As fighting resumed between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, the leaders of the Islamic Republic, whose identities at this point remain not entirely clear, have claimed to have some friends in extremely high places. They also continue to cast the entire conflict in terms of a religious war, which they have done from the beginning of the Islamic Republic itself, while Western analysts have been just as consistent in ignoring all their religious talk and insisting it was of no importance. It may not be, but then again, it may be the key to their motives and goals, which we overlook at our own peril.
The Daily Mail reported Tuesday that the Iranians released a video showing rockets they were about to fire emblazoned with stickers. The sticker on one rocket read: “Hey Trump, our God is the same God who carried the faith of Abraham forward for centuries — the God of Moses and Jesus.”
In this, the Iranians appear to have been responding to Trump’s messages in which he signed off with “Praise be to Allah.” They’re telling him that the god around whose law they have built their regime is not some alien deity, but the same God that Jews and Christians worship. Trump has never shown any inclination to become a theologian, but he likely is aware of how risible this is in light of the Islamic regime’s brutality. Earlier this year, Iranian leaders massacred 40,000 of their own people for the crime of protesting against their regime, in line with the Qur’an’s command to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah” (8:60). Does that sound like the teaching of Moses or Jesus to you? No, it doesn’t to me, either.
A sticker on another bomb, however, stuck with the theological theme. It read: “If they claim to have destroyed all or most of Iran’s military capability, yet they are still being slapped around by Iran, there are two reasons. First, they are lying; second, the prayers and blessings of the prophets Moses, Jesus, David and Solomon stand behind the monotheistic nation of Iran.”
Is Iran “slapping around” the United States at all? It certainly doesn’t seem as if it is from any of the available facts at hand, but even more importantly, is it doing so because it is getting supernatural help from “the prophets Moses, Jesus, David and Solomon”? That’s what Iran’s Islamic regime would have us believe, but it strains credulity for a number of reasons.
One is that the very ordering of the names of these four “prophets” reflects a notorious Qur’anic error. The book that Muslims revere as a perfect copy of the eternal book that has existed forever with Allah in paradise and (they insist) was given to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel depicts Mary, the mother of Jesus, being addressed as “sister of Aaron” (19:28).
This has embarrassed Muslims for fourteen centuries, for, despite all their efforts to explain it away, it’s quite clear what happened here: In Arabic, the names Mary and Miriam, the sister of Aaron and Moses, are both rendered Maryam. The authors of the Qur’an, having only a sketchy knowledge of Biblical history, assumed that the two women were one and the same, and thus further assumed that Jesus was Moses’ nephew. Thus the Iranian rocket’s order is chronological: after Moses comes Jesus, and then David and Solomon.
The most important aspect of this claim of prophetic help, however, is that it is designed to solidify the identity of the Iranian regime with Allah and Islamic. The Iranian regime implements Islamic law, and because it does so, it equates itself with Allah, such that waging war against it equals waging war against Allah.
Related: What Iran Really Wants in Order to Validate Its Islamic Regime
That means that when Trump — and Iranian dissidents — oppose the regime in Tehran, the Iranian leaders would have us believe that they are opposing the creator of the universe. This also justifies the most draconian punishments: “The only reward for those who make war upon Allah and his messenger and struggle to sow corruption on earth will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet cut off on opposite sides, or be expelled from the land. Such will be their degradation in this world, and in the hereafter, theirs will be an awful doom.” (Qur’an 5:33)
All this illustrates yet again that the religion of Islam is absolutely central to the Islamic Republic’s understanding of its conflicts with America and Israel. Islam is also the primary motivating factor behind those conflicts. Yet the influence of Islam is the one aspect of both conflicts that no one in Washington seems to think is worth considering. Still, when the Islamic Republic claims the support of Moses, Jesus, David and Solomon, foreign policy analysts and policymakers would do well to study Islam in order to understand the regime’s motives and goals. They won’t, however.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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