At this exceptionally alarming time, when bad people in Israel and the West seem to have the wind behind them, two developments have lifted the spirits.
A mob of masked protesters wearing keffiyehs and carrying Palestinian flags staged a “bicycle boycott” ride in Philadelphia to target and intimidate Jewish- and Israeli-owned businesses. They hadn’t expected that thousands of people would turn up to defend the Jews and actually outnumber the mob, forcing some of those louts to abandon the demonstration.
The second development involves 13 Republican-led U.S. states that have threatened trade reprisals and divestment measures against the United Kingdom and the Netherlands over their proposed trade sanctions targeting Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria.
In both instances, civilization has begun fighting back against those running interference for barbarism.
The barbarians have gained the upper hand in the West because the decent majority of them haven’t understood that a war is being waged against them and their society in which they must either muster their courage to fight or lose their way of life.
The situation in Iran shows what happens when people flinch from this. In February, U.S. President Donald Trump didn’t flinch. He bombed Iran—albeit only after Israel had risked its own people to make the skies safe for American warplanes.
But then Trump flinched, refusing to allow Israel to continue to attack and thus further degrade Tehran’s ability to lash out. The result was Iran’s seizing control of the Straits of Hormuz, stepping up attacks on neighboring Arab states, and replenishing its ballistic-missile and other military programs.
The high oil price and spikes in the cost of living resulting from this continuing Iranian aggression helped produce the Republican rout in the midterms.
If Trump really had defeated the regime instead of the patently false victory that he has repeatedly claimed, even America’s anti-war public would have been impressed, his enemies on both sides of the political divide would have been unable to use the war against him, and the oil price would have gone down.
Instead, a re-energized Tehran has been gloating that it has defeated America in both the Straits of Hormuz and in Washington, D.C.
And it’s stepping up its efforts to sow terror around the world.
The U.S. Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, who is leading an economic pressure campaign aimed at asphyxiating the Iranian regime, has been forced to move to an American military base because of an Iranian threat to his life.
Other present and former members of the administration face similar threats from Tehran, which has also made repeated attempts to kill Trump himself.
Civilization has begun battling against those running interference for barbarism.
This week, the United States abruptly moved its bombers from RAF Mildenhall, a military airbase in England, because of Iranian threats. Last month, the Pentagon removed B-1 bombers from another English airbase, RAF Fairford, as officials grew concerned about a complex Iranian-backed plot to kill American pilots and target aircraft using drones and other measures.
American security authorities have now revealed that Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, who was already in detention in New York on terrorism charges, is suspected of having masterminded the Fairford plot from his prison cell.
Al-Saadi reportedly told FBI officers of his close relationship with Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who died in an Israeli airstrike on Feb. 28—the start of the war against Iran—and Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander killed in an American drone strike in January 2020.
Al-Saadi is said to operate an IRGC terrorist group that was behind nearly 20 attacks across Europe in less than three months. These included the firebombings of Jewish ambulances and synagogues in Britain, and a drone attack on the Israeli embassy, as well as a plot to kill Jews at synagogues in America.
However weakened, the Tehran regime remains a potent threat not just to its own people—whom it continues to tyrannize, jail and murder—but to America, Britain and Europe.
We don’t know if Trump will attack Iran again. Signals coming from the administration are confused and ambiguous, maybe deliberately so. Trump was using the apostle of appeasement, Vice President JD Vance, to negotiate with Iran through Qatari and Pakistani intermediaries.
But he has suddenly transferred Vance from dealing with Iran to tackling crime in America. The United States continues to reinforce its military buildup in the Gulf, and Trump himself said this week: “We want to make sure we have a total victory, not a 93% victory.”
Trump may suddenly resume the war. He may instead continue with his economic pressure campaign, which will take at least another year to bring down the Iranian economy, if not the regime. Or he may continue with that for a short time and then declare a final victory, which he will redefine in accordance with his unique characteristic of reordering reality.
While it survives, the Iranian regime will continue to mount deniable attacks on America and Britain while messing with the West’s political mind, using Vance as its most important weapon of disorientation and demoralization.
The vice president, who refused to denounce his friend Tucker Carlson over the podcaster’s vicious Jewish-conspiracy theories, has now even more disturbingly echoed that thinking.
In a post on X purporting to explain the midterms debacle, Vance stated four things that needed to change: “1) End the war, 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation, 3) Put America First, 4) Change our relationship to Israel.”
By supporting those who maliciously blame Israel for the war in Iran, Vance has now positioned himself as leader of the anti-Israel, isolationist, Jewish conspiracy wing of the Republican Party. He believes that riding the Carlsonite tiger will deliver him the White House. He is thus a threat to the Jewish world.
Western refusal to neutralize Iran, however, long predates the emergence of these deeply troubling currents in America.
Partly, it was due to the fear that Iran was just too large and too powerful to take on. Western governments believed that they could use Tehran instead to contain other more dangerous enemies in the Middle East.
They were also beguiled by Iranian charm into the belief that these were people with whom the West could safely do business.
Little did they understand the Islamic jihadi mind.
This crosses all divisions of tribe, clan and state to unite the entire Islamist world in the implacable belief that Muslims are under divine instruction to conquer Israel and the non-Islamic world for Islam. Any agreement with their enemies must therefore be temporary, strategic and utterly worthless.
Israel itself has shown similar blindness to the reality of the jihad, the cause of its catastrophic misreading of Hamas in Gaza that led to the Oct. 7, 2023 onslaught in southern Israel.
The same error lies behind the appalling Israeli political situation that has now developed, with 19 Arabs who were elected to the Knesset in last month’s election now poised to form a government under Gadi Eisenkot as prime minister.
It’s shocking that these parties were permitted to stand for election at all. This is not because they are Arabs or Muslims. It’s because they are all Islamists committed to the destruction of the State of Israel.
Before last month’s election, Israel’s Central Elections Committee disqualified them from running because they all fell afoul of the Basic Law that prohibits political parties if they support “armed struggle” against Israel or deny it as a Jewish state. But the committee was overruled by the Supreme Court.
Since its creation, Israel has been ambivalent about its Arab population. This has prevented it from properly tackling the full threat posed by a proportion of that population. It is a lethal weakness.
In the post-Oct. 7 war, Iran turned its own weakness into strength because America has turned its strength into weakness.
The 1979 revolution that brought the Iranian regime to power ignited, inspired and incentivized the Islamic jihad around the world. Now that regime must be destroyed once and for all. No more negotiation and compromises with evil.
To defeat barbarism, civilization must fight back.
