The Jihadist Theocracy of Iran ... Fading

"We're geared to do whatever is necessary to achieve our dual aim, to remove ... two existential threats - the nuclear threat and the ballistic missile threat."

"We did act - to save ourselves, but also, I think, to not only protect ourselves, but protect the world from this incendiary regime."

"We can't have the world's most dangerous regime have the world's most dangerous weapons."

"Iran will pay a very heavy price for the murder of civilians. We will also achieve our goal. We are here because we are in an existential battle, which today is understood by every citizen of Israel."

"Think about what would happen if Iran had 20,000 missiles like this [that hit the northern Israeli community of Bat Yam]. It would be an existential threat to Israel. That is why we launched a war of salvation against a dual annihilation threat, and we are doing so with strength." 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu  

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits homes hit by Iranian projectiles on Sunday, June 15, 2025.

(photo credit: PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE)

How much more threatening provocations, bald statements of intent to annihilate its presence, inciting of deadly violence, complicity in training, arming and dispatching satellite terror groups would any country other than Israel reasonably tolerate before finally in the realization that there was no possibility of reaching detente with an avowed enemy and to prevent total existential calamity it must act to protect itself and its population to preempt the inevitable? After decades of incendiary threats, attacks by terror proxies of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the potential of facing a nuclear strike, Israel, left with no other choice, moved to defend itself and extinguish that threat.

 

Friday, 13th of June long before dawn rose to illuminate the day, that pre-emptive military strike was undertaken, reaching deep within Iranian territory toward very specific targets -- the country's nuclear infrastructure, its military sites, and most particularly its organizational capacity in the targeting of its senior military officials, its nuclear scientists and those senior officials in control of state mechanisms geared toward the jihad intentions of the theocratic state.

 

People gather outside an area hit by an Israeli strike in Tehran on 13 June. Photograph: Meghdad Madadi/Tasnim News/AFP/Getty Images

 

Israel is accused by many in the Western media, hinted at by the leaders of allied nations of overstepping its rights in planning and executing a full-scale attack on Iran. But none of these other countries have had to live for years with the Iranian Damoclean sword hanging over them, or responding to strike after strike by neghbouring terrorist groups or their administrations that incite the populace to violence against their population. Urging a ceasefire when Israel has only just launched an operation to nullify the Islamic Republic regime's focus on destroying the Jewish state, is an exercise in futility.

 

The threat against Israel represents a direct and imminent one, but the same surly threats, although not quite so freely expressed, are meant to create disequilibrium within Western democracies for the ultimate purpose of destroying their culture, laws, politics and ideology in favour of that of extreme political Islam as Muslim migration accelerates, creating large political, professional and activist blocs whose favour is sought by politicians with an eye fixed on votes, bypassing the longer stealth picture of overturned traditions and values.

 

Israel's Iron Dome air defense system fires to intercept missiles over Tel Aviv, Israel on Sunday.

Leo Correa/AP

 

Israel's expected, but still shocking decision to launch a full-scale attack on Iran is fully legitimate in the international arena of legal permissibility. Every nation has the inherent right to defend itself under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations. Iran, as the only member of the UN that has openly threatened the annihilation of another UN member, it is understood that the threat goes well beyond rhetoric, but expresses full intention. 

 

According to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Israel is a "cancerous tumour" which "must be  eradicated". Iran has never been content to stop at verbal insults and threats of assault, but has moved to ensure that actual violent attacks take place as precursors to its final intent. In the IRGC's Quds Division's formation, training and arming of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Houthis in Yemen, Shia militias in Iraq, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, a pincer movement closing in on Israel was not only contemplated but put into motion.

 

These are groups whose focus on occasion strayed toward disturbed actions hitting Western interests through Tehran's global network, attacking American troops, disrupting global shipping, and hitting western allies in the Mediterranean, South America and Europe. Which led eventually to October 7, 2023, when Iranian proxy Hamas gave vent to its ambition of fomenting dread terror to a degree not to be outdone in its sadistic savagery, much less imagined that human nature could sustain such a degree of malevolence.

 

Rescue personnel work at an impact site following a missile attack from Iran, in Bat Yam, Israel, June 15, 2025 (credit: RONEN ZVULUN/REUTERS)

 

But it was an event that galvanized a traumatized nation to launch its military in a response to destroy the capacity of the Palestinian terror group to ever imagine a repeat could occur, striking at its leaders, its headquarters, its rocket launching sites, its interminable tunnel system, its weapons depots. And when Hamas was left licking its wounds but still launching missiles, it was Hezbollah's turn after a year of lobbing missiles into Israel, when precision technology placed pagers in the hands and pockets of shocked terrorists for long-range efficiency in administering punishment.

 

Although the Houthis' direct fire into Israel placed an additional burden on Israel to respond to that third front, the fourth failed to fully surge when Syrian opposition groups moved to destroy the Assad regime's hold on Syria. And then it was Iran's turn, to feel the full vibrant, deadly strength of the enemy whose ire it had so carefully cultivated over the years. The International Atomic Energy Agency had declared Iran in violation of its nuclear non-proliferation obligations earlier in the week. In the realization that it had little time left before Iran reached the end stage of producing nuclear weapons, Israel took the initiative.

 

Vehicles jam a highway as a fire blazes nearby in the oil depots of Shahran, northwest of Tehran, on June 15, 2025. (ATTA KENARE / AFP)

 

Necessity moved Israel to destroy the Islamic Republic's aspirations for nuclear achievement; to match nuclear warheads to the technologically advanced missiles it had devised for that purpose. With success, Israel may remove a regime that beggared its nation's culture and economy for the greater interests of forming a Shi'ite cabal capable of undermining and destabilizing the greater numbers of Sunni-led Arab regional governments. Removing the Ayatollahs and the IRGC from power in Iran to free the Iranian population from its stranglehold, relieving the region of the tensions inherent in Iran's bid for conquest, and freeing Israel from the prospect of a nuclear night, would also release the international community from the octopus-probing arms of Islamist state theocratic jihad. 

 

The Iranian regime’s security chain of command that has been eliminated by Israeli strikes, June 14, 2025. (Israel Defense Forces)