Yesterday marked the first anniversary of America’s killing of Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Islamic Republic’s expeditionary Quds Force, who for many years directed the network of militias and terrorist groups that have wreaked havoc and destruction throughout the Middle East. Two weeks ago, Iran-backed forces fired a barrage of rockets that landed near the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and Israel and the U.S. have placed their forces on high alert in anticipation of a more dramatic attempt by Tehran to exact revenge. Recalling her own stunned response to the news of Suleimani’s death, and that of her fellow Iraqis, Rasha Al Aqeedi writes:

[T]hose with no personal experience living at the mercy of tyranny struggle to comprehend the perception of invincibility that some leaders create in the minds of those over whom they rule. The disbelief over the death of tyrants is unrelated to our personal feelings towards them. It isn’t a form of political Stockholm syndrome; it stems from a perception of almightiness built by those who dictate every aspect of our lives. Their actions decide the fate of millions and the outcome, however brutal, does not harm their authority.

Suleimani saved a collapsing Syrian regime, prolonging [that country’s civil] war, giving sectarian succor to Islamic State’s genocidal propaganda, and corralling the wretched of the earth, from Afghan children to Syria’s Alawite poor, into fighting on behalf of his expansionist project.

The ancient kings and pharaohs believed in, and lived by, their own immortality, which permitted them to rule by unmitigated savagery, free from even lip service to humane rules of war. Modern-day tyrannies count on three things. First, the inaction and indifference of an international community that has mastered the phrase “gravely concerned” and shown an unwillingness to do much else. Second, a rising Western consensus which holds that dictators must be coddled and appeased lest their downfall produce unintended consequences. Third, deception: the transformation of their own atrocities into heroic military victories.

Men like Soleimani have to be removed before the agony and destruction they’ve caused can ever be righted.

Stephen Daisley writes about the slaying of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim:

Yaron and Sarah were murdered in a climate of lies and vilification and hatred. . . . The more institutions participate in this collective madness, the more madness there will be. The more elected officials and NGOs misrepresent the predictable consequences of asymmetric warfare in densely populated territories, where much of the infrastructure of everyday life has a dual civilian/terrorist purpose, the more the citizenries of North America and Europe will come to regard Israelis and Jews as a people who lust unquenchably after blood.

The most intolerant anti-Zionism is becoming a mainstream view, indulged by liberal societies, more concerned with not conflating irrational hatred of Israel with irrational hatred of Jews—as though the distinction between the two is all that well defined anymore.

For years now, and especially after the October 7 massacre, the call has gone up from the pro-Palestinian movement to put Palestine at the heart of Western politics. To pursue the struggle against Zionism in every country, on every platform, and in every setting. To wage worldwide resistance to Israel, not only in Wadi al-Far’a but in Washington, DC. “Globalize the intifada,” they chanted. This is what it looks like.