Matthew Syed in the Times – Israel knows what we won’t accept: the mullahs want nuclear war:
The West is afflicted, as so often, by a stunning failure of imagination. Again and again over the past two days, I’ve read commentaries with “on the one hand, on the other hand” prevarication about the Israeli strikes, the idea that while we “mustn’t” let Iran get nuclear weapons, we should disarm it “some other way”. How, exactly? Perhaps a continuation of recent diplomatic failure, or maybe more phone calls urging “restraint” (see Keir Starmer and David Lammy) as the fundamentalists rush to enrichment while deceiving and dissembling — as an authoritative report by the International Atomic Energy Agency just revealed?
Still we in the West struggle to understand religious fanaticism, the high likelihood that if Iran gained nuclear weapons, it would use them against Israel. That isn’t just my opinion, by the way; it’s what the mullahs have been telling us for more than 40 years, ever since they came to power in the 1979 revolution, perhaps the worst thing to have happened to Iran and the wider Middle East. They call Israel “Little Satan”; the “enemy of humanity”. Recently, Ali Khamenei, supreme leader and successor to the “great” Ayatollah Khomeini, described Israel as a “cancerous tumour that must be removed”.
The failure, from Obama's horribly misjudged JCPOA to the current hand-wringing by Starmer and Lammy, is precisely that inability to appreciate what it means for a country to be ruled by mullahs who really believe – really believe – in the return of the hidden imam, leading to an apocalyptic war pitching the forces of righteousness against the forces of evil. These religious nut-jobs shouldn't be within a million miles of nuclear weapons.
I still remember vividly hearing about the child martyrs of Iran, the innocent kids indoctrinated by fanatics into believing that the greatest glory they could bring to Allah was to walk — even run — into minefields and towards machinegun fire on behalf of the Ayatollah during the Iran-Iraq war. Younger readers may find this shocking but at least 20,000 children (some just 11 and 12, the age of my son and daughter) died this way, limbs strewn across battlefields that nobody remembers any more, egged on by those who were supposed to protect them.
It isn’t a regime; it’s a death cult. In the BBC documentary Child Soldiers, some of those who were sent to die as kids but amazingly survived talk of how death is eulogised by the clerics. Hossein Fahmideh, a boy who blew himself up, became an icon, government propaganda proclaiming him a hero who was now in the inner circle of heaven. A mural in central Tehran depicted him under the loving paternal gaze of the Ayatollah with the words: “Our leader is that 12-year-old child who threw himself with a grenade under the enemy’s tank, destroyed it and himself and drank the sweet nectar of martyrdom”. A soldier talks casually of how two children sprinted across a rigged-up field the better to reach heaven. “They started arguing about who should step on the mines first,” he says, “to achieve their primary goal of becoming a martyr and joining Allah.”
This is a sickness: the virus of fundamentalism. When religious psychopaths say they love death, not life, they are telling the truth. Listen to them. Drink it in. Allow it to subvert your “enlightened” complacency about what it would mean for Iran to get to 90 per cent enrichment, when it is already so close. This is a regime that to this day funds suicide bombers across the region; clubs women with batons for daring to lift the hijab; and sat malignly behind the October 7 atrocity. This month fanatics chanted, “Death to Israel,” during Iran’s official haj. Social media posts show children starting the school day with genocidal slogans. A UN report in March revealed that the regime was stepping up its use of drones, facial-recognition cameras and apps to enforce religious repression as well as to export violence with targeted assassinations. Doesn’t this give a hint of what they are about?
Mutually assured destruction: you may remember the phrase. Pundits often intimate that nuclear war can’t happen because nobody would launch a first strike in the knowledge that the inevitable counterattack would kill them too. This is wrong. Utterly wrong. The logic may work for western leaders. It might work with Russia too: do you think Putin — with his looted billions, young girlfriend and grotesque venality — wants to die? Not a chance. Not even the criminal Kim Jong-un wishes to perish, marinading, as he does, in the imperial harem with the monstrous privileges he steals from his impoverished people.
Religious fanatics are different. Radically different. They want to die. It’s why it is not just conceivable but probable that an ageing fundamentalist leader would launch a nuclear strike against Israel, and feel closer to Allah as the inevitable response loomed large on the radar screen. Do western commentators still not understand that this is precisely why so many sane Iranians (the majority) are thrilled by the Israeli attack? They know only too well that an Iranian nuclear weapon isn’t only an existential threat to the “Zionists” but, just as surely, to themselves. They would be incinerated in the counterstrike, their lives lost as collateral damage in another person’s sick fantasy.
Wake up, world. Every conversation I had in Israel in February, including with three former PMs, opposition leaders and security experts, circled back to the Iranian threat. Remember, too, that Iran gaining a nuclear weapon would lead instantly to proliferation across the region and the wider world. In other words, it would be the first domino that could, in time, lead to the destruction of humanity. It is why the phrase I keep hearing — that Israel is doing the world a “favour” — is so inadequate. A favour? It is facing reprisals and death for hitting the head of the snake on behalf of us all.
Mick Hartley 