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Last month, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei told an enraged crowd of Islamists that President Trump’s statements weren’t even “worthy of a response.”
As the crowd chanted “Death to America”, Iran’s leader called Trump a liar, and warned that, “America should leave the region, and leave it will.” Then he called for the destruction of the Jewish State while the crowd chanted, “Death to Israel.”
The only question was whether America and Israel would take the regime’s threats seriously.
That question was answered when Israel, after two decades of trying to get the mostly fictitious “international community” to do something about Iran’s nuclear program, finally took action.
The endless negotiations in pursuit of an impossible deal that would somehow allow Iran to have nuclear technology without nuclear weapons were based on refusing to listen to what the Islamist terror regime said, as recently as weeks ago, and refusing to believe that it meant it.
To believe in a nuclear deal, you also had to believe that a terror state that gets its electricity from its abundant natural gas resources for a fraction of the cost of our electricity wanted a civilian nuclear program. To believe in any kind of deal with Iran, you had to believe, as the New York Times insisted to sell Obama’s nuke deal, that Iran “has a complicated relationship with the phrase” and that when it says, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”, it doesn’t really mean it.
“The situation between America and Iran is this: When you chant ‘Death to America!’ it is not just a slogan – it is a policy,” Ayatollah Khamenei explained in 2023.
What did that policy look like in practice?
“‘Death to America’ means death to Trump,” Khamenei previously warned.
Last year, an Iranian operative was charged in a plot by the IRGC, Iran’s terror arm, to assassinate Trump before Election Day. The “complicated relationship” wasn’t so complicated and it’s not a metaphor. “Death to Trump” literally meant trying to kill the president. “Death to America” means the destruction of America. And “Death to Israel” means just what it says.
Apologists for the Jihadist regime in Tehran try to pretend that it’s about our foreign policy, but beyond chanting for the destruction of America, Israel and England, the chants at the Khamenei speech included “Death to the hypocrites and infidels” (meaning the deaths of all non-Muslims and insufficiently devout Muslims) and death to those who oppose the supreme power of Sharia Islamic jurisprudence in the form of its Ayatollahs, Mullahs and other theocratic tyrants.
According to Ayatollah Khomeini anyone who did not believe that Mohammed, Islam’s genocidal warlord prophet was a messenger of Allah, is defined as an infidel, and the only thing to do is to convert him, enslave him or kill him. “If one permits an infidel to continue in his role as a corrupter of the earth, the infidel’s moral suffering will be all the worse. If one kills the infidel, and this stops him from perpetrating his misdeeds, his death will be a blessing to him.”
Opposing the Ayatollahs just made America one of the first ‘infidels’ in line for destruction.
Iran kidnapped our diplomats, bombed our Marines, abducted and tortured our people, brutally killing them in the most grotesque ways, because its regime believes in “Death to America.”
Not as a metaphor or a complicated relationship, but as violently graphic as the Muslim terrorists jumping up and down on the body of Navy diver Robert Stethem and then putting up a microphone to his face to broadcast the screams or removing the skin from the face of Colonel William R. Higgins before castrating, killing him and dumping his body near a mosque.
That’s ‘Death to America’.
The Israelis, who live much closer to Iran than we do, did not decide to escape into the extended Carter administration diplomatic dreamworlds about a deal with Iran. They understood that Iran was serious and they acted. Whatever we do or don’t do about Iran, we would be fools to pretend that the Islamic terrorist regime isn’t serious about wanting us dead.
And bigger fools to act like we can bribe or negotiate our way out of the threat.
Right now, Israel is doing our work for us in fighting Islamic terrorists. It’s doing it even though our elected officials keep sending mixed messages, undermining Israel, calling for restraint and pretending that the Middle East would be more stable if it were dominated by the terrorists.
Obama already tried that with the Arab Spring. It turned out the same way Carter’s Iran tampering and every experiment in nation building and democracy by the Bushes, Clinton and other administrations did. Instead of standing up to Muslim terrorists, we let ourselves be intimidated by them, by their sheer numbers, by their destructiveness and willingness to die.
But Israel, far smaller than us, a country tiny enough that you can walk its width, stood up to an entire region. Iran is 80 times Israel’s size, has 9 times its population and yet Israel did what so many of our administrations feared to do. Why? Because Israel understood what we deny.
Israel knew that the calls for genocide are real and that the alternative to action is death.
Faced with the threat of death, Israel instead brought death to the IRGC leaders of Iran’s death machine, to its commanders and struck at the machinery of its ballistic missile and nuclear program meant to kill millions. Its secret wasn’t just its brilliant strategy, but its grip on reality.
Israel took Iran seriously and acted seriously. It faced down death threats and delivered death to the terrorist enemies of civilization. That is what serious nations do. Unserious ones play word games and take refuge in wishful thinking. As we confront not only Iran, but Islamic terrorists around the world and in our own country, it’s time we get serious too.
If our enemies want to kill us, we have a choice between killing them or letting them kill us.