵² The Times of Israel reported these connections under the headline: “Why are US ‘pro-Israel’ groups boosting a far-right, anti-Muslim UK extremist?”⁵³ It was a fair question. The answer is that Robinson’s activism serves the same geopolitical project their funding supports.

And then came the invitation. In October 2025, Robinson arrived in Israel at the official invitation of Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli.⁵⁴ The visit was organised by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.⁵⁵ Robinson filmed himself at Ben Gurion Airport declaring he was there to “show solidarity with the Jewish people and the Israeli people.” He claimed — in direct contradiction of the evidence presented in the opening paragraphs of my previous article, “Jews in History” — that Israeli control keeps Christians safe in Jerusalem.⁵⁶

The Board of Deputies of British Jews condemned him. “Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and supporters of far-right extremist organisations like the English Defence League are not welcome at our community’s events,” they said.⁵⁷ The Zionist Federation said the same.⁵⁸ The mainstream Jewish community in Britain does not want this man speaking for them.

The Israeli government invited him anyway. Officially. Through a cabinet minister. Organised by the ruling party.

This is the convergence. An American think tank network — funded by foundations documented in Fear, Inc. — finances a British far-right street organiser. That organiser is then officially hosted by the government of Israel. The mainstream Jewish community in Britain says he is not their ally. The Israeli government says he is. The counter-Islam network and the Israeli state are not merely aligned. They are operationally connected. The money, the platforms, and the diplomatic engagement are documented.

Robinson is not alone. He is the most visible case, but the pattern is structural.

Richard Spencer — the white nationalist who led the Charlottesville march where men chanted “Jews will not replace us” — went on Israeli television in August 2017 and told the audience: “You could say that I am a white Zionist in the sense that I care about my people. I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.”⁵⁹ He later called Israel “the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state” and “the one that I turn to for guidance.”⁶⁰ When Israel passed its 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law — which conferred the right to national self-determination exclusively to the Jewish people — Spencer praised it: “Jews are, once again, at the vanguard, rethinking politics and sovereignty for the future, showing a path forward for Europeans.”⁶¹

Spencer is an antisemite. He is also a Zionist. These are not contradictions. They are the same position expressed in two directions. The ethno-nationalist who believes white people should have their own state and the ethno-nationalist who believes Jews should have their own state share a premise: that ethnic groups should be separated into territories, and that coexistence is impossible. Spencer recognises this. He is not being ironic when he calls himself a white Zionist. He is identifying a genuine structural kinship — one that the Haavara Agreement of 1933, documented in “The Greatest Antisemitism,” established long before Spencer was born.⁶²

When Spencer challenged a rabbi who confronted him at Texas A&M University — “Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel? Maybe all of the Middle East could go move into Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really want that?” — the rabbi had no answer.⁶³ He had no answer because the question exposes a contradiction that the IHRA definition was designed to conceal: if ethno-nationalism is wrong when white people do it, it is wrong when anyone does it. Spencer’s argument is repugnant. It is also, on its own terms, logically coherent. And that coherence is the most devastating indictment of the ethno-state model that Israel represents.

Katie Hopkins connects all three nodes. She speaks at Horowitz Freedom Center events in the United States.⁶⁴ She marches alongside Robinson in the United Kingdom.⁶⁵ She screens her documentary in Israel and declares it her “natural home.”⁶⁶ She works with the Center for Security Policy.⁶⁷ She is amplified by the president of the United States.⁶⁸ She is not a marginal figure who happens to appear in multiple contexts. She is a node in a transatlantic network that links American think tank money, British far-right street politics, and Israeli government engagement.

And then there is Brigitte Gabriel — the founder of ACT for America, the largest grassroots counter-Islam organisation in the United States, the woman who received the Menachem Begin Prize from the State of Israel in 2025.⁶⁹ Gabriel has described Israel as “the vanguard in the world’s fight against Islamic terrorism.”⁷⁰ Her executive director, Guy Rodgers, was formerly the National Field Director for the Christian Coalition of America — the same organisation documented in “Holy War” as a pillar of the evangelical-Israeli alliance.⁷¹ The counter-Islam network and the Christian Zionist movement share personnel. The personnel share funding. The funding serves a single geopolitical project.

The thesis of this section can now be stated plainly, because the evidence supports it: being anti-Islam is Israeli foreign policy playing out at the domestic level. The counter-Islam network does not exist independently of the geopolitical project it serves. Anti-Muslim sentiment in Western publics is not an organic cultural phenomenon. It is a cultivated product — manufactured by funded organisations, amplified by media figures with direct access to heads of state, defended by think tanks with documented ties to the Israeli government, and rewarded by that government with prizes and official invitations.

The think tanks mapped in “The Network” do not merely happen to align with Israeli strategic interests. They are, in documented cases, directly connected to Israeli government outreach, lobbying infrastructure, and diplomatic strategy. The hostility toward Islam that pervades American and British conservative culture is not a bug in the system. It is the system working as designed — manufacturing the domestic consent required for the foreign policy described in “Holy War.”

Who Benefits

Cui bono.

The foundations that funded the counter-Islam network spent over $119 million in documented revenue between 2008 and 2011 alone. One single donation — $18 million — put a propaganda film into 28 million American homes before a presidential election. The think tanks that received those funds produced the intellectual framework that became model legislation, that became state bills, that became a congressional caucus with fifty-seven members and growing. The media figures who amplified those talking points had direct access to the president of the United States — and used it. The IHRA definition, designed to identify hatred of Jews, was turned into a tool to suppress criticism of a state — and its own author says so. A professor lost his job for naming the connection between Zionism and anti-Muslim bigotry. A historian cancelled his own course rather than teach under a definition that criminalises honest description of Israeli policy. And a far-right street organiser with five criminal convictions was officially invited to Israel by a cabinet minister while the mainstream Jewish community in Britain said he does not speak for them.

None of this serves Jewish safety. Antisemitic incidents rise in direct correlation with Israeli military operations — a pattern documented by anti-Zionist Jewish organisations and acknowledged by researchers on both sides of the debate.⁷² The industry that claims to fight antisemitism generates it, because the conflation of Israel with Jewishness ensures that every act of Israeli violence produces a backlash against Jewish communities who had no part in the decision. The machinery does not protect Jews. It uses them.

None of this serves Muslim communities. The 3.5 million Muslims in the United States and the nearly four million in the United Kingdom live under a manufactured narrative that treats their faith as an ideology of conquest, their religious practice as evidence of infiltration, and their civil rights organisations as terrorist fronts. Forty-seven members of Congress thought that was a reasonable enough premise to found a caucus around. Fifty-seven now.

The people who benefit are not the communities named in the hatred. The beneficiaries are the defence contractors who need permanent enemies to justify permanent budgets. The surveillance firms that need permanent threats to justify permanent monitoring. The political actors who need civilisational conflict to sustain their relevance. And the governments — in Washington, in Jerusalem, and in the capitals of every country that has adopted the IHRA definition or passed anti-Sharia legislation — that use fear as a management tool.

This article has named the machinery. “Holy War” named the theology. “Just for Fun” named the illegality. “Jews in History” recovered the history that was erased. Together, these four articles document a single system: a system that captured American foreign policy for a theological agenda, launched an illegal war to advance it, inverted a thousand years of history to justify it, and built an industry to ensure that no one is allowed to say so without being called a bigot.

The industry does not fight hate. It farms it. And until we name the farmers — the foundations, the think tanks, the media amplifiers, the legislators, and the governments that profit from permanent civilisational conflict — we will never harvest anything but more of the same.

This is the fourth and final article in the Fireline Press series. “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy” documented the theological infrastructure. “Just for Fun: The War in Iran” documented the illegality. “Jews in History — Who Protected Whom” recovered the history. This article named the machinery.

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

Share

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

Endnotes

¹ James S. Coates, “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” Fireline Press, 18 March 2026.

² James S. Coates, “Just for Fun: The War in Iran — Parts I & II,” Fireline Press, 24 March 2026.

³ James S. Coates, “Jews in History — Who Protected Whom,” Fireline Press, [date TBC] 2026.

⁴ 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.

⁵ Ibid. The seven foundations identified were: Donors Capital Fund, Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Newton and Rochelle Becker Foundation, Russell Berrie Foundation, Anchorage Charitable Fund/William Rosenwald Family Fund, and Fairbrook Foundation.

⁶ Corey Saylor, “The U.S. Islamophobia Network: Its Funding and Impact,” Council on American-Islamic Relations, April 2014. The report documented $119,662,719 in total revenue for inner core organisations between 2008 and 2011. Note: the source reports use the term “Islamophobia.” This article uses “cultural racism against Muslims” and “counter-Islam bigotry” as more precise descriptions of the phenomenon. Where the source terminology appears, it reflects the language of the cited organisation, not the author’s.

⁷ Fear, Inc. (2011). The Donors Capital Fund’s contribution included an $18 million single donation in 2008, detailed later in this section.

⁸ Frank Gaffney founded the Center for Security Policy in 1988. The SPLC has described it as an anti-Muslim hate group. Gaffney has promoted the conspiracy theory that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the US government. See “Frank Gaffney,” Southern Poverty Law Center; “Center for Security Policy,” Islamophobia Network (islamophobianetwork.com).

⁹ ACT for America claims 2.8 million members as of 2024. See “Breathtaking Achievements,” ACT for America Substack, June 2024. Earlier claims of “five million” appear on Gabriel’s official biography page. The SPLC, BuzzFeed News, The Guardian, and the Center for American Progress have all described the organisation as anti-Muslim.

¹⁰ Southern Poverty Law Center designation of ACT for America. See also Center for American Progress, Fear, Inc. (2011).

¹¹ Brigitte Gabriel was awarded the Menachem Begin Prize in 2025 “in recognition of her significant contribution to the people and the State of Israel.” See actforamerica.org/aboutbrigitte.

¹² Saylor (2014): “Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum granted $1,242,000 over three years to Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism” and “between 2009 and 2011 MEF sent Yigal Carmon’s Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) $450,000.”

¹³ The David Horowitz Freedom Center has been described by the SPLC as specialising in “giving anti-Muslim voices and radical ideologies a platform to project hate and misinformation.” David Horowitz earned $488,953 in 2011. Saylor (2014).

¹⁴ The Gatestone Institute published “Swift Injustice: The Case of Tommy Robinson” in defence of the far-right British activist. See Times of Israel, “Why are US ‘pro-Israel’ groups boosting a far-right, anti-Muslim UK extremist?” 24 January 2019.

¹⁵ Anders Breivik cited Robert Spencer’s blog Jihad Watch 162 times in his 1,500-page manifesto before murdering 77 people in Norway on 22 July 2011. Fear, Inc. (2011).

¹⁶ Pamela Geller’s blog Atlas Shrugs was cited twelve times in Breivik’s manifesto. Fear, Inc. (2011).

¹⁷ Robert Spencer was banned from the United Kingdom in June 2013 alongside Geller, on the grounds that their presence was “not conducive to the public good.” SPLC, “Ann Coulter Cites White Nationalists, Anti-Muslim Activists and Other Racists in New Book,” 29 June 2015.

¹⁸ Coulter cites Robert Spencer in her book ¡Adios, America! (2015). She also cites VDARE, a white nationalist outlet, and Peter Brimelow, its founder. SPLC (2015).

¹⁹ David Yerushalmi drafted model anti-Sharia legislation that was introduced in multiple state legislatures through ACT for America’s grassroots network. See Fear, Inc. 2.0 (2015); “ACT for America,” Wikipedia.

²⁰ Frank Gaffney described ACT for America as a “force multiplier” for the anti-Sharia legislative agenda. Cited in The New York Times; see “ACT for America,” Wikipedia.

²¹ The Sharia Free America Caucus was founded on 18 December 2025 with forty-seven members from twenty-two states, co-founded by Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX). By 18 March 2026, Self announced the caucus had grown to fifty-seven members, with sixteen from Texas alone. See “Anti-Muslim Rhetoric from US Government Officials & Political Figures,” compiled by James S. Coates, March 2026; Rep. Keith Self (@RepKeithSelf), X post, 18 March 2026.

²² The caucus introduced seven bills including HR 4097, which would designate CAIR as a terrorist organisation. Ibid.

²³ CAIR designated the Sharia Free America Caucus an anti-Muslim hate group on 18 February 2026 — the first time in CAIR’s thirty-two-year history it designated a congressional caucus as an extremist organisation. Ibid.

²⁴ Coulter’s post-9/11 statement appeared in her column for National Review Online on 13 September 2001; she was subsequently fired. She doubled down in her book How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) (2004). “Ragheads” and “jihad monkeys”: see “Ann Coulter,” Islamophobia.org. “Car-burning cult”: Media Matters, “Coulter: Islam is ‘a car-burning cult,’” 8 February 2006. Frum’s comparison to Harriet Beecher Stowe: see “Ann Coulter,” Islamophobia.org.

²⁵ Coulter was one of only forty-five accounts Trump followed on X (formerly Twitter). See “Ann Coulter,” Islamophobia.org.

²⁶ SPLC, “Ann Coulter Cites White Nationalists, Anti-Muslim Activists and Other Racists in New Book,” 29 June 2015.

²⁷ Coulter shared anti-Muslim videos from Britain First, which Trump then retweeted in November 2017, provoking an international incident with the British government. See Haaretz, “Ann Coulter, Who First Tweeted Trump’s anti-Muslim Videos: Source and Credibility ‘Irrelevant,’” 30 November 2017.

²⁸ Hopkins tweeted “We need a final solution” on 23 May 2017, following the Manchester Arena bombing. She was fired from LBC. She called for internment camps on Fox News’ Fox & Friends in June 2017. She called refugees “cockroaches” in The Sun in 2015. She spoke at a Horowitz Freedom Center event in March 2017. She has worked with the Center for Security Policy. See “Katie Hopkins,” Wikipedia; Media Matters, “Trump keeps amplifying far-right racist Katie Hopkins,” 2019.

²⁹ Trump amplified Hopkins at least eleven times as president, including retweets calling Baltimore a “sh*thole” and attacking the “Mayor of Londonistan.” Media Matters (2019).

³⁰ Hopkins screened her documentary Homelands in Tel Aviv and stated: “It feels like Israel is kind of my natural home... It’s my ambition to be Jewish.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 22 July 2019.

³¹ Hopkins marched alongside Tommy Robinson in central London on 13 September 2025. See AFP photograph captioned in Times of Israel, 15 October 2025.

³² The Donors Capital Fund donated $18 million in 2008 to the Clarion Fund for distribution of the DVD “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” to 28 million swing-state voters. Fear, Inc. (2011).

³³ The Florida distributor’s description of the DVD as “the single most powerful piece of media” is cited in SPLC, “New Report Details Funding Sources Behind Anti-Muslim Fearmongers,” 2011.

³⁴ International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” adopted 26 May 2016, Bucharest. The full text and examples are available at holocaustremembrance.com. The US State Department adopted the definition and encouraged other governments and international organisations to do the same.

³⁵ Ibid. The eleven illustrative examples are presented as guidance: “Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to...” Seven of the eleven examples relate to Israel.

³⁶ The Nakba — the displacement of approximately 700,000–750,000 Palestinians during 1947–49 — is documented in endnote 73 of “Jews in History — Who Protected Whom” (Fireline Press). See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

³⁷ Kenneth S. Stern, “A Bad Deal: By Adopting the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, Universities Are Sacrificing Academic Freedom,” Knight First Amendment Institute, Columbia University. Stern wrote: “Many pro-Israel Jewish groups eventually weaponized the definition to suppress student speech and to go after faculty for what they said, materials included in their courses, and speakers they invited to campus.” See also The Nation, “How a Leading Definition of Antisemitism Has Been Weaponized Against Israel’s Critics,” 27 December 2023.

³⁸ The Antisemitism Awareness Act passed the US House of Representatives on 1 May 2024 by a vote of 320–91, mandating the use of the IHRA definition by the Department of Education in evaluating complaints of antisemitism on campuses. See “IHRA definition of antisemitism,” Wikipedia.

³⁹ Columbia University adopted the IHRA definition in 2025 as part of its settlement with the Trump administration. See “IHRA definition of antisemitism,” Wikipedia.

⁴⁰ Rashid Khalidi, then Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, cancelled his fall 2025 lecture course on the history of the modern Middle East. He stated the IHRA definition “deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews.” See “IHRA definition of antisemitism,” Wikipedia.

⁴¹ Miller v University of Bristol (Case No. 1400780/2022), Bristol Employment Tribunal, judgment delivered 5 February 2024. Regional Employment Judge Rohan Pirani. The unanimous 108-page judgment found Miller’s anti-Zionist beliefs qualified as a protected philosophical belief under Section 10 of the Equality Act 2010, that his dismissal constituted direct discrimination contrary to Section 13, and that he was unfairly and wrongfully dismissed. See judiciary.uk; Al Jazeera, “UK tribunal says academic discriminated against due to anti-Zionist beliefs,” 6 February 2024; Times Higher Education, “’Anti-Zionist’ Bristol professor unfairly dismissed, judge rules,” 6 February 2024.

⁴² Zillur Rahman, partner at Rahman Lowe and Miller’s legal representative, described the ruling as a “landmark case” that “marks a pivotal moment in the history of our country for those who believe in upholding the rights of Palestinians” and that “underscores the issue of weaponising antisemitism to stifle discussions on Zionism.” Al Jazeera (2024); Jewish Voice for Labour, “David Miller Verdict,” 5 February 2024.

⁴³ Palestine Legal documents the use of the IHRA definition to chill campus speech, providing examples from multiple universities. See Palestine Legal (2020); “What Is Wrong with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Definition of Antisemitism?” PMC/National Library of Medicine, 2022.

⁴⁴ Gayle (2017), cited in “What Is Wrong with the IHRA’s Definition of Antisemitism?” PMC (2022): Michael Freeman, Counsellor for Civil Society Affairs at the Embassy of Israel in the UK, pressured the University of Manchester into changing the title of a talk critical of the Israeli government, invoking the IHRA definition.

⁴⁵ Luke Akehurst, director of We Believe in Israel and member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, circulated an edited version of the IHRA definition to British local authorities. The qualifying phrase “could, taking account of the overall context, include” was replaced with “The guidelines highlight manifestations of antisemitism as including.” See Cushman (2017), cited in PMC (2022).

⁴⁶ Over 100 organisations asked the United Nations to reject the IHRA definition. The Nation, “How a Leading Definition of Antisemitism Has Been Weaponized Against Israel’s Critics,” 27 December 2023.

⁴⁷ James S. Coates, “The Greatest Antisemitism,” brjimc.com, 2026. The article documents the theological and ethical arguments of Torah-based Jewish anti-Zionism, including the erasure and delegitimisation of anti-Zionist Orthodox communities.

⁴⁸ Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) founded the English Defence League in 2009 and was previously a member of the British National Party. His convictions include fraud, assault, drug offences, and contempt of court. In 2021, he was found liable for libelling Jamal Hijazi, a fifteen-year-old Syrian refugee, and ordered to pay £100,000 in damages. See “Tommy Robinson (activist),” Wikipedia; Times of Israel, “Why are US ‘pro-Israel’ groups boosting a far-right, anti-Muslim UK extremist?” 24 January 2019.

⁴⁹ Israeli flags were prominently carried at Robinson’s London march on 13 September 2025, by both Jewish and non-Jewish supporters. See Jerusalem Post, “Tommy Robinson on Israel, the UK, and the Middle East,” 19 September 2025.

⁵⁰ Daniel Pipes confirmed that the Middle East Forum bankrolled three demonstrations in London defending Robinson. Pipes denied paying for Robinson’s legal defence but verified the demonstration funding. The Guardian reported the MEF connection; Pipes pushed back against allegations that Robinson is an anti-Muslim bigot. Times of Israel (2019).

⁵¹ The Gatestone Institute published “Swift Injustice: The Case of Tommy Robinson” in defence of Robinson. The piece’s author, Bruce Bawer, did not respond to requests for comment. Times of Israel (2019).

⁵² David Horowitz emailed The Guardian: “Tommy Robinson is a courageous Englishman who has risked his life to expose the rape epidemic of young girls conducted by Muslim gangs and covered up by your shameful government.” The SPLC has said Horowitz’s organisation specialises in “giving anti-Muslim voices and radical ideologies a platform.” Times of Israel (2019).

⁵³ Times of Israel, “Why are US ‘pro-Israel’ groups boosting a far-right, anti-Muslim UK extremist?” 24 January 2019.

⁵⁴ Robinson arrived in Israel in October 2025 at the official invitation of Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli. Times of Israel, “British anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson arrives in Israel,” 15 October 2025.

⁵⁵ The visit was described as “an official visit organized by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.” Jacobin, “It’s No Surprise That Tommy Robinson Loves Israel,” November 2025.

⁵⁶ Robinson claimed in Israel that Israeli control keeps Christians safe in Jerusalem. This claim is directly contradicted by the documented pattern of attacks on Christian clergy in Jerusalem detailed in “Jews in History — Who Protected Whom” (Fireline Press), endnotes 1–6, citing Haaretz, CBN News, the Rossing Centre, Middle East Eye, and the Armenian Weekly.

⁵⁷ Board of Deputies of British Jews: “Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) and supporters of far-right extremist organisations like the English Defence League are not welcome at our community’s events.” Middle East Monitor, 24 May 2021; repeated in multiple subsequent statements.

⁵⁸ The Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland also distanced itself from Robinson. Middle East Monitor (2021).

⁵⁹ Richard Spencer, interview with Channel 2 News (Israel), 16 August 2017. Reported by Times of Israel, Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and the Forward.

⁶⁰ Spencer described Israel as “the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state” at the University of Florida. See Foreign Policy In Focus, “Israel’s New Admirers: The White Nationalist Right,” 3 March 2021; MERIP, “The Old ‘New Anti-Semitism’ and Resurgent White Supremacy,” February 2018.

⁶¹ Spencer tweeted his praise of the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law: “I have great admiration for Israel’s nation-state law. Jews are, once again, at the vanguard, rethinking politics and sovereignty for the future, showing a path forward for Europeans.” Haaretz, “White Nationalist Richard Spencer Backs Israel’s Contentious Nation-state Law,” 22 July 2018.

⁶² The Haavara Agreement of 1933 — a formal arrangement between the Zionist Organisation and the Nazi regime to facilitate the transfer of German Jewish assets and emigration to Palestine — is documented in James S. Coates, “The Greatest Antisemitism,” brjimc.com, 2026. The structural alignment between ethnic separation movements is not a modern phenomenon.

⁶³ The exchange between Spencer and Rabbi Matt Rosenberg at Texas A&M University is documented in Current Affairs, “Why Israel Is Richard Spencer’s Favorite Argument,” November 2017; MERIP (2018).

⁶⁴ Hopkins spoke at a David Horowitz Freedom Center event in March 2017. See endnote 28.

⁶⁵ Hopkins marched alongside Robinson in central London on 13 September 2025. See endnote 31.

⁶⁶ Hopkins screened Homelands in Tel Aviv. See endnote 30.

⁶⁷ Hopkins has worked with the Center for Security Policy. See “Katie Hopkins,” Wikipedia.

⁶⁸ Trump amplified Hopkins at least eleven times as president. See endnote 29.

⁶⁹ Gabriel received the Menachem Begin Prize in 2025. See endnote 11.

⁷⁰ Gabriel described Israel as “the vanguard in the world’s fight against Islamic terrorism” at a conference sponsored by the UN Permanent Mission of Palau and the Aja Eze Foundation. See “Brigitte Gabriel,” Wikipedia.

⁷¹ Guy Rodgers, executive director of ACT for America, was formerly the National Field Director for the Christian Coalition of America in the 1990s. The Christian Coalition’s role in the evangelical-Israeli alliance is documented in James S. Coates, “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” Fireline Press, 18 March 2026. See “ACT for America,” Wikipedia.

⁷² The correlation between Israeli military operations and spikes in antisemitic incidents globally is documented by multiple sources. Anti-Zionist Jewish organisations, including those documented in “The Greatest Antisemitism” (brjimc.com, 2026), argue that Israel’s claim to speak for all Jews makes every Jewish person a potential target for backlash against Israeli state actions. The Community Security Trust’s own annual reports show spikes in UK antisemitic incidents during periods of Israeli military operations in Gaza.

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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, now named as Essa Suleiman of Camberwell, south London, walked through Golders Green in broad daylight with a knife and stabbed two Jewish men, aged 76 and 34. Earlier the same morning, he had attempted to murder a longtime Muslim friend, Ishmail Hussein, at Hussein's home in Southwark. He has since been charged with three counts of attempted murder. Scotland Yard has confirmed that Suleiman was referred to Prevent, the government's anti-extremism programme, in 2020, and that the case was closed the same year.⁴⁶ He did not flee. Hours later, at 15:21 BST, HAYI claimed Suleiman as one of their "lone wolves" — a man whose first attempted victim of the day was a Muslim he had known for twenty years. 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 first injuries came on 29 April 2026 — at the hands of a man whose first attempted victim of the day was his Muslim friend.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.

Share

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. ITV News, "Essa Suleiman appears in court charged with attempted murder after Golders Green attack," 1 May 2026.

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.

Share

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.

Share

“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.

Share

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

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.

Share

“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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

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

Share

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

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

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

Share

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

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

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

Share

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

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.

Share

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
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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

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

Share

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

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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