Israel vs Iran: The targets no one is talking about, Part 1

Qom is where Shari'a is turned into state policy, where the nuts and bolts of the totalitarian terror state are dreamt up, and where the bureaucracy that codifies the legal enforcement of Islamic oppression is trained. The evil that kills so many springs not from Tehran, but from Qom.

Israel vs Iran: The targets no one is talking about, Part 1

In the latest Muslim accomplishment to match the Islamic Golden Age, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) managed to fire off 181 ballistic missiles towards Israel, scoring the following kill rate: Israelis killed, 0; Palestinians killed, 1; Iranians killed, 5. The five Iranians were IRGC soldiers killed when their missile exploded upon launch, injuring 12 more brothers. This reminds us of how the United States managed to kill 57 Iranians by targeting the then IRGC Chief, Qasim Soleimani. His mourners killed the other 56 by stampeding at the funeral.

On the night of Tuesday 1 October, commentator's around the world were aghast that, after the IDF killed arch-terrorist Hassan Nasrallah, the Iranian regime choose saving face over saving its own existence, and fired 181 ballistic missiles at Israel. It was immediately clear, even to those in the West who hate Israel, that the Iranian regime had just given Israel the perfect excuse for taking out that very regime and destroying the entire infrastructure of death they had so devoutly put in place over the past 45 years. The head-shaking, "very big mistake" incredulity soon gave way to speculations on the most likely targets Israel will hit in response.

Analysts present maps of Iran's nuclear facilities, military sites and economic infrastructure, and go back and forth on the relative impact of hitting this, that or the other of these targets. It would be hard to disagree on the necessity of destroying these targets, yet such commentators fail to see the wood for the trees. I would like to propose that there may be other, overlooked targets that are at least as important as those currently so widely discussed.

An already forgotten footnote of the discussions is that the conflict has been bracketed alongside the defeat of Nazi Germany and of Kokka-Shinto Japan. This vital connection had been dismissed even earlier, right after 7 October, as "you can't defeat an ideology", before anyone had even brought up the ideological defeat of the Nazis and the Japanese. It is too uncomfortable to reflect on what really needed to be done to defeat the ideologies of these two 20th-century totalitarianisms. Just because we don't want to talk about it, does not mean that it does not have to be talked about. Instead, we prefer to hide behind the baseless assertion that you can't defeat an ideology, sometimes masquerading as the pseudo-profound "you can't defeat an idea". To cut to the chase, it is nothing but an excuse to avoid criticising Islam, the great malaise of our time.

Some saw "the unseen hand of God at work" in what the IRGC managed to get for their 181 ballistic missiles. They are correct, God is at work here, but not quite in the way they imagine it. "The ideology" that no one wants to name, is every bit as devastating and tenacious as Nazism, Communism or Kokka-Shinto, and in many ways more so.

In the case of Islam, this ideology holds that God has ordained for the world Shari'a, and that it is obligatory upon the adherents of this ideology to impose "God's Law" upon that world, by means fair or foul, by deceit or by war. It is an ideology that does not expect uniformity from all it votaries and makes a clear distinction between those who wage war, and those who support those who wage war. It is a clear division of labour stipulated in minute detail.

The chilling genius of this system is that jihad warfare is not an obligation on every Muslim, unlike, say, the five daily prayers. It is a communal obligation. This means that if some in the community do the killing, everyone has fulfilled the obligation and escaped sin, but if no one does it, then everyone has sinned. It is therefore in everyone's interest to ensure that someone does it. The Qur'an distinguishes between "those who give of their blood and their treasure," (and who, upon being slain while slaying, get on a fast track to Heaven where an unfeasibly large number of eager virgins await them), and "those who sit at home", whose duty it is to support the killers in a myriad of ways (hiding them, feeding them, transporting them to their target, providing them with information, such as where the Jews live, have their businesses or park their cars).

On a societal level, this arrangement, compounded by several others more or less iniquitous, results in a society permanently in high stress, paranoid and inherently incapable of social progress. The salient point here is that while, on the one hand, there are killers, and on the other hand there are "peaceful Muslims", they are not different because they are each part of a different system; they are different because they are each part of the same system. Jihad mass-murder would be much more difficult to carry out without peaceful Muslims.

The more far-sighted people on both shores of the Persian Gulf states, especially Muhammad bin Salman, can see that Islam is responsible for the pitiable condition of the Arab Muslim states (they could only watch as China sped right past them despite their huge oil wealth), while the Palestinians, on the one hand, and ISIS, on the other, concentrate within themselves the very depth of Muslim backwardness and depravity. In Hamas these two special attributes come together. What we witnessed on 7 October was nothing compared to what they are capable of.

But the discomfort that comes with the manner in which we began to destroy the ideologies of Nazism and Kokka-Shinto – putting Dresden to flame and dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – is not the only reason we are coy about "the ideology". There is a darker side to that coyness: we find it too depressing to contemplate that every single Muslim is guilty, by simple virtue of the fact that they need some among their number to kill, for them to escape sin. In the West they go to great pains to publicly insist that such people are not Muslims and that what they do is not Islamic, yet they know who those people are, and will not report them. Of course not!

Western liberals need exactly this deceit, for it provides them with a less depressing alternative than reality, and helps them cling to the fantasy that there are two kinds of Muslims: "moderate/peaceful Muslims" (or simply "Muslims") on one hand; and "extremist/radical/jihadist Muslims" (designated "Islamists") on the other. To preserve a clear line between them, they have no choice but to steadily erode their own moral standards.

Thus Muslims who merely beat their wives are not extremists. Muslims who merely cut off the daughters’ clitorises and sew up their labia are not extremists. Muslims who merely marry off their underage daughters to adult strangers are not extremists. Muslims who merely want to impose a barbaric system of law on all of ua are not extremists. Muslims who merely refuse to shake hands with members of the opposite sex are not extremists. Muslims who would merely want to see apostates killed and homosexuals thrown to their deaths off high buildings are not extremists. Muslims who merely believe a Muslim’s life is worth more than a kafir’s are not extremists. Muslims who merely feel they have nothing to explain when one of their own beheads a teacher in the street or an old lady praying in a church are not extremists. Muslims who merely have God on their mind for the entirety of their waking hours are not extremists. Muslims who merely send their young children for indoctrination are not extremists. Muslims who merely teach the Qur’an are not extremists. Muslim parents who merely pressure their traumatised daughters to return to their violent abusive husbands are not extremists. Muslims who murder their daughters for being “too Western” are not extremists. Muslims who insist, “I do not have to respect the laws of the land,” are not extremists.

Those Muslims who commit terrorism, mass murder, gang rape, or take sex-slaves are extremists. At least, that was before 7 October. Since then, as it has always been virtuous to support the Palestinians and to oppose Israel, and the Palestinians on that day showed themselves no less depraved than ISIS, vast swathes of what otherwise might have been Western liberals have found the dividing line between Muslims and "Islamists" to have become superfluous. By their thousands, across the Western landscape, they proudly chant and scream the praises of the most grotesque barbarism we have seen since ISIS.

The rest of the liberal West, weak of constitution as they are, have no choice but to double down to keep clear blue water between their fantasy Muslims and the "Islamists". They'll make ever greater efforts to explain what "Islamists" are, as if by doing so, their Muslims somehow remain part of a gentler, more acceptable version of Islam, or simply, the only Islam, as distinct from a different system they call "Islamism". The liberal West, therefore, refuses to criticise Islam or to look at it too closely, a deepening admission of "Islamophobia", if you like. Wittingly or unwittingly, by going out of their way to never criticise Muslims, they keep both sides of the jihad relation alive and well, while the clear blue water between them turns increasingly red.

What does all of this have to do with Israel's targets?

Plenty. Hamas is the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hezbollah, the Party of Allah, is officially the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon. The official name of the Houthis is Helpers of Allah. Israel is currently involved in a war against all three, yet, astonishingly, Islam is coming out of all this without a scratch. Not even Shi'a Islam, the sect to which two of them belong and the third is enthralled, is having a bad word said against it. The liberal West has come to the point were it must be very careful to make absolutely sure that it never makes the mistake of criticising Islam.

Up till 7 October, Islam could be criticised (because it was an idea, you know) while Muslims (as people) may never be criticised. After 7 October, such sycophants dare criticise neither. We must focus firmly on "Islamism" because the "Islamists" are the enemy. So Israel must strap on the blinkers and see only the political, military and economic targets. The head of the snake is in Tehran, but its heart, its life-force, is in Qom. Coming hard on the heels of the stunning string of ongoing Hezbollah humiliations, and the humiliation of the IRGC's spectacularly cack-handed missile attack on Israel, cratering the Islamic Seminary in Qom will seal the Shi'a's comprehensive humiliation, so much so that Shi'a ideology will die, and finishing off the IRGC will be a mopping-up operation. The rest of the Shi'a terror network will fall apart.

Those who would recoil from this suggestion have to keep in mind that Qom is not Karbala. It is neither the spiritual centre of Shi'a Islam, nor the focus for lay Shi'a religious life. Qom is where Shari'a is turned into state policy, where the nuts and bolts of the totalitarian terror state are dreamt up, where its ideologues are incubated and nurtured, and where the bureaucracy that codifies the legal enforcement of Islamic oppression is trained. The evil that kills so many thousands of Iranians springs not from Tehran, but from Qom.

The upcoming generation of Iranians have made a sport of publicly knocking turbans off the heads of clergy. They will very much appreciate Israel knocking off the great turban of Qom. So will Mahsa Amini's father, who famously chased a presumptuous mullah from his daughter's funeral, "Take your Islam and go!" Bombing the Islamic Seminary at Qom is a favour that will never be forgotten, and it should be one of Israel's top targets. Why is no one talking about it?

Part 2/...


Picture credits:

Mahdi Fathi Arjmand - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133289663

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Screenshots from "How Israel Could Strike Iran", Ryan McBeth, YouTube, 4 October 2024, https://youtu.be/Rl7fsEvk8BM (Don't be put off by the wacky humour. There are serious points here).

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