The Khomeinist vision requires spreading Islam everywhere and eliminating Israel

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estern statesmen and analysts consistently make the mistake of viewing Iran from a rationalist-materialist perspective — i.e., one that assumes that all people are motivated primarily by the desire to gain a larger piece of the material pie. Accordingly, they place little emphasis on the power of theological motivations. Yet the rationalist-materialist perspective cannot, for instance, account for suicide bombers, either individual or national.

The assumption that the Iranian mullahs are subject to the same cost-benefit analysis as everyone else underlay the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal. It would be the height of reason, Obama thought, to recognize Iran as the regional hegemon and show great sensitivity to their “equities,” including a full-blown nuclear program. In that way, our ultrasophisticated president sought to turn Iran from foe to friend and into a status quo power.

Similarly, today, the failure to appreciate the theological fanaticism of the Iranian regime renders it difficult to understand the events unfolding in Iran at present, both in terms of how we arrived at the present moment and why the regime is ideologically incapable of extricating itself from its current state.

At the time of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Western experts busied themselves assuring Americans that they had nothing to fear from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. University of Texas professor James Brill assured President Jimmy Carter, whom he served as an advisor, that Khomeini was a man of “impeccable integrity and honesty.”

Princeton professor Richard Falk, subsequently the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine, assured readers of the New York Times that they had nothing to fear from Khomeini and that he would provide a “desperately needed model of humane governance for a third-world citizenry.” The depiction of him as “fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices” was, according to Falk, “happily false.”

One who was not persuaded, however, was the great Orientalist Bernard Lewis, who actually took the time to read Khomeini’s 1970 collection of speeches, Islamic Government. In his speeches, Khomeini broadcast his goal of spreading sharia law across the world and expressed his disdain for non-Muslims in the harshest possible language. His writings were also filled with hatred for Jews and the view that Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the Middle East is an intolerable affront to Al-lah. Israel must therefore be eradicated in its entirety.

Lewis offered to share his findings with readers of the New York Times, but the op-ed editor told him that it would be of no interest to them. Those uninterested Times readers were therefore shocked when Khomeini turned out to be a cruel fanatic, one of whose first acts as supreme leader was to execute the shah’s military leaders, who had been promised amnesty if troops did not fire on Khomeini’s legions. Ten months after the fall of the shah, students loyal to Khomeini took over the American embassy and held 52 Americans for 444 days.

IN TIME, KHOMEINI embarked on a plan to eliminate Israel. Iran’s nuclear program was, at least in part, aimed at the creation of a weapon that could destroy Israel. And the set of alliances the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with groups on Israel’s borders and bent on its destruction was another key ingredient in reaching that goal.

October 7, 2023, represented the culmination of that plan. Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gloated in the wake of October 7, “The Zionist regime is melting before the eyes of the world.” Hamas’s attack was, in his words, “a huge blow to the Zionist enemy,” one that would leave “an indelible black mark.”

Ironically, Hamas’s attack turned out to be the Islamic Revolution’s greatest act of self-harm. The threat to Israel from Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis was dramatically reduced over the more than two years that followed October 7. All those groups are but a fraction of their former selves. Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad, another former ally, has fled Syria for Moscow. Finally, Iran was humiliated during the so-called 12-Day War with Israel, which enjoyed complete freedom of action in the skies above Iran.

The $20 billion that Iran had invested in Hamas and Hezbollah since 2012 was reduced to rubble, and Iran itself suffered direct losses in the billions of dollars. That cost has not been lost on the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who have poured into the streets over the past weeks calling for the downfall of the regime. “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran” is their rallying cry.

Iranians are acutely aware that at a time when 80 percent of the population does not receive the daily requirement of 2,100 calories, the regime is sending billions to Hamas and Hezbollah. As Iran suffers a prolonged drought of Biblical proportions, the regime is investing not in desalinization but in foreign military adventures. And all because the Khomeinist vision requires spreading Islam everywhere and eliminating Israel.

WHAT WILL COME of the current round of demonstrations in 100 cities and 31 provinces across Iran is still unknown. Perhaps the regime will succeed in quelling the protests for the time being by ruthlessly mowing down tens of thousands. But whatever happens, writes Hudson Institute Middle East expert Michael Doran, the regime of the mullahs has been fatally wounded and cannot survive the year with its authority intact.

That does not mean that Iran has ceased to be a threat to Israel or to the world. A theocracy that feels its end approaching is highly dangerous; it might even seek to trigger a nuclear Armageddon, which in Shiite theology is the prelude for the appearance of the so-called Hidden Imam. Baruch Hashem, they have no nuclear arsenal with which to do so.

The regime has lost “the most important attribute of a functioning state: control over its currency,” according to Doran. When the official rate of the Iranian rial is 35 times the market rate, the rial is no longer currency. “Savings become meaningless, contracts lose credibility, and economic planning is impossible.”

While Iran may still have oil revenues, those are held abroad in shell companies and by intermediaries, and as such are not available for macroeconomic stabilization or public welfare that might quiet the protestors for a period of time.

Iran has all the elements that make it ripe for revolution: economic collapse, military humiliation from its confrontation with Israel, legitimacy erosion of a regime willing to machine gun down as many thousands of its own citizen as it takes, and international isolation.

At least with respect to the economic collapse, a solution is available. Iran could accept the deal the Trump administration has put on the table: Dismantle the nuclear and ballistic missile programs and stop financing regional proxies in return for sanctions relief. But the Supreme Leader has rejected that offer, for to do so would be to give up the regime’s very raison d’être. “Ideology and regime identity take precedence over survival,” concludes Doran.

Just like the Nazis who diverted critical military resources at the end of World War II toward the Final Solution, so too the mullahs will not abandon their goals of spreading Islam worldwide and wiping out Israel.

Lesson for Israel: When an enemy is theologically committed to your destruction, take them at their word.

Hypocrites International

The regime of the Iranian mullahs has yet again shown its true colors — it cares only about retaining its power, with no concern for the lives or well-being of the Iranian population, just as Hamas has little concern for the lives of residents of Gaza. In 1988, after eight years of war with Iraq and amid rising popular discontent, the Khomeini regime massacred 30,000 political prisoners, by the most conservative account, according to Iranian-American writer Roya Hakakian.

And today, an alliance of physicians working in eight hospitals and 16 emergency rooms across Iran, as reported in the British press, conservatively estimates the numbers of those killed at 16,500 and wounded or injured at 330,000. Most of those casualties took place over a two-day period beginning January 8, after IRGC units and Basij militia took over from regular police units and switched from crowd control to seeking to quash the protests entirely. The regime scheduled 800 hangings. When President Trump threatened military strikes, the regime claimed it had postponed those hangings, and Trump used that as a justification for calling off the strikes.

But the regime was not the only group to reveal its true colors. So have the hundreds of thousands who marched against Israel’s alleged “genocide” in Gaza in major cities in America and Western Europe and set up university encampments for months, while chanting for Israel’s destruction. They have shown themselves to be moral poseurs, claiming to be motivated by humanitarian concerns, but highly selective in their expression.

Western streets remain empty of protestors against the Iranian regime and no university encampments have been created. Even the Hollywood glitterati, always eager to show off their moral sensitivity, did not have a single word of sympathy for the Iranian people brutalized by their own regime or criticism of the mullahs at the recent Golden Globes awards.

And yet in every respect, protesters in Iran have more claim to sympathy than Gazan civilians. The Iranian protestors were deliberately targeted with machine guns by regime forces for seeking, inter alia, freedoms taken for granted by all Westerners. Civilian casualties in Gaza, by contrast, were collateral damage of a war forced upon Israel by the attack of October 7 at a level of savagery rarely seen, in which over 1,400 Israelis were slaughtered and 250 taken hostage. Indeed, the deaths of Gaza civilians were part of a deliberate Hamas strategy of maximizing civilian casualties by building hundreds of miles of tunnels under civilian areas.

So why the difference in response? For one thing, those wearing kaffiyehs and hijabs featured prominently in the mass demonstrations celebrating October 7, even before Israel had responded at all, and later among those protesting Israel’s self-defense. Many of the demonstrators are Muslims sympathetic to Iran’s Islamic Revolution and its determination to spread sharia law worldwide.

Another large cohort are younger Americans taught by their professors to think of human beings in terms of ideological categories, not as flesh-and-blood people like themselves. Indulged children of the West, they loathe their own countries as guilty of imperialism and colonialism and are sympathetic to all those who style themselves as enemies of the West, even brutal ayatollahs who would as soon hang them from high cranes.

And of course, the old rule applies: “If it’s not Jews, it’s not news.” Hundreds of thousands can be killed in conflicts around the world — think Syria, Sudan, Rwanda — without a peep from the right-thinking people. Hospitals can be deliberately targeted in Ukraine, Christians kidnapped and forced into slavery in Nigeria, Muslim Uyghurs kept in concentration camps in China. Silence.

But if Jews are involved, and especially if they can be portrayed as perpetrators, the streets are filled. Accusations of Jews committing “genocide” provide absolution not just for the Holocaust but for millennia of murderous pogroms and expulsions. Jewish success makes them perfect stand-ins for the West itself for its material advancement.

Finally, for the Jew-haters of the left and right, there is always a Jewish angle. Never mind the manifest failures of the Islamic Revolution and its endless crimes against the Iranian people — e.g., employing thousands of children as human minesweepers in the Iraq-Iran War. Let nothing be said. After all, were the mullahs to fall, the greatest enemy of Israel would be removed. And that must not be.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1096. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)