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

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

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

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

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

It would ask for exactly what Iran is asking for.

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

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

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

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

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

Iran has a past worth knowing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop attacking us.

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

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

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

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

Guarantee it won’t happen again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pay for the damage — because the dead have rights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone at the table, or nobody.

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

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

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

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

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

Recognise our sovereignty over Hormuz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not the first time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

¹⁶ Larijani killing: see endnote 7.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At thirty-six minutes past one on the morning of the twenty-third of March 2026, three masked figures approached the car park of the Machzike Hadath Synagogue on Highfield Road, Golders Green. They carried petrol. Security camera footage, later shared with media outlets worldwide, shows them dousing the vehicles methodically and without hesitation. Then they ran.

What they set on fire were ambulances.

Four ambulances belonging to Hatzola Northwest — a volunteer-led, free emergency medical service run by members of the Jewish community — erupted in flames outside the synagogue. Oxygen canisters on board exploded. Windows shattered in the adjacent block of flats. Thirty-four residents were evacuated into the March night. Six fire engines and forty firefighters responded. The blaze was brought under control by 03:06. No one was killed. But four of the organisation’s six ambulances were destroyed.¹

Hatzola is not a political organisation. It is not an arm of any government. The first Hatzola chapter in the United Kingdom was established in Stamford Hill in 1979. Hatzola Northwest — the unit whose ambulances were destroyed in Golders Green — handles over five thousand calls a year, with an average response time of under five minutes. It serves everyone, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, in a 2.5-mile radius of its base in northwest London. It is staffed entirely by volunteers, funded entirely by community donations, and receives no government money whatsoever. There are seven Hatzola chapters across the United Kingdom, with units in Manchester, Gateshead, Hertfordshire, and Canvey Island.²

The Metropolitan Police declared the attack an antisemitic hate crime. Counter-terrorism police took charge of the investigation. Three suspects are being sought. As of this writing, no arrests have been made.³

The question this article exists to answer is not who did this. The police will find that out, or they will not. The question is why. Why would anyone attack a volunteer ambulance service whose sole purpose is to save lives? If this attack was connected to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East — and while the investigation is in its earliest hours, the targeting of a Jewish institution suggests it may well have been — then a question demands answering: why would anyone destroy emergency medical equipment — equipment that might save a life tonight, any life, regardless of faith — and believe they had struck a blow for justice?

The answer is a lie. A lie told so often, reinforced so relentlessly, and defended so aggressively that it has become, for millions of people from every political persuasion and background, indistinguishable from the truth.

The lie is that the Jewish people and the State of Israel are the same thing.

They are not. And until that lie is dismantled — in law, in media, in the assumptions that people carry without examining — every Jewish institution in every country on earth will remain a proxy target for anger at a foreign government’s policies. A volunteer medic in Golders Green will be treated as though he bears personal responsibility for decisions made by politicians in Jerusalem. A community ambulance will be treated as a military asset. And the people who pay the price will be the ones who had nothing to do with it.

This is not the first time. Five months ago, on the morning of Yom Kippur — the holiest day in the Jewish calendar — a man drove a car into worshippers outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Manchester and attacked them with a knife. Two innocent men were killed: Melvin Cravitz, who was killed by the attacker, and Adrian Daulby, who was struck by police gunfire during the armed response. Three others were seriously injured. The attacker, who was shot dead by police, was wearing what appeared to be an explosive vest.⁴

The rabbi of that synagogue, Daniel Walker, said afterwards that the attacker had shouted as he stood on the steps looking through the window at the congregation: “They are killing our kids.” Rabbi Walker’s response captures the entire problem this article addresses: “The ridiculousness of suggesting that two of the nicest people you are ever going to meet would ever harm a fly, let alone kill anyone’s kids. But this accusation is on every Jew in the world, that we are somehow collectively killing kids.”⁵

Every Jew in the world. Collectively.

That is the conflation. That is the lie. And it is burning ambulances in Golders Green.

British Jews, British Institutions

The Jewish community in Britain is not a recent arrival. It is not a transplant from the Middle East. It is not an outpost of a foreign state. It is one of the oldest continuous minority communities in Western Europe, and its institutional life predates the State of Israel by centuries.

The London Beth Din — the rabbinical court of the United Synagogue — has functioned as the central religious authority for British Jewry since the early eighteenth century. It handles civil disputes, divorce, conversion, genealogical research, and the supervision of kashrut through the largest kosher certification organisation in Europe. The Sephardi Beth Din serves the UK’s Sephardi community with the same range of religious functions. The Manchester Beth Din and the Federation Beis Din operate independently alongside them. These are not shadow courts. They are religious arbitration bodies operating within and subject to British law, deriving their authority from the Arbitration Act 1996. Their rulings, where both parties have voluntarily agreed to be bound by them, are enforceable through the High Court — but the civil courts retain the right to intervene in any case where the award is considered unreasonable or contrary to public policy.⁶

This is what religious freedom looks like in a functioning democracy. A community maintains its own traditions of dispute resolution, its own dietary standards, its own processes for marriage and divorce — and does so within the framework of the law of the land, not in opposition to it.

Beyond the courts, British Jewish communal life is an ecosystem of institutions that exist for one purpose: the welfare of the community and its neighbours. Hatzola, whose ambulances were torched in Golders Green, is one example. Shomrim, the neighbourhood watch organisation that was among the first to condemn the arson attack, is another — a volunteer-run community safety group that works alongside and in cooperation with the Metropolitan Police. Jewish schools educate thousands of children across the country. Jewish welfare organisations, burial societies, and charitable foundations serve needs that have nothing to do with geopolitics and everything to do with the daily life of a religious community rooted in Britain.⁷

These institutions are not Israeli. They are not funded by Israel. They do not answer to Israel. Many of them predate the Zionist movement entirely, let alone the state it produced.

And yet they are targets.

The Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitic incidents and provides security for the Jewish community in Britain, recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents across the United Kingdom in 2025 — the second-highest annual total in its history, and more than double the 1,662 incidents recorded in 2022, before the current conflict in the Middle East began. Of those incidents, fifty-one per cent referenced or were linked to Israel, Gaza, the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, or the subsequent war. There were 1,766 incidents showing explicitly anti-Zionist motivation — instances where the terms “Zionism” or “Zionist” were used as euphemisms for “Jew” and “Jewish,” or in conjunction with other antisemitic abuse. For the first time in the CST’s history, over two hundred incidents of anti-Jewish hate were recorded in every single calendar month.⁸

The pattern is unmistakable. When the Israeli government acts, British Jews pay the price. When Israeli forces conduct military operations in Gaza, antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom spike. When the conflict dominates the news cycle, Jewish children in British schools face harassment. When politicians in Jerusalem make inflammatory statements, synagogues in Manchester and London are vandalised, threatened, and now burned.

The Yom Kippur attack in Manchester — in which Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby were killed at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue on 2 October 2025 — was the first fatal antisemitic terrorist attack on British soil since the CST began monitoring incidents in 1984. Greater Manchester Police reported that antisemitic hate crime tripled in the three weeks that followed.⁹

And now Golders Green. Ambulances. Volunteer ambulances that save lives regardless of faith, burned to shells outside a synagogue, because someone could not — or would not — distinguish between a Jewish community and a Jewish state.

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What Is a Jew?

To understand how the conflation works, it helps to understand why it works so well. And that requires engaging — carefully, respectfully, and honestly — with a question that has no clean answer: what, exactly, is a Jew?

This is not an idle question, and it is not asked here to provoke. It is asked because the conflation of Israel with the Jewish people depends entirely on the ambiguity of Jewish identity, and anyone who wants to dismantle the conflation must first understand the ambiguity it exploits.

Rabbi Morris N. Kertzer, in his widely respected introduction to Judaism, What Is a Jew?, opens with a disarmingly honest admission: “It is difficult to find a single definition of a Jew.” He then proceeds to offer not one definition but five. A Jew is one who accepts the faith of Judaism — the religious definition. A Jew is one who seeks a spiritual base in study, prayer, and daily routine dedicated to Jewish wisdom — the spiritual definition. A Jew is one who, without formal religious affiliation, regards the ethics, folkways, and literature of Judaism as his or her own — the cultural definition. A Jew may also be understood through an ethnic definition — though Kertzer notes that this definition is, in his words, “going the way of the dinosaur,” as the Jewish community increasingly includes converts and those raised with no ethnic identity in particular. And Judaism has been called a civilisation — a people linked by a common history, a common language of prayer, a vast literature, and above all a sense of common destiny. In this sense, Jews are a people, not in the national or racial sense, but in a feeling of oneness.¹⁰

Five definitions. None of them complete on its own. All of them true simultaneously. And — this is the point that matters for this article — none of them mention a state.

Kertzer is equally clear about what a Jew is not. Jews are not a race. Their history reveals, as he puts it, countless additions through marriage and conversion. There are Jews of every physical appearance, from every continent. There are black African Jews from Ethiopia, Chinese Jews from Kaifeng, Jewish communities across the Indian subcontinent. Nor are Jews a nation in the modern sense. Jewish, Muslim, and Christian citizens of Israel do constitute a nation, Kertzer acknowledges — but there are no national ties that unite all Jews throughout the world. Jews, he writes, are part and parcel of every community in which they live.¹¹

And no one speaks for all of them. Kertzer devotes an entire chapter to this point. There is no Jewish pope. No single authoritative body to which all Jews owe allegiance. Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Orthodox Jews all maintain their own synagogues and rabbinic organisations. Each congregation does what it thinks best. There is wide diversity within all synagogue groups, and no element of compulsion. The old expression captures it: “Where you find two Jews, you find three opinions.”¹²

I have a personal encounter with this complexity. Years ago, before my conversion to Islam, I attended Jewish conversion classes. I did not complete them — I needed to resolve the question of Jesus as Messiah first, and that journey led me elsewhere. But during those classes, the rabbi explained something that has stayed with me. He told me that if I completed the conversion, I would have rights as a Jew. But without a Jewish mother, I would not be considered Jewish in the fullest halakhic sense — though my children would be.¹³

I later discovered, through maternal DNA testing, that I am three per cent Ashkenazi Jewish by ancestry. That means somewhere on my mother’s side, a third to fifth great-grandparent was Jewish. By the ethnic definition, I carry Jewish heritage. By the religious definition, I am not Jewish and never was. The two frameworks do not agree, and they were never designed to. Jewish identity was not constructed to be legible to outsiders. It was constructed to maintain a covenant community across millennia of displacement, and it did so with extraordinary success — precisely because it could not be reduced to a single category.

This complexity is not a weakness. It is the defining feature of one of the most resilient identity structures in human history. But it is also the crack through which the conflation enters.

If Jewishness were purely religious, then criticism of the State of Israel would obviously be a political matter — no more connected to Jewish identity than criticism of Saudi Arabia is connected to Islam. If Jewishness were purely ethnic, then Israel’s religious claims to the land would be irrelevant, and the state would be judged as any other state is judged: by its actions. It is the fact that Jewish identity is both — and neither cleanly — that allows the conflation to operate. The ambiguity creates a space in which political criticism can be reframed as ethnic hatred, and ethnic hatred can disguise itself as political criticism. Both the defenders of Israel and its most vicious opponents exploit the same confusion. The Israeli government says: to criticise us is to attack the Jewish people. The antisemite says: the Jewish people are responsible for what Israel does. Both claims rest on the same false premise — that Israel and the Jewish people are one and the same.¹⁴

They are not. And the people who most urgently need that distinction to be made are Jewish people themselves — the ones who are being attacked in Manchester and Golders Green for a conflation they never asked for and many actively reject.

A hostile reader might object at this point: but most Jews do support Israel. Doesn’t that make the conflation natural, even if imprecise?

It does not. And the evidence comes from within the Jewish community itself.

Kertzer addresses this directly. “Almost all Jews in North America are Zionists,” he writes, “in the sense that we all support the right of Jews to have a Jewish state, even though we continue to consider ourselves an integral part of the lands in which we live.” That last clause is the one that matters. Supporting the right of a state to exist is not the same as being represented by its government. Kertzer himself acknowledges that official Israeli government policy sometimes falls short of Jewish ethical expectations, “at which time Jews may object to the Israeli government, much as Americans protested during the Vietnam War.” The analogy is precise: an American who protested the Vietnam War was not anti-American. A Jew who objects to Israeli government policy is not anti-Jewish. And neither is represented by the government they are criticising.¹⁵

Contemporary polling confirms what Kertzer observed. A 2024 J Street survey of American Jewish voters found that ninety per cent believe someone can criticise Israeli government policies and still be pro-Israel. Sixty-eight per cent disapprove of Prime Minister Netanyahu. A 2025 Washington Post poll found that sixty-one per cent of American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza — and yet seventy-six per cent still say Israel’s existence is vital to the long-term future of the Jewish people. These are not people who have abandoned Israel. Whether Israel deserves that loyalty given its conduct — a question I have addressed at length elsewhere — is not the point here. The point is that even among those who extend it, the conflation is rejected. They are people who refuse to let a government speak for them — who insist, as Kertzer insisted, that supporting a state and being represented by its leaders are entirely different things.¹⁶

The conflation does not survive contact with what Jewish people actually think. It survives only in the minds of those who have never asked them.

The Machinery of Conflation

The conflation of Israel with the Jewish people did not arise organically. It was built. It is maintained by specific mechanisms, operated by identifiable actors, and it serves identifiable interests. Understanding those mechanisms is essential to dismantling them.

The first mechanism is Israel’s claim to speak for all Jews everywhere.

In February 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “I went to Paris not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a representative of the entire Jewish people.” On 1 March 2015, preparing to address the United States Congress, he repeated the claim: “I feel that I am an emissary of the entire Jewish people.”¹⁷

The response from Jewish leaders was immediate and sharp. Senator Dianne Feinstein, herself Jewish, called the claim “arrogant” and said flatly: “He doesn’t speak for me.” The editors of The Forward, one of America’s oldest Jewish publications, wrote: “We’ve learned to find vitality and sustenance in a dynamic pluralism that resists centralisation… We wouldn’t presume to speak for all Jews. Neither should anyone else.” J Street, a liberal pro-Israel lobbying group, publicly contested the claim. Jewish members of the United States Congress boycotted the speech.¹⁸

What makes this claim extraordinary is that it contradicts Israel’s own founding commitment. In 1950, in the Ben-Gurion–Blaustein Agreement between Israel’s first Prime Minister and the president of the American Jewish Committee, David Ben-Gurion stated “without any reservation, that the State of Israel represents and speaks only on behalf of its own citizens and in no way presumes to represent or speak in the name of the Jews who are citizens of any other country.”¹⁹

That agreement was not a casual remark. It was a formal diplomatic understanding, negotiated precisely because American Jewish leaders were alarmed at the suggestion that a new foreign state might claim authority over their identity. Ben-Gurion understood the danger and disavowed it explicitly. Netanyahu reversed that disavowal. In doing so, he did not merely make a political claim. He asserted ownership over an identity that — as Rabbi Kertzer’s own analysis makes clear — has no single owner, no pope, no central authority. And he made every Jew on earth a potential proxy for his government’s actions.

The second mechanism is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

The IHRA definition, adopted in 2016 and since endorsed by dozens of governments and hundreds of institutions, defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” So far, unremarkable. But the definition is accompanied by eleven illustrative examples, seven of which relate to Israel. Among them: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.” And: “Applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” And: “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”²⁰

Read that last example again. The IHRA definition lists, as an example of antisemitism, the act of holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the State of Israel. On this point, the definition is correct — it is antisemitic to hold Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions. But the definition simultaneously creates the conceptual framework in which that collective responsibility becomes almost inevitable, because it treats the state and the people as so deeply intertwined that criticism of one is presumptively an attack on the other.

The definition includes a caveat: “Criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” But in practice, as over a hundred human rights and civil liberties organisations — including Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union — warned in a letter urging the United Nations not to adopt the definition, “the IHRA definition has often been used to wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and thus chill and sometimes suppress, non-violent protest, activism and speech critical of Israel and/or Zionism.” Even Kenneth Stern, the American Jewish Committee lawyer who was the principal drafter of the original text, has publicly objected to its institutional adoption, saying it was designed as a data-collection tool, not a speech code.²¹

The effect is circular. The definition says it is antisemitic to hold Jews responsible for Israel’s actions — but the broader framework of the definition treats Israel and the Jewish people as so deeply connected that separating them becomes an act requiring justification. The conflation is embedded in the very instrument designed to combat the hatred that the conflation produces.

The third mechanism is Christian Zionism — a force that reinforces the conflation from outside the Jewish community entirely.

This article is not the place to rehearse in full the history of the evangelical movement’s embrace of the State of Israel; I have documented it at length in “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy.”²² But the essential point bears repeating here. Evangelical theology — the theology that drives Christians United for Israel (with over ten million members), that shapes Republican foreign policy, that told American troops God anointed their president to trigger Armageddon in Iran — cannot distinguish between Jews and Israel. In its eschatological framework, they are literally the same thing. The Jewish people are prophetic instruments. The State of Israel is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy. To criticise Israel is to oppose God’s plan. To support Israel is to hasten the Second Coming — after which, in the theology’s own terms, Jews will convert or be destroyed.

Christian Zionists do not conflate Israel with the Jewish people out of ignorance. They do it because their theology requires it. And they are the most powerful external force maintaining the conflation in the Western world.

These three mechanisms — Israel’s claim to speak for all Jews, the IHRA definition’s embedding of the conflation into the language of anti-hatred policy, and Christian Zionism’s theological inability to separate a people from a state — operate together. They create a world in which a volunteer medic in Golders Green and a politician in Jerusalem are, in the minds of millions, the same thing. And when anger at the politician’s decisions reaches a certain temperature, it is the medic’s ambulance that burns.

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The Consequences

Numbers tell part of the story. The Community Security Trust’s 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025 are not an abstraction. They are 3,700 moments in which a Jewish person in Britain was harassed, threatened, assaulted, or had their property damaged because they were Jewish. They are 3,700 instances in which the conflation crossed the threshold from bad theory into lived experience.²³

But the numbers do not capture the texture of what this means for a community.

It means Jewish children walking to school past security guards. It means synagogues that cannot operate without bollards, CCTV, and community volunteers trained in threat assessment. It means a Jewish student on a university campus being asked to explain — or apologise for — the actions of a government she may never have voted for, in a country she may never have visited, on the basis of nothing more than her identity. It means a Jewish family in Golders Green waking to the sound of oxygen canisters exploding and the smell of burning ambulances drifting through their windows.

It means, in the words of one Golders Green resident who could smell the smoke from his living room: “It’s a terrible, terrible act what happened… Why is it happening to us? We’re living in scary times.”²⁴

The CST’s data reveals a direct and measurable correlation. Fifty-one per cent of the antisemitic incidents recorded in 2025 referenced or were linked to Israel, Gaza, the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, or the subsequent war. The worst month was October 2025, with 463 incidents — sixty-three per cent higher than September’s figure — driven in part by the aftermath of the Yom Kippur attack in Manchester. When Jewish communities are perceived to be vulnerable, antisemites exploit that perception. When the conflict in the Middle East intensifies, the violence follows British Jews home.²⁵

The Yom Kippur attack deserves particular attention, because it illustrates the conflation in its most lethal form. On the morning of 2 October 2025, a man drove his car into worshippers arriving at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Manchester and attacked them with a knife. Two men — Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby — were killed. Three others were seriously injured. The attacker, Jihad al-Shamie, a thirty-five-year-old British citizen born in Syria, was shot dead by police. He had been wearing what appeared to be an explosive vest, later determined to be fake.²⁶

As the attacker stood on the synagogue steps, looking through the window at the congregation inside, he shouted: “They are killing our kids.”

They. Not the Israeli government. Not the IDF. Not a named politician or a specific policy. They. The people inside a synagogue in north Manchester, gathered to observe the holiest day of their calendar — a day devoted to atonement, fasting, and prayer. In the attacker’s mind, those worshippers were not Melvin Cravitz, a man whose bravery saved lives, or Adrian Daulby, a man described by those who knew him in terms of profound affection. They were they. The Jews. The ones who are killing kids. Collectively responsible. Interchangeable with a state.²⁷

That is what the conflation produces. Not just statistics. Not just policy debates. Dead people. In Manchester. In Golders Green. In the communities where Jewish families have lived for generations, practised their faith, raised their children, and served their neighbours — and are now being made to pay for the actions of a government that does not represent them, in a conflict they did not start, on the basis of an identity they share with a state only in the minds of those who cannot or will not see the difference.

The Double Standard

There is another community in Britain that knows what it looks like when religious institutions are reframed as outposts of a foreign threat. I know this because I am part of it.

British Muslim communities operate religious institutions within the British legal framework in ways that closely parallel the structures just described. Sharia councils handle marriage, divorce, and inheritance matters in an advisory capacity, subject to British law — just as the Beth Din does. Muslim welfare organisations, schools, community centres, and charitable foundations serve the daily needs of a religious community rooted in Britain — just as their Jewish counterparts do. Muslim volunteer networks provide services to their neighbours regardless of faith — just as Hatzola does.

And these institutions are routinely treated — not as expressions of a religious community’s life in the country where it lives, but as evidence of divided loyalty, foreign infiltration, or civilisational subversion. Sharia councils are presented in tabloid headlines as parallel legal systems threatening British sovereignty. Muslim schools are subjected to suspicion that would never attach to a Jewish or Christian school operating under identical legal frameworks. The word “mosque” carries, for a significant portion of the British public, connotations of extremism that the word “synagogue” does not — though both are simply houses of worship where communities gather to pray.²⁸

The mechanism is identical. A religious community’s institutions are reframed as arms of a foreign enemy. For Jews, the foreign enemy is Israel — and the reframing turns synagogues into targets. For Muslims, the foreign enemy is variously ISIS, Iran, al-Qaida, or an imagined global caliphate — and the reframing turns mosques into suspects. In both cases, the people who suffer are British citizens practising their faith in their own country, being held responsible for the actions of actors and governments they have no connection to and no control over.

The Peacehaven mosque arson — which occurred just two days after the Manchester synagogue attack in October 2025 — illustrates the symmetry with grim precision. When Jewish communities are attacked, Muslim communities are attacked in retaliation, and vice versa. The conflation operates in both directions, and both communities bleed.²⁹

This is not a competition between communities. It is not an attempt to centre Muslim experience in an article about Jewish suffering. It is a statement of structural fact: the conflation of a religious community with a foreign state or political movement is the same error, producing the same consequences, regardless of which community it targets. And the people who maintain these conflations — whether they are antisemites who cannot distinguish a Jew from the Israeli government, or counter-Islam activists who cannot distinguish a Muslim from a terrorist — are often drawing from the same intellectual well. The counter-Islam network documented in my forthcoming article, “Antisemitism and Counter-Islamism: The Industry,” overlaps significantly with the machinery that maintains the Israel-equals-Jews equation, because both conflations serve the same political interests.³⁰

The principle at stake is simple, even if its application is contested: a religious community has the right to maintain its own institutions, its own traditions of worship, its own processes for resolving internal disputes according to its own laws — within the framework of the law of the land, not in opposition to it. The Beth Din operates this way. Sharia councils operate this way. Neither is a threat to British sovereignty. Both are expressions of the same principle: that religious freedom means the freedom to live as a community, not merely to believe as an individual.

When that principle is violated — when a community’s institutions are treated as evidence of disloyalty rather than expressions of belonging — the result is what we see in the CST’s statistics, in the charred ambulances of Golders Green, in the blood on the steps of a Manchester synagogue, and in the suspicious glances directed at every mosque in the country after an attack carried out by someone who happened to share a faith with a billion other people.

The conflation is the common enemy. And it will not be defeated by either community alone.

Back to Golders Green

Hatzola Northwest’s ambulances will be replaced. The community has already said so. Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said it plainly: “The UK Jewish community will meet the moment with strength, pride and resolve. We will replace the ambulances and continue our service to this nation that we love. We shall not be moved.” Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis called the arson “a particularly sickening assault — not only on the Jewish community, but on the values we share as a society.”³¹

The ambulances will be replaced. The volunteers will go back to work. The next time someone in Golders Green has a heart attack, or a child breaks a bone, or an elderly person falls — Hatzola will respond, as it has for nearly half a century, regardless of the patient’s faith, regardless of whatever political fury is burning through the news cycle that week. That is what they do. It is who they are.

But resilience is not a solution. Replacing burnt ambulances does not address the lie that made them a target. And the lie will keep producing the same results — in Golders Green, in Manchester, in Paris, in Brooklyn, in Melbourne — until it is confronted directly and dismantled systematically.

The lie is that Israel speaks for all Jews. It does not. Israel’s own founding prime minister said so.

The lie is that Jewish identity is inseparable from the State of Israel. It is not. Jewish identity — religious, spiritual, cultural, ethnic, civilisational — predates the state by millennia and will outlast it, whatever its future holds. Rabbi Kertzer’s five definitions do not include “citizen of Israel.” The old expression — “Where you find two Jews, you find three opinions” — does not add “unless the topic is Israeli foreign policy, in which case they all agree.” The diversity is the tradition. The tradition is not a state.

The lie is that criticising Israel is the same as hating Jews. It is not. The IHRA definition itself says so, even as its structure makes the distinction almost impossible to maintain in practice. And the people who most urgently need that distinction to hold are not the critics of Israel. They are the Jewish families in Golders Green and Manchester and every other community in this country who are being made to pay for a conflation they never endorsed.

I write this as a Muslim, as a British citizen, as someone who attended Jewish conversion classes before his own faith journey led him elsewhere, as someone who carries Ashkenazi ancestry in his DNA and one hundred per cent certainty that the people who burned those ambulances are the enemies of everything both our traditions hold sacred. I write it because the same mechanism that turns a Jew into a proxy for Israel turns a Muslim into a proxy for ISIS, and both conflations are sustained by people who profit from the confusion and have no intention of clearing it up.

The untangling is not anti-Jewish. It is the most pro-Jewish thing anyone can do. It is the insistence that a Jewish volunteer medic in Golders Green is not responsible for the actions of a government in Jerusalem. That a Beth Din in London is not an outpost of the Knesset. That Hatzola is not the IDF. That a community’s ambulances are sacred — not because of whose Star of David is painted on the side, but because they save lives, and saving lives is what both our traditions call us to do.

They are not the same. And until we stop pretending they are, the people who pay the price will be the ones who had nothing to do with it.

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

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

Endnotes

¹ Metropolitan Police statement, 23 March 2026; CNN, “Jewish volunteer ambulances set on fire outside London synagogue in antisemitic attack,” 23 March 2026; Jewish News, “Jewish community responds to Golders Green Hatzola arson attack,” 23 March 2026.

² Hatzola Northwest, hatzolanw.org; Hatzola (Stamford Hill), hatzola.org; Hatzola Manchester, hatzolamanchester.org; Gateshead Hatzola, hatzola.org.uk.

³ Detective Chief Superintendent Luke Williams, Metropolitan Police oral statement, 23 March 2026.

⁴ “Manchester synagogue attack,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, statement to Parliament, 13 October 2025; Counter Terrorism Policing, updates on Manchester attack investigation.

⁵ Rabbi Daniel Walker, quoted in Times of Israel, “’Shut the doors!’: Manchester survivors describe chaos of deadly Yom Kippur terror attack,” 21 October 2025.

⁶ London Beth Din, bethdin.org.uk; “London Beth Din,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Sephardi Beth Din, sephardi.org.uk; Manchester Beth Din, mbd.org.uk; Federation Beis Din, federation.org.uk; Arbitration Act 1996; “Use of the Beth Din as a Forum for Determining Civil Disputes,” Barrister Magazine, 20 June 2023.

⁷ Hatzola Northwest, hatzolanw.org; Shomrim, statement on X, 23 March 2026; Jewish News, “Jewish community responds to Golders Green Hatzola arson attack,” 23 March 2026.

⁸ Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025, published 11 February 2026.

⁹ “Manchester synagogue attack,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Counter Terrorism Policing, Manchester attack updates; Greater Manchester Police statements, October 2025.

¹⁰ Rabbi Morris N. Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, revised edition (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster), Chapter 1: “What Is a Jew?”, pp. 7–8.

¹¹ Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, pp. 8–9. On Jews not being a race or a nation: “The Jews are not a race. Our history reveals countless additions to our numbers through marriage and conversion.” And: “It would be equally misleading to speak of the Jews as a nation, though in antiquity they were… But there are no national ties that unite all Jews throughout the world. Jews are part and parcel of every community in which we live.”

¹² Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, Chapter 12: “Who Speaks with Authority for the Jews?”, p. 28.

¹³ Personal account of the author. For the broader context of this period, see Will Prentiss, God and Country (memoir).

¹⁴ For a comprehensive treatment of how the conflation operates theologically and politically, see James S. Coates, “The Greatest Antisemitism: How Zionism Betrays Judaism, Endangers Jews, and Dehumanises Semitic Peoples,” Fireline Press, 2026.

¹⁵ Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, Chapter 11: “What Are Zionists?”, pp. 26–27.

¹⁶ J Street, “Jewish Voters Reject Trump and Republicans, Support Diplomacy, Oppose Netanyahu Government Policies,” election survey conducted by GBAO Strategies, 30 October – 5 November 2024; Washington Post, survey of 815 American Jewish respondents, 2–9 September 2025, published 4 October 2025.

¹⁷ Netanyahu’s February 2015 statement: “I went to Paris not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a representative of the entire Jewish people,” reported in Washington Post, 12 February 2015. His 1 March 2015 statement: “I feel that I am an emissary of the entire Jewish people,” reported in Washington Times, 2 March 2015.

¹⁸ Senator Dianne Feinstein, CNN’s State of the Union, 1 March 2015; The Forward, “Who Speaks for the Jews?”, 11 February 2015; J Street public statement, February 2015. See also: “Benjamin Netanyahu’s Claim to Speak for All Jews Is Disputed, Characterized As ‘Arrogant,’” The American Council for Judaism; Times of Israel, “Sen. Feinstein pans Netanyahu over claim to speak for all Jews,” 1 March 2015.

¹⁹ The Ben-Gurion–Blaustein Agreement, 1950. Cited in Shmuel Rosner, “Does Netanyahu represent ‘the entire Jewish people’?”, Jewish Journal, 2015.

²⁰ International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” adopted 26 May 2016, holocaustremembrance.com; also available at the United States Department of State, “Defining Antisemitism,” state.gov.

²¹ Human Rights Watch et al., letter to the United Nations, 4 April 2023, signed by 104 human rights and civil society organisations including the ACLU. On Kenneth Stern’s objections to institutional adoption of the definition he drafted: see “IHRA definition of antisemitism,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026), with multiple sourced references to Stern’s public statements.

²² James S. Coates, “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” Fireline Press, 2026.

²³ Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025, published 11 February 2026.

²⁴ Gedale Weinberg, quoted in CNN, “Jewish volunteer ambulances set on fire outside London synagogue in antisemitic attack,” 23 March 2026.

²⁵ CST, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025: “The worst month was October, with 463 antisemitic incidents reported, the fifth highest monthly total ever logged by CST and 63% higher than September’s figure.”

²⁶ “Manchester synagogue attack,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, statement to Parliament, 13 October 2025; Counter Terrorism Policing, Manchester attack updates.

²⁷ Rabbi Daniel Walker, quoted in Times of Israel, “’Shut the doors!’: Manchester survivors describe chaos of deadly Yom Kippur terror attack,” 21 October 2025. Walker reflected: “The ridiculousness of suggesting that two of the nicest people you are ever going to meet would ever harm a fly, let alone kill anyone’s kids. But this accusation is on every Jew in the world, that we are somehow collectively killing kids.”

²⁸ For a detailed examination of how Jewish courts work within UK law, and the parallels with other religious arbitration bodies, see “The Beth Din: Jewish Law in the UK,” Centre for Social Cohesion / Henry Jackson Society. The Arbitration Act 1996 provides the legal framework under which both the Beth Din and Sharia councils operate.

²⁹ “Peacehaven mosque arson,” referenced in the Wikipedia article on the Manchester synagogue attack (accessed 23 March 2026). The arson attack on the Peacehaven mosque occurred on 4 October 2025, two days after the Yom Kippur attack in Manchester.

³⁰ James S. Coates, “Antisemitism and Counter-Islamism: The Industry,” Fireline Press, forthcoming April 2026.

³¹ Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, statement to CNN, 23 March 2026; Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, statement on X, 23 March 2026.

The commander, the NCO wrote, “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.” The commander told the room that President Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”¹

He had a big grin on his face when he said it.²

The NCO described the commander as a “Christian First” supporter — someone whose religious identity had always been conspicuous but who had never before crossed this particular line. The briefing shocked troops in attendance. The NCO was writing on behalf of sixteen service members: eleven Christians, one Muslim, one Jew, and three whose faith was not specified.³ They were not objecting to Christianity. They were objecting to being told, in an official military briefing, that their war was a holy one.

They were not alone. By the following evening, the MRFF had received more than 110 similar complaints. Within days, the number exceeded 200. The complaints came from every branch of the military — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force — spanning more than 40 units across at least 30 installations.⁴ Mikey Weinstein, the MRFF’s founder and a former Air Force officer, described the phenomenon as “unrestricted euphoria” among commanders who believed that the bombing of Iran represented the fulfilment of Christian prophecy.⁵

This was not one rogue officer having a bad morning. This was a pattern. And patterns do not emerge from nowhere.

To understand how a United States military officer could stand in front of his troops in 2026 and tell them — with a grin — that their president was divinely anointed to trigger the apocalypse, you have to understand the infrastructure that made that moment possible. You have to trace the theology, the money, the political alliances, and the decades of deliberate cultivation that turned a fringe eschatological belief into the operating system of American foreign policy.

That infrastructure has a name. Several names, actually. But the one that matters most is the one its architects would use themselves: Christian Zionism.

This is the story of how it captured the Pentagon.

1. The Pentagon’s Prayer Room

A note on sourcing before we proceed. The MRFF complaints are anonymised to protect service members from retaliation. No audio or video recordings of the briefings have surfaced. Snopes, in its investigation, left the claim “unrated” for this reason.⁶ What we do have is over 200 complaints from more than 40 units across 30 installations in every branch of the military, logged by an organisation with two decades of documented work on religious freedom in the armed forces. We have the specific, detailed language of the NCO’s email. And we have a context — a chain of events at the highest levels of the Department of Defense — that makes these complaints not just plausible but predictable.

That context begins with a prayer service.

In May 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held the first of what would become monthly Christian worship services in the Pentagon’s auditorium. The services were broadcast live on the Department’s internal television network.⁷ They were described as voluntary. Military.com reported that service members and defence contractors had raised concerns about feeling pressured to attend, with one contractor describing the services as “inherently discriminatory” because they provided Christians an opportunity to get face time with senior leadership that members of other faiths were denied. A retired Air Force brigadier general, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisal, told the outlet that contrary to the Pentagon’s assurances, roll call does take place — and that attendance functions as “a litmus-loyalty test for who’s in and who’s out,” with consequences for annual performance reports, promotion recommendations, and contract reviews.⁸ Mikey Weinstein of the MRFF put it more bluntly: service members were being “voluntold.”⁹

None of this surprises me. I worked with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations as an operative on their Joint Drug Enforcement Team, and I worked on base as a civilian for a number of years. I have had many officers and enlisted friends in my employment and social circles, and family members who have served across multiple branches. I know how signals travel down a chain of command, and how the boss’s preferences become the unit’s priorities. What the Pentagon calls voluntary, the rank and file experience as an expectation.

The first service was led by Brooks Potteiger, pastor of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship in Tennessee — Hegseth’s own church, and a congregation affiliated with Doug Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.¹⁰ That detail matters: Wilson’s theological network was not introduced to the Pentagon as a later escalation. It was there from the first day. Subsequent services featured Southern Baptist pastors — Chris Durkin of Colts Neck Community Church in New Jersey, who had spurred Hegseth’s renewed interest in Christianity; Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington; Garrett Kell of Del Ray Baptist Church in Virginia.¹⁰ Conservative, but within the broad mainstream of American Protestantism. What came next was not.

On February 17, 2026, Hegseth invited Doug Wilson to lead the Pentagon’s monthly worship service. Wilson is the founder of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and the co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches — a network of over 150 churches internationally.¹¹ He runs Canon Press, a publishing house with national reach, and helped build the Association of Classical Christian Schools, a network of nearly 475 schools.¹² He is, in other words, not a fringe pastor shouting into a webcam. He is an institution builder with a decades-long project and a growing sphere of influence.

His beliefs are worth stating plainly, because they are not hidden. Wilson has publicly argued that women should not have the right to vote and should submit to their husbands.¹³ Women are barred from leadership positions in his church and cannot vote in congregational decisions. He believes homosexuality should be a crime. He has described Christian enslavers in the American South as being on “firm scriptural ground” — a position that multiple outlets, including Word & Way and Religion Unplugged, have characterised not as neutral historical observation but as an approving defence of the institution.¹⁴ He advocates for a Christian theocracy in which non-Christians — explicitly including Muslims — would be barred from public worship and public office, and in which the Apostle’s Creed would be incorporated into the United States Constitution.¹⁵ He opened a church in Washington, D.C. in 2025, telling reporters it was part of his plan to make America a Christian nation.¹⁶

This is the man Pete Hegseth calls a mentor.

Hegseth is a member of a CREC-affiliated church in Tennessee. He moved his family there specifically to send his children to a school in Wilson’s classical Christian network.¹⁷ The Pentagon confirmed that the Secretary “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”¹⁸ When Wilson stood at the Pentagon podium, Hegseth stood beside him, praying with his hand on Wilson’s shoulder. The Department of War’s rapid response account on X posted a photograph of the moment with the caption: “We have gathered at the Pentagon for our monthly worship service. We are One Nation Under God.”¹⁹

Hegseth does not hide what tradition he is claiming. Tattooed on one arm is the Latin phrase “Deus Vult” — “God wills it” — the battle cry of the First Crusade. On his chest is the Jerusalem Cross, the coat of arms of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, established in 1099 after Crusader armies massacred the city’s Muslim inhabitants and burned its Jews alive in their synagogue.²⁰ The man running the American military has branded himself, permanently and literally, with the insignia of medieval Christian holy war.

Two weeks earlier, at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, Hegseth had gone further. He declared that “America was founded as a Christian nation” and that “as public officials, we have a sacred duty 250 years on to glorify him” — pointing upward as he said it.²¹ He suggested that serving in the U.S. military was a form of Christian spiritual warfare, and that the soldier willing to “lay down his life for his unit, his country, and his creator — that warrior finds eternal life.”²¹

Read that again. The Secretary of War told service members that dying in combat earns them eternal life. This is not a figure of speech. This is not a rhetorical flourish at a fundraiser. This is the civilian head of the American military telling troops that their service has soteriological weight — that it contributes to their salvation.

And then the bombs fell on Iran. And commanders, having watched the Secretary of War spend nine months building the theological infrastructure from the top, did what officers in a hierarchical system always do: they followed the signal. Whether individual commanders watched those broadcasts or read those speeches is beside the point. In a hierarchical culture, the message travels down the chain whether or not every link is aware of its origin. They took the message Hegseth had been broadcasting — that America is a Christian nation, that military service is spiritual warfare, that God’s plan is being executed through American power — and they delivered it to their troops in the only language that was left. The language of Armageddon.

The 200 complaints were not an aberration. They were a harvest.

There is an irony here that should not pass without notice. For two decades, the machinery of the war on terror has projected onto Muslims the image of a hidden theological command structure — a mastermind who radicalises foot soldiers through religious ideology until they are ready to kill and die for the cause. That projection is now a mirror. The theological command structure described in this section is not hidden. It is broadcast on the Pentagon’s internal television network, posted on official social media accounts, and delivered from the podium of the National Prayer Breakfast. The foot soldiers are not radicalised in secret — they are radicalised in uniform, during duty hours, by their chain of command. The only difference is that when the theology is Christian and the foot soldiers are American, we do not call it what it is.

Post-publication update — April 4, 2026:

On April 2, 2026 — less than three weeks after this article was published — Hegseth fired three Army officers on the same day: Gen. Randy George, the Chief of Staff of the Army; Gen. David Hodne, commander of Army Transformation and Training Command; and Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., the Army’s Chief of Chaplains. No official reason was given for any of the three dismissals. Green’s firing was the first time in the history of the United States Army that a Secretary of Defense has removed a chief of chaplains.⁶⁷

The firings came one day after Hegseth had pushed for changes to the chaplain corps, telling chaplains in a video message to be “less therapeutic and more pastoral.”⁶⁸ Green, a Baptist minister endorsed by the National Baptist Convention, had overseen religious support across all faiths in the Army. He was not an evangelical.

Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, speaking on MSNBC’s The Weekend on April 4, connected the three firings directly to the pattern described in this article. Hertling, who knew Green personally — “he was one of my chaplains when I was a brigade commander” — called Green “one of the finest officers and ministers in the army.” He said the three firings together were “much more damaging” than any single dismissal, and that the officers “were standing up for something.” Hertling connected the firings explicitly to Hegseth’s public statements that soldiers are “fighting for Jesus,” calling those remarks “despicable” — and noted the timing: Passover weekend.⁶⁹

The harvest continues.

2. The Prophetic Clock

To understand what those commanders believed they were telling their troops, you have to understand a theology that most Americans have absorbed without ever learning its name. It is called dispensationalism, and it is the engine driving everything described in this article.

Dispensationalism is not Christianity. It is a specific interpretation of Christianity — a nineteenth-century invention that has, through a combination of publishing, broadcasting, and political organising, been branded to become the dominant eschatological framework for tens of millions of American evangelicals. Its core claim is that human history is divided into a series of “dispensations” — distinct eras in which God relates to humanity under different covenants. The current dispensation, in this framework, is approaching its end. And the end has a very specific sequence.

The theology was systematised by John Nelson Darby, a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish preacher who developed a reading of biblical prophecy called premillennialism.²² Darby’s ideas crossed the Atlantic and found fertile ground among American evangelicals, amplified by figures like Dwight Moody and James Brookes.²³ But the real accelerant was a book — the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909, which embedded Darby’s dispensationalist framework directly into the margins of scripture.²⁴ For millions of readers, the interpretive notes became inseparable from the biblical text itself. The theology appeared to be what the Bible actually said.

The sequence goes like this: The Jews must return to the land of Israel. The state of Israel must be established. The Temple in Jerusalem must be rebuilt. A period of tribulation will follow, culminating in the battle of Armageddon — a literal military conflict in the Middle East. And then Christ will return.

Every step must happen in order. And every step that advances the sequence is, in this framework, doing God’s work.

This is not metaphorical for the people who hold it. A 2017 LifeWay Research poll found that 80 percent of evangelical Christians in the United States believe that the rebirth of Israel in 1948 was a fulfilment of biblical prophecy — and 73 percent said events in Israel are part of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation.²⁵ Eighty percent. That is not a fringe belief. That is a supermajority within a community that constitutes roughly a quarter of the American electorate.²⁶

The political implications are staggering. If you believe — truly believe, as an article of faith — that the state of Israel is God’s prophetic clock, then supporting Israel is not a foreign policy position. It is a religious obligation. Opposing Israeli expansion is not a strategic disagreement. It is an act of defiance against God’s plan. And war in the Middle East is not a catastrophe to be avoided. It is a prophecy to be fulfilled.

Hal Lindsey understood this before almost anyone in the modern media landscape. His 1970 book The Late, Great Planet Earth — a copy of which I was encouraged to read during my time in the Assemblies of God church — translated dispensationalist theology into popular language, selling tens of millions of copies — some estimates claim up to 35 million, including later editions — and becoming the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s.²⁷ It told ordinary Americans that the geopolitical events unfolding in the Middle East were the literal fulfilment of biblical prophecy — and that they were living in the last days. Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, launched in 1966 and still broadcasting six decades later — having outlived its founder, who died in 2023 — carried the same message into American living rooms five days a week for decades, reaching a peak audience of millions and building a media empire — the Christian Broadcasting Network — that became the launchpad for Robertson’s own presidential campaign in 1988.²⁸

Robertson understood that theology without political organisation was just talk. In 1989, he founded the Christian Coalition, installing Ralph Reed as its first executive director.²⁹ The Coalition built a grassroots political machine that, at its peak, claimed 1.7 million members and distributed 45 million voter guides in the 1996 election cycle alone.³⁰ It did not merely support candidates. It trained them, organised them, and placed them at every level of government from school boards to Congress. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, founded a decade earlier in 1979, had already demonstrated the model: take the theology out of the sanctuary and into the voting booth.³¹ The Christian Coalition refined it into a permanent political infrastructure.

This is where the theology of the prophetic clock meets the machinery of American power. Dispensationalism tells you what must happen. Organisations like the Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority, and the 700 Club tell you how to make it happen. And the Israeli government — as we will see — tells you who to call.

I know this theology from the inside. I grew up in an evangelical community in southern Illinois where the leader taught this exact eschatological framework — that Muslim nations were the “dark forces of Satan” surrounding Israel, that the End Times were imminent, and that believers had a duty to prepare. I went on to spend years in the Assemblies of God church and other evangelical congregations, and the teaching was the same everywhere. The theology described in this section is not something I encountered in a book. I absorbed it across multiple churches over many years before I left as an adult. When I hear commanders telling troops that bombing Iran is God’s divine plan, I recognise the language. I grew up in it.

The Ground Level: Toxic Christianity

Before this theology reaches the Pentagon briefing room or the halls of Congress, it lives in the pews. And before it becomes a matter of foreign policy, it starts in the pews not as concern for saving souls and trying to convince them of the best values they espouse as believers in the “God of Love,” but as contempt for other people and other religions.

Scroll through evangelical social media on any given day and you will find posts from organisations like “Operation Heal America” declaring that Allah is a “fake” god — a deity separate from and opposed to the God of Abraham.³² It is not that it is a constructive criticism of the Islamic faith, but that this claim is theologically illiterate. “Allah” is the Arabic word for God. Arab Christians — millions of them — use the word in their liturgy, their prayers, their Bibles. It is the same God. The same Abrahamic tradition. The same root.

But theological literacy is not the point. The claim is part of a pattern of theological projection that runs through this entire article — a movement that accuses Islam of holy war while tattooing Crusader holy warrior insignia on the chest of its Secretary of War, that accuses Muslims of world domination and destruction while broadcasting sermons of sparking Armageddon to troops on the Pentagon’s internal network, and that accuses Islam of hostility towards all Jews while its own history includes burning Jews alive in their synagogues and whose theology envisions that all Jews who do not accept Christ will perish in the very Armageddon they are working to bring about.

The point is not truth. The point is the construction of an enemy. And once the enemy is constructed, the rest follows: the contempt becomes policy, the policy becomes war, and the war becomes God’s will.

A movement that claims to “heal America” by slandering a fellow Abrahamic faith — one that believes in the virgin birth of Jesus, his messiahship, his ascension to heaven, and his second coming to establish God’s kingdom — is not engaged in evangelism. It is not fulfilling the Great Commission. You cannot bring people to Christ through contempt. What it is doing is something more useful to the project described in this article: it is building, at the congregational level, the same hostility toward Islam that its political allies exploit at the policy level, including the foreign nation state of Israel.

The theology of contempt scales. The social media post that calls Allah a fake god and the combat briefing that calls the Iran war God’s divine plan are not different phenomena. They are the same phenomenon at different altitudes. The post teaches the congregation that Muslims worship a false god. The briefing teaches the troops that bombing Muslims is God’s will. The distance between the two is shorter than anyone wants to admit.

3. The Strategic Alliance

The theology described in the previous section would be a curiosity — an eccentric feature of American religious life — if it had remained in the sanctuary. It did not remain in the sanctuary because it was invited out. And the invitation came from West Jerusalem.

The Israeli government’s cultivation of American Christian Zionism as a strategic asset is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented history, openly acknowledged by Israeli political figures, and in many cases celebrated by both parties to the alliance.

It began in earnest with Menachem Begin. When the Likud leader became Prime Minister of Israel in 1977, he recognised something that his Labour predecessors had not fully appreciated: American evangelicals were a vast, politically organised constituency whose theology made them unconditional supporters of the Jewish state. Begin established a special liaison for evangelical Christians and cultivated personal relationships with American religious leaders — most notably Jerry Falwell, who became one of Israel’s most vocal advocates in the United States.³³

The alliance was built on a pragmatic bargain that both sides understood without stating openly. Danny Ayalon, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, described an agreement between Begin and Pat Robertson: “We are both waiting for the Messiah. When the Messiah comes, we will ask him. And according to his answer we will know who is right.”³⁴ The eschatological disagreement — evangelicals believe Jesus will return; Jews do not — was set aside because the short-term political interests aligned perfectly. Evangelicals wanted Israel supported, defended, and expanded. The Israeli right wanted American political cover, military aid, and unconditional diplomatic backing. The deal was struck.

Ronald Reagan brought Christian Zionists into the White House with enthusiasm, hosting discussion groups that gave figures like Falwell, Robertson, and Hal Lindsey direct access to Congressional and national leaders.³⁵ The relationship cooled somewhat under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but the structural alliance remained intact — maintained by organisations like AIPAC that understood the value of the evangelical voting bloc even when the president himself was less receptive.

The decisive moment came in 1995, at AIPAC’s annual policy conference. Until that point, many evangelicals had been wary of Jewish organisations, and the feeling was mutual. But at that conference, AIPAC invited Ralph Reed — the executive director of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition — to join the proceedings. The two movements discovered they could reach a concurrence of views on the basis of promoting the welfare of Israel.³⁶ Robertson, who had previously publicly decried Jewish influence in America, declared he would stand with Israel and oppose the creation of a Palestinian state. The alliance between the pro-Israel lobby and the evangelical right was formalised, and it has only deepened since.

The numbers tell the story. Christians United for Israel, founded by San Antonio megachurch pastor John Hagee in 2006, now claims over 10 million members.³⁷ That is nearly double the entire American Jewish adult population of approximately 5.8 million.³⁸ The largest Zionist organisation in the United States is not Jewish. It is evangelical Christian. CUFI’s annual summits draw thousands of attendees and feature direct addresses from Israeli political leaders. At CUFI’s 2017 conference, Benjamin Netanyahu declared that evangelical Christians were “one of Israel’s greatest allies.”³⁹

Evangelical Christians now constitute roughly a third of the Republican Party base.⁴⁰ Christian Zionism has become a central plank of the Republican platform — not because Republican strategists are dispensationalists, but because dispensationalists are reliable voters whose single-issue loyalty to Israel aligns with the party’s broader geopolitical commitments. The theology provides the passion. The party provides the power. And Israel provides the strategic direction.

This brings us to February 2026, and a moment that crystallised the entire arrangement in a single exchange.

Mike Huckabee — former Arkansas governor, former Baptist minister, and the United States Ambassador to Israel — sat down for a podcast interview with Tucker Carlson. Carlson asked Huckabee about a Bible verse in which God promises Abraham that his descendants will receive land stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates — a territory encompassing modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Carlson pointed out that this was, in effect, “basically the entire Middle East.”

Huckabee’s response: “It would be fine if they took it all.”⁴¹

He later attempted to walk the statement back, calling it “somewhat of a hyperbolic statement.”⁴² But the damage — or, from the perspective of the project, the signal — was sent. Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry described the remarks as “extremist rhetoric.” Egypt called them a “flagrant breach” of international law. The State Department declined to comment.⁴³

The Israeli right and American evangelicals are running the same play from different playbooks. One reads the Torah, the other the Book of Revelation. Both arrive at the same conclusion: the land is promised, the borders must expand, and anyone in the way is an obstacle to prophecy.

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich — who gave a speech in 2023 at a podium displaying a map that showed Jordan as part of Israel — appeared to welcome Huckabee’s remarks.⁴⁴ This is the convergence in action: the theological claim and the territorial ambition reinforcing each other, each providing the other with legitimacy it could not sustain alone.

Huckabee was not freelancing. The Likud Party — Netanyahu’s own party, Israel’s governing party — has stated since its founding platform in 1977 that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”⁴⁵ The platform has never been rescinded. When Palestinians use the phrase “from the river to the sea” — a phrase that for many describes freedom from occupation, however contested its interpretation — they are censured, expelled from universities, and accused of calling for genocide. When Likud puts the same territorial claim in its founding charter, it is called policy — and underwritten with American tax dollars.

4. The Convergence Point

There is a place where all of this converges — where dispensationalist theology, Israeli territorial ambition, American evangelical money, and global geopolitical risk meet on a single hilltop in Jerusalem. It is called the Temple Mount by Jews, Haram al-Sharif — the Noble Sanctuary — by Muslims. And it may be the most dangerous thirty-five acres on Earth.

For dispensationalists, the prophetic sequence requires a Third Temple to be built in Jerusalem before the Tribulation can begin. The first two temples — Solomon’s, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and Herod’s, destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE — stood on what some believe is, though no archaeological verification has proven, the same site where the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock have stood for over a thousand years. Al-Aqsa is the third holiest site in Islam, the place from which the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have ascended to heaven. Nearly 2 billion Muslims understand any threat to it as an existential provocation.

The Third Temple movement is not hypothetical. It is organised, funded, and politically connected.

The Temple Institute, based in Jerusalem, has spent decades preparing for the construction of a Third Temple — fabricating priestly garments, recreating ritual vessels, and training descendants of the priestly caste in sacrificial procedures.⁴⁶ Boneh Israel, an evangelical Christian organisation, has imported red heifers from Texas to Israel and raised them under strict ritual conditions required for a purification ceremony that is considered a prerequisite for Temple construction. Israel’s Ministry of Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage has funded development of the site where the ceremony is planned.⁴⁷

There is an irony here that Christian theology cannot easily absorb. The central claim of Christianity is that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was the final sacrifice — the one that rendered all animal sacrifice obsolete. Evangelical organisations funding the restoration of Temple sacrifice are financing the reversal of the very act their faith considers the most important event in human history.

Yehuda Glick, a former Likud member of the Knesset, has led a growing movement calling for Jewish prayer rights on the Temple Mount — a direct challenge to the status quo that has governed the site since Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967. Under that arrangement, Israel controls access to the compound but the Islamic Waqf administers the religious sites. The movement to erode this arrangement has gained momentum, with increasing numbers of Jewish visitors ascending the Mount under police escort.⁴⁸

Christian Zionist organisations provide both financial and political support for these efforts. The alliance between dispensationalist evangelicals and Orthodox Jewish Temple activists is, like the broader Christian Zionist alliance, built on a shared short-term objective concealing incompatible long-term theologies. The evangelicals want the Temple built because it triggers Armageddon and the return of Christ. The Orthodox activists want it built because it inaugurates the Messianic Age. Both sides know the other’s endgame. Both sides have decided it doesn’t matter yet.

Hamas understood the explosive power of this convergence. When it launched its attack on October 7, 2023, it named the operation “Al-Aqsa Storm” — and explicitly cited the increasing Jewish incursions into the compound as a provocation.⁴⁹ Whatever else October 7 was, it was a reminder that the Temple Mount is not an abstraction. It is a detonator. And the people who are most actively working to set it off believe the resulting explosion is not a risk to be managed but a prophecy to be fulfilled.

This is the point that most Western commentary misses entirely. When American evangelicals send money to Temple preparation organisations, when Israeli politicians campaign on Jewish sovereignty over the Mount, when red heifers are raised in the Judean hills according to ancient ritual specifications — these are not curiosities. They are operational steps in a project whose architects believe they are building toward the end of the world. And they have the political connections, the financial resources, and the theological conviction to keep building.

The question is not whether they will succeed in constructing a Third Temple. The question is how much damage the attempt will cause — to the Middle East, to interfaith relations, and to the hundreds of millions of people who will interpret any move against Al-Aqsa as a declaration of civilisational war.

There is a theological problem at the heart of this project that its architects never address. Prophecy, by definition, is God’s work. If it requires political lobbying, congressional funding, and cattle breeding programmes to advance, it is not prophecy — it is a construction project with a biblical veneer. To engineer the fulfilment of God’s plan is to declare, in practice, that God cannot or will not fulfil it himself. That is not faith. It is its opposite. And the Christians driving this project might consider a warning from the teacher they claim to follow: “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? And I will tell them plainly, I never knew you. Away from me.” The full theological case against self-fulfilling prophecy — and what the Christian tradition’s own texts say about those who appoint themselves as God’s architects — is a subject that deserves its own treatment, and will receive it.

5. From 9/11 to Iran

The evangelical capture of American foreign policy did not begin on September 11, 2001. But 9/11 was the accelerant that turned a slow-burning theological project into a five-alarm fire.

Within hours of the attacks, a framing was available — the “clash of civilizations,” borrowed from Samuel Huntington’s 1996 thesis and already embedded in the evangelical worldview.⁵⁰ Five days later, President Bush used the word “crusade” in remarks to the press, then retracted it.⁵¹ But the retraction was for the press. In a 2003 meeting with Palestinian leaders, Bush reportedly told them: “I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did. And then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq. And I did.”⁵² The White House denied it. The Palestinian foreign minister who was present stood by the account. The framing had already been received by the audience that mattered most: the tens of millions of Americans who already believed that Islam was a prophetic enemy and that conflict with the Muslim world was both inevitable and divinely ordained.

The Iraq War was the proving ground. But it is worth remembering what came before it. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, American evangelicals were enthusiastic supporters of the mujahideen — on the grounds that they were God-fearing fighters resisting godless communism, a system of the devil. Muslims were allies when the enemy was atheism. They became prophetic enemies the moment the Cold War ended and a new narrative was required. The underlying dispensationalist hostility toward Islam had always been there — but during the Cold War it took a back seat to the greater enemy of godless communism. Back then, Allah was not a “fake god.” Back then, Muslims who believed in the God of Abraham were useful. Once that enemy fell, Islam moved from ally to adversary almost overnight, and the God that Muslims had always worshipped became, conveniently, a false one. The 9/11 attacks — carried out by men from the same broader movement the West had armed, funded, and then abandoned in Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew — only reinforced the new narrative. The blowback became the justification.

The Iraq war had no connection to 9/11 — a fact that was established at the time and has been confirmed exhaustively since — but it had the support of the evangelical base because it advanced the broader project: reshaping the Middle East in ways that served both American strategic interests and the dispensationalist prophetic timeline. Evangelical leaders provided moral cover for a war of choice. Congregations provided the political base that made the war sustainable even as public support eroded. The alliance between the national security establishment and the evangelical right, forged in the Reagan years, was battle-tested in Iraq and found reliable.

Meanwhile, a new infrastructure was being built — one that bridged the gap between evangelical theology and national security policy. Organisations like Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT for America, and Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum built a counter-Islamism network that translated theological hostility toward Islam into the language of threat assessment and national security.⁵³ These were not evangelical organisations in the traditional sense. They were policy shops. But they served the same function: they provided a secular-sounding justification for the civilisational conflict that dispensationalist theology had already declared.

The pattern continued through the Obama years — when evangelical opposition to the Iran nuclear deal was ferocious and theologically motivated — and accelerated dramatically under Trump. From the moment he was elected in 2016, evangelical leaders christened Trump as “God’s anointed” — a vulgar, thrice-married casino mogul who could not name a favourite Bible verse, recast as a divine instrument chosen to restore Christian America.⁵⁴ The embassy move to Jerusalem in 2018 was celebrated by evangelical leaders as prophecy fulfilled. Netanyahu himself compared Trump to Cyrus the Great — the Persian king who freed the Jews from Babylonian exile and enabled the rebuilding of the Temple.⁵⁵ Banners appeared in Israel proclaiming “Cyrus the Great is alive!” The comparison was not casual. It positioned Trump within the prophetic narrative as a divinely appointed instrument — a non-believer chosen by God to advance the Jewish return, just as Cyrus had been.

The Abraham Accords of 2020 normalised relations between Israel and several Arab states while bypassing the Palestinian question entirely — a restructuring of the regional order that served both American and Israeli strategic interests and that evangelical leaders embraced as further evidence of prophetic momentum.

Then came the wars. The June 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities — the 12-Day War — established the precedent: the United States would use military force against Iran. The March 2026 full-scale joint operation with Israel, which killed Supreme Leader Khamenei and launched sustained bombing campaigns across Iranian territory, was the culmination.⁵⁶

Each step looks like geopolitics from the outside. The intelligence assessments, the diplomatic cables, the military planning — all of it conducted in the language of national security, threat assessment, and strategic necessity. But among the people in the room when these decisions are made are men and women who believe, with absolute sincerity, that serving God’s timeline is serving America’s national interest — that Armageddon is in America’s interest, that Christ’s return and all the death and destruction that must precede it is in America’s interest, that innocent lives lost are a means to an end that serves America’s interests, and that any war that advances the prophetic sequence is not a cost to be weighed but a duty to be fulfilled. The language of security is the vehicle. The theology is the driver.

When Pete Hegseth stood at the National Prayer Breakfast and told military personnel that the warrior who lays down his life “finds eternal life,” he was not speaking metaphorically. When commanders across thirty installations told their troops that Trump was anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire for Armageddon, they were not freelancing. They were delivering, in explicit terms, the message that the Secretary of War had been transmitting either behind closed doors or in coded terms for nine months.

The capture is complete. The question is what to do about it.

6. The Constitutional Betrayal

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States begins with ten words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The Establishment Clause. It is the first freedom named in the first amendment — the thing the founders considered so important that they put it before speech, before the press, before assembly, before the right to petition the government.

What Pete Hegseth has built at the Pentagon — monthly Christian worship services broadcast on the Department’s internal network, led by a pastor who advocates theocracy, attended by service members in a hierarchical culture where the boss’s invitation carries the weight of an order — is not a celebration of religious freedom. It is the establishment of a de facto state religion within the most powerful military on Earth.

Fred Wellman, a twenty-year Army combat veteran, called it “an unconstitutional and extreme attack on the 1st Amendment going completely unchecked by Congress.” He wrote: “Hegseth is using his official position to make his religion the official one of the Department of Defense using official facilities, communications channels and personnel.”⁵⁷

Consider who serves in that military. Roughly 20 percent of the U.S. armed forces identify as Catholic.⁵⁸ Doug Wilson — the man Hegseth invited to preach at the Pentagon — has described the Catholic Mass as “idolatry” and Catholic devotion to Mary as “Mariolatry.” In his vision of a Christian America, Catholic public processions would be outlawed as “public displays of idolatry.”⁵⁹ A fifth of the force Hegseth commands practices a faith that his personal pastor considers heretical and would suppress by law.

Then there are the Muslim service members. The Jewish service members. The Buddhists, the Hindus, the atheists, the agnostics — all of them watching their chain of command declare, from the podium of the Pentagon, that this is a Christian nation waging a Christian war.

The Myth of the Christian Founding

When defenders of this arrangement invoke “Judeo-Christian values” as the foundation of the American republic, they are telling a story that the founders themselves rejected.

The founders were not Christians in any sense Pete Hegseth or Doug Wilson would recognise. Thomas Jefferson took a razor to the Bible, physically cutting out every miracle, every supernatural claim, every reference to the divinity of Christ — producing what is now known as the Jefferson Bible, held today by the Smithsonian Institution.⁶⁰ Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and George Washington were Deists at best, ambiguous on orthodox Christianity at a minimum. The Constitution does not mention God. Not once. The First Amendment explicitly prohibits the establishment of religion. These are not obscure historical footnotes. They are the foundational documents of the nation Hegseth claims to be defending.

And then there is the Treaty of Tripoli. Drafted under George Washington, signed by John Adams, ratified unanimously by the United States Senate in 1797. Article 11 states, in plain English: “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”⁶¹ Unanimously. Not a dissenting vote. The founders were explicit.

When Hegseth declares that “America was founded as a Christian nation,” he is not offering an interpretation of history. He is contradicting the founders in their own words, ratified by their own Senate, in a treaty they wrote themselves.

The United States may be a nation populated by Christians, but it was founded as a nation for everyone equally, regardless of the religious make-up of the country. That is what the founders intended. That is what they wrote into law. The demographic composition of the population does not override the constitutional framework that governs it.

What “Christian Morality” Built

But let us take the claim on its own terms for a moment. Suppose we accept the premise that Christian morality shaped the American project. What did it build?

It built a country on the graves of indigenous peoples. Sand Creek. Wounded Knee. The Trail of Tears. The systematic destruction of nations that had inhabited this continent for millennia, justified by a theological doctrine — the Doctrine of Discovery — that was explicitly Christian.

The papal bull Inter Caetera, issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, granted European Christian powers the right to claim lands inhabited by non-Christians — a doctrine that drove the colonisation of the Americas for three centuries before the United States existed. The papal bull carried no authority in the Protestant republic that eventually emerged — but the legal principle it established did. In 1823, the Supreme Court adopted the Doctrine of Discovery as the foundation of American land title in Johnson v. M’Intosh, ruling that indigenous peoples held rights of occupancy but not ownership because Christian discovery took precedence.⁶² That ruling has never been fully overturned. Protestant America rejected the Pope’s theology but embraced his permission to take the land.

The Vatican did not formally repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery until March 2023.⁶³ It took five hundred and thirty years to say it was wrong.

It built a country on the backs of enslaved Africans — kidnapped, transported, sold, beaten, worked to death, and bred like livestock for generations. And here is a fact that the “Christian nation” narrative systematically erases: scholars estimate that between 15 and 30 percent of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Muslim.⁶⁴ They carried their faith with them in chains. They prayed in secret. They built this country — its agriculture, its infrastructure, its wealth — in bondage. When Wilson and Hegseth declare America a Christian nation, they are not merely wrong constitutionally. They are erasing the forced labour of Muslim people from the nation’s founding story.

The first Muslims in America did not arrive as immigrants or refugees. They arrived as property. And slaveholding was not a contradiction of Christian values at the time — it was entirely consistent with them, defended from the pulpit, justified with scripture, and practised by the faithful for centuries. It took a civil war that killed over 600,000 Americans to change that theology. The values evolved. But they did not evolve on their own.

The defenders of Christian civilisation would do well to read the history they claim to own — in order.

When Omar ibn al-Khattab conquered Jerusalem for Islam in 637, the Christian Patriarch invited him to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Omar refused — not out of contempt, but out of respect: he feared that if a caliph prayed there, future Muslims would claim it as a mosque. He prayed outside instead. The mosque built on that spot still stands, across from the church he chose to protect.

When the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they burned Jews alive in their synagogue and massacred the Muslim inhabitants until, by the accounts of their own chroniclers, blood ran through the streets.

The Crusaders did not limit their violence to Muslims and Jews. The Fourth Crusade of 1204 never reached the Holy Land at all — instead, the armies sacked Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world, looting its churches, destroying its relics, and massacring its Christian inhabitants. Fellow believers were plundered when they stood in the way of the project. That pattern has not changed. Today, Doug Wilson calls the Catholic Mass idolatry. Hegseth’s Pentagon services exclude non-evangelical Christians from the vision of the nation they serve. The new Crusade, like the old ones, devours its own.

When Saladin retook the city in 1187, he spared the Christian population, kept the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Christian hands, and invited the Jews to return — earning comparisons, in the Jewish world, to Cyrus the Great.

The Ottoman Empire governed Jerusalem for four hundred years, and throughout that period Christian holy sites were preserved under a system of religious governance that guaranteed their protection.

Today, under Israeli governance, Christian clergy are spat on and pepper-sprayed in the streets of Jerusalem, churches are vandalised, and Arab Christians have had their homes and land destroyed and confiscated. The Christian population of Jerusalem has fallen from 25 percent a century ago to less than one percent.⁶⁵

David J. Wasserstein, Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, wrote in the Jewish Chronicle: “Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth.”⁶⁶ His words, not mine. The history they tell people to read is the history that refutes them.

The line from the Crusades to the Pentagon prayer service is shorter than most people realise, because it was never broken. Between 1096 and 1272, nine Crusades sent Christian armies to conquer the Holy Land, massacre its inhabitants, and establish kingdoms in the name of God. The battle cry was “Deus Vult” — God wills it. The symbol was the Jerusalem Cross. Nearly two centuries of holy war, launched by popes and sustained by the doctrine that killing for Christ earned salvation. The motivation was not merely territorial. The Crusaders believed that Christ would not return until the Holy Land was under Christian control — that the Second Coming required Jerusalem in Christian hands. The theology driving the original Crusades was, at its core, the same eschatology that drives the dispensationalist project today: take the land, fulfil the conditions, trigger the return.

When the formal Crusades ended, the project did not. It continued through the Doctrine of Discovery, which extended the Crusader logic to the entire non-Christian world. It continued through the colonisation of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. It continued through forced conversions, residential schools where indigenous children were taken from their families and forced to adopt Christianity, and the theological architecture of empire. And it continues now — in the Pentagon prayer services, in the Secretary of War’s Crusader tattoos, in the commanders telling troops that bombing Iran is God’s divine plan.

If the nine traditional Crusades ended in 1272, what Hegseth and the Christian nationalist movement are building is the tenth. Though it might be more accurate to say the Crusades never ended. They just changed uniforms. If the current wave began with the establishment of Israel in 1948 — the event dispensationalists treat as the prophetic starting gun — then we are nearly eighty years into the tenth.

7. What This Means for What Comes Next

This article has traced a line from a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish preacher to a twenty-first-century Pentagon prayer service. From John Nelson Darby’s dispensations to Pete Hegseth’s hand on Doug Wilson’s shoulder. From the Scofield Reference Bible to over 200 complaints filed by service members who were told their war was God’s plan.

The line is not metaphorical. It is institutional. It runs through specific organisations — the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, the 700 Club, Christians United for Israel — and specific alliances: Begin and Falwell, Reed and AIPAC, Huckabee and Netanyahu. It runs through specific moments: the 1995 conference where evangelicals and the pro-Israel lobby formalised their partnership, the 2018 embassy move that was celebrated as prophecy, the February 2026 prayer service where a pastor who would bar Muslims from public life preached to the most powerful military on Earth.

And it runs through Iran. Through the 12-Day War of June 2025 and the full-scale operation of March 2026. Through the strikes that killed a head of state, the bombing campaigns that continue as this article is published, and the commanders who told their troops — in official briefings, in every branch of the military, across thirty installations — that all of it was God’s divine plan.

This is not an article about one rogue officer, or one controversial pastor, or one overzealous Secretary of War. This is an article about a capture so complete that the people inside it no longer recognise it as capture. They think it is faith. They think it is patriotism. They think it is destiny.

The Iran war is not only a moral failure. It is a legal one. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Article 51 permits military action only in self-defence against an armed attack — not as a preventive strike, not as a theological project, and not because a movement believes God requires it. The United States ratified the UN Charter in 1945, and under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, ratified treaties are the supreme law of the land. The Geneva Conventions, which the United States also ratified, govern the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners and civilians. These are not aspirational documents. They are binding American law. The Iran war violates them.

And it is not the first time. Vietnam — where villages were burned and civilians massacred at My Lai. The Bay of Pigs. Iraq — launched on fabricated evidence, producing Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers tortured and sexually humiliated prisoners in a war their president said God told him to fight. Guantánamo, where men were held without charge and subjected to interrogation techniques that the Red Cross called torture. Afghanistan — where prisoners were stuffed into shipping containers and left to suffocate while soldiers watched. Libya. Syria. In conflict after conflict, the United States has waged wars that violate the laws it signed and the values it claims — and in war after war, religious conviction has provided the moral cover for a secular republic to behave as though the law does not apply to it.

This is the final betrayal, and it is not constitutional but theological. The movement that has captured American foreign policy does not merely violate the laws of the republic it claims to defend. It violates the demands of the faith it claims to follow. The Sermon on the Mount says “Blessed are the peacemakers.” The Geneva Conventions say protect the wounded and the prisoner. The UN Charter says do not attack a nation that has not attacked you. The Constitution says do not establish a state religion. This movement has broken every one of those commitments — secular and sacred alike — and called it obedience to God. In any other context, a movement that had infiltrated the highest levels of a nation’s military and intelligence apparatus, that operated in service of an ideology its own government’s laws prohibited, and that directed foreign policy toward objectives incompatible with the national interest, would be called what it is: a fifth column.

They have the most powerful military on Earth at their disposal. They have a theology that interprets every escalation as progress toward salvation. They have a political infrastructure that has been decades in the making and is now more deeply embedded in the machinery of American power than at any point in the nation’s history.

And they have one more thing: the absolute, sincere, unshakeable conviction that they are right. That God is with them. That the fire they are lighting in the Middle East is the signal fire for the return of Christ.

The rest of us — Christians, Muslims, Jews, and everyone else who will live with the consequences of this conviction — do not have the luxury of treating this as someone else’s problem. The evangelical capture of American foreign policy is not a culture war story. It is not a religious liberty debate. It is a national security crisis dressed in vestments.

And unless it is named, understood, and confronted with the same seriousness its architects bring to the project, it will not stop with Iran.

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

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Banner image: DOW Rapid Response (@DOWResponse), X/Twitter, February 17, 2026

Endnotes

¹ Jonathan Larsen, “U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for ‘Armageddon,’ Return of Jesus,” Substack, March 2, 2026. Original NCO complaint email reproduced in full.

² Ibid. The NCO’s exact words: “He had a big grin on his face when he said all of this which made his message seem even more crazy.”

³ Ibid. The NCO specified writing “on behalf of 15 fellow troops” plus themselves. The Mirror US (March 5, 2026) reported the breakdown as including 11 Christians, one Muslim, and one Jew.

⁴ Middle East Eye, “US troops told Iran war is ‘anointed by Jesus’ to bring on Armageddon, watchdog says,” March 4, 2026. The MRFF reported over 200 complaints. Military.com confirmed the figures independently (March 3, 2026).

⁵ “US commander said Trump ‘anointed by Jesus’ to attack Iran: Report,” Newsweek, March 4, 2026. Weinstein’s “unrestricted euphoria” characterisation.

⁶ Snopes, “Investigating claim US troops were told Iran war is for ‘Armageddon,’ return of Jesus,” March 3, 2026. Left “unrated” due to anonymity of complainants and absence of audio/video evidence.

⁷ Reuters, “US Defense Chief Hegseth Leads Christian Prayer Service at Pentagon,” May 21, 2025.

⁸ Military.com, “Defense Contractors Report Invite to Pentagon’s Christian Prayer Service,” January 2026. Contractor described services as “inherently discriminatory”; retired Air Force brigadier general confirmed roll call and described attendance as “a litmus-loyalty test.”

⁹ Mikey Weinstein, Military Religious Freedom Foundation, quoted in The Spokesman-Review, December 2025. “Voluntold” characterisation of Pentagon prayer service attendance.

¹⁰ Baptist News Global, “Hegseth promotes Christian America at Pentagon and NRB,” February 27, 2026. Lists the pastors who led prior services.

¹¹ CNN, “Hegseth invited pastor who calls for Christian theocracy to lead Pentagon prayer service,” February 19, 2026.

¹² Baptist News Global, op. cit. Reports Wilson’s network includes nearly 475 schools through the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

¹³ The Wall Street Journal, September 2025 profile of Wilson (cited in MSNBC coverage). Wilson endorses repealing the 19th Amendment and supports a patriarchal society.

¹⁴ The Hill, “Hegseth invited controversial Christian nationalist to preach at Pentagon,” February 19, 2026. Wilson’s published position on slavery.

¹⁵ People For the American Way / Right Wing Watch, “Hegseth Invites Christian Nationalist Extremist Doug Wilson to Lead Pentagon Worship Service,” February 2026. Details Wilson’s theocratic vision.

¹⁶ Associated Press report cited in MSNBC, February 2026. Wilson’s D.C. church planted in 2025.

¹⁷ The Spokesman-Review, “Hegseth invites controversial Idaho pastor and self-described Christian nationalist to lead Pentagon’s monthly prayer meeting,” February 18, 2026.

¹⁸ Pentagon press secretary statement, reported by Military Times, February 20, 2026.

¹⁹ DOW Rapid Response (@DOWResponse), X/Twitter, February 17, 2026.

²⁰ Hegseth’s tattoos documented by Religion Unplugged, Word & Way, and National Catholic Reporter. “Deus Vult” on his arm; Jerusalem Cross on his chest.

²¹ Baptist News Global, op. cit. Hegseth’s National Prayer Breakfast remarks, February 5, 2026. Also reported by People For the American Way.

²² Britannica, “Christian Zionism.” Darby’s development of dispensationalism and its transmission to America.

²³ The Impact of Christian Zionism on American Policy, by William N. Dale, American Diplomacy journal. Notes Darby’s influence on Moody and Brookes.

²⁴ The Scofield Reference Bible (1909) is widely documented as the primary vehicle for popularising dispensationalism in America. See also Timothy Weber, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend (Baker Academic, 2004).

²⁵ LifeWay Research, 2017 poll. Reported in multiple sources including the LSE Undergraduate Political Review, “The Politics of Apocalypse: The Rise of American Evangelical Zionism,” February 2025.

²⁶ Evangelical share of the American electorate estimated at roughly 25 percent. Pew Research Center data.

²⁷ Hal Lindsey, The Late, Great Planet Earth (Zondervan, 1970). Sales figures widely documented; named the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s by the New York Times.

²⁸ The 700 Club premiered in 1966. Christian Broadcasting Network audience and reach documented in multiple media profiles.

²⁹ The Christian Coalition was founded in 1989 by Pat Robertson with Ralph Reed as executive director. See Ralph Reed, Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics (Free Press, 1996).

³⁰ Christian Coalition voter guide distribution figures from contemporaneous reporting and Reed’s own accounts.

³¹ Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979. Disbanded 1989. See Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell (Princeton University Press, 2000).

³² Operation Heal America (@OperHealAmerica), X/Twitter posts. July 25, 2025: “Allah is NOT the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (230K views). March 12, 2026: “Allah, the fake monotheistic god of the Koran, is NOT the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” September 29, 2025: “Don’t be fooled! Allah, the fake ‘god,’ is not the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Screenshots held by author.

³³ Foreign Policy, “The Fall of Netanyahu Costs American Christian Zionists Their Greatest Ally in Israel,” July 19, 2021. Details Begin’s cultivation of evangelical leaders.

³⁴ Ibid. Danny Ayalon’s account of the Begin-Robertson agreement.

³⁵ William N. Dale, “The Impact of Christian Zionism on American Policy,” American Diplomacy. Reagan’s hosting of Christian Zionist leaders.

³⁶ Ibid. The 1995 AIPAC conference and Ralph Reed’s invitation.

³⁷ Christians United for Israel membership figures from CUFI’s own public statements and multiple media reports. LSE analysis (February 2025) confirms 10 million+.

³⁸ American Jewish adult population figure from Pew Research Center, “Jewish Americans in 2020.”

³⁹ Netanyahu’s remarks at CUFI’s 2017 conference, reported by LSE Undergraduate Political Review, op. cit.

⁴⁰ Evangelical share of the Republican base from Britannica’s Christian Zionism entry and Pew Research data.

⁴¹ NBC News, “Outcry after Ambassador Mike Huckabee suggests Israel has God-given right to Middle East land,” February 22, 2026. Video of the Tucker Carlson interview.

⁴² Ibid. Huckabee’s subsequent characterisation of the statement as “somewhat of a hyperbolic statement.”

⁴³ Ibid. Saudi and Egyptian reactions. State Department non-response confirmed by Al Jazeera, February 22, 2026.

⁴⁴ Al Jazeera, “What is Greater Israel, and how popular is it among Israelis?” February 26, 2026. Smotrich’s 2023 map incident and response to Huckabee.

⁴⁵ Likud Party original platform, 1977: “Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Documented via Jewish Virtual Library, Wikipedia, Responsible Statecraft, The Nation, and NPR.

⁴⁶ Al Jazeera, “What do Texan red heifers have to do with Al-Aqsa and a Jewish temple?” April 9, 2024. Details Temple Institute preparations.

⁴⁷ Ibid. Boneh Israel’s role and Israeli government funding.

⁴⁸ The Daily Beast, “A Christian Group Is Building a Movement That Could Destabilize Jerusalem’s Most Explosive Holy Site,” September 2024. Yehuda Glick and the movement for Jewish prayer rights.

⁴⁹ Hamas named the October 7, 2023 operation “Al-Aqsa Storm.” Ayin Press, “What are we praying for?: Reimagining the Third Temple in Jewish Thought and Politics,” February 2024, documents the connection between Temple Mount incursions and Palestinian responses.

⁵⁰ Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1996).

⁵¹ President George W. Bush used the word “crusade” on September 16, 2001. The White House subsequently walked back the language.

⁵² Nabil Shaath, former Palestinian Foreign Minister, quoted in BBC documentary Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, broadcast October 2005. Bush’s remarks at June 2003 meeting with Palestinian leaders. Corroborated by Palestinian minutes reported in Haaretz.

⁵³ The Center for Security Policy (Frank Gaffney), ACT for America (Brigitte Gabriel), and the Middle East Forum (Daniel Pipes) are documented in multiple investigations of the counter-Islamism network, including the Center for American Progress report “Fear, Inc.” (2011) and subsequent reporting.

⁵⁴ Lance Wallnau declared Trump “God’s anointed” using Isaiah 45/Cyrus parallel, 2015-2016. CBS News, Charisma magazine. Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Rick Perry used similar “ordained by God” language. Pew Research found roughly a third of white evangelicals believed Trump’s election reflected God’s will.

⁵⁵ Netanyahu compared Trump to Cyrus at multiple public events beginning in 2018. See also CounterPunch, “Biblical Bloodlust: Huckabee, Cyrus, and the Zionist Greater Israel Fantasy Fueling the Iran War,” March 6, 2026.

⁵⁶ The Mirror US, “US commanders tell troops Trump ‘anointed by Jesus’ to start Iran war,” March 5, 2026. Timeline of the June 2025 12-Day War and March 2026 operations.

⁵⁷ Fred Wellman’s statement posted on X/Twitter and reported by The Hill, February 19, 2026.

⁵⁸ Catholic share of U.S. military estimated at approximately 20 percent. 2019 DoD data reported by Congressional Research Service; also cited in Letters from Leo, “Pete Hegseth’s Pastor Wants to Ban Catholic Processions in America,” March 2026.

⁵⁹ Ibid. Wilson’s characterisation of the Mass as “idolatry” and his vision for outlawing Catholic public processions.

⁶⁰ The Jefferson Bible (formally The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth) is held by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

⁶¹ Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11, ratified unanimously by the United States Senate, June 7, 1797. Signed by President John Adams.

⁶² The Doctrine of Discovery, based on papal bulls including Inter Caetera (1493), influenced American law through Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) and subsequent rulings. See Robert J. Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny (Praeger, 2006).

⁶³ The Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery on March 30, 2023.

⁶⁴ Estimates of the Muslim proportion of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas vary. Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (NYU Press, 1998), is the standard academic reference. Estimates range from 15 to 30 percent depending on region and period.

⁶⁵ Rossing Center Jerusalem, 2024 report: 111 documented anti-Christian incidents. Jerusalem Story, National Catholic Reporter, Arab News, and Armenian Weekly have reported attacks on Christian clergy. Christian population statistics from multiple demographic sources.

⁶⁶ David J. Wasserstein, “So, what did the Muslims do for the Jews?” Jewish Chronicle, May 24, 2012.

⁶⁷ CNN, Reuters, AP, NBC, CBS, ABC, Al Jazeera, Military.com, TIME, Baptist News Global, The Hill, Axios, Stars and Stripes — all confirmed the firings on April 2-3, 2026. Baptist News Global confirmed Green’s dismissal was the first of its kind in Army history.

⁶⁸ AP, “Hegseth asks the Army’s top uniformed officer to step down while US wages war against Iran,” April 3, 2026. Hegseth’s video message telling chaplains to be “less therapeutic and more pastoral.”

⁶⁹ Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, MSNBC, The Weekend, April 4, 2026.

I know that’s not what you expected to read. You clicked on this because the title confirmed something you already believed — that something about Islam isn’t right, that someone’s running a game, that you’re being played. You’re correct on all three counts. You’re just wrong about who’s doing the playing.

My name is James Coates. I’m a white American, born Catholic, raised in Illinois. I served as a Joint Drugs Enforcement Team operative for the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations and later an undercover counterterrorism operative for the FBI. In 2004, when I learned that members of an Islamic group I was embedded with were plotting to travel to Iraq and join Al-Qaida’s insurgency against American forces, I acted on it. I wore a wire to their weekly meetings. I ran firearms training at their jihad camp while federal agents watched from the treeline and snipers held positions in the surrounding woods. I did this for two years. When it was over, all four men were convicted. The media called them the “Houston Taliban.”

I am also a published author and expert on Islam who trained officers at the Houston Police Academy on Islamic extremism in America. I have spent decades studying its theology, its legal traditions, its internal fractures, and the way it is exploited by people on every side. I have written publicly about the tribalism in Muslim communities, the ethnic hierarchies, the organisational cowardice that refuses to confront radicalism when it surfaces in their own ranks. I have named these problems and paid for naming them. If you want someone who will tell you everything is fine, you’re reading the wrong article.

But I didn’t write this to tell you what’s wrong with Muslims. I wrote this because your anger — which is real, and in many cases justified — is being exploited by people you haven’t identified yet, for purposes that have nothing to do with your safety or your country. Someone is profiting, and they need you never to find out who.

Let me show you.

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The Industry

There is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States whose product is your anger toward Muslims. It has an organisational structure, a revenue model, donor networks, legislative infrastructure, and a well-documented track record. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is conspiracy fact. The financial trail is public record for anyone who cares to look. Mainstream American charities have been caught unknowingly funneling millions of dollars to counter-Islam advocacy groups through a financial mechanism called donor-advised funds, which allow wealthy donors to give anonymously through reputable institutions. The money flows from names you’d recognise — household charitable foundations — into organisations you’ve never looked into, run by people who’ve made careers out of your concern. The only people who haven’t told you about it are the people cashing the cheques.

Between 2014 and 2016 alone, auditors identified 1,096 charitable organisations funneling money to 39 counter-Islam groups, with a combined revenue capacity of at least $1.5 billion. Since 2010, over 230 counter-Islam, Muslim ban and counter-sharia bills have been introduced or enacted in state legislatures across the country. This isn’t grassroots concern. This is an industry.

The ecosystem has clearly defined roles. ACT for America — the largest counter-Islam organisation in the country, with chapters in every state and a direct pipeline to legislators — provides the grassroots muscle. The Center for Security Policy serves as the think tank, churning out reports raising the spectre of Shariah law. The David Horowitz Freedom Center operates as the content factory, publishing FrontPage Magazine and funding Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch blog. Spencer has been barred from entering the United Kingdom for his views. In my decades of studying Islam, I can tell you that much of what he publishes wouldn’t survive five minutes of scrutiny from anyone who’s actually done the fieldwork. But accuracy was never the point. Outrage was.

The funding flows through channels designed for anonymity. Mainstream charitable foundations — commercial, community, and religious organisations — have been exploited as vehicles for funneling anonymous donations from wealthy donors into this network. A donor gives to a credible institution through a donor-advised fund, and that money quietly is siphoned away to organisations whose entire business model depends on keeping the outrage machine running.

And then there’s the political infrastructure. On December 18, 2025, Representatives Chip Roy and Keith Self launched the Sharia Free America Caucus. It now claims 55 members from 22 states, including the House Majority Whip. The caucus has introduced seven bills. The Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act would make advocacy for Shariah law grounds for deportation. Another bill would give Congress the power to designate organisations as terrorist groups through legislation — not through courts, not through evidence, but through a vote.

If that doesn’t concern you, it should. The Patriot Act was sold as a tool to fight Al-Qaida. It was used to surveil American citizens. The TSA was sold as airport security. It became a permanent bureaucracy that hasn’t caught a single terrorist. Every expansion of government power gets sold on the target you agree with and used on the target you didn’t see coming. That’s not a left-wing talking point. That’s American history. Politicians prey on our concerns, stoking fear. Organisations profit off of our concern. And we find that the freedoms we enjoy become less and less over time.

Here’s what none of these 55 members will tell you: every one of those seven bills is a fundraising engine. Every press release generates donor emails. Every media hit drives campaign contributions. They aren’t solving a problem. They’re fundraising off one. And the last thing any of them want is for the issue to actually get resolved — because the moment it does, the donations stop.

You may already be familiar with what the members of this caucus say when they think you’re on their side.

Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee — whose district includes over 40,000 Muslim Americans — posted on X: “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.” That post received 2.6 million views. The next day he wrote: “Paperwork doesn’t magically make you American. Muslims are unable to assimilate; they all have to go back.” When challenged, his response was: “My comments wouldn’t even be a news story if I had said this about Christians. Cry harder. Christ is King.”

Representative Randy Fine of Florida posted: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” That post received 45.6 million views. Forty-five million. When asked about Ogles’s comments, House Speaker Mike Johnson refused to condemn them, saying there’s “a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem” — validating the lie while pretending to distance himself from its language.

Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project and former Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee — a man with 475,000 followers and direct access to power — posted a timeline of what he imagines a Muslim’s evening looks like: “6 pm: pray to their pedophile god. 7 pm: eat on the floor like dogs. 8 pm: like posts of Jewish women and their babies getting raped and slaughtered. 9 pm: build dirty bombs. 10 pm: pray to their pedophile god.”

Conservative commentator Benny Johnson, with over 2.5 million followers, posted: “A Muslim flag was raised at Newark City Hall as people chanted ‘Allahu Akbar.’ Mamdani sat on the floor and ate with his hands at New York City Hall. This isn’t assimilation. This is takeover.” That post received 215,000 views. Here’s what Johnson left out: the Newark flag raising was part of New Jersey’s official Muslim Heritage Month, enacted through bipartisan state law in 2022. The US flag flew alongside it, as required by state law. “Allahu Akbar” translates to “God is great.” Sitting on the floor to eat is a cultural tradition older than the United States. Johnson stripped the context, manufactured a threat, and a quarter of a million people absorbed it without checking a single fact. That’s not journalism. That’s a business model.

The popular account Libs of TikTok described a man performing the tawhid gesture — a raised index finger signifying monotheism, used in every daily prayer by every Muslim on earth — as “a Muslim doing the ISIS symbol.” That post received 426,000 views. Major international news outlets have had to issue formal corrections and apologies for making the same false claim. The gesture predates ISIS by fourteen centuries. But 426,000 people now associate a prayer gesture with terrorism, because an account with millions of followers told them to.

Political commentator Stacy Ruth declared: “Buddhism is a religion. Hinduism is a religion. Judaism is a religion. Christianity is a religion. Islam is a political ideology masquerading as a religion.” Representative Mary Miller said she was “proud to stand firmly against this radical ideology that seeks to uproot the constitutional principles and Christian values on which our nation was founded.”

These aren’t backbenchers. These are powerful voices with audiences in the tens of millions. But ask yourself — what has any of them actually done about the problem they keep telling you exists? Have any of those seven bills passed? Has a single one of those posts made your community safer? Or did they just make someone’s follower count bigger and someone’s campaign fund fatter? The question isn’t whether they believe what they’re saying. The question is who else benefits when they say it.

You thought you were forming your own opinion. You were consuming a product. And the product is our anger.

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The Foreign Hand

Before I continue, I need to make a distinction that the people profiting from this deliberately blur, because keeping it blurred protects them from scrutiny.

Some of the most devout Jewish communities in the world — groups like Neturei Karta, the Satmar Hasidim, True Torah Jews — have opposed Zionism on religious grounds since the ideology was founded in the 1890s. They argue that it hijacked Jewish identity for a political project that had no basis in Jewish theology before the nineteenth century. For this, they are called self-hating Jews. They are told they are not real Jews. They are marginalised, smeared, and shut out — by the very apparatus that claims to speak for all Jews everywhere. Ask yourself why. These communities don’t raise money for Israel. They don’t lobby Congress. They don’t fit the model. And when the most religiously observant Jews on the planet tell you that the Israeli government doesn’t represent them or their faith, and get attacked for saying it, that should tell you everything about the operation I’m about to describe. What follows is about the Israeli government’s cash cow, its lobbying apparatus, and where our money is going.

The Israeli government spends enormous sums to shape how we think about Muslims. In 2025, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs signed a $6 million contract with the US-based firm Clock Tower X LLC to produce digital content and influence how artificial intelligence systems — including tools like ChatGPT — respond to topics involving Israel. The 2025 budget allocated an additional $150 million to the Foreign Ministry for influence operations — a twenty-fold increase over previous years. These funds target American college campuses, social media platforms, and international media.

Then there’s TikTok. In September 2025, Netanyahu sat down with a group of American influencers at Israel’s Consulate General in New York — and the meeting was recorded. His words were not ambiguous. He called social media “the most important weapon to secure our base in the US.” He identified the TikTok sale as “the most important purchase going on right now. Number one. Number one.” He then said of Elon Musk and X: “We have to talk to Elon. He’s not an enemy, he’s a friend. If we can get these two things, we will get a lot.”

Days later, the TikTok deal went through. The US operations were transferred to a consortium led by Oracle, whose co-founder Larry Ellison is a longtime Netanyahu ally and major donor to the Israeli military. Ellison has hosted Netanyahu on his private island. The consortium includes Rupert Murdoch and Michael Dell — Dell posted a photo with the Israeli president captioned “It’s an honor to stand with Israel” and is a major donor to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.

A foreign head of state went on camera, called our social media platforms weapons, celebrated their purchase by his allies, and told a room full of influencers that controlling these platforms would allow Israel to “get a lot.” Again, that’s not a conspiracy theory. That is a PsyOp by a foreign government on our minds.

The strategic logic is straightforward. Our concern about Islam serves Israeli foreign policy by reframing the conflict as civilisational — the West versus Islam — rather than what it actually is: a political conflict over occupation, dispossession, and the rights of the Palestinian Arabs. The more focused we are on Islam as a threat at home, worrying about what our neighbour is up to, the less likely we are to question what is being done with our tax money overseas.

And it is our money. The United States has provided Israel with over $317 billion in US taxpayer funded aid since 1951, adjusted for inflation, making it the largest cumulative recipient of American foreign aid since World War II. In the two years since October 2023 alone, the US has spent $21.7 billion in direct military aid to Israel, with an additional $9 to $12 billion on related military operations in the region. The Israeli Defense Ministry confirmed that since October 2023, the United States delivered ninety thousand tons of arms and equipment on eight hundred transport planes and one hundred and forty ships.

Israel receives its annual aid in the first thirty days of the fiscal year — no other country gets this treatment. Unlike any other recipient, Israel is not required to account for how it spends US aid, including on settlements that violate stated US policy. Meanwhile, Israel maintains free universal healthcare and free education for its citizens. We are subsidising another country’s social safety net while our own crumbles, and the people telling us to be angry about Muslims are making sure we never connect those dots.

Ask yourself why the conversation is always steered toward Islam and never toward the cheque our government writes every year. Someone doesn’t want us connecting those dots.

The same infrastructure extends into technology — and this is where it comes home. The tech companies taking billions in defence contracts with Israel, paid for by our tax dollars, are the same ones building the surveillance systems being deployed on American soil. Google’s $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract provides cloud and AI services to the Israeli military. Microsoft’s Azure powers Israeli government operations. Amazon Web Services enables intelligence gathering overseas. These are the same companies providing facial recognition to American police departments, predictive policing algorithms to American cities, and cloud infrastructure to American intelligence agencies. The technology gets tested on someone else’s population, AI designed for warfare, and then deployed on ours. If you think the AI tools being built for foreign military operations won’t eventually be pointed at American citizens, you haven’t been paying attention to how this works. It’s already coming home while we are distracted by the political sleight of hand of our politicians.

Our tax dollars fund the bombs. Our anger provides the political cover. And the people telling us to be angry about Muslims are the same people making sure we never ask why. The road to truth always lies at the end of a money trail.

The Intel

Now let’s look at some of the claims we’ve all heard repeated. Some of them don’t hold up when you check the source.

Shariah is one of the most misunderstood words in this debate. There is no single book of Shariah — you cannot walk into a bookshop and buy one, the way you can buy a Bible or a Qur’an. There are books about Shariah, and there are law books in Muslim-majority countries that reflect local cultural norms — sometimes with an Islamic flavour. But that’s no different from Western nations whose laws carry a Christian influence without being based on the Bible, or Israel, where Jewish identity shapes the state but not every law of the Torah is practised. Shariah is not a legal code waiting to be imposed. It’s a tradition of thinking that different countries apply differently — or not at all. Shariah is a science of interpretation practised across five major schools of thought, each reaching different conclusions on issues ranging from prayer posture to commercial law. Over ninety percent of Shariah has nothing to do with criminal law. It covers prayer, fasting, charity, personal hygiene, inheritance, and business ethics. When politicians ban Shariah, they won’t be banning a book — they will be banning a way of thinking. And once the government can ban one way of thinking, yours is next.

Shariah courts in Western countries — including the United States and United Kingdom — operate identically to Jewish Halakha courts, known as Beth Din. Both handle civil matters on an opt-in basis: divorce, inheritance, contract disputes. Neither imposes religious law on non-adherents. Neither has jurisdiction over criminal matters. The Beth Din system has operated in America for decades without a single “Ban the Beth Din” bill. The forty-seven members of the Sharia Free America Caucus could not define what they are trying to ban — and have never proposed banning its Jewish equivalent. The inconsistency tells you everything about who’s running the game.

In fact, Israel itself — the country our tax dollars subsidise to the tune of $317 billion to expand, operate influence campaigns against us — operates Shariah courts for its Muslim citizens, handling matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The politicians who vote to send that money to a country with Shariah courts are the same ones telling you that Shariah in America is an existential threat. Let that sink in.

The claim that Muhammad was a pedophile is a commonly debunked claim Mike Davis recently shared with 475,000 followers. It is built on a contested hadith — a recorded oral tradition written down two to three centuries after the events it describes. What no one sharing this claim tells you is that the hadith literature contains multiple contradictory accounts, and the weight of the evidence — drawn from independent chronological records, biographical sources, and battlefield participation logs that prohibited anyone under fifteen from military expeditions — places Aisha in her late teens to early twenties at the time of marriage. The single account claiming she was nine requires ignoring all of it. No contemporary of the Prophet — not even his bitterest enemies, who accused him of everything from insanity to sorcery — ever accused him of marrying a girl too young. Meanwhile, US state laws as recently as today permit marriages as young as twelve with parental consent. Before condemning seventh-century Arabia, examine your own legal codes. The person who told you this was counting on you never looking it up.

Halal slaughter requires that an animal be humanely raised throughout its life, removed from the sight of other animals before slaughter, and killed with a single clean cut to the jugular using a razor-sharp knife, with a short prayer said beforehand. This is virtually identical in principle to Jewish kosher slaughter, known as shechita. Both traditions mandate humane treatment and the rapid draining of blood. The “ban halal” crowd has never proposed banning kosher. Ask yourself why. When politicians target one practice and protect an identical one, they’re not legislating food safety or concern for animal cruelty. They’re picking a target and hoping you don’t notice the double standard. Remember the political sleight of hand and who benefits from the outrage.

The idea that Islam is incompatible with democracy or trying to take over isn’t new — and it didn’t convince the founding fathers of our great nation. Thomas Jefferson hosted the first White House iftar dinner in 1805, rearranging the time of a state dinner to accommodate the Ramadan fast of the Tunisian ambassador, Sidi Soliman Mellimelli. Jefferson owned a copy of the Qur’an. And the author of this article served as a counterterrorism operative protecting American democracy — and helped bring to justice people who were plotting against it.

In a nation of many religions — and we often forget that different denominations of Christianity were once treated as separate and rival faiths — this is where we should be most concerned. Article VI of the United States Constitution states: “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law regardless of religion. Every bill introduced by the Sharia Free America Caucus — from making Shariah advocacy grounds for deportation to designating organisations as terrorists by legislative vote — violates the foundational principles of the country these legislators claim to defend.

And here’s where it gets personal. What happens when Evangelicals set religious tests for Catholics? Or Protestants for Mormons? Setting the precedent by banning Islam — a religion that believes Jesus is the Christ, that he ascended to Heaven, and that he will return in his second coming — brings it home on just how easy it would be to ban any denomination the group in power deems undesirable or a threat to what they believe is the real religion of the nation. The person who told you Islam is incompatible with America was counting on you never reading your own Constitution. Or just not caring. Benjamin Franklin warned us: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” He wasn’t talking about Islam. He was talking about us.

The Exit

The people profiting from our anger don’t live in our neighbourhoods. They’ve never set foot in the communities they talk about. They have constructed, for profit and for political power, an image of 1.8 billion people based on the worst acts of a fraction of a fraction — and they’ve made a very comfortable living doing it.

And it isn’t just domestic profiteers. AIPAC and the Israeli government benefit directly from every ounce of our outrage. It is the political cover for a foreign policy that costs thousands of American lives and American treasure — $317 billion and counting — while the recipients enjoy the social programmes we can’t afford. The outrage machine keeps our eyes on Islam so we never look at the line item in the federal budget.

We were never stupid. We were targeted. The same psychological machinery that radicalises a young Muslim man watching jihadi recruitment videos in his bedroom is the same machinery being used on us: curated content selected for maximum emotional impact, an in-group that rewards escalation, an algorithm that serves us more of what makes us angry, and an industry that profits from our inability to see past the noise. The mechanism is identical. Only the content differs.

I know this because I’ve watched radicalisation from every angle a person can watch it from. I was radicalised myself, as a teenager, in a Christian cult that beat me with oak table legs and broomstick handles in the name of God’s authority — I know what it feels like to have a worldview constructed for you by people who profit from keeping you captive. I watched people I was close to get radicalised by online propaganda until they were ready to fly to Iraq and kill American soldiers. I trained them at a jihad camp while wearing a wire, and I helped put them away. And now I watch ordinary, decent Americans get radicalised by a billion-dollar industry that needs our outrage more than it needs the truth.

The machinery is the same every time. A curated feed. An authority figure who profits from our outrage. A community that polices doubt — where questioning the narrative gets you branded a traitor or a sympathiser. And a set of claims that fall apart the moment you verify them independently. The men I helped convict had their Anwar al-Awlaki recordings and their Baghdad Sniper videos. We have our Benny Johnson posts and our Libs of TikTok screenshots. The emotional architecture is identical: select the most inflammatory content, strip it of context, serve it to people who are already angry, and watch the radicalisation compound.

The real-world consequences are already here. In 2024, monitors recorded 8,658 complaints about incidents targeting Muslims across the United States — the highest number ever documented. That’s not a sign of a country getting safer. That’s a sign of a population being manipulated into attacking their own neighbours while the people running the operation cash cheques and win elections. Every incident is a data point in someone’s fundraising deck. Every headline is a donation driver. The outrage isn’t a side effect of the industry. It is the industry.

The exit starts with checking what we’ve been told — and not by asking the people who told us, because they have a financial interest in keeping us in the dark. Not by retreating into our own curated content to reinforce what we already believe. Step out. Challenge the beliefs we’ve been carrying. Beliefs aren’t permanent — they change as we grow, and changing them is a sign of strength, not weakness. Look up the donor-advised fund filings. Read the actual text of the bills being proposed in our name. Search the names I’ve given you and follow the money. See who’s getting paid, and ask yourself whether the people getting rich off our anger have ever done a single thing to make our lives better.

I told you about my work for the USAF Office of Special Investigations and my counterterrorism work for the Federal Bureau of Investigations, I told you about being raised Catholic, my time in a Christian cult and after becoming an Evangelical Christian, but there’s one more thing you should know about the man who wrote this article.

I’ve been Muslim nearly thirty years. But I didn’t abandon Christianity — I grew into Islam through it. I spent years studying the Bible, the Jewish scriptures, and eventually the Qur’an. What I found was that Islam didn’t ask me to reject Jesus — it asked me to revere him, as the Christ, born of a virgin, who ascended to Heaven and will return. My faith deepened. It didn’t break. The men I helped convict didn’t just betray their country — they betrayed a faith that teaches the same reverence for Jesus that your church taught you.

Everything I told you about the profiteers, the foreign influence operations, the manufactured outrage, the claims that fall apart when you check them — I told you as a man who knows Islam from the inside, who has lived it, bled for it, and been exiled for defending it honestly.

Christ himself told us: “You cannot serve God and money.” Every politician, every lobbying group, every influencer, every organisation I have named in this article — ask yourself which one they are serving. The answer has been staring us in the face the entire time.

You just read an entire article by a Muslim and didn’t throw it in the bin. You evaluated the evidence on its merits. You followed the facts where they led. That is the version of you that the hate industry cannot afford to exist — because a person who evaluates evidence is a person who can’t be hustled.

The most radical thing you can do right now is verify.

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

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

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