Deep background: Iran under the mullahs is a totalitarian dictatorship, like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and communist North Korea. Dictatorships, by their nature, have no claim to sovereignty.

Iran’s mullahs, ayatollahs, and other varieties of witch doctors are a cross between a horde of fanatics and a criminal gang. To speak of their enslavement of their own populace as if it had a particle of legitimacy means the rulers have the right to subjugate and terrorize those caught in its jaws. Such relativism does to morality what jihadists did to the World Trade Center on 9/11.

As one Iranian escapee asked on social media: Why is it, do you think, that there are no Iranians in the West protesting Israel’s attack? The absence of protests by Iranian refugees tells you all you need to know about the nature of the Iranian regime.

Why, then, do the civilized world’s leaders and intellectuals tolerate the Iranian dictatorship and urge “restraint”? Why don’t Western nations combine with Israel to knock out not just a couple of nuclear bomb-building sites, not just to kill a couple of higher-ups in the regime, but to wipe this evil off the face of the earth?

Israel seems to have the ability to target and kill specific individuals, yet no one is calling for the execution of the Ayatollah and his henchmen.

Removing the cancer is the only long-term solution. Announce that the Ayatollah’s terror-regime is over, blast the slave-owners to their imagined after-life, assert the moral rightness of this act of self-defense against the world’s biggest sponsor of international terrorism, and urge the Iranian people to set up a secular government.

The only thing standing in the way is: the West’s intellectuals. They created what’s spoken of as “the moral weakness of the West.”

But weakness understates it. The intellectuals seethe with hatred for Western values—i.e., the Enlightenment values of reason, objectivity, individual rights, and political liberty.

Their fundamental enemy is: reason. For over two centuries, Western philosophers have been denying reason, proclaiming in a hundred different ways that reason is biased, subjective, illusory, or a total myth.

After skeptics such as David Hume softened them up, Western intellectuals were easy prey for the “solution” to skepticism devised by Immanuel Kant. Kant, in effect, proclaimed, “Who needs reality? It’s good enough that we all live in the same shared delusion.”

Kant and his followers had murky ways of putting it, of course: “intersubjective agreement,” “shared intuitions,” “collective unconscious,” “transcendental categories of the understanding.” But all of it added up to substituting “people say” for “it is.”

The motive? To save religion and its moral imperative of self-sacrifice. “I found I had to deny reason in order to make room for faith. All objections to [Christian] morality and religion will be for ever silenced . . .” (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxxi.)

From Kant to Hegel, to Schopenhauer, to Comte, Nietzsche, Marx, Lenin, Freud, Jung, Durkheim, Habermas, Dewey, Whorf, Green, Derridas, Foucault, Feyerabend, Rorty, Chomsky—the philosophers and their lieutenants in the “social sciences” were united in attacking reason, self-interest, and individualism, and promoting their antitheses: mysticism, self-sacrifice, and collectivism.
The motto of the whole Kantian rebellion against the Enlightenment is “Vox populi, vox dei”—the voice of the collective is the voice of God. You can call it Society or you can call it God; either way, your role is to kneel and obey.

Thus, college students today are trained not to think—thinking is too individualistic—but to march and chant.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free!” What river? What sea? It’s unlikely they know.

Free from what? Not from Hamas’ iron dictatorship—no, Hamas’ enslavement of Gazans is the will of the collective, so it does not matter how many lives it claims.

What the chanters want is freedom from “colonialism.”

You ask: Just what is colonialism?

They answer: “Huh? It’s like oppression and uh privilege and like . . . you know, colonialism.”

You ask: Does Hamas want to kill Jews for being Jews?

They respond: “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free!”

Israel is not immune from the anti-reason, anti-self philosophy: the most frequently offered justification for the existence of Israel is: God promised this land to us.
That’s the Kantian merger of religion with collectivism. “God,” of course, is a primitive myth, but so is the “us.” No title to land can be held by a tribe; ownership is individual, not collective.
The whole situation can be clarified by rejecting collectivism and realizing that the issue is not about “occupation” or “stolen land” but about jurisdiction: which law ought to rule in a given territory: Hamas’ law or Israel’s law?

Hamas has no right to control anyone’s land, or issue edicts to anyone. Like the thug-fanatics who rule Iran, the creatures who hold the whip hand in Gaza, who teach children to blow themselves up in martyrdom and use women and children as human shields—these blood-soaked killers have no right to go on living, let alone to rule over any land or any person.

Dictatorships do not recognize any rights of their enslaved subjects. They cannot, therefore, claim some “right to rule.”

When Israel “occupies” some territory, it means people living there then get the rule of law, the protection of their rights under that law, and a peaceful existence free from secret police, revolutionary tribunals, torture, and execution. Whatever the inhabitants’ religion, tribal background, or former nationality, when Israel gains sovereignty (not ownership) over the area in which they live, that is like being released from a dungeon.

Once we cease to think in collective terms, the principle becomes clear: among fully free countries, it does not matter which one has jurisdiction over the area in which you live. Your life and happiness depend on your rights being protected, not violated, by whichever government has jurisdiction.

Whether or not one lives under the jurisdiction of a rights-protecting government, not the colors of the flag one lives under, is the life-or-death issue.

“From the river to the sea, people will be free”—when the people in that territory are free of the Hamas dictatorship.

The time has come to move toward freeing all the people in the Middle East, thereby making the whole world safer. The time has come to end the Islamic Regime in Iran.

P.S. It may already be happening. See, for instance, this edition of “Traveling Israel”:

https://ko-fi.com/post/Israels-Air-Dominance-Over-Iran-Y8Y21GI5SK?ref=email_newpost