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 themselves in knots over their values while their adversaries face no such constraints.
Now, as President Donald Trump's final deadline of 8pm ET Tuesday for Tehran to open the Strait of Hormuz and pave the way to the end of the Iran War nears, it is worth stating directly what the impotent, elitist, beard-stroking armchair generals prefer to conceal.
The moral architecture underpinning what we today call 'war crimes' is not an invention by the administrative state. Its foundations are Judeo-Christian. And it is a concept that America's Islamist foe does not honor but will manipulate in its crusade to destroy the West.
The sanctity of the non-combatant, the prohibition of the deliberate killing of the innocent, the idea that even an enemy possesses inherent dignity — these derive from Biblical texts and the natural law tradition they inspired.
When Hugo Grotius laid the groundwork for international humanitarian law in the seventeenth century, he was drawing on Scripture and scholastic theology, not on abstract rationalism alone.
This matters enormously, because other civilizations operate from drastically different premises. An alien tradition that is not linked to the Biblical injunction against murder, one that calculates human life in terms of revolutionary utility, doesn't merely interpret these norms differently. It rejects their source entirely.
The war crimes framework was never designed to govern actors who repudiate its foundations. Pretending otherwise is wilful blindness.
The Islamist attitude to human life — Iran's and her proxies' alike — was expressed with matter-of-fact brutality by the late former president of Iran, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
As President Donald Trump's final deadline for Tehran to open the Strait of Hormuz and pave the way to the end of the Iran War nears, it is worth stating directly what the impotent, elitist, beard-stroking armchair generals prefer to conceal
I have spent my adult life watching liberal democracies tie themselves in knots over their values while their adversaries face no such constraints (Pictured: Anti-war demonstrators in New York City on March 22)
Speaking at Tehran University, Rafsanjani declared that even one nuclear bomb inside Israel would destroy everything, and that such destruction was acceptable to Islam as it would cause, relatively speaking, a small damage to Muslims. Rafsanjani and Islamists like him truly love death, and they have said so openly, for decades, to anyone willing to listen.
Iran has spent a generation acting accordingly, embedding its military apparatus inside civilian infrastructure. Its nuclear facilities were built in secret, hidden from international inspectors for years, and designed from the start with weapons potential. Its missile systems are stored in populated areas, ensuring that any strike on them becomes, in the language of its defenders, a humanitarian violation.
The Revolutionary Guard's financial networks run through mosques and charities. Hezbollah, Iran's primary foreign proxy, stores its weapons inside residential buildings in southern Beirut. The pattern is consistent because the philosophy is consistent. The civilian population ceases to be something to protect and becomes something to deploy.
When a regime makes that choice, it has already decided who bears the risk. It has decided that its own people are an acceptable shield. The war crimes argument ignores that decision altogether; to acknowledge it would mean holding the regime accountable for the consequences of its own strategy.
Hamas absorbed that strategy from Tehran and, armed and financed by the same hand, put it to use on October 7, 2023. The result was 1,200 people dead in a single day.
Families were burned alive, women were raped beside the bodies of their relatives, and children were executed in front of their parents. After committing those atrocities, Hamas retreated into a tunnel network built beneath schools and hospitals, counting on the world to cast their pursuers as criminals.
Astonishingly, much of the world obliged. To call Israeli strikes on those tunnels war crimes is to accept, whether knowingly or not, exactly the logic its architects designed: place 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. It shot protesters in the streets during the 2009 Green Movement. It hanged dissidents from cranes in public squares. In September 2022, it killed Mahsa Amini in a detention facility, then slaughtered the young women and men who marched in her name. And this year in a matter of two weeks the Basij gunned down over forty thousand people in cold blood. The combined weight of these facts barely registers against a single American airstrike on an Iranian bridge.
Hamas absorbed that strategy from Tehran and, armed and financed by the same hand, put it to use on October 7, 2023 (Pictured: Mourners in southern Israel on February 19, 2024)
Rafsanjani (right) and Islamists like him truly love death, and they have said so openly, for decades, to anyone willing to listen. (Pictured) Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in Tehran in 1997
That disproportion is worth examining. It reveals something about the war crimes argument that its proponents rarely acknowledge. It is applied selectively, and the selection follows a political logic rather than a moral or legal one.
One side in this conflict values life. The other celebrates death. Where other states recruit soldiers, the Islamic Republic manufactures martyrs. Its theology holds that dying in the cause of the revolution is a reward. There is no grief in that accounting, only glory. Its leadership has openly stated that the destruction of Israel and the humiliation of America are non-negotiable objectives. The revolutionary constitution enshrined these objectives.
When the United States destroys an Iranian uranium enrichment facility, the more honest question is: what has it prevented? A nuclear-armed Iran, passing a weapon directly or through a proxy to where it can do maximum damage, would constitute an atrocity of a different order entirely. The risk calculus must include what doesn't happen. That future atrocity, the one forestalled, never appears in the indictment. And yet the West is told to fight with one hand tied behind its back, lest it resemble the forces it confronts.
None of this, however, grants license for indiscriminate violence. The West must not become what it opposes. Targeting civilians intentionally is wrong, and no military objective justifies deliberate slaughter. The calculated risk of civilian harm during strikes on legitimate military targets is a fundamentally different act from intentional massacre. The law draws this distinction clearly. Legal experts know it. The commentators deploying war crimes as a rhetorical instrument know it too, which is precisely why they work so hard to obscure it.
In September 2022, it killed Mahsa Amini in a detention facility, then slaughtered the young women and men who marched in her name (Pictured: Iranian Americans rally outside the White House in 2022)
The record of American conduct deserves a place in this argument. Pilots have been retrieved at considerable cost. Strikes are planned, checked, and double-checked. Billions of dollars are poured into weapons built to limit civilian harm. Taken together, these represent a military genuinely constrained by law, which is precisely what separates it from the forces it confronts. Critics who ignore this are either ignorant or arguing in bad faith.
Both failures carry consequences, because this conflict reaches far beyond Iran. China is watching, carefully and patiently. Beijing has spent years pulling American adversaries into alignment while tightening its grip on Washington's allies through economic dependency and political obligation. What appears to be a regional conflict is one element of a much larger design that runs through Tehran, Pyongyang, and Moscow.
Whether the United States can project credible, sustained force against a hostile regime reaches far beyond the Middle East. So does its absence.
If every strike, every sanctions package, every military deployment can be neutralized by a chorus of condemnation, the regime achieves through accusation what it could never achieve through force. The West's own vocabulary becomes the means of its defeat.
The West should keep its principles, but principles mean nothing when applied selectively. They demand consistent application on both sides, including the side that has shown nothing but contempt for them. This is a war between a civilization that holds life sacred and one that has made a religion of its sacrifice. That distinction is worth defending.
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