Is Iran the Only Obstacle to the US/Israel Genocidal Wars? *

     An interesting article here from Theo Horesh

Theo Horesh

Israel’s targeting of over a hundred Beirut sites in under a minute today suggests their attack on Lebanon has now reached genocidal proportions. Given their new name for the assault, Operation Eternal Darkness, and their continual threats to turn Lebanon into Gaza, their genocidal intent should now be clear. Any time a group is committing genocide in one place, we should expect the violence they are carrying out elsewhere to turn genocidal if given time, for genocide is never so much an intention as it is an impulse—and Israel’s genocidal impulses should now be blindingly obvious.

In this way, Iran’s threat to withdraw from the recent ceasefire agreement if Israel continues with its assault on Lebanon might be said to constitute a humanitarian intervention. And while humanitarian interventions are so rare that many political analysts would argue they virtually never occur, this is at least the second on the part of Iran. The first happened in the early nineties in Bosnia, where they joined with H•zb•llah in breaking an arms embargo, which had been imposed by the West, to stop what would later be labelled a genocide, ironically… by the West.

But if we take western states at their word, and we treat Hez•ollah and the Ho•this as mere proxies of Iran, then we would have to label their intervention in Lebanon as Iran’s third humanitarian intervention, following their efforts to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Both groups sough to raise the financial and political costs to Israel of sustaining the genocide by, in the case of the Ho•this, closing off the Red Sea to shipping, and in the case of H•zb•llah, forcing Israel to divert a substantial portion of its forces to the north.

So, what we are seeing is a historical rarity. 

The willingness of Iranian leaders to continue fighting is all the more extraordinary in that their lives are arguably more at risk than perhaps any other leadership in the modern history of war. There has certainly never been a case in modern interstate warfare where the leader of a country, the head of their judiciary, and the head of their legislature, along with a number of cabinet level officials, were all killed in so short a period—and the high level assassinations have been going on for years now, including two secretaries of defense. So, we cannot say that the Iranian leadership is simply risking the lives of their citizens while they punch buttons from afar. 

Political pundits would not hesitate to call it a humanitarian intervention if carried out by western democracies, but we are so indoctrinated that even the most radical western news sites would not think of it in the case of Iran.

Still, it is not lost on the average citizen. A tremendous portion of the American electorate has sided with Iran, and so has most of the world, by the looks of most comment sections of major news sites. Genocide is the ultimate evil, and groups that carry it out tend to be despised, insofar as their crimes come to light. So, the targeting of Israel and American sites in the Middle East, along with the United Arab Emirates, which has been sustaining the genocide in Sudan, seems to have provided much of the world with a sense of relief—in spite of the substantial risks to the global economy and the possibility of nuclear armageddon.

And it seems to have provided many with the only real sense of justice they have experienced in global affairs in years.

These are simply the facts, framed so as to highlight what remains invisible to most people due to the spell of propaganda in which we are all immersed. It is not to endorse Iran’s government or H•zb•llah, which would be illegal in many countries in the West, in any case. Whatever might be said about Iran’s human rights abuses at home, and there is a lot to criticize; and however much the country’s experiment in theocratic democracy is in need of dramatic reform; they are stopping what a substantial portion of the planet has come to see as the greatest threat to humanity.

And at great risk to everything they hold dear, not least their own lives, Iran’s leaders have refused to let Lebanon go the way of G•za, at least for the moment—and that is more than can be said of any other state. And this raises a simple question: why has every single western democracy allowed itself to be shown up by a country whose military most of them have labeled terrorists? And why have so many of us, who have criticized the country’s failure to live up to our own highest standards of human rights at home, failed to sacrifice even a small portion of what their leadership is willing to risk in order to stop what many would now agree is the greatest threat to humanity?

Of course, my readership comes from all over the world, and many have put their lives at risk to stop Israel’s crimes against humanity; and many have done the same to bring greater freedom to Iran. We should honor them all, but we should not lose site of the complexity of international affairs. The villains of yesteryear are often driven to take heroic stands today; the heroes of today are often the villains of tomorrow. And a good cause under one set of circumstances can quickly sour as the ground moves beneath our feet and everything on the geopolitical chessboard changes places.

Hence, we should honor what is right and good when it is taking place, knowing every value system and ideology is prone to corruption, and everyone is capable of heroic stands—as anyone who has watched a few films can imagine.

It is even possible to work to stop a genocide while simultaneously supporting the extermination of a people. Iran might be said to have done this in fighting Isis in northern Iraq while supporting Assad’s extraordinary crimes against humanity in Syria; the Biden administration did this for a time in stopping arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which was starving Yemen, while sustaining the genocide in G•za—though they would eventually come to support the starvation of Yemen in solidarity with Israel, along with the genocide in Sudan, by upgrading America’s defense partnership with the United Arab Emirates, also for Israel.

We need not support a party to recognize its extraordinary stands for justice. But when the people we are accustomed to criticizing risk more than ourselves for our own causes, as so many of us have recently seen with Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, we should take this as an impetus to work harder. The fight for G•za is not over. Israel can be stopped. And it is quite possible it will go the way of the greater majority of states that define themselves around committing genocide—which is to say in the dustbin of history, unwept, unsung, and detested for the grotesque monstrosity it came to be.

Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny: The Crisis Before the Fascist Inferno

The title is not with the original article. FFWP Admin