The Blogs: I Declare War on Iran

5 Reasons why you — and your country — should too.

Bibas is the wake up call. Time to take our heads out of the sand, smell the Jihad, and fight back.

I’m a Jew, and I’m formally declaring war on Iran. I can’t wait any longer for Israel to do it, or for the United States, Britain or Saudi Arabia. If you are a Jew — orthodox, liberal, cultural, Haredi — or someone living anywhere in the world with western values — right, left, liberal, conservative — it makes no difference. You should declare war on Iran and all of its Radical Islamist proxies. Here’s why:

Bibas.

The Bibas tragedy is horrifying. The utter barbarity – from abduction to strangulation to the disgusting “handover party” of mutilated children. The entire Jewish people are in mourning. Who would not be horrified by this?!

A few billion others, that’s who. Radical Islamists like Hamas, their apologists and thugs of all kinds around the world glorify this kind of personal, graphic, barbaric violence. They call it “legitimate resistance” — at least when it’s perpetrated against Jews. Look how much of the world is celebrating 10/7. Hard to believe?

Thomas Friedman offers a clue to this insanity in the opening pages of his iconic book on the Arab/Israeli conflict, From Beirut to Jerusalem. He describes the experience of Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, the Israeli commander tasked with coordinating with warring factions in the Lebanese civil war in the 1980’s. “The first night after I arrived,” Shahak recalled, “… a group of Druze elders demanded to see me… They set before me three orange crates. One had human heads in it, another had torsos, and the other arms and legs… They said these were Druze sheiks whom the Christians had ambushed and then carved up… I was really shocked,” Shahak continued. “I had never seen anything like this in all my years as a soldier… So I got in a jeep and went down to see one of the Phalangist (Christian) commanders… I demanded an explanation. ‘Oh, I know this trick,’ he said. There had been a fight that day between some of his men and some Druze… and the Druze took their own dead away and then carved them up to make it look like the (Christians) did it… to stir up their own people. I just shook my head. I realized at that moment that I was in the middle of a game I did not understand.”

There are so many Jihadi values we cannot understand: restrictions on basic personal freedoms and human rights, subjugation of women, rewards for suicide bombers. The toxic list goes on. But make no mistake: this IS their value system, as is their imperative to export it through violent Jihad.

We may want to live peacefully side by side, but their values demand us enslaved or dead. Face it: It’s us vs them. We need to fight.

2. Believe what they say, and they say they will not stop till they kill us all.

The Bibas children may have become iconic symbols of the war, but Hamas has much bigger plans for the rest of our kids. On Oct 7th they burned alive, tortured and murdered 30 other kids in front of their parents. In their founding charter, official press statements and instructions to their followers, Hamas says they want to commit the atrocities of 10/7, in their words, “Again, and again, and again.” But do they really? Is it just rhetoric?

My grandfather, a holocaust survivor from Poland, used to say in referring to Yassir Arafat — Jewish public enemy #1 of that time period– “I trust Arafat completely. He says he wants to drive all us Jews into the sea, and I believe him.”

The problem with the western liberal mindset is that we tend not to believe barbarians like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Houthis, and the Iranian thugs pulling the Jihad strings from Tehran. We imagine all people surely just want to live in peace, side by side with neighbors, even if they may have different values than ours. I mean, doesn’t everyone just want prosperity, clean water, and a better world for their children?

No. Those may be our values, but they are not theirs. Jihadists are nevertheless very honest people. They are clear that they want an Islamic world for their children, without Jews and without western values. Believe them.

But they should also believe us. We are SO DONE with people who burn our children alive.

We must destroy them before they destroy us.

3. No one is coming to save us.

I grew up in the “post World Wars” period full of flourishing liberal democracies with guaranteed human rights, a United Nations to peacefully arbitrate disputes, an International Court of Justice to rule above politics, and so many more inventions of a supposedly “enlightened world.” In the spirit of the tikkun olam I learned in Hebrew School, I donated to Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders, and gave up my Halloween treats to collect pennies for UNICEF. I got a “world class” Ivy League education. It seemed that our generation had all the tools to transcend the horrors of ignorance and racism.

Oct 7th showed us who our friends really are. Not the UN, not Amnesty, not the Court. Not the great universities, nor the labor movements, nor the social justice causes for which we wholeheartedly fought. Seems many of those we thought were friends have abandoned us. While we Jews still have allies, if we don’t stand up for ourselves no one else will. Time to fight.

4. They declared war on us 100 years ago.

Ever since Sayyid Qutb created the philosophical foundations of Radical Islamism in the mid-1900’s, adherents to this racist, perverse and murderous branch of Islam have been waging war against our values, our society, our people. There have been thousands of Jihadi “terror” attacks in Israel and the West in the past decades. But, ironically, by calling it “terror,” we have hamstrung our response. Actions against terrorists are mostly “surgical,” designed to root out the specific terrorists involved without hurting “innocent bystanders.” So while millions of radical muslims are at war with us Jews and Westerners, we ban bottled water on airplanes as a response. They vow to kill us and take our lands. We can’t even point to their lands on a map.

And while we’ve been denying the seriousness of the threat, they’ve been taking over countries and armies. Islamic cruise missiles shutting down global shipping, and hitting Tel Aviv from… Yemen?! Seriously? Dayenu. Enough.

War is messy and terrible. There can be horrific collateral damage. Witness Gaza. But victory is at least possible. Terrorism is a shadow that can go on forever, but wars can be won or lost. Iran and its Islamic henchmen declared war long ago on us. Let’s declare war back, and fight to win — even at terrible cost.

5. They simply refuse to surrender.

The Palestinians and their supporters need to admit they have lost, surrender unconditionally, and accept the terms of defeat. Yet for 75 years they haven’t. They lost the war in 1948, and 1967, and 1973 — all wars they started. Yet the resistance lives! They are still considered “refugees” by the UN after almost a century of living elsewhere.

It’s time for the Palestinians to lose once and for all and admit total defeat. This time, there can be no more demands for the “right of return.” Some will have to just go away and go live somewhere else just like all other refugees have always done– like the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from our homes in Arab countries. Or my family from Poland, for that matter. We must not let the rest of the world, including the US government, pressure us for “cease fire” or “withdrawl.” We must fight for total victory and utterly destroy the enemy. And we won’t stand for festering wounds on our borders, like the abhorrent refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank, full of poverty stricken pawns in some perverse PR game. These poor souls are cynically kept as weapons against us, taught to hate us, and pathetically despised by the many Arab and Western countries that profess to care but are too scared to settle these radicalized human time bombs in their cities. After all, Islamists threaten the “moderate” dictatorships in the middle east and Western nations almost as much as they threaten Israel.

No more. We need to win the war, demand surrender, and accept nothing less. After we utterly defeat this toxic brood, we can revert to being the enlightened, compassionate, “tikkun olam-niks” that we truly are, and help them rebuild their lands, their homes, and their economies — ‘cause that’s what people with our values do. Ain’t that right, Germany and Japan?

Until then, we need to fight till the enemy surrenders.

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Follow the antisemites. They know what they are doing.

We should take a page from the many antisemites of various flavors who have beat us soundly at the public relations game for the last 2,000 years. They feed their ideologies to their kids in mother’s milk, in kindergarten, at Sunday school, and now, on TikTok. The newest antisemites — the “anti-zionists” — have succeeded brilliantly over the last decades in poisoning so many minds here in the US — in our own Jewish families! — and around the globe. They’ve created an army of zombie “useful idiots” out of nice Jewish and gentile kids alike who block traffic yelling, “Globalize the Intifada,” with no understanding of what that means or who would die first (them). Oct 7th was their “Coming Out Party!” So fun! Aren’t these Kaffiah’s vogue?!

By getting clear that we have a real murderous enemy surrounding us, and educating ourselves from birth onward as to the nature of the threat, maybe we can rally what it will take to defeat this evil. Declaring war is a necessary step to motivate and mobilize the people and resources it will take to win what is a just fight against a terrible enemy. Radical Islam, and its most powerful and disgusting proponents in power in Iran, must be confronted head on. I declare war on them. You should too.

Sign this declaration of war.

And just maybe our countries will follow our lead.