The unspeakable truth about ‘war crimes’ in Iran as Trump threatens ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’: AYAAN HIRSI ALI

I have spent my adult life watching liberal democracies tie their own values ​​into knots while their rivals face no such constraints.

Now, as 8pm ET approaches on Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s deadline for Tehran to open the Strait of Hormuz and pave the way for the end of the Iran War, it’s worth pointing out directly what the impotent, elitist, bearded generals choose to hide.

The moral architecture that underlies what we today call ‘war crimes’ is not an invention of the administrative state. Its foundations are Judeo-Christian. And this is a concept that America’s Islamist enemy does not honor but will manipulate in his crusade to destroy the West.

The sanctity of non-combatants, the prohibition of deliberate killing of innocents, the idea that even the enemy has innate honor; these derive from the biblical texts and the natural law tradition they inspire.

When Hugo Grotius laid the foundation for international humanitarian law in the seventeenth century, he was drawing not only on abstract rationalism but also on Scripture and scholastic theology.

This is extremely important because other civilizations operate from very different premises. A foreign tradition, unconnected with the Bible’s command against murder, calculating human life according to revolutionary utility, not only interprets these norms differently. He completely denies his sources.

The war crimes framework was never designed to govern actors who reject its foundations. To claim otherwise is willful blindness.

The Islamist attitude of Iran and its proxies towards human life was expressed with realistic ferocity by the late former president of Iran, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

I have spent my adult life watching liberal democracies tie knots on their own values ​​while their rivals face no such constraints (Image: Anti-war demonstrators in New York City on March 22)

Speaking at Tehran University, Rafsanjani explained that even a single nuclear bomb inside Israel would destroy everything, and that such destruction was acceptable from the perspective of Islam because it would cause relatively little harm to Muslims. Rafsanjani and Islamists like him really do love death, and they’ve been making that clear for decades to anyone willing to listen.

Iran has acted accordingly for a generation, embedding its military apparatus within the civilian infrastructure. Its nuclear facilities were built secretly, hidden from international inspectors for years, and were designed from the outset to have weapons potential. Missile systems are stored in crowded areas, ensuring that any attack on them becomes, in the language of their defenders, a humanitarian violation.

The IRGC’s financial networks are run through mosques and charities. Hezbollah, Iran’s primary foreign proxy, stores its weapons in residential buildings in southern Beirut. The model is consistent because the philosophy is consistent. The civilian population ceases to be something to be protected and becomes something to be deployed.

When a regime makes this choice, it has already decided who will bear the risk. He decided that his people were an acceptable shield. The war crimes argument completely ignores this decision; To accept this would mean holding the regime responsible for the consequences of its own strategy.

Hamas received this strategy from Tehran and, armed and financed by the same hand, it was implemented on October 7, 2023. As a result, 1,200 people died in one day.

Families were burned alive, women were raped in the presence of their relatives, and children were executed in front of their parents. After committing this atrocity, Hamas retreated into a network of tunnels built beneath schools and hospitals, trusting that the world would criminalize those who followed it.

Surprisingly, much of the world obliged. To call Israel’s attack on these tunnels a war crime is, knowingly or unknowingly, to fully accept the logic designed by their architects: Put your people in the line of fire, invite a response, and watch the West condemn itself.

The Iranian regime applies the same logic to its own people. He shot protesters in the streets during the 2009 Green Movement. He hung the opposition from cranes in the squares. In September 2022, he killed Mahsa Amini in a detention facility, then massacred young men and women who marched in his name. And in just two weeks this year the Basij murdered more than forty thousand people in cold blood. The combined weight of these facts would barely be outweighed by a single American air strike on a bridge in Iran.

Hamas received this strategy from Tehran and, armed and financed by the same hand, it was implemented on 7 October 2023 (Image: Mourners in Southern Israel, 19 February 2024)

Rafsanjani (right) and Islamists like him really do love death, and they’ve been making that clear for decades to anyone willing to listen. (Image) Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in Tehran in 1997

This disproportion is worth examining. It reveals something about alleged war crimes that its defenders rarely acknowledge. It is applied selectively, and the choice follows a political logic rather than a moral or legal one.

One side of this conflict values ​​life. The other celebrates death. While other states are recruiting soldiers, the Islamic Republic is producing martyrs. His theology holds that dying for the revolution is a reward. There is no sorrow in this accounting, there is only glory. Its leadership has made clear that the destruction of Israel and the humiliation of America are non-negotiable goals. The revolutionary constitution exalted these goals.

When the US destroyed Iran’s uranium enrichment facility, the more honest question is: What did it prevent? An Iran with nuclear weapons transferring its weapons to a place where it can cause maximum damage, either directly or by proxy, would constitute a completely different atrocity. The risk calculation should also include those that do not occur. This atrocity, which will be prevented in the future, is never included in the indictment. But the West is still being told to fight with one hand tied behind its back, lest it become like the forces it faces.

But none of these allow indiscriminate violence. The West must not become what it opposes. Intentionally targeting civilians is wrong, and no military objective justifies deliberate massacre. The calculated risk of civilian harm during attacks against legitimate military targets is a fundamentally different act from intentional massacre. The law makes this distinction clear. Legal experts know this. Commentators who use war crimes as a rhetorical tool also know this, and that is exactly why they work so hard to conceal it.

He killed Mahsa Amini in a detention center in September 2022, then massacred young men and women who marched in his name (Image: Iranian Americans rally outside the White House in 2022)

The record of American behavior deserves a place in this debate. The pilots were recaptured at significant cost. Strikes are planned, controlled and rechecked. Billions of dollars are being poured into weapons produced to limit harm to civilians. Taken together, these represent an army truly constrained by law, which sets it apart from the forces it faces. Critics who ignore this are either ignorant or argue in bad faith.

Both failures have consequences because this conflict extends far beyond Iran. China is watching carefully and patiently. Beijing has spent years trying to keep its American foes in line while tightening its grip on Washington’s allies through economic dependence and political obligation. What appears to be a regional conflict is one element of a much larger plan involving Tehran, Pyongyang and Moscow.

Whether the United States can project and deploy credible and sustained force against a hostile regime extends well beyond the Middle East. So is its absence.

If every strike, every package of sanctions, every military deployment can be neutralized by a chorus of condemnation, the regime achieves by accusation what it could never achieve by force. The West’s own vocabulary becomes the tool to defeat it.

The West should uphold its principles, but principles mean nothing when applied selectively. They demand consistent enforcement from both sides, including the side that shows nothing but disdain for them. This is a war between a civilization that considers life sacred and a civilization that makes sacrifice a religion. This distinction is worth defending.