Iran is a religious state, which gives it superpowers? By Chris Mitchell in The Australian.
Commentators in Australia discuss Iran as a rational state rather than a time capsule of religious ideas. Yet those religious ideas underpin the strategies of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini: hatred of Jews, the embrace of martyrdom, and rejection of modernity. …
International law:
In Australia, the ABC could not report what was really happening, focused instead on whether various attacks on Iran and its proxies complied with international law.
Why? The national broadcaster appears to abhor Trump and Netanyahu more than it does a state that has financed terror around the world, including antisemitic attacks in Australia last year. …
Resistance:
Key to understanding Iran is the idea of “resistance”, something young Australian students and journalists who think they are speaking truth to power unthinkingly support but only because they have no idea what “resistance” means to an Islamist. …
The Arabic word “muqawama” means resistance. It is both “’the Islamic Republic’s greatest source of resilience — and the engine of its unravelling,” [Times of Israel’s political correspondent Haviv Rettig Gur] argues.
“When used by the leaders of Iran or Hezbollah or Hamas or the Houthis … (it) refers to a sustained, never-ending campaign of violence accompanied by a willingness to absorb catastrophic levels of damage. As the damage sustained to one’s own polity grows, so the sanctity and religious meaning grows with it.”
Sacrifice is the ultimate weapon the weak can use against the powerful. Rettig Gur outlines the role of a Syrian preacher, Izzedine al-Qassam, who died in 1935 as a martyr outside Jenin in the north of the West Bank shouting: “This is Jihad, victory or martyrdom.”
His death sparked the 1935-38 Arab revolt against British rule and is emblematic for Hamas which named its key combat force the Al-Qassam Brigades and its most common rocket the Qassam.
Into this legend 1960s Palestinian intellectuals added Mao’s theory of guerilla warfare: “A militarily inferior force embedded in a sympathetic population could exhaust a technologically superior enemy simply by refusing to be eliminated.” Sound like Hamas in tunnels? …
Rettig Gur argues Hamas and Iran’s Ayatollahs believe: “You do not need to win … You need to make the cost of occupying you unbearable in moral, political and economic terms.” …
But is religious-level resistance ultimately self-defeating?
Like Russian communism, the system contains the seeds of its own destruction.
The educated young of Iran see their rulers enriching themselves while Iran pays for weapons for Iran’s terror proxies.
Iran, with 93 million people, an educated population and enormous natural resources, has a smaller GDP than tiny Israel which has a population of only nine million and few natural resources. This is why Hamas’s October 7 pogrom was timed to disrupt the Abraham Accords negotiation process.
Normalisation of relations between Israel and the Gulf States would be a disaster for the Mullahs: Iran’s domestic protest movement is more interested in a better life than a better martyrdom.
Students chanting “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon – my life for Iran”, and “They take our bread to buy rockets for Lebanon”, know a lot more about real resistance than the keffiyeh-wearing pro-Palestine mobs here each weekend.
Funny how the media never point how how flagrantly the West’s opponents violate “international law.” Somehow “international law” only ever impedes or constrains the West, never it enemies.