https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/06/israel-understands-the-enemy-it-faces-do-the-rest-of-us/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module
From the book On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, by Douglas Murray. Copyright © 2025 by Douglas Murray. Reprinted by permission of Broadside Books, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers.
Iran against the West
Today the government most responsible for spreading the accusation that Israel is expansionist and colonialist is the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran, which has spent recent years assiduously expanding its colonies. What has Gaza become but a colony of Iran? What has Iraq become since Iran moved into the vacuum left by America after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein? Or Yemen? Or Syria, into which Iran had poured Hezbollah and other forces? Iran and its proxies and mouthpieces in the West have spent years accusing Israel of being a colonial, expansionist state while all the time expanding and colonizing everywhere they can reach in the region. Why did the mullahs order Hezbollah to engage in the Syrian civil war except to prop up Syria as a forward base of Iran? And what of Lebanon, which even in 2006 still had a government able to distance itself from the actions of Iran’s army, Hezbollah. By the time Hamas started its October 2023 war against Israel and Hezbollah joined in, Lebanon had become practically a colony of Iran — with Hezbollah ruling the country by terror and setting up its weaponry among Lebanese civilians. For years Hezbollah had set up checkpoints at Beirut Airport for passport control and had acted as the government of that country, whether the people wanted that or not. And there is much evidence that they do not.
Everywhere the same rule holds. Groups like Hamas that delight in their bloodlust accuse the Israelis of being insatiable killers. Palestinian groups and their supporters who encourage their youth to view death through “martyrdom” as the highest form of valor claim that the Jews are bloodthirsty child-killers. People who use rape as a weapon of war accuse the Israelis of insatiably raping prisoners in Israeli jails.
On January 31, 1979, a flight took off from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Its destination was Tehran, where it would land the following day. The plane was carrying the Ayatollah Khomeini, a fanatical Shiite leader who had been living in exile from his native Iran for more than 14 years. His return heralded the end of the reign of the shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi), the overthrow of the shah’s government, and the turning point of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Khomeini and his supporters swiftly seized power, took 52 American citizens and diplomats hostage at the American Embassy in Tehran, and proceeded to kill their domestic political opponents. This included the communists and trade unionists who had struggled alongside the Islamists to overthrow the shah.
