There are times in life when one would far prefer not to be right. To have been wrong – spectacularly, humiliatingly wrong – would be a mercy compared with the knowledge that one’s warnings were sound, one’s fears justified, and one’s darkest intuitions confirmed.
I speak of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime many in the West still prefer to view through the gauze of wishful thinking: an ancient civilization, misunderstood, wrongly maligned – a proud nation defending itself against foreign conspiracies. Such is the fairy tale whispered in the lecture halls of our universities, the think tanks of our capitals, the studios of our broadcasters. It is a fairy tale I cannot allow to stand.
I walked into Iran. I lived in the belly of the beast. I sat with the ideologues who designed its project. I listened as they spoke of conquest not as fantasy but as certainty, not as aspiration but as inevitability. My testimony is not one of speculation, still less of prejudice, but of lived experience.
And it must, once and for all, shatter the ludicrous notion that the Islamic Republic is anything but an engine of expansion, subjugation, and tyranny.
Iran's grand plan
Those who imagine that Iran is content to remain within its borders, to act as a mere regional nuisance, are fatally deluded. From the very inception of the Islamic Republic in 1979, the revolution was not a revolution but a coup against pluralism, secularism, and the possibility of a modern Muslim state.
Khomeini and his clerics constructed a system not for Iran alone but for export. Palestine was appropriated as a banner under which to seduce the Sunni majority, Israel was cast as the eternal scapegoat, and the true project – the seizure of Mecca and Medina, the dethroning of the House of Saud, and the conquest of Arabia – was hidden in plain sight.
What I witnessed, and what the world must at last confront, is that Iran’s model of takeover follows a discernible pattern, one we are seeing replicated with unnerving precision across the Middle East and, increasingly, in the streets of Western capitals.
The plan's steps
The first marker is always the corruption of language. Words are twisted until they bear no resemblance to their meaning.
Freedom comes to mean submission. Justice becomes revenge. Resistance becomes sadism. Palestine itself is no longer a nationalist cause but a cosmic justification for eternal war. The West has been duped into repeating these words without grasping the trap into which it falls.
The second marker is the capture of institutions. In Iran, it was the universities first, turned from engines of inquiry into hothouses of indoctrination. The guilds, the unions, the judiciary – all were repurposed as instruments of clerical control.
The same disease now spreads here. Our universities hound Jewish students into silence. Our cultural institutions are paralyzed by the fear of offending the very forces sworn to destroy them. Even medicine, the most humane of professions, has not been spared, with doctors praising proscribed terrorist groups while entrusted with the lives of Jewish patients.
The third marker is the street. Revolutions always spill from lecture halls into public squares. The marches in Tehran became political theater until the city was possessed by the single voice of the mullahs.
Today, the great cities of the West echo with the same sound. Banners with swastikas waved without shame. Chants of “Death to Jews” and “From the river to the sea” reverberate under the windows of our parliaments. The West shrugs them off as protests. They are not protests. They are rehearsals – rehearsals for the public conditioning of populations, rehearsals for the day when mobs will not only chant but act.
The fourth marker is the cult of victimhood. No tyranny can succeed without it. In 1979, America was the Great Satan, Israel the Little Satan, and the Jew the corrupter of all things. Today, Islamist groups and their Western fellow-travellers cloak themselves in the language of oppression while erasing the voices of others.
The expulsion of 850,000 Jews from Arab lands, the slaughter of Yazidis, the persecution of Christians, the silencing of dissenters – all of it vanishes beneath the monolithic narrative of Palestinian victimhood. The murderer is recast as martyr and the martyr as oppressor. Truth itself becomes another casualty.
The final blow
And then, finally, comes the sword. The last marker. The moment when language, institutions, streets, and myths are fully aligned, and all that remains is the blade. It was so in Iran. It was so in Yemen, where the Houthis remade a nation into an Iranian satrapy in less than a decade. It was so in Lebanon, once the Paris of the Middle East, now reduced to a broken vassal of Hezbollah.
And it is so today in Gaza, where Hamas has perfected the marriage of fascism and theocracy, turning children into fodder, women into chattel, and men into instruments of death.
Do not imagine that the West is immune. The markers are already here. Our language is corrupted, our institutions infiltrated, our streets dominated, our narratives hijacked. How far are we, then, from the sword? How long before the ideology that disfigured Iran, that consumed Yemen, that gutted Lebanon is brandished openly against us?
When I sat in Tehran with the architects of this project, I was struck not by their rage but by their patience. They believe the West will collapse of its own accord, that its guilt and its timidity will render it defenseless. They do not need to storm our gates; they believe we will fling them open ourselves. And I fear they are not wrong.
The West must heed the warning
However, I did not take on this mission to despair. I did it because I believe that warnings, if heard, can be heeded. I did it because I saw how a nation can fall, how a people can forget who they once were, how swiftly civilization can be recolored in the hues of tyranny.
I did it because I believe the West is still capable of waking up, defending itself, and recognizing that this is not about Israel alone but about the survival of freedom everywhere.
The Islamic Republic is not a misunderstood neighbor. It is not a normal state. It is the most sophisticated totalitarian enterprise since the fall of the Soviet Union, and it will not rest until Mecca and Medina are seized, the House of Saud is broken, and the West itself is shackled.
I walked into the belly of the beast so that I might tell you this. I heard it from their own mouths. And now I say it with all the force of lived witness: The markers have all been met. Only the sword remains.
The writer is executive director of We Believe In Israel.