Is a Preemptive Strike in the Offing?

AP Photo/Vahid Salemi

Perhaps the most worrisome news of the day is the Iranian threat to launch a massive drone and missile attack against Israel. Up to this time, Iran has worked with considerable effect through its proxies, principally the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and — if it is not too far-fetched to suggest — Iran’s increasingly reliable proxy outrider the United States of America under the feckless and incompetent Joe Biden. 

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Like his mentor Obama before him, Biden is one of Israel’s most consistent and determined critics and, judging from his betrayal of Israel at the United Nations, a capricious and untrustworthy ally as well. Indeed, Biden cares more about Democrat constituents in Dearborn, Mich., the Somalian capital of the U.S., who chant "Death to America," than about one of America’s most reliable friends and partners.

Israel has reacted to the Iranian threat as it must, with its foreign minister stating bluntly that “If Iran attacks from its own territory, Israel will respond and attack in Iran.” Israel’s retaliatory and justified invasion of Gaza after Hamas’ barbaric terror strike inside Israel has been called a mistake by Biden, who has emboldened Iran, flush with billions in American bribe money, to threaten Israel with extinction. 

His recent pledge to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “our commitment to Israel's security against these threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad” is certainly not heartfelt and is likely duplicitous. Probably the most favorable interpretation we can put on Biden’s bravado may be that he has realized that he allowed the situation, which he helped to provoke, to get out of hand and is now verbally backtracking in a feeble effort to defuse the Iranian menace and the specter of a Mideast war. 

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When Israel faced catastrophic defeat in the 1973 war, then-Prime Minister Golda Meir refused to consider the nuclear option, even though the situation was existential. Today things may be different. Hezbollah is estimated to deploy up to 150,000 rockets aimed at Israel, more than enough to devastate the country. No less alarming, according to reports, Iran is now agonizingly close to achieving a nuclear breakthrough, and there is no guarantee that the Mullahs would not activate their arsenal, whether conventional or thermonuclear, against the Jewish state.

We know that Iran is a Shi’ite nation, a branch of Islam that believes in the return of the so-called Twelfth Imam, or Mahdi, who is descended from Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth caliph assassinated in 661 in a succession war, after which the split between Sunnis and Shi’ites eventually became permanent. Historian Emmanuel Sivan in "Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics" warned that an integral part of Shi’a Islam’s belief and thought involves the igniting of a worldwide conflagration. 

Shi’ites believe that Allah’s kingdom will be established on earth by the Twelfth or Hidden Imam, whose “second coming” can be accelerated by creating the right set of circumstances, namely, the fomenting of violent upheavals in a holocaust of blood and fire among the nations of the earth — in particular, Israel. And the mullahs are just crazy enough to bring such a cataclysm to pass.

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Joe Biden, his advisors, regional “experts,” and his party in general are too ignorant of Islamic teachings and readily available Shia scholarship to know any of this or even to consider it worthy of study in order to familiarize themselves with the explosive politics of the sector. As Lesley Hazleton remarks in "After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split," “history is often made by the heedless.” But the Israeli leadership is educated and alert to the threat. That is why I suspect they would not respond to imminent destruction as did Golda Meir but would repay annihilating fire with annihilating fire — or, if convinced the missiles are poised to rain from the sky, may well initiate a pre-emptive strike. This is the nuclear tinderbox that Biden through his actions and policies is about to toss his cigar butt into. 

Should a calamity of this nature occur, the fault cannot be ascribed wholly to Iran for the ayatollahs do not live in the age of reason. They are without mind. Nor can the responsibility be laid at Israel’s door. The country will not allow itself to be incinerated. The blame rests largely on the slumping shoulders of the categorically worst president in the entire panorama of American history — though he has several former collaborators in Jimmy Carter, who gave us modern Iran, and Barack Obama, who subsidized it. 

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Voters must understand what is at stake and act accordingly. The issue is truly incendiary. One can only hope that Biden and his treacherous party go down to ignominious defeat before we cross the point of no return.

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