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ISRAEL’S unprovoked attack on the people of Iran, in violation of that country’s sovereignty and of international law, has been a long time in the making.
By DR ISMAIL LAGARDIEN
The story does not, however, start in Tel Aviv. The origins of the attack are in the grand designs of the United States, as much as it is part of the imaginaries of eternal innocence and the viciousness with which the Jewish state has begun to reach towards creating the Greater Israel. What is disturbing – though nothing can more disturbing than the grotesquery and wanton slaughter of innocents Palestine – is the levels of paralysis, the permissibility and complicity among Iran’s neighbours. There is, also, fear.
Tehran Times reported in March this year that there were an estimated ’50 000 American forces’ in ten military bases within close proximity of Iran. Nobody seems to have the courage, or the military hardware, to get into a fight with the US and its biggest proxy in Western Asia, the Jewish state. It is as fair to say that Israel is a Jewish state as it is to say that Iran is an Islamic state.
Israel is the beach head in Western Asia for the European world; especially the USA, Germany, Britain and France. The most recent attacks by the Jewish state against its neighbours – Israel has also attacked Lebanon and Syria – are part of a permutation of projects, shaped by Islamophobia, greed (the US wants access to Iran’s natural resources), and the creation of the Greater Israel, from the banks of the Nile and eastward across much of the Arab world to Madinah and possibly Makkah which, the Israelis have said, they sought to ‘purify’.
Western intellectuals may spin it any way they wish, but Iran does not have a history of invading foreign countries. The USA, on the other hand, has what has, arguably, been the biggest and deadliest killing machine since 1945. Israel is a creation of European settler colonialism in 1948, founded on terror by the Irgun and Stern gang, paramilitary forces that wrought havoc in Palestine in the late 1940s, which led to the Nakba and a seven-decade process of erasure of Palestinians to the point where we are, now, witnessing the first Holocaust of the 21st century. This background of violence should not be dismissed out of hand. It is the leitmotief of the post-war United States and Israel.
The Islamophobia argument carries less weight when we recall that Muslim-majority countries, like Jordan, Iraq and Syria, provided logistical support for Israel’s killing of Iranians. It was reported on June 13 that Jordanian authorities shut down one of that country’s main airports and restricted civilian traffic to use the facility for logistical support of Israel’s mission for mass killing of Iranians. The report detailed that military cargo planes had been arriving from the United States and Europe through Jordanian airspace, believed to be carrying weapons and equipment bound for Israel.
The independent news platforms, The Middle East Eye and The Cradle (a journalist-driven publication) reported on the day after the first wave of Iran’s response to the Jewish state’s mass murder mission that Jordan and ‘Arab states…. helped shoot down Iranian drones launched in response to the unprovoked Israeli attack against the Islamic Republic’.
Greed and the Greater Israel project
The USA, in particular, has set up ‘alternative governments’, either in waiting in America, like the Pahlavis, or through fomenting divisions or enmity between China’s provinces, most notably Taiwan.
With Iran, the US wants to overthrow the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran and replace them with the more compliant ‘crown prince’, Reza Pahlavi – who, mind you, is close friends with Benjamin Netanyahu. Much like the way that the US, Europe and Israel have sanctified Ahmad al-Sharaa, Syria’s new president, the triad wants to put a compliant leader, like Pahlavi, in office in Tehran. Should this happen, the triad will have access to Iran’s natural resources, destroy the Islamic state, and give Israel the right to (further) do as it pleases in the region.
What happens next will probably be increased attacks by the Jewish state on Iranians, which will be justified by lies and misinformation and propaganda of ‘terrorism’, and claims that the Iranian people support the Palestinian people, which by definition makes them enemies of the Jewish state.
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Iran has been attacked by the Israelis and the triad in a pincer-movement; the Jewish state through violent military attack, with Europe and North America providing the political and propaganda support, and Iran’s neighbours too heavily imbricated in the network of liberal global capitalism, dominated by the Wall Street-Washington Axis.
Israel is hoping its murderous attacks take everyone closer to a Third World War, and even closre to the Jewish prophecy that the final battle will be the total destruction of Amalek – essentially everyone who is not Jewish – as expressed in the Positive Commandment 188, by Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides), a Sephardic rabbi and philosopher, who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah scholars of the Middle Ages.
This is the pincer movement in which Iran is caught; between a Jewish project to destroy all non-Jews, and the European-North American project of overthrowing the leaders of the Islamic State, replace them with Reza Pahlavi, and get access to Iran’s natural resources.
Dr Ismail Lagardien is an internationally recognised political economist and writer. His main interests are in global political economy, global finance and historical capitalism, and he has designed and taught a course in Islam and the Muslim World in International Relations.
- This article was first published in the June 20, 2025 print edition of Muslim Views.
