"Our strategy is to erase Israel from the global political map." — Major General Hossein Salami, now commander-in-chief, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, MEMRI, February 4, 2019.
For reasons that at present remain obscure, the ayatollahs who rule Iran have chosen this moment as an inflection point in their long war with the West.
President Joe Biden is visiting Israel today, allegedly to urge Israel’s government not to “escalate” the war Iranian proxy armies Hamas and Hezbollah started by their October 7 attack that killed as many as 1,500 Israelis and international visitors.
If President Biden is truly committed to ending the current war, rather than traveling to Israel to admonish Prime Minister Netanyahu not to “escalate” the war Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah started on October 7, he should have travelled to Qatar. Qatar is an ostensible U.S. ally that also has a long history of funding Hamas, to demand an end to their support for one of our most dangerous enemies and the extradition of the Hamas leadership they openly harbor.
At about the same time Biden’s trip to Israel was announced, Iran Foreign Ministry Spokesman Nasser Kanaani said the opening of new fronts in the war between Iranian proxies and Israel may not be limited to a single border and “could be as broad as Palestine’s geography.” Iran doesn’t recognize Israel, which borders Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt as well as the Palestinian Territories.
Contemporaneously with those developments Russian President Vladimir Putin emerged as an unlikely peacemaker conducting a call with four Middle Eastern leaders — the presidents of Egypt, Iran, Syria and the Palestinian Authority — to discuss the Israel-Hamas war, the Kremlin said according to reporting by Bloomberg News.
“There was a unanimous opinion on the need for an urgent cease-fire and the establishment of a humanitarian truce,” the Kremlin said in the statement. Russia said it’s ready to coordinate efforts to stop the hostilities. Putin held a separate phone call with Netanyahu and communicated details of the earlier conversations, Bloomberg reported.
We hope Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn’t buy these disingenuous calls from Joe Biden, Russia and Iran not to “escalate” the war against Hamas, Hezbollah and inevitably Iran.
The concept of avoiding “escalation” of hostilities in a war is a construct of the Left that gained currency in American thinking through Soviet information operations during the Cold War and especially the Vietnam era when Soviet proxies across the globe were organizing and fighting insurgencies against Western-oriented governments.
As soon as the Soviet-backed insurgents started to lose there would be a steady drumbeat of propaganda against “escalating” the conflict from Soviet mouthpieces in the Western media.
The inevitable result of this language warfare was that Western governments never pursued their enemies to complete defeat and the civilian population’s will to resist was gradually sapped by an unending drip, drip, drip of insurgent attacks which left vulnerable populations willing to accept peace at the cost of Communist victory.
We see the same dynamic today in Israel with all these calls for ceasefires and admonitions to Netanyahu not to “escalate” the war. They merely prolong the inevitable final confrontation, and their immediate effect is to allow Hamas, Hezbollah, and their puppet master Iran to regroup, rearm and redeploy, making the ultimate goal of their defeat and annihilation that much more difficult.
Everyone in the West who is honest about the conflict, its roots and its inevitable resolution recognizes that regime change, or the complete military defeat of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is the only way this now 40+ years long conflict is going to end.
As writers for the Gatestone Institute observed, as Iran's open support for Hamas has demonstrated, the ayatollahs have no interest in reaching a peaceful accommodation with Israel and the West.
This is hardly surprising given the estimated $100 million a year Tehran gives Hamas to help develop its terrorist infrastructure, part of the £13.1 billion Iran has spent on developing its terrorist network throughout the Middle East during the past decade, from supporting Houthi rebels in Yemen to Shia militias in Iraq.
The true extent of Iran's military support for Hamas was recently laid bare by the movement's leader, Ismail Haniyeh, when he revealed that funds received from Tehran had helped to fund the development of missile and defense systems designed and built in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
What will it take for the U.S. and its allies to grasp that the appeasement of the Iranian regime is read by the mullahs and their proxies as weakness? If such appeasement continues, make no mistake: today, the carnage is Israel; tomorrow, it will be the U.S. and Europe.
The truth is that our most dangerous enemy is Iran’s form of political Islam, and the only way to defeat it is to drop the fiction that “Islam is a religion of peace” and use all our national power to eventually destroy Sharia-supremacism, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian system of “Absolute Wilayat al-Faqih” (Guardianship of the Jurist).
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