A Death Cult with a State Flag

The missiles that lit the sky over Tel Aviv on June 13, 2025, were not fired in a vacuum. They were not the product of misunderstanding or territorial dispute. They were the expression of a hatred that has burned steadily for nearly half a century—kindled in the mosques of Tehran, passed like poison through militias in Lebanon and Syria, and sharpened to a blade by Hamas.

The war did not begin in 2025. It did not begin in Gaza. It began in 1979, with the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran. When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power, he did not merely replace a monarch with a cleric. He replaced a secular, Western-aligned state with a totalizing theocracy—one that viewed the existence of Israel not as a diplomatic issue but as a theological affront. At the heart of Iran’s new revolutionary identity was the call for the annihilation of Israel.

This was not politics. This was theology. And it remains so today. Ayatollah Khomeini referred to Israel as “the Little Satan,” and enshrined in Iranian political culture a genocidal obsession masquerading as resistance. His successor, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has called Israel “a cancerous tumor that must be removed.” Iranian textbooks omit Israel from maps. Iranian children are taught to chant “Death to Israel” before they can tie their shoes. State-sponsored rallies end with the promise of Israel’s destruction—not metaphorically, but literally. This is not a fringe ideology. It is official state doctrine, rooted in the conviction that the presence of a sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East is intolerable to God.

And because Iran knew it could not eliminate Israel through conventional war, it chose a slower, more insidious path. It built a shadow network, a constellation of proxy armies and terrorist militias, all designed to encircle and exhaust Israel. Over decades, this web has grown to include Hezbollah in Lebanon, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis in Yemen, Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq, and most strategically, Hamas in Gaza.

Hamas is often spoken of as a political movement or as the governing authority of Gaza. But these characterizations obscure its essence. Hamas is the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its 1988 founding charter is not a political document—it is a manifesto for genocide. The language is unambiguous. It states: “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it, as it had eliminated others before it.” And more chilling still, in Article 7, it declares, quoting a hadith from Sahih Muslim: “The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, killing them. Then the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’” This is not metaphor. This is an explicit theological mandate to hunt and kill Jews.

What Hamas seeks is not peace, or even land. What it seeks is extermination. It is a death cult draped in nationalist slogans, and it has found its most powerful patron in Iran. Though Iran’s Shia regime and Hamas’s Sunni roots might seem at odds, their shared hatred of Israel has long united them in purpose.

For over 30 years, Iran has provided Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, advanced weaponry, encrypted communications, rocket components, and training in Quds Force camps from Syria to Lebanon. Iranian scientists and engineers have helped Hamas build a domestic rocket industry. The massive underground tunnel systems in Gaza—used to store weapons and launch surprise attacks—were constructed with Iranian guidance.

On October 7, 2023, that investment paid off. In the early morning hours, Hamas fighters breached the border and unleashed a massacre unlike anything seen since the Holocaust. More than 1,200 Israelis were murdered—children, babies, elderly, entire families shot, burned, and butchered in their homes. Others were dragged into Gaza and paraded as trophies. This was not a military operation. It was a pogrom, calculated and cruel.

And Iran celebrated. Hamas leaders thanked Tehran. The Wall Street Journal and other credible sources reported that the attack had been planned with Iranian oversight, and that Iran had given it a green light during a high-level meeting in Beirut with leaders from both Hamas and Hezbollah. This was not an outburst of local rage. This was a coordinated assault directed, supported, and encouraged by Tehran.

The October 7 massacre was not the culmination of Iran’s strategy—it was an inflection point. What followed was an escalation by design. Hezbollah opened a second front in the north, lobbing thousands of rockets into Israeli towns. The Houthis in Yemen began targeting commercial shipping lanes with drones and missiles. Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq began attacking American military installations. The entire Axis of Resistance, as Iran proudly calls it, was activated.

Even then, Iran retained a fig leaf of deniability. But in April 2024, that veil was torn away. For the first time in modern history, Iran launched a direct assault on Israel—not through proxies, but under its own flag. More than 300 drones and ballistic missiles flew from Iranian soil, crossing into Israeli airspace. While most were intercepted by Israel and its allies, the message was clear: Iran was no longer hiding.

Israel responded with restraint. It understood the stakes. But the intelligence reports in the months that followed could not be ignored. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed what Israeli defense officials already knew—Iran had quietly pushed its nuclear enrichment past the 90% threshold and was testing longer-range missile delivery systems with clear intent. Iranian nuclear scientists had resumed warhead miniaturization work. And deep inside IRGC bunkers, operational plans were being drafted for the day when Israel would no longer be able to act without risking annihilation.

On June 12, 2025, Israel acted—not out of vengeance, but out of necessity. The operation, called Rising Lion, was a sweeping, precise, multi-target strike that destroyed Iran’s key enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow, decapitated major IRGC leadership cells, crippled missile infrastructure, and killed several of Iran’s top nuclear engineers and generals. It was a calculated blow, designed to delay or prevent what could become the most existential threat Israel has ever faced.

Because make no mistake: if Iran obtains nuclear weapons, the world is not dealing with a rogue state. It is facing a regime that believes it is fulfilling divine prophecy. We are not talking about deterrence in the Cold War sense. We are talking about a messianic death cult armed with nuclear warheads—a regime whose leaders openly embrace martyrdom, speak of the end of days, and believe that chaos will hasten the return of the hidden Imam. Giving such a regime the bomb is not a risk. It is a guarantee of catastrophe. Israel knows this. It has lived for decades in the shadow of annihilation. And while others may gamble with delay, Israel cannot afford that luxury. It cannot wait and hope that reason prevails in Qom. It cannot assume that fanatics with uranium will act like statesmen. It must act. It did act.

Iran’s response—Operation True Promise III—was predictable: over 150 ballistic missiles and 100 drones launched indiscriminately at Israeli cities. Civilians were killed. Families torn apart. But the reality is that Iran was already at war. This was not the beginning. It was the unveiling.

Every rocket fired from Gaza, every drone launched from Syria or Yemen, every missile now falling from Iranian skies bears the fingerprints of Tehran. Iran is not merely a sponsor of terrorism. It is the architect of a global death doctrine, the benefactor of jihad, the manufacturer of apocalypse. And now the world must decide: will it continue to pretend this is a tragic misunderstanding? Will it continue to blame Israel for choosing survival over suicide? Or will it finally speak the truth?

Iran lit the fuse.

And perhaps the most tragic and revealing part of this story is that many in the West—especially in America—cannot seem to grasp what is happening. They do not see a genocidal regime. They do not hear the chants of “Death to Israel” or read the Hamas charter. They do not ask why Iran funds death in Gaza instead of clean water in Qom. They do not understand Israel’s strike for what it was: an act of survival.

Why? Because we have lost the ability to see clearly. We no longer live in a reality-based culture. The same civilization that can no longer define what a woman is, or defend the basic logic of borders, is ill-equipped to understand war. The same population that calls borders fascist now lectures Israel on restraint, as if survival were an indulgence and self-defense an act of aggression.

This is not just ignorance. It is dogmatism—religious in fervor, but divorced from truth. And as with all dogma, but especially ill-considered dogma, there exist glaring inconsistencies. In Iran and in Gaza, homosexuals are imprisoned, tortured, even executed. Women are subjected to second-class legal status, forced veiling, and in many cases, denied the most basic freedoms. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to dissent are non-existent. And most strikingly, the antisemitism that for decades thrived in the shadows of the West Bank, Gaza, and Iran has now become acceptable—even fashionable—among many circles in the Western Left. Once the language of religious fanatics and dictators, open hatred of Jews has been rebranded as liberation politics, post-colonial resistance, or academic critique. What was once fringe is now cheered on campuses, amplified in street protests, and rationalized by those who claim to stand for justice. Where is the Western outcry? Where are the protests for gay Palestinians, for Iranian women, for the religious minorities rotting in Evin prison?

Americans on both sides have retreated into ideological bunkers, where facts are filtered through tribal loyalty and morality is measured by slogans. The result is a political landscape where the Regressive Left fail to understand that this conflict is not a “cycle of violence,” but a one-sided war waged by a theocratic death cult against the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.(and the Reactionary Rght fail to understand a multitude of things)

They cannot see it because to see it would require them to believe again in moral clarity—in the difference between civilization and barbarism, between nations that build and those that burn, between imperfect democracies and perfect tyrannies. It would require admitting that some things are not symmetrical, not equivalent, not nuanced, such as a theocratic death cult.

And so, many will keep missing the point. They will say “both sides.” They will talk of proportionality. They will quote resolutions and cry for de-escalation—without ever asking who escalated, or what is at stake if Israel loses. But Israel cannot afford the West’s illusions. It cannot afford America’s therapeutic politics, its self-soothing relativism, or its cultural neuroses disguised as enlightenment. Israel is not playing a game of narrative. It is fighting for its existence.

And still, the truth remains—simple, brutal, and absolute:

Iran lit the fuse.

And if the world cannot say that plainly—cannot speak truth without trembling—it will not be Israel that falls first. It will be truth itself.