The Iran War began on 7 October

Not even three years ago, paid goons of the Islamic Republic murdered a 13-year-old British girl. They bashed their way into the room in which she had scrabbled for sanctuary with her mother and sister and shot her to death. They then set a fire, reducing the girl to ash. She could only be identified by her dental records. The tyrants in Tehran celebrated. They marshalled their supporters on to the streets to sing and dance over this orgy of violence that entailed the merciless slaying of a British innocent. It’s a ‘turning point in history’, they crowed, as reporters were in the girl’s blackened home, holding their noses against the stench of death.

Her name was Yahel Sharabi. And I intend to say it to every fellow Briton who says the crisis in the Middle East ‘has nothing to do with us’. And to every slack-jawed Labour minister twiddling awkwardly with their ties as one of the great geopolitical emergencies of our time swirls all around them. And to every keffiyeh-smothered smug leftist who is currently painting the Islamic Republic as the innocent victim of an ‘unprovoked war of aggression’. Was the killing and immolation of a British girl not a provocation? Was the murder of her in the arms of her mother and sister – who were also killed – not an act of aggression? Was the slaying that day of a thousand others who were guilty of the same crime as young Yahel – they were Jews – not war?

Yahel was one of 18 British citizens murdered by Hamas and its allies on 7 October 2023. Her sister Noiya, 16, and her mother Lianne, who was born in Bristol, were two others. There was also Aner Shapiro, 22, who ran into a public bomb shelter with 30 others from the Nova music festival. He threw back seven of the grenades that the Hamas fascists hurled in, but was killed by the eighth. There was Nadav Popplewell, 51, spirited into Gaza by Hamas brutes and then killed. And Bernard Cowan, 57, from Glasgow, shot dead in Kibbutz Sufa: the only Scot killed that day. More British citizens were killed on 7 October 2023 than in any terror attack since the ISIS mass shooting at Sousse, Tunisia in 2015.

And their killers were backed by the Islamic Republic. The Iranian regime funded Hamas to the tune of $100million a year. It provided Hamas with weapons tech and logistical support. It had intimate knowledge of Hamas’s fascistic plans for 7 October. It has since held numerous official celebrations of the barbarism of that day. Nothing to do with us? The Iran-backed murder of 18 British citizens, most of them Jews? Perhaps Britain’s handwringers might let us know their threshold for Jew-murder, the point at which the foreign-funded killing of our Jewish compatriots might finally prick their slumbering consciences. Tell us: how many dead British Jews would be the price of your moral concern? Twenty-five? Fifty? A hundred?

This is not to justify what is currently taking place. I am as troubled as so many others are by the events in Iran and the surrounding region. I’m a little like Tulsi Gabbard used to be, before she threw her lot in with the Trumpists: a ‘hawk’ when it comes to going after terrorist outfits that invade our lands or butcher our citizens, but a ‘dove’ when it comes to wars of regime change. History tells us regime-change wars have a nasty habit of unleashing regional instability while stealing the democratic initiative from the liberty-thirsting populace in the regime at hand. If Iran is to be freed from the squatting thugs of the Islamist theocracy, it is only the Iranian people who will do it.

No, this is an attempt to drag some historical context on to the morally barren wasteland of infantile posturing we have borne witness to these past few days. The woke left’s depiction of Iran as the guiltless victim of Western imperialism is an outrageous lie. The crank right’s claim that Israel is the cause of every war in the Middle East – if not the whole world – reeks to the heavens of anti-Semitic ahistoricism. The UK government’s flummoxed nonchalance about the whole thing speaks to how thoroughly the technocratic mind-virus blinds one to truth and morality. This tyrannical regime funded the murder of our Jewish countrymen. Including a child. Does that mean nothing to you?

This started on 7 October. People say it didn’t, but it did. That is the day on which the so-called Axis of Resistance declared war on the Jewish State, and through the Jewish State on the West. That’s the day when Iran’s most brutish proxy – Hamas – sent a 6,000-strong army of jihadists into Israel. They arrived by land, sea and air to rape and murder Jews, including British Jews. It was the next day, 8 October, that Iran’s proxies in Lebanon – Hezbollah – started to rain missiles on northern Israel, causing the internal displacement of 60,000 civilians. They were later joined by Iran’s proxies in Yemen – the Houthis, another avowedly anti-Semitic army – who have fired more than a hundred missiles and drones at the Jewish nation over the past year or so.

When people describe the Israel-US attack on the theocrats in Tehran as ‘unprovoked’, what they are really saying is that they do not consider the mass murder of Jews to be a provocation. When they call it unwarranted aggression, they’re saying the violent destruction of Jewish life is not something worth getting aggressive about. When they describe Israeli strikes against Tehran as an ‘escalation’, and never used that word for the Tehran-sponsored barbarism inflicted on Israel, they betray their own hyper-paternalistic Third Worldism. They confirm that in their Western-centric worldview, America and Israel are responsible for every earthly ill, while child-like states such as the Islamic Republic merely respond. Or ‘resist’. It’s ‘resistance’ when the Islamic Republic and its proxies kill Jews, but a ‘war crime’ when the Jews and their allies push back. We see you.

Events in Iran speak not to any criminal madness or bloodlust on the part of the American Empire and the Jewish State, but rather to the suicidal lunacy of 7 October. You don’t have to support the current regime-change efforts to recognise that the Iranian regime and its murderous proxies brought this calamity upon themselves. The 7 October attacks will go down as the most self-destructive military adventure of modern times, an act of apocalyptic vanity. Yahya Sinwar, the architect of that grim day, thought he would bring Zionism to its knees and provoke a Nazi-like expulsion of Jews from the Holy Land. Yet now he is dead, his movement of Hamas is decimated, Hezbollah is flagging, and the Iranian backers of their anti-Semitic crusade are under severe pressure.

The Islamic Republic did this to itself. It forgot that killing Jews has consequences now. It isn’t the 1490s or the 1930s. The rape and murder of Jews comes with repercussions these days. That the regime forgot this is somewhat understandable. It is, after all, consumed by cosmic delusions, by an inflated sense of holy importance as the final boss of Jew hatred. The Western left’s neglect of this truth, however, is less forgivable. You would think that woke agitators who love to talk about ‘consequence culture’ would recognise that murdering a thousand Jews might provoke war. Their demonisation of Israel and absolution of the Islamic Republic is not ‘anti-imperialism’ – it is the double racism of seeing the Jewish State as the sole author of violence in the Middle East and ‘brown’ Persians and Arabs as witless, wide-eyed victims.

It is terrible that the people of Gaza suffered so much in the wars of 7 October. It is terrible that Iranian civilians are now suffering in these wars, too. But this era of apocalyptic violence was started not by Israel or America but by the Islamic Republic. What concerns me is that the military suicide committed by Islamists on 7 October is finding its echo in the moral suicide of the West in the same period. Witness the Hamas sympathy on our streets these past two years or the current floundering of our rulers who can’t even bring themselves to say the Islamic Republic is a wicked regime whose Jew hatred, misogyny, homophobia and intolerance run counter to the moral virtues of our own civilisation. If you don’t think the killing of Yahel Sharabi and a thousand other Jews is an act of historic importance, then you have been defeated, too. Iran and its proxies may not have succeeded in destroying the Jewish nation, but they destroyed your soul.

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, Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy, is out now. Find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.