Iran’s opposition to Israel is not driven by geopolitics but by a perceived religious obligation to annihilate it. For Iran and its proxies, there can be no diplomatic solution for a theological problem like Israel. This is why Iran doesn’t advocate for a Palestinian state so much as it demands the destruction of the Jewish state. And why Iran funds Palestinian terrorists and tunnels, not hospitals or schools (not even UNRWA). Iranian clerics consider the destruction of Israel a religious duty, believing that reclaiming Jewish territory as part of the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) will hasten the coming of the Mahdi and the Day of Judgment. And Iran views itself as the leader of the Islamic world precisely because it leads the battle against "Islam’s enemies." This is not my biased analysis or a 'Western' interpretation; it is the reasoning Iran provides its citizens as it directs vast state and military resources toward annihilating a country 1,000 miles away. The only people who dispute this are Westerners who project their own values and assumptions onto a world they neither know nor seek to understand. Such naivety is perhaps understandable, but no longer forgivable. This video, from just last week, shows a prominent Iranian cleric speaking on Iran’s primary news channel. He is not an osbcure cleric but wholly representative of the Iranian leadership and worldview. Leaders such as Khamenei (Iran), Nasrallah (Hezbollah) and Yemen (al-Houthi) are not merely political figures; they are religious leaders each claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad, and they take their religious duties with utmost seriousness. In the West, we lack an equivalent type of leadership, leaving us unprepared to grasp the gravity of their threats and actions.
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