American war with Iran is becoming inevitable

My father was born in Isfahan, the ancient imperial capital of Iran that UNESCO rates as one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And although he left Iran in his youth in the 1950s, Iran never left him.

Every night he played Persian music, and our family loved Persian cuisine; in my opinion, it’s the best in the world. Even my fully Ashkenazi wife, Debbie (I’m Ashkefardi. My mother was born in Brooklyn with an accent that never left her), learned to cook exceptional Persian dishes, like Ghormei Sabzi, which endeared her to my father.

But from the age of my bar mitzvah I began to hate Iran. It was 1979, and I watched a hapless, pathetic, and weak Jimmy Carter unable to provide a credible American response to the millions of people, mostly followers of the murderous Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, chanting “Death to America” in the streets of Tehran, as they toppled an American ally. I even remember the day when the exiled shah’s palace, always with a tank in front of it, was finally overrun by the Islamist extremists. Within weeks the American embassy was overrun and our country endured 444 harrowing days, not completely dissimilar to what Israel and American Jewry are enduring now, with the hostages held by the monsters of Hamas.

Get The Jewish Standard Newsletter by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

Two things are not in doubt. First, that the shah was no saint — but compared to the utter brutality of Khomeini and the mullahs who overthrew him, he was a benevolent autocrat. And second, Carter’s abandonment of the shah led to the rise of Islamist fundamentalism from which Muslims and non-Muslims alike suffer even today.

Historians estimate that throughout the many decades of the shah’s regime, his brutal Savak internal security service may have killed, at a maximum, some 3,000 Iranian dissidents. That’s an unforgivable number but a decimal point compared to the hundreds of thousands who would die in Khomeini’s and his successor Khameini’s reigns of brutality and endless wars. And this doesn’t even factor in the tens of thousands of innocents they have murdered the world over in terror attacks, including thousands of Americans, both civilians and soldiers, in Lebanon, Iraq, Argentina, and Europe.

A few years back, my wife and I spent an evening with the empress of Iran, Farah Diba Pahlavi, at her Maryland home. It was a surreal experience. On the piano were photos of her and her husband, the late king, along with their children, as if they were any ordinary immigrant American family.

She is a woman of undeniably noble bearing and warmth, who remains immensely popular in Iran till today. I asked her how her husband had lost power. Not that I would ever endorse such immoral behavior — indeed, I was a relentless public champion of the failed Arab spring, which was brutally repressed by Arab potentates — but why didn’t he use the playbook of other Islamic leaders, who repressed rebellion with force? I will never forget her answer, which she spoke with the sincerity of truth. “His generals begged him to. But he told them he refused to slaughter his own people.”

Till today the Shah’s reputation remains mixed at best, and even his son and successor, Reza Pahlavi, whom our organization, the World Values Network, honored at a New York City gala for friendship with the Jewish people and who also lives in Maryland, supports the complete democratization of Iran rather than any return to a royal prerogative.

Four decades later, here we are.

The Iranian government, run by arch snake oil salesman and religious fraud Ayatollah Ali Khameini, is easily and undeniably the most cruel and evil on earth.

What else can be said of a government that promises and works daily toward the execution of a second Holocaust, hangs gay Iranians from cranes in public squares, brutally tortures young women to death for simply showing strands of hair in public, and stones women to death? And this is aside from the global terrorism it sows in every part of the world, and, most sinisterly, its seemingly unstoppable move to gain nuclear weapons by which to either explode or at least terrorize the world for a century to come.

In short, Iran’s barbarity and the kleptocracy of its greedy rulers, who have become filthy rich off illicit oil sales, has no modern equal.

And this has gone on for nearly half a century with Iran rarely ever being punished. What to do about Iran?

As I write these lines on Tisha B’av, the most mournful day on the Jewish calendar, Israel is waiting, like a sitting duck, for Iran to attack it again. In a briefing presented by the IDF’s Chief International Spokesman (Res.) Col. Jonathan Conricus, whom we brought to Times Square in front of thousands of people in a pro-IDF rally, was clear. Any belief that Iran’s initial attack in April with 300 drones, missiles, and rockets was just a feint and not serious is preposterous. Its aim was to murder as many Israelis as possible, firing missiles the size of school buses and using its most state-of-the-art drones.

Why is Israel just sitting around waiting to be attacked? Who does that? Is that how Israel achieved its lighting victory in 1967, by waiting for Nasser, who promised to push the Jews into the sea, or by using his threat to strike first and destroy all his air forces?

Then there is this.

A week ago, no less than the American attorney general, Merrick Garland, confirmed in a press conference that Iranian agents had hired assassins in the United States to murder President Donald Trump. Luckily and unbeknownst to them, the people they hired were undercover American law enforcement agents.

Are you kidding me? Iran is planning to actually murder a former American president, who also happens to be the Republican nominee for president, and there is no American response? Isn’t the planned murder of a former and perhaps future American head of state an act of war?

Three years ago, on the first yahrzeit of my father of blessed memory, we hosted former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to deliver the first memorial lecture to a crowd of 1,000 on the streets of Manhattan in what constituted a reopening of sorts for New York Jewish life after the covid lockdowns. Although Pompeo had officially left office four months before, he arrived with perhaps 100 NYPD, Secret Service, and state department agents to protect him. The size of the security cordon perplexed me until I read, just a few days later, that Iran was actively trying to murder him and John Bolton, on American soil, in retaliation for the targeted killing of arch-terrorist Qassam Soleimani, the terrorist head of the IRGC.

What the hell? You mean Iran’s chants of “Death to America” is not just a slogan it uses to rile up its populace and terror proxies worldwide to murder American servicemen and women and civilians, but even the very leaders of our nation?

Has America fallen so low that we’re allowing a third-rate gang of terrorists to possibly decapitate the highest personnel of our government?

Can you only imagine what the United States or Britain would have done to Japan or Germany if they tried to assassinate President Franklin Roosevelt or Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the war?

Let me be clear. I hate war, no more so than now when my two eldest sons are combat soldiers in the IDF in special forces units who have already seen significant action. I wish the war in Gaza would end this moment, so my sons can come home in peace.

But I also recognize that Israel’s failure to destroy Hamas utterly will see Israelis die well into the next generation and beyond.

But in truth, there is no Hamas, there is no Hezbollah, there are no Houthis, and there is no Islamic Jihad without Iran to back them.

The head of the snake has one name and one name only. Iran. Iran. Iran.

We Americans are understandably in an isolationist mood when we see how the noble and patriotic rhetoric that we heard during the Bush 43 years have ended with ten thousand dead American heroes in Afghanistan and Iraq, $2 trillion flushed down the toilet, and nothing to show for it. Afghanistan is literally ruled by the same disgusting misogynist knuckle-draggers, the Taliban, that we dislodged two decades ago, and Iraq is one of the most vocal governments supporting Hamas. Both nations are essentially enemies of the United States.

From Donald Trump to Joe Biden to Kamala Harris to my friend Bobby Kennedy, every leading American candidate for the presidency is opposed to the forever wars in the Middle East.

And yet, when it comes to Iran, it’s time to ask an uncomfortable question. What alternative is there?

Barack Obama sought, like Chamberlain before him, to appease Iran, and in an act of almost surreal stupidity on the part of a genius of a man, actually thought to grant it not only $150 billion but essential hegemony over the Middle East, in the hope that it would civilize.

We know how that ended.

Then, Donald Trump, in an act of great political courage, threw out the JCPOA Iran deal and nearly bankrupted the mullahs, a policy that the United States must continue regardless of the appeasers’ criticisms. But even that did not fully bankrupt the mullahs, as China rushed to Iran’s aid and bought their oil illegally off the international markets.

Which leads us to one conclusion. Whoever occupies the White House may face no choice but this: a military campaign against Iran, joined with all our NATO, EU, and international allies — and indeed by every nation that wants to see a civilized earth — finally disarming Iran, destroying its nuclear capability, and offering the long-suffering people of Iran an opportunity at true liberation.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach of Englewood is the author of the newly published guide to fighting back for Israel, “The Israel Warrior.” Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @RabbiShmuley.