In 2009 and multiple times since, Benjamin Netanyahu called Iran a messianic apocalyptic cult, and said that the future of Western Civilisation depended on stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
In 2015, he compared Iran to Nazi Germany, and drew parallels between the appeasement of Hitler before WW2, and the deal signed by Iran and the world’s largest powers to limit its nuclear capabilities.
It’s 2025, Israel has launched a Pearl-Harbour-like attack on Iran, Netanyahu is still calling Iranians Nazis and the apotheosis of evil, and the genocide of the people of Gaza continues to reach new heights of barbarism while the world watches on doing all but nothing. Now it is clear that there is only one state that lives up to the moniker of messianic apocalyptic death cult, and at the rate that state is going the future of all civilisation may depend on reining in its rampage.
The Real Cult of Death
The facts speak for themselves: 50,000 children killed and injured in Gaza in what is a genocide and not a war; an assault on Iran without provocation to decapitate its leadership and prevent it from producing nuclear weapons when the foremost intelligence agencies have asserted it is not building them; risking global conflict and Israel’s own likely destruction should such an event arise for highly dubious short-term gain by attempting to force the US into a war; and believing all of this is ordained from on high.
If messianic means believing anything and everything you do is blessed by a celestial seal of approval, if apocalyptic means risking Armageddon to achieve your ends, and if death cult means annihilating anyone and everyone who stands in your path, then there is no better messianic apocalyptic death cult on our planet at present than Israel. Few serious commentators will fight the case for the Iranian State and its supreme leader being a force for good, but in terms of death and destruction it pales in comparison to its Zionist neighbour.
Iran has mostly resigned itself to brutal domestic oppression, and backing organisations like Hezbollah and Hamas, financially, militarily and ideologically. It is also, despite strong words and Manichaean pronouncements, home to the largest population of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel, who seem to be quite happy to be there and, in fact, see Israel itself as a far greater evil than their homeland, with the Iranian Parliament’s sole Jewish member calling it a ‘savage, child-killing regime’.
The First Nakba, the slow but steady subsumption of Palestine in contravention of international law and the apartheid that the Palestinian People live under – this already puts Israel among the most heinous of nations. Genocide, war crimes, the use of white phosphorus, bombing Iran and dragging the USA into a large-scale conflict regardless of the consequences – this puts Israel into a class almost of its own of the most extreme and dangerous of states.
Divine DNA
The state of Israel is founded upon a divine sense of self. The Zionist movement laid claim to Jerusalem and the lands of Palestine as the birthright of the Hebraic People. This right was enshrined in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 where Britain pledged its support for the Zionists in their desire to establish their own state in Mandatory Palestine (1920 to 1948) and vowed to do all in its power to realise it. The mass migration of Jews to Palestine followed, resulting in much unrest and violence before an Israeli State was established in 1948, subsequent to a civil war in Palestine and the First Arab-Israeli War.
Coming home for one meant losing home for the other, but the central contention of Zionism is that the Palestinians were, in effect, squatting on hallowed ground, thus all wrongdoings are nullified and all actions justified. This belief remains as unshakeable as ever and means that everything done in its name has been perfectly justifiably, from the original sins of the Jewish state right up to the horrors of the present.
From Misdemeanours to Murder in the First
The decades-long blockade of Gaza and the complex network of zones, checkpoints and permits that regulates life in the West Bank saw the Palestinian People treated much like cattle, with most every aspect of their public life tightly controlled. After the Hamas terrorist attack of the 7th of October 2023, cattle to be managed became vermin to be exterminated. Israel has gone from misdemeanours to, comparatively speaking, murder in the first.
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan rang his counterpart in Israel, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, to express his outrage at Israel’s decision to carpet bomb Beirut during the siege of the city, resulting in the deaths of 300 people. The siege took place against the backdrop of the Second Israeli Invasion of Lebanon. Reagan was shocked by the ‘needless destruction and violence’, and the assault threatened to scupper American attempts to end the war. 20 minutes after the conversation the bombings stopped.
And we are talking about Ronald Reagan here; a beacon of reason and mercy he was not. But such is the seismic shift in what Israel can demand and dictate that he looks like a seraphim angel by contrast.
This would be unthinkable today. No American president will force Israel to stand down, and it’s questionable whether Israel would listen. The larger part of the American Establishment has moved to a position where the Israeli State can do no wrong, and Israel, with arguably the most powerful lobby in the USA, has played a large role in moving it there.
Now Israel can kill and injure 50,000 children in Gaza and nothing happens, while Russia kills and injures 2,406 children in Ukraine and it is the Devil incarnate. Israel can unleash a genocide on the Palestinian People and raze Gaza to the ground, commit war crimes for fun, kill a few hundred aid workers, prevent 2.1 million people from receiving critical aid, pummel the nuclear facilities of Iran in an unprovoked attack, risking a ‘Chernobyl-style catastrophe’ in the process, and succeed in pulling the United States into a war that had a real chance of metastasising into a global conflict (and still may), and somehow these are all acts of self-defence.
If this is defence, one wonders what attack would look like?
This is where Israel stands at present. It is the only messianic apocalyptic death cult in town, and it can get away, quite literally, with murder.
Great article, but personally I never label Hezbollah and Hamas as a terrorist group anymore.
takes some guts to say this stuff. LOUDER SHANE!
and the references make your voice very strong!