Fear and Loathing in Iran—Where Ayatollahs Say the Darndest Things
In House Party, a late 60s American TV show, host Art Linkletter had a segment called “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” Linkletter would interview young children and coax them into saying exactly what they were thinking because the truth was funny. I thought about that show as I read the darndest things Iran’s theocrats had to say about Israel and the U.S. since their Islamic revolution in 1979. I found it all morbidly funny.
For instance, take what Iran’s now dead Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in 2000: “Iran’s stance has always been clear on this ugly phenomenon (Israel). We have repeatedly said that this cancerous tumor of a state should be removed from the region.” Isn’t that darling?
It was Tuesday afternoon, and I was digging for more of the darndest things Ali had said, when at 3:24 p.m., a missile alert pulsed from my phone (take a listen), startling me. But I wanted more dark humor before I had to head to the miklat (my apartment building’s bomb shelter), so I kept going. Ali didn’t disappoint. Fifteen years later, he affirmed his message, declaring that “G-d willing, there will be no such thing as a Zionist regime in 25 years.” No lines to read between. Iran had a twenty-five-year plan to wipe out Israel. I hear you, man. But, Ali, what should Muslims do in the interim? “Until then,” Ali answered, “struggling, heroic, and jihadi morale will leave no moment of serenity for Zionists.” Like poetic symmetry, at that threatening moment, the sirens sounded (take a listen). Iranian missiles were headed my way. I hightailed it down to my miklat.
By 3:30 p.m., after the Iron Dome booms rattled my miklat, Home Front Command gave the all-clear signal. I helped my neighbor walk her three little kids to their second-floor apartment and resumed my reading of all the darndest things Iran’s despots had said in the name of Islam.
“We must strive to export our Revolution throughout the world, and must abandon all idea of not doing so, for not only does Islam refuse to recognize any difference between Muslim countries, it is the champion of all oppressed people,” said the first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, on March 21, 1980, to commemorate the Iranian New Year. How sweet. And we see that Ayatollah Ali, Ruhollah’s successor, had no problem with that plan. While Israel may have had a special place in Ali’s heart, why limit such hatred to the Jews when you can export it to the rest of the world? Ali indeed delivered, and at no extra charge. As Marjan Keypour Greenblatt of the Atlantic Council put it, “Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has operated along two strategic tracks: exporting its Shia revolutionary doctrine and establishing influence through networks like the ‘Axis of Resistance.’”
Into the night, I read speeches by Iran’s Ayatollahs, presidents, generals, cronies. They all had the same Jew hatred stench. Jews suck. Israel sucks. They need to be eliminated. My readings left me with the distinct impression that these Iranian theocrats had a rather unhealthy obsession with Israel and the Jews. Old story, different actors. Still, it bummed me out. I needed sleep.
I was shaken out of my slumber at 12:11 a.m. by Home Front Command. Incoming Iranian missiles were expected. Three minutes later, sirens. Down to the miklat I went. My neighbors were all there, just like old times. A second siren sounded, signaling more missiles. This was unusual. We were worried. Then we heard explosions and prayed it was Iron Dome taking care of business.
The missile incidents ended by 12:42 a.m. We all headed back to our apartments, hoping to get some sleep.
I got up at 7:00 a.m., made coffee, had breakfast, and reviewed what I wrote the night before. I was about to dig into more greatest hits by Ayatollah and company when at 7:56 a.m., I received another missile alert. I braced myself for a siren, but it never came. I shook off my anxiety and kept researching.
Like an icebreaker at a party, in November 1979, just before assuming the position, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini started playing the name-calling game with the U.S. Fresh off a successful overthrow, Ruhollah declared that, “In this revolution, the Great Satan is America that gathers around other devils blatantly.” Thus began the Iranian tradition of name-calling. Sticks and stones, right? Wrong. Iran would go on to be responsible for nearly 1,000 American deaths.
Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier, Jew hater, and Iranian loyalist, was one of Iran’s more entertaining theocrats. For instance, in 2005, Mahmoud famously said that Israel “is a disgraceful blot” that should be “wiped off the face of the earth.” He was also notoriously cruel. According to Human Rights Watch, under Mahmoud, executions increased by 300 percent, and he made Iran the world leader in juvenile executions.
Mahmoud continued his despotic stand-up routine throughout his reign. In 2006, he said, “You should know that the criminal and terrorist Zionist regime which has 60 years of plundering, aggression and crimes in its file has reached the end of its work and will soon disappear off the geographical scene.” But he got a little testy in September 2008, when, wearing no burka to veil his threat, Mahmoud declared that Israel has no roots in the Middle East and would be “eliminated.” I hear you, man. Iran has a plan to eliminate the Jewish state. Nothing new to Israel. Iran, take a number.
How should Israel be “eliminated’? In 2014, Ayatollah Ali made it clear that “while waiting for an end to this cold-blooded murderous regime, mighty armed resistance is the only way to deal with it.” True to his word, in July, 2024, Revolutionary Guard aerospace chief Amir Ali Hajizadeh, proudly boasted that of course, Iran has been acting through Hezbollah and Hamas, “as it is obvious from the weapons of our dear ones in Palestine, Lebanon and elsewhere, it has now become clear that they are in fact being helped and supplied by Iran”. But Amir is dead now. Israel took him seriously and then took him out.
(It got a bit ridiculous on Thursday. My writing got interrupted five times because of missiles headed to Jerusalem. I think Iran doesn’t want me to finish this article.)
Then we have the classic mafia-like threats from none other than Iran’s version of the Godfather, the second Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. He didn’t like the fact that some Middle East nations were cutting deals with Israel so, on October 3, 2023, he warned that “The definitive stance of the Islamic Republic is that the governments which prioritize the gamble of normalization with the Zionist regime will incur losses” and “Today, the situation of the Zionist regime is not one that should motivate closeness to it; they shouldn’t make this mistake.” You can just see Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather delivering such a message to his enemies. In retrospect, Ali tipped his hand (unlike cool, calculating Michael Corleone) when he said just four days before October 7, “This cancer will certainly, G-d willing, be eradicated by the hands of the Palestinian people and the resistance forces throughout the region.” So much for Ali Khamenei. He was rubbed out on February 28 of this year.
From Ruhollah to Ali and every other Iranian theocrat (Supreme or otherwise), Iran’s grand obsession has always been Israel and the Jewish state’s eradication. It lies at the core of Iran’s ideology and served as a way to pander to the Arab solidarity. It’s really sick when you think about it. But when, from its inception, Iran’s theocratic leaders continually pronounce that Israel is a cancerous tumor, a disgraceful blot to be eradicated, wiped off the face of the earth by armed resistance, and back up these Jew hatred threats with a military and nuclear build-up aimed at Israel and by funding and supporting Hamas and Hezbollah as proxy armies, you kinda have to believe that not only is the Iranian regime sick but they will kill you with their disease unless you stop them first. Israel and the U.S. are stopping them first.
But the Iranian regime’s capacity for depravity and the threat its ideological export program poses is best revealed through its tyrannical rule over the Iranian people. From its inception, this regime has carried out mass executions of political prisoners, criminalized the exercise of freedom of expression, association, and assembly, used deadly force to suppress protesters, enforced ideological policies of discrimination and repression of women, and used drones, informers, and surveillance on women to enforce the hijab law. In Gestapo-like fashion, the Iranian regime has committed such cruelties through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—a religious, ideological police force. In 2022, a 22-year-old woman was arrested for allegedly flouting Iran’s Islamic dress code and was beaten to death in custody. In 2023, a sixteen-year-old girl met the same fate at the hands of the morality police for allegedly failing to cover her hair. This year alone, over 30,000 Iranians have been murdered for the sin of protesting. But that wasn’t enough. As an underscore to their barbarism, on March 19, the Iranian regime publicly executed three protesters by hanging, one of whom was a teenager. Their crime: “waging war against God.”
I must admit that taking stock of the Iranian regime’s forty-seven-year history of threatening Israel and the U.S., along with the brutal ways it has crushed its citizens, while Iranian missiles fly over my Jerusalem apartment, has colored my view. Still, no amount of post-traumatic stress can distort the reality that the Iranian regime embodies an aggressive evil, and stopping such evil is a good thing. So, why are so many principled Americans opposed to stopping this evil?
American reluctance to take up arms against a clear evil, such as the Iranian regime, is nothing new. Americans did not favor entering the war against Hitler, even in the face of his clearly displayed evils. Only after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor did public opinion shift. The same isolationist views prevail now when it comes to Iran. But there’s an interesting twist: not all Americans oppose war as a means of liberation, as long as it targets Israel and the Jews.
The Free Palestine, Globalize the Intifada, From the River to the Sea crowd showed no hesitation in supporting Hamas and their murderous “resistance.” But it’s a completely different story when it comes to the liberation of the Iranian people from an evil, theocratic regime. From this ‘Free Palestine, etc.’ crowd, we either have silence or support for the despotic regime, combined with shouts of death to America. I’m at a loss to find a better example of moral hypocrisy. Maybe it’s just pure Jew hatred.
It’s way too easy to obscure moral clarity when discussing the war with Iran—just mention American President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and watch how the conversation degrades. It’s all a convenient distraction from the simplicity of the threshold moral question, because the morality of waging war against Iran’s evil ways does not rise or fall with either man or their politics. Rather, the Iranian regime represents a self-confessed, undisputed evil, and the threshold moral question is simply, Are you for or against doing what is necessary to stop that evil? Israel and America have answered that question in the affirmative.