AlHouthi4President

https://farsi.rouhollah.ir/library/sahifeh-imam-khomeini/vol/18/title/111

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❗️US troops report commanders framing Iran war as ‘God’s plan’

As first reported by independent journalist Jonathan Larsen, a US combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers that the war on Iran is part of “God’s divine plan,” allegedly claiming President Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus” to ignite Armageddon. The complaint, filed with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, is one of more than 110 logged within 48 hours from over 40 units across at least 30 installations. Complainants, including Christians, a Muslim, and a Jew, have requested anonymity to avoid retaliation. The Pentagon has yet to respond.

According to MRFF President Mikey Weinstein, service members report “unrestricted euphoria” among segments of the chain of command portraying the assault on Iran as biblically sanctioned and tied to end-times prophecy in the Book of Revelation. One NCO wrote that such rhetoric is eroding morale and violating constitutional oaths, particularly for troops in Ready-Support status who could be deployed at any moment.

The controversy unfolds as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth expands overt evangelical programming within the Pentagon, including prayer sessions and Bible studies aligned with staunch pro-Israel theology. Weinstein reports that many US commanders appear particularly enthused by the prospect of an intensely violent confrontation, emphasizing how much bloodshed they believe is necessary to align events with a fundamentalist Christian end-times narrative.

As a non-Muslim and, in general, an opponent of religious states, I firmly support the Islamic Republic of Iran. Let me explain.

The FIRST and most obvious reason to support Iran is that solidarity is due to any independent people under attack by the imperial power. That much, most people understand. Imperialism has always been the great social evil.

SECOND, and fundamental to the first, since the Iranian people chose a revolutionary path based on Islamic principles, we should respect their right to self-determination, whether or not that is a path we would have chosen for ourselves. The right of a people to self-determination is the key human right, before all others, placed in international human rights law (the ICCPR and the ICESCR) by the former colonial states, with grudging acceptance from the former colonial powers.

It is plain from the recent huge rallies in Iran (January 12, 2026 and February 2026) and surveys - the UNDP reported in 2018 that 71% of Iranians trust their national government (almost double the figure for the USA), while University of Maryland polls in 2019 showed 82% support for murdered Iranian anti-terrorist commander Qassem Soleimani and strong majority support for other political leaders - that the great bulk of the Iranian people in Iran support their nation, especially in face of the new waves of US and Israeli aggression.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 expelled the US-backed dictatorship (of the “Shah” or “Emperor” Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) installed by the Anglo-Americans after they overthrew an elected social democratic government in 1953. After decades of political repression, resistance to this despised regime came to be organised mainly through the mosques. As a result, contemporary Iranian self-determination has been attached to Islamic Shia values which stress the need for sacrifice in opposing unjust regimes and tyrants.

Well before I came into contact with the Arab and Muslim world, I had developed my own spiritual understandings and moral reasoning from other cultures (mostly from India and Latin America). I am not at all closed to learning from other cultures, but similarly not open to adopting a new religion; indeed my spiritual path turned me away from many common elements of organised religion. While respecting the Shia tradition of sacrifice and resistance, and conscious of the tremendous examples of Shia leaders like Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and Haj Qassem Soleimani, tremendous ambassadors for their nations and their religions, I maintain a deep conviction that no culture has a monopoly on decent human values. Indeed, I was struck by the common features I saw in indigenous communities of the Pacific Islands and in those of the Arab world. That helped convince me that many traditional and decent human values (e.g. hospitality, reciprocity and inclusivity) developed independently in many parts of the world.

The lessons I learned from Islamic scholars in Syria reinforced this view. Seeing that Quranic scholar Muhammad Said Ramadan Al-Bouti was murdered by Western backed Jabhat al-Nusra terrorists in his Damascus mosque, along with 40 of his followers, taught me the great difference between conservative Sunni Muslim scholars and extremists. And on hearing that I was publishing a book on the resistance (Axis of Resistance, 2019), Syria’s former Grand Mufti Sheikh Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun was quick to tell me that resistance (to Imperialism and Zionism) should never be the property of any particular religion; further, that no state should be based on any particular religion. Even though pluralist Syria (when Assad was president) was closely allied to both Hezbollah and Iran, I appreciated his point.

THIRD, the Islamic Republic of Iran has, for the most part, done the right thing by its people. This is not just a matter of opinion. UNDP reports from 1999 and 2018 show that, between 1990 and 2017, Iran was second only to the People’s Republic of China in making outstanding advances in its Human Development Index. Iran’s HDI grew on average 1.21% per year over those 27 years, mainly due to improvements in mass education and maternal and child health. I discussed this in my 2019 book Axis of Resistance (Chapter 14).

Contrary to much of Western propaganda, average living conditions in Iran were very poor in the pre-revolution period. Yet between 1980 and 2017, average life expectancy in Iran rose from 54.1 to 76.2 years. Average years of schooling more than quadrupled, from 2.2 to 9.8 years. According to a 2022 report by the Washington-based World Bank, the expected years of schooling for children in Iran by 2020 was 11.9 years for boys and 11.8 years for girls. Those tremendous advances in education and health laid the basis for the technical and industrial development pursued by successive Iranian governments, away from a simple dependence on energy reserves, which characterises many oil rich countries.

FOURTH, the Islamic Republic of Iran has provided tremendous support to the Palestinian and other independent peoples of the West Asian region, besieged and attacked as they are by imperial powers and the Zionist enemy. No other state or entity has provided the means for these people to defend themselves. Since 1979, Iran’s support for the Palestinian people and their various Resistance groups - falsely derided as “terrorist” by imperial regimes - has been consistent and strong. This support includes cultural events such as International Quds Day, at the end of Ramadan, to remind Muslims to support the oppressed people of Palestine. Indeed, Iran’s firm support for Palestine is the main reason why the nation has been targeted by the Israelis, Washington and their hangers-on. In response to this, Iran has tried to build regional cooperation and regional resistance to foreign occupation.

A Palestinian academic colleague resident in Iran has taken regular measure of Iranian public support for the government’s backing of the Palestinian resistance; he says that support increased after Trump’s January 2020 murder of Qassem Soleimani and again after the Israeli attacks on Iran in June 2025.

In recent years, Washington has tried to roll the clock back, through hybrid wars consisting of incessant propaganda, direct attacks, economic siege, and contracted terrorism. Some of that propaganda has successfully fooled Western populations into supporting yet another “color revolution”, even though it is obviously orchestrated by Washington and the Israelis.

Much of the propaganda has been anti-Islamic, such as the depiction of Iran as anti-woman, through enforcement of the hijab or head scarf dress code for women. I have to admit I am also against a state imposed dress code aimed at women. However, the Western campaign has been dishonest and ignores the reality of women in Iran.

First of all, hijab or modesty is a religious requirement (not the same as a state mandate). Second, the massive Western campaign claiming that in 2022 Iranian police beat to death a young woman - Mahsa Amini - for improper head scarf was completely false and contrary to the public evidence of CCTV and a coroner’s report. Third, while it is true that many young Iranian women do not like the head scarf rule, they have also subverted it, so that the practice in most Iranian cities is that many Muslim women just wear a loose scarf over their shoulders, raising it when they pass a shrine or a mosque. As a result of this practice, Iranian women have probably the most relaxed hijab custom in the Muslim world.

Finally, while Iran’s leader Seyyed Ali Khamenei strongly supports the hijab as a religious requirement, he has also called for tolerance and respect for women with “inadequate hijab”, saying that “those who do not fully observe the hijab should not be accused of being irreligious or against the Revolution … why do you accuse such people? … [who] are covered in different ways … and are shedding tears [at religious and national events] … they are our own children, they are our daughters.”

Nevertheless, it is difficult for any non-Muslim to accept the principle of religious guardianship (Velayat-e Faqih in Iran), which is the foundation of Iran’s hybrid democratic system. Indeed, there are even some important Shia leaders who opposed this doctrine, such as the late Lebanese Marja Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. Yet as I said above, religious guardianship is not my choice, it is that of the people of Iran. Further, we can often see greater democratic processes at work in Iran than in the Anglo-American world, which is mostly subject to oligarchic rule.

As an independent observer I have to recognise that the Islamic led Iranian Revolution kicked out a foreign power, then the Islamic Republic invested in its people, making massive advances in the health and education of its boys and girls, building a strong and resilient nation and playing the most important regional role in supporting the Palestinian people and the other independent peoples of the region.

Iran’s consistent firm adherence to principle is not a coincidence but rather a result of its strong and mature leadership since the revolution. For the most part, it has been the liberal wing of Iranian politics that has, at times, weakened the nation, in a fruitless pursuit of some crumbs for ingratiating themselves with Western elites. Without Iran’s principled leadership, there would have been greater concessions to that voracious monster that is Anglo-American imperialism and its bastard Zionist child.

Ultimately, power in the twenty-first century rests on complex credibility, the product of interaction between material capability, narrative consistency and perceived legitimacy in the use of force. If the United States initiates a war it cannot decisively conclude, fails to guarantee key trade routes for its allies and exports economic instability to the global system, that credibility erodes cumulatively. Partners seek to diversify alliances; competitors test limits with greater audacity; the centre no longer holds. The central issue is not immediate military capacity but the aggregate effect on America’s relative position within an international system that is no longer unipolar, where power is assessed not only by the capacity to destroy but by the aptitude to produce a stable and predictable order.

The conclusion is more nuanced than often presented, yet no less consequential. The principal risk to American influence derives not solely from Iranian capabilities but from underestimating a state that has made strategic patience and resilience the core of its grammar of international action. Any decision to confront Tehran militarily would not constitute a mere tactical miscalculation but a conscious strategic wager against a system designed precisely to absorb shocks, impose cumulative costs and preserve a regional equilibrium that, though unfavourable to Washington, remains functional and possesses its own stabilising logics. It is a wager against the adversary’s very nature, a particularly hazardous choice when that adversary has built its political identity around survival under persistent and asymmetric pressure.

The most likely outcome would not be immediate catastrophe for either side but a prolonged sequence of attritional pressures — gradual, systemic and difficult to reverse — that would ultimately test America’s credibility, strategic focus and operational reach.

This is not ideology but a pre-emptive strategic autopsy: an exercise in structural foresight intended to understand how a decision that is technically feasible — even tactically straightforward — may accelerate geopolitical and economic dynamics that ultimately redefine the balance of power it sought to preserve, shifting it in unforeseen and unfavourable directions. Prudence, clarity in planning, accurate risk perception and the management of conflict over time are variables that far exceed the mere sum of military capabilities or force deployments.

In this sense, Iran’s strategy is articulated around the logic of protracted resistance, in which patience and operational consistency become central instruments for sustaining relative stability under extreme external pressure.

The dilemma for Washington, therefore, is not binary between war and peace, but between a conflict that can be maintained on its own terms and one that, once initiated, immediately redefines the rules against it, transforming strengths into liabilities and initiative into a trap of escalating commitment. In this contemporary paradox, the supreme exercise of power may lie not in the demonstration of force but in the disciplined capacity to recognise and avoid a self-generated strategic trap, preserving resources and attention for the challenges that truly shape the horizon of the twenty-first century.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43616072

Excerpt:

When the US negotiates with Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, it is because the US was unable to replace Chavismo with some clown like María Corina Machado and Juan Guaidó. “Washington’s kidnapping of Maduro was intended to demonstrate the empire’s dominance. But it also exposed its limits: the durability of the Bolivarian Revolution and the reality that even great powers must sometimes negotiate with governments they detest.”

Delcy Rodríguez, now acting president while Maduro is held hostage by the empire, met with US Department of Energy officials, and immediately narratives emerged that she had betrayed the Bolivarian Revolution by privatizing oil. This is false. The reform of the Organic Law of Hydrocarbons dictates that the state remains the owner of the natural resources and that public entities maintain majority ownership of all joint ventures with private corporations in the oil sector. Furthermore, the law stipulates that the final authority for all disputes will be the Venezuelan courts, rather than some court in Washington or New York. Misión Verdad wrote that “the Venezuelan State externalizes and transfers to others the risks of commercial activity, while directly benefiting from the activities of the operators, fully preserving public ownership of the deposits and resources.” Changes in the royalty structure and external marketing and sales does not reflect privatization; instead it is a reaction to the technical and financial barriers that the United States has imposed on Venezuela through a sustained siege. Rather than spreading social media tabloids, we should reflect on the reasons why Venezuela lacks the machinery and capability to refine its heavy crude, or the barriers to investment in PDVSA and why it is severely limited in its capacity to engage in foreign sales. The answer to these is the reality of the US blockade.

It is painful to see revolutionaries shaking hands with kidnappers, but politics is not a movie. Expecting Venezuela to strike back militarily ignores reality. The US maintains an enormous armada off the Venezuelan coast, air bases nearby, and is strangling Cuba simultaneously. The US has proven that it will airstrike civilian targets and destroy civilian infrastructure and then brag about its crimes to the world and get away with it. This is exactly what happened in Yemen just last year and has been inflicted upon Gaza for over two years.

Therefore, negotiation is not betrayal; it is survival. We must distinguish between compromise of principle and compromise of necessity. Venezuela is being extorted to sell oil to US companies that supply the Zionist entity. This is not a choice; because the alternative is nothing. The reality, for millions of Venezuelans and the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela is that the revolution must retreat following military defeat, but it is not ideological surrender. Revenue returns to the people, preventing the total collapse of the government. We can compare this to the imperialist war on Syria, where US-backed terrorists stole oil revenues and strangled the state and its people.

Excerpt:

When the US negotiates with Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, it is because the US was unable to replace Chavismo with some clown like María Corina Machado and Juan Guaidó. “Washington’s kidnapping of Maduro was intended to demonstrate the empire’s dominance. But it also exposed its limits: the durability of the Bolivarian Revolution and the reality that even great powers must sometimes negotiate with governments they detest.”

Delcy Rodríguez, now acting president while Maduro is held hostage by the empire, met with US Department of Energy officials, and immediately narratives emerged that she had betrayed the Bolivarian Revolution by privatizing oil. This is false. The reform of the Organic Law of Hydrocarbons dictates that the state remains the owner of the natural resources and that public entities maintain majority ownership of all joint ventures with private corporations in the oil sector. Furthermore, the law stipulates that the final authority for all disputes will be the Venezuelan courts, rather than some court in Washington or New York. Misión Verdad wrote that “the Venezuelan State externalizes and transfers to others the risks of commercial activity, while directly benefiting from the activities of the operators, fully preserving public ownership of the deposits and resources.” Changes in the royalty structure and external marketing and sales does not reflect privatization; instead it is a reaction to the technical and financial barriers that the United States has imposed on Venezuela through a sustained siege. Rather than spreading social media tabloids, we should reflect on the reasons why Venezuela lacks the machinery and capability to refine its heavy crude, or the barriers to investment in PDVSA and why it is severely limited in its capacity to engage in foreign sales. The answer to these is the reality of the US blockade.

It is painful to see revolutionaries shaking hands with kidnappers, but politics is not a movie. Expecting Venezuela to strike back militarily ignores reality. The US maintains an enormous armada off the Venezuelan coast, air bases nearby, and is strangling Cuba simultaneously. The US has proven that it will airstrike civilian targets and destroy civilian infrastructure and then brag about its crimes to the world and get away with it. This is exactly what happened in Yemen just last year and has been inflicted upon Gaza for over two years.

Therefore, negotiation is not betrayal; it is survival. We must distinguish between compromise of principle and compromise of necessity. Venezuela is being extorted to sell oil to US companies that supply the Zionist entity. This is not a choice; because the alternative is nothing. The reality, for millions of Venezuelans and the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela is that the revolution must retreat following military defeat, but it is not ideological surrender. Revenue returns to the people, preventing the total collapse of the government. We can compare this to the imperialist war on Syria, where US-backed terrorists stole oil revenues and strangled the state and its people.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43585700

#Lying israelis disqualified from Olympics

In a news story that will shock nobody, the israeli bobsled team was caught faking an illness in order to change their team roster after doing miserably in preliminary rounds. They then went on social media to lie about the events and pretend they were being persecuted by the Olympic committee.

A colony comprised of thieves, liars, and cheats; they still continue to murder Lebanese and Palestinians on a daily basis despite the ceasefires. Just a few days ago they killed 18 Lebanese and wounded dozens more after bombing an apartment complexes in the Bekaa Valley. Of course, the lying death cultists claimed they were targetting "command centers."

Over 690 Palestinians in Gaza have been slaughtered by the IOF since the start of the ceasefire, 200 of whom are children. Yet the israelis continue to claim self defense.

Social media users recently found some articles about another disturbing practice of the settler colonial death cult, literally gathering up kittens and puppies to burn them alive during some sort of holiday involving bonfires.

This depraved violence against literal defense animals happens on a weekly basis. Last week israili "civilians" burned dozens of sheep in Hebron.

In final news about the depraved settlers, israeli so-called "civilians" continue to carry out terrorism in the West Bank including torching mosques. Yesterday, hundreds of armed israeli settlers broke into the town of Huwara, south of Nablus, where they carried out provocative rituals, forcing local Palestinian businesses to shut down. This is of course happening at the same time as 'israel' is severely limiting Palestinians access to Al Aqsa mosque during the holy month of Ramadan under the claims of "security concerns."

Ramadan Mubarak to all the Believers in the chat.

Sayed Abdul-Malik Badr al Din al Houthi gave some great advice this year (as he always does.)

Fully translated speech from the Leader of the Yemeni Revolution on 29 Shaban 1447.