Protesters burning the Israeli and U.S. flags during a protest against Israeli attacks on multiple cities across Iran at a bridge leading to the fortified Green Zone where the U.S. Embassy is located in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, June 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)
According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran is “urgently signaling that it seeks an end to hostilities and resumption of talks over its nuclear programs.” However, it adds that “Israeli leaders have little incentive to halt their assault before doing more to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites and further weaken the theocratic government’s hold on power.”
For example, Israel’s military announced this morning that it had killed Ali Shadmani, whom it identified as Iran’s wartime chief of staff and most senior military commander. Israel and Iran launched a new round of attacks as the conflict entered its fifth day. President Donald Trump left the Group of Seven summit in Canada last night to return to Washington due to the situation in the Middle East.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Fox’s Bret Baier recently, “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.” He added, “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.”
Why would he call Iran “the world’s most dangerous regime”?
Iran’s missiles are “aimed at all of us”
Writing for Jewish News Service, the Emmy Award-winning journalist and filmmaker Yuval David warns: “The Islamic Republic of Iran is not just a regional menace but a global threat.” He reports that the regime “has openly vowed to annihilate Israel, wipe Jews off the map, destroy the United States, and dismantle Western democracy from within.”
As evidence, he states:
Iran has invested heavily—not only in uranium and missile technology, but in terror networks that span continents. . . . Their fingerprints can be found on bombings, assassinations, cyberattacks, and propaganda that work to destabilize governments and threaten the notion of human freedom.
He warns that this Islamist movement is “an aggressive, political movement cloaked in religion that seeks to dominate, subjugate, and destroy.” He closes with this: “The missiles flying toward Israel . . . are not just aimed at Jews. They are aimed at all of us.”
German journalist and publishing executive Mathias Döpfner agrees: “In a world of bad actors, Iran is the most aggressive and dangerous totalitarian force of our time.”
Not just a republic but a revolution
Why would Iran want to destroy Israel and “dominate, subjugate, and destroy” the West?
Iran was an ally of the West prior to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini immediately cut off all official relations with Israel, declaring it an “enemy of Islam” and “Little Satan” while designating the US as the “Great Satan.”
This was in part because of the CIA’s support for the regime of the Shah, whom they installed in a 1953 coup. But Iran’s hatred for the West is especially fueled by an ideology with which most of us are not familiar.
Ali Shariati was a Western-educated intellectual who was inspired by Marxist anti-colonialist scholars. Accordingly, he divided the world into the oppressed (including Iran) and the oppressors (primarily the West) and framed a revolutionary ideology to oust the “oppressors” and “liberate” Iranians. He died before the 1979 revolution, but Khomeini capitalized on the popularity of his ideas.
In addition, Iran’s Shiite theocrats believe they are leading not just a republic but a revolution to export their radicalized Islam in preparation for the coming of the Mahdi, their messiah. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims that the “Jewish state will be destroyed before Mahdi’s arrival.” Some even see Russia’s war against Ukraine as a prelude to the “reappearance of the Lord of the Age” (the Mahdi).
Add the fact that Sharia law permits lying to non-Muslims to advance Islam, and we can see why Israel views Iran’s nuclear ambitions as an existential threat to their survival and negotiations as a ploy to buy time until Iran can create weapons with which to destroy the Jewish state.
“The West’s greatest blind spot”
What about the threat of retribution if Iran used nuclear weapons against Israel and the West? Middle Eastern scholar Raymond Ibrahim warns:
For nations whose leaders and upcoming leaders have been systematically indoctrinated into believing that the greatest good is to usher in a “rightly guided figure” from Islamic legend—no matter the cost, including to the nation itself—the implications are nothing short of apocalyptic.
This is why he calls Mahdism “the West’s greatest blind spot concerning Iran’s nuclear program.”
Israel does not suffer from this “blind spot” and has resolved to remove this threat to their future. The outcome of this conflict remains to be seen, but it clearly illustrates the power of ideology to mold history.
Let’s close with this: the ideology that birthed the Church is the ultimate answer to the ideology that birthed the Islamic Republic of Iran. The gospel offers sanctification beyond anything religious legalism can produce, since the Spirit lives in followers of Jesus:
His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:3–4).
And one day the true Messiah will return to bring “a new heaven and a new earth” in which we will live forever (Revelation 21:1). We are one day closer to that day than ever before.
In the meantime, I am using this conflict to pray daily for spiritual awakening to bring true shalom—peace with God, others, and ourselves—to Israel and Iran.
Will you join me today?
Quote for the day:
“The world can create trouble in peace, but God can create peace in trouble.” —Thomas Watson
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