The Iran War (was Nuclear Program) thread
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From a guy named Peter Hmmelman. No idea who he is, but worth the read.
The joint American and Israeli strike on Iran, and the reported killing of Ayatollah Khamenei and other senior regime and Revolutionary Guard leaders, may in time be seen as one of those hinge points upon which history turns — a civilizational shift, or the beginning of one.
I can’t help but notice that this has occurred on Parashat Zachor, the Sabbath on which Jews are commanded to remember Amalek, the ancient enemy who sought their destruction, and on the eve of Purim, when the Persian tyrant Haman’s plot to annihilate the Jews was thwarted and he himself was put to death. History does not mechanically repeat itself. And yet patterns and memory persist. The ancient land of Persia once again stands at the center of a story whose ending has not yet been written.
But what interests me just now is not only the military action itself, but the response from certain quarters, including some who celebrated the pogrom of October 7, 2023, or offered tacit or overt support to those who funded it, orchestrated it, and carried it out. More troubling still is the moral confusion this response has laid bare.
Let me begin with something that should be obvious, but which is often ignored: the Iranian regime is not the Iranian people. Iran is the heir to a distinct and ancient culture, one of the great civilizations of human history, with extraordinary brilliance in science, art, and literature. And for years, millions of its citizens have protested their government, often at the cost of their lives. They have been shot in the streets. Imprisoned. Tortured. Disappeared. Women beaten for showing their hair. Teenagers killed for daring to speak out. Citizens demanding that their government stop spending vast national treasure on weapons while their own economy collapses around them. It is a radical Islamist regime whose survival has depended not on the consent of its citizens, but on their fear.
How else does one account for the images now emerging from Iranian cities, streets filled with people celebrating the death of the tyrant who had kept them trapped since the revolution of 1979?
And yet, in the aftermath of this strike, one hears a troubling refrain. That what Israel and the United States have done is somehow equivalent to what the Iranian regime itself has done. That the moral categories are interchangeable. That power is power. Violence is violence. That there are no meaningful distinctions.
This is the conflation. And it is not a small error. It is the central error of our time.
The Iranian regime has funded and directed proxy armies across the Middle East, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, organizations whose explicit purpose has been the destruction of Israel and whose methods have included the deliberate targeting of civilians. Kidnappings. Rapes. Executions. The burning alive of families in their homes. These are not accidental tragedies of war. They are intentional acts, rooted in an ideology that seeks not merely military victory but the eradication of a people, and whose ambitions extend far beyond Israel’s borders.
Israel, like the United States, is a society in which leaders can be voted out, criticized openly, protested in the streets. It is a society with an independent judiciary, a free press, and citizens who argue endlessly about the morality of their own actions. To imply that such a system is morally equivalent to the Iranian regime is a collapse of both logic and common sense.
Part of this collapse arises from the way political hatred reshapes perception itself. Many despise Donald Trump. His conduct and rhetoric, along with the accusations and indictments he faces, have given many good reasons to condemn him. These matters deserve scrutiny. But condemnation, however justified, does not erase the distinction between a democratically elected leader, however flawed, and an authoritarian ruler with a documented history of imprisoning, torturing, and murdering his own citizens.
Whatever your feelings about Donald Trump, he did not order the mass killing of his own citizens to preserve his rule. He did not oversee the violent suppression of recent nationwide protests in Iran, where dissident groups report that as many as 7,000 people were killed and thousands more imprisoned in a matter of weeks. He did not preside over a regime that tortures and, in some cases, kills women for refusing to wear a head covering. And yet, in the rhetoric of our time, he is often spoken of as though he were morally interchangeable with those who have done precisely these things. To place him in the same moral category as such a regime is not serious analysis. It is conflation in its most dangerous form.
This confusion appeared again in a public statement by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who condemned the strike as “an illegal war of aggression,” while saying nothing about the regime itself. Nothing about the thousands of protesters killed in recent weeks. Nothing about the men and women who were imprisoned. Nothing about the ideology that made such repression possible. The emphasis fell instead on condemning those who opposed the regime. This is how moral clarity erodes. Not all at once, but by degrees.
Democracies, imperfect as they may be, tend to align with one another, as Israel and the United States have long done. Autocracies do the same. China and Iran have developed a long-term strategic partnership encompassing economic, political, and military cooperation. Russia maintains a comprehensive strategic partnership with Tehran as well. North Korea, historically and rhetorically, has aligned itself with Iran against Western pressure. These autocratic regimes recognize in one another a shared interest in preserving power without accountability and in resisting those who would demand it.
We are living in a moment in which the distinction between democracy and tyranny is being deliberately blurred. Everything becomes the same. Every act equally evil. Every nation equally guilty. And once that happens, nothing can be defended.
Not freedom. Not democracy. Not even the idea that some things, however imperfect, are still worth preserving.
To understand the nature of the regime, it helps to recall an episode from the Iran-Iraq War. As the German political scientist and journalist Matthias Küntzel has documented, Ayatollah Khomeini imported hundreds of thousands of small plastic keys from Taiwan. These keys were distributed to Iranian boys sent to the front, some of them barely in their teens. Many were deployed in mass advances across minefields, where their role was to detonate the explosives with their own bodies. The keys, hung around their necks, were presented to them as symbols of their passage into paradise.
And perhaps that is why I cannot stop thinking about Purim.The story is so familiar it risks losing its force. An empire. A tyrant. A lethal decree. The machinery of annihilation set into motion. And then, its unexpected reversal.
But the deeper lesson of Purim is not vengeance. It is the refusal to accept the lie that those who seek to destroy and those who seek to live are morally equivalent. Purim exists to remind us that such symmetry is an illusion. The ancient land of Persia outlived Haman. The Iranian people, the Jewish people, and all those who refuse to live under tyranny will outlive this regime as well. -
Saw we had 3 F-15s get shot down, I guess by friendly Kuwait fire. Pilots are alive after ejecting. It's interesting the planes fly (fall?) so steady in a flat horizontal spin, I wonder if that is by design so that pilots can eject? I have no idea. Anyway.... good job Kuwait. Is Iran even flying any jets? More like Ifly, amirite?
Side note... I also saw the Burj Khalifa (tallest building in world) turned off its lights so that drones would have a harder time seeing it, after a drone-bomb flew into it yestetrday.
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Really insightful question by the female anchor at 26:14.
"Why are you attacking US bases?"
"Umm you idiot, because they're attacking us lolz?"
Link to video -
@AndyD said in The Iran Nuclear Program thread:
it's long overdue given the last 50 years of this dreadful Iranian regime conducting its war against westernised infidels.
It's interesting to think how long he's been in power. I think Iran has had 4 leaders in 100+ years. I don't know of another country with that track record.
@jon-nyc said in The Iran War (was Nuclear Program) thread:
It's interesting to think how long he's been in power. I think Iran has had 4 leaders in 100+ years. I don't know of another country with that track record.
China is close with 5, but only after the last 80 years. Mao, Deng, Jiang, Hu, Xi
