A surgical strike against Islamist tyranny

The world has awoken to news of a decapitation. Early this morning, Israel time, the air force of the Jewish State struck with astonishing precision against the tyrants and infrastructure of the Iranian regime. The top dogs of the Islamic republic have been taken out. Its nuclear facilities have been reduced to ashen wreckage. None of us can afford the luxury of political aloofness in this moment, far less that moral cowardice that masquerades as pacifism. Too much is at stake. Events compel us to stir from our insouciance and take a side for once.

From what we know, this would appear to be one of the most laser-focussed strikes against a hostile regime in the history of warfare. Those images of apartment blocks entirely intact aside from the floor where one of Iran’s despots lived are a testament to the exactness of Israel’s daring raid. The list of the dead is astounding. They include General Mohammad Bagheri, the chief of military staff, and Hossein Salami, leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Imagine the glee of the families of the 500 youths who were butchered by Salami’s guards in 2022 for the crime of believing that women deserve ‘life and freedom’.

Just like that, the regime’s two chief military autocrats are gone. The man responsible for Iran’s murderous, imperial foreign ventures (Bagheri) and the man charged with maintaining the unforgiving diktats of the republic against its own freedom-dreaming citizens (Salami) are no more. Just this week, Salami said: ‘Our next confrontation with the Israelis will be far more crushing, devastating and destructive.’ Yes, for you.

Other military leaders were assassinated, too. So were nuclear scientists, including Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation. Israel says these regime boffins were developing a ‘nuclear programme’ for ‘military objectives’. They’ve been ruthlessly pursuing the ‘weaponisation’ of uranium, it says. Indeed, the prime justification for Operation Rising Lion, as the mission has been christened, was to ‘eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat’.

Naturally, given this is a military venture by the state that luvvies and activists love to hate, Israel’s operation already finds itself shrouded in misinformation and shrill censure. Israel is a ‘rogue’ nation launching an ‘unprovoked’ assault on poor Iran, cry the morally lost leftists of the West. They echo the Iranian regime itself, which tweeted: ‘Remember we didn’t initiate it.’ Excuse my language, but yes you fucking did. You initiated this when you sponsored the largest mass murder of Jews since the Nazis and the largest exiling of Jews since the Arab wars of the 1940s.

It was the Iranian regime’s proxy, Hamas, that started the current war in Gaza, when it sent an army of 6,000 tooled-up fascists to rape Israeli women and slaughter Israeli families. And it was the Iranian regime’s proxy of Hezbollah that turned the heat up even further with its daily bombings of northern Israel that caused 60,000 Israelis to evacuate their homes – the single largest fleeing of Jews from war since the fallout from the Arab-Israel conflict of 1948. Say it with me: Iran started this war.

Israel is now accused of ‘escalating’ tensions. Why is it escalation when the Jewish State takes out a general of the Iranian regime but not when that general’s allies kidnap a mother and her two babies for the ‘crime’ of being Jews in the Holy Land? Those who wring their hands harder over the death of General Mohammad Bagheri than they did over the deaths of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas have forfeited the right to be considered morally decent human beings. They’ve taken a side, even if they refuse to acknowledge it: the side of Islamo-fascism against the Jewish nation.

Show me one state on Earth that would tolerate the existence of a nearby regime that had sent its proxies to rape and murder your people and had sworn itself to your annihilation. Israel is right to say the Iranian regime is ‘devoted to the destruction of the State of Israel, not just as an ideal, but as a binding directive’. That is clear from Iran’s statements, its terrorism and its war-making. Those referring to Israel’s op as a ‘regime-change war’, thus slyly likening it to the vain, reckless wars of the Western powers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are being outright duplicitous. Israel is carefully attacking a regime that attacked it, not violently blundering into a far-off nation in search of that fleeting moral rush of global importance as the postwar order corrodes.

Both sides must now ‘show restraint’, say the leaders of Europe with snivelling conformity. ‘We urge all parties to step back’, says Keir Starmer. Let’s leave to one side the fact that Israel is showing restraint, and is launching precise strikes rather than mimicking the lethally infantile ‘shock and awe’ that Britain and America pursued to such ruinous effect in Iraq. More pointedly, to call on Israel to ‘show restraint’ against the regime that sponsored a fascistic bloodbath against the Jews is, to be blunt, sick-making.

One envisions Starmer and the rest issuing their chickenshit cries at every crisis point in human history. To America after Pearl Harbour, or to the Free French army following the Nazi conquest of France: ‘Show restraint. Step back. Don’t do anything too risky.’ It is moral cowardice in the drag of diplomacy, spinelessness dolled up as peacemaking. It is even worse on the so-called left, which expressly calls on Israel and Israel alone to lay down arms. That these people now shed tears over Israel’s assassination of Islamist tyrants confirms that it was never the tragic death of Palestinian civilians that horrified them about the Gaza war – it was the temerity of the Jewish State in standing up for itself against its foes. Their ‘pacifism’ masks a disgustingly blasé attitude towards the murder of Jews by religious hysterics.

War is awful, and sometimes necessary. Israel’s confrontation with the Islamic republic is being cynically coat-tailed by American war hawks who’ve long dreamt of vengeance for the humiliations the US suffered during the Iranian Revolution. And it is being cynically damned as criminal by leftists who seem to believe that every act of Jewish self-defence is by definition a war crime. The rest of us have a moral duty to rise above all this self-serving noise and answer the following question: are we on the side of a regime that sponsors the mass murder of Jews, the exportation of Islamist terror and the savage repression of women and homosexuals, or are we on the side of Israel? I know my answer.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy