On April 1st 2024, an Israeli missile struck the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, destroying the Consulate building and killing 16 people, including Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and 7 other members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The government of Singapore made no comment on this act of mass assassination together with its unprecedented violation of a 3rd country’s sovereignty. But on April 14th 2024, less than 24 hours after Iran conducted retaliatory air strikes on 2 Israeli military facilities which caused no fatalities and only one minor injury, Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) posted a statement on its website condemning Iran. It should be noted that Iran had just granted visa-free entry to Singaporeans on January 31st of this year. Iran has very few countries it considers “friendly” enough for a visa waiver. Not only did we not grant Iran the courtesy of reciprocal visa-free entry for its citizens, but we chose to repay the Iranian gesture of welcome with a condemnation.
The Times of Israel said of responses to Iran’s retaliatory strike: “Western nations condemn Iran attack on Israel, issue statements of solidarity.” It is unsurprising that these countries condemned Iran’s retaliation, but not Israel’s assassination strike. One of the effects of Gaza is that the words “Western nations”, “hypocrisy” and “double standards” tend to find themselves in the same sentence. Is this such a good time for Singapore to advertise its attachment to “the West”?
As an awkward aftertouch, the fountainhead of these condemnations didn’t show much conviction in them. After almost all the Iranian drones and missiles had been successfully shot down by Israeli, US, UK, French and Jordanian air defenses, US President Biden publicly told his Israeli counterpart Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to “take the win” and back off. He also stated that the US would not join the Israelis if they chose to launch a counter-response against Iran. Apparently, the US president did not find the Iranian retaliation particularly “condemnable”. It was simply a golden opportunity for Israel and its allies to launch a coordinated PR attack against Iran. And it was a no-brainer for the Western media apparatus to spin its well-worn tale of Iranian aggression and Israeli innocence because Iran does not have a voice in the West, either through the media or through diplomatic channels. Americans know Iran through cartoon drawings of a menacing “Ayatollah” looming over hordes of brainwashed fanatics shouting “Death to America” while a missile blasts through the White House in the background, and this is pretty much the picture that English-speaking Singaporeans have of Iran too.
Taboo Violation and Upping the Ante
In stark opposition to “the West”, the rest of the world understood that Iran had acted with characteristic restraint. Israel had been assaulting Iran since 2010 with assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists on Iranian soil and missile strikes on Iranian military commanders in Syria and Iraq, all taking place against a backdrop of cyberattacks on Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities which had led to both “soft” destructions of centrifuges and “hard” explosions. On January 3rd 2020, Israel’s provocations reached an apex when its spy agency Mossad provided precise intelligence for Donald Trump’s assassination of Sardar Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. Soleimani was the commander of the élite Quds Force branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a steadfast defender of his country ever since the Iran-Iraq War that took up most of the 1980s, a national hero beyond ideology, revered alike by the faithful of the Wilāyat al-Faqīh and by the Monarchists who despise the Iranian régime.
Then in January 2024, about 100 people were killed by suicide bomb as they attended a memorial ceremony for Soleimani in his hometown of Kerman on the 4th anniversary of his assassination. Although ISIS claimed responsibility for the massacre, Iran blamed the US and Israel.
Throughout these 14 years of Israel’s murders and nuclear sabotage, Iran had never delivered any kind of response. On April 1st, Israel upped the ante once again by not just killing the person widely seen as Soleimani’s successor, but doing so in an Iranian diplomatic mission, thus violating a taboo of international relations that Iran could not ignore. The Israelis had thus provoked an unprecedented yet inevitable Iranian response for which Iran could then be condemned, based upon the collective preconception that Israel only acts in “self-defense”, while Iran’s acts are always “malign” and “destabilizing”. But Israel is falling behind the times. After Gaza, its cultivated image of victimhood is falling apart.
For most of the world, Gaza is where the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) openly violate international humanitarian law (the international law of war) and international human rights law (the law of both peacetime and war). Gaza is also where Israel’s penchant for violating taboos is on full display, and this penchant is eviscerating its claims to moral rectitude. A taboo is “a social group's ban, prohibition, or avoidance of something based on the group's sense that it is excessively repulsive.” Luring ambulance medics to a trapped 6-year old girl and then ripping all of them to shreds with automatic gunfire, sniping an elderly woman in the leg as she walks home, then shooting at anyone attempting to reach her, letting her lie on the ground for hours and finally running her over with a tank, sniping another elderly lady in a Catholic church and then shooting her daughter dead as she tries to move her mother’s body to safety, blowing up hospitals, churches, mosques, bakeries, schools, orphnages and refugee tents, abducting doctors with their families and dumping their executed bodies in a shopping mall, broadcasting recordings of women’s and children’s voices to lure civilians into the open and kill them, tracking a Hamas official and waiting for him to sit with his family for dinner before blowing them all to pieces from the air, executing children in front of their parents, mowing down crowds of starving people waiting for aid, assassinating doctors while they attend to patients, letting a dog maul a wheelchair-bound patient to death, stripping medical staff and patients naked, then zip-tying their hands behind their back and executing them, leaving some of the corpses with IV lines and catheters still attached, while others are found beheaded or with organs and skin removed, and finally not content with merely violating the living, using bulldozers to dig up graves and desecrate corpses before dumping them by the hundreds into mass graves and covering them with whatever rubble and rubbish is lying around – such acts are “excessively repulsive” to all who claim to be human.
The IDF breaks taboos out of bravado and bloodlust. The Israeli government encourages its soldiers and citizens to do so for more subtle reasons. These atrocities, together with their bland reception in “the West”, are a mass grooming exercise which reinforces the dogma that the Israelis are a special people enjoying a unique impunity which brooks no challenge.
Israel’s April Fool’s Day attack on Iran’s Embassy was likewise not just an act of mass murder combined with a violation of the sovereignty of its host country, Syria. It also violated a taboo of international relations dating back to classical antiquity and enshrined in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations to which Israel itself is party. Diplomatic missions are sacrosanct in peace and in war. There have been attacks on Embassies in the past, but they were carried out by rioters, students, militant groups or “by accident”, never by another state’s armed forces. Even amidst the indiscriminate violence that was normalized in the 2nd World War and the Korean War, diplomatic missions were never violated. And Israel was not even at war with Iran.
Just as with its atrocities in Gaza, Israel’s violation of Iran’s diplomatic mission was a multi-purpose operation. It flaunted Israel’s impunity and humiliated its victims while dehumanizing those same victims in the eyes of a stupefied “international community”. At the same time the attack was calculated to provoke a response for which the victim could be blamed. Israel was correct in counting on Iran’s response, as well as on the West’s predictable condemnation. What Israel didn’t count on was the West’s loss of political centrality and moral authority in the eyes of “the Rest”.
The ”Western Nations” of Asia
“The West” is not a geographical or ethnic term, but an ideological one. There are 3.5 “Western nations” of “non-Western” origin – Japan, South Korea, Singapore and the ambiguous territory of Taiwan, all of which predictably condemned Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Taiwan did not give a reason for its condemnation, while South Korea took offense at the “large scale” of the Iranian response, with Japan and Singapore specifically denouncing Iran’s action as a “dangerous escalation”.
To be generous, we may say that all these countries’ governments found Iran’s response “disproportionate” to the original Israeli attack. That is why their official statements made only passing reference to Israel’s extrajudicial killing of 16 Iranians in a diplomatic mission. As to why they considered Iran’s response disproportionate, it is because whether they know it or not, they do not find Iranian and Palestinian lives to be worth as much as Israeli lives or even as much as the Western resources deployed to shoot down Iran’s aging drones.
Iran’s Retaliation Analyzed
In contrast to the Western narrative of a dangerous yet bungled Iranian military escalation, there were in reality 5 strategic components to Iran’s attack – defense, deterrence, intelligence gathering, de-escalation and retribution.
Defense - Iran’s strikes on Israel were limited to two air bases. It is likely that one of them had been used to conduct the missile strike on the Iranian Embassy. Both air bases were still functional and capable of launching future strikes. Iran’s attack on these bases was therefore consistent with Chapter VII of Article 51 of the UN Charter, which grants to all states “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations”
Deterrence – Deterrence “is the act of discouraging an act by instilling fear of its consequences”.
Iran gave the US 72 hours’ advance warning of its attack, the warning filtered down to the mainstream media and gradually the whole world knew it was imminent. On the day of the pre-announced attack, the Iranians launched a swarm of aging Shahed-136 drones which took on average 5 hours to reach Israel, giving plenty of time for US, British and French air-to-air and Aegis defense systems to down them all. Next, Iran delivered a salvo of lesser quality cruise missiles which were neutralized by Israel’s vast array of THAAD, Iron Dome, Shadow 3, David’s Sling and Patriot surface-to-air defense systems. Finally, the Iranians launched a mix of ballistic missiles of varying sophistication, of which ten hit their targets after evading all of Israel’s anti-ballistic missile defense systems, including a state-of-the-art AN/TPY-2 X-Band radar system which can track missiles from their launching point in Iran.
Because of Iran’s advance warning, there were no personnel or aircraft exposed at the airbases. Iran staggered its combined drone and missile attack, with no intention of overwhelming its enemy’s defenses. It didn’t use its most advanced weapons. And yet with all this absence of cutting-edge technology, Iran still managed to penetrate the most robust anti-ballistic missile defenses in the world. While inflicting minimal damage and zero loss of life, Iran implied the potential for catastrophic destruction if it were to use its most advanced weapons and did not give advance warnings or stagger its attacks. It must be said that Iran did not succeed in its deterrence mission, because 3 months later Israel assassinated Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil while he was resting in a state guest house prior to his planned attendance at a presidential inauguration ceremony. In Muslim culture, a guest is more honored than oneself and one’s own, so this act was calculated to up the ante once again.
Intelligence Gathering - Iran’s slow and staggered intrusion into Israel allowed it to learn about the defense capabilities of Israel and its allies. It revealed which parties would rush to defend Israel, and how and from where they would do so. Theoretically, Israel’s awareness that Iran possesses this intelligence should in turn enhance Iran’s deterrence potential.
De-escalation – Iran’s biggest achievement was Joe Biden’s refusal to get involved in an Israeli counterstrike. Over the past 3 decades, Binyamin Netanyahu has been prodding the US to attack Iran. He almost succeeded with Donald Trump, who would have gone to war over Iran’s taking down of a US spy drone over Iranian territory, had he not been dissuaded by his generals. Netanyahu’s need for the US to attack Iran has never been as pressing as it is now, to take the world’s focus off the daily slaughter and maiming of Palestinian mothers, grandmothers, children and infants, to distract the Israeli population from the failure of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, and above all to convince the world that Israel is in the right by virtue of the United States’ going to war for it.
But Biden de-escalated, and that means Iran caused him to de-escalate.
Retribution - Retribution is an intuitive right, ingrained in social custom and the stuff of drama from ancient Greece to modern cinema. The right to retribution is enshrined in law. In the West, the state takes control of the retribution process by converting it to institutionalized punishment. In Iran the right of retribution is returned to the wronged individual. A mother whose son has been murdered has the right to pardon the murderer who would otherwise be executed. The role of the Iranian State is to officiate the aggrieved party’s retribution, while the aggrieved person is empowered to demand an eye for an eye, or to forgive.
Iran has not yet taken an Israeli life for an Israeli murder of one of its own. By contrast, it is Israeli doctrine to obliterate densely populated city blocks as a means to “pressure governments”, to kill any amount of civilians on the basis that a single enemy fighter is hiding among them, to murder the sisters, sons and grandchildren of a Hamas political leader when he isn’t even with them. This is the same Israel which presents itself as the heroic vanguard in a war between “civilization and barbarism”, and which “the West” cannot bring itself to condemn for fear of committing an unpardonable sacrilege. It is an Israel that epitomizes a world where truth, logic and morality are all turned upside down.
What the Public was Told and Why
The position of the nations which condemned Iran was conveyed to the world in the following words of then UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron during a Sky News interview: “There was a massive degree of difference between what Israel did in Damascus and 301 weapons being launched by the state of Iran against the state of Israel, for the first time a state-on-state attack, 101 ballistic missiles, 36 cruise missiles, 185 drones, that is a degree of difference, I think a reckless and dangerous thing for Iran to have done, and I think the whole world can see, who have wondered what is the true nature of Iran – it’s there in black and white.”
What we have here is quintessential Israeli propaganda. Cameron focuses on a single element of Iran’s attack – the quantity of weapons used – and ignores everything else, including the fact that Iran’s targets were military bases while Israel’s was a diplomatic mission, that Iran gave advance warning of its attack and flew its drones for 5 hours so they could be picked off at leisure by Israel and its allies, whereas Israel conducted a stealth attack designed to maximize death and destruction, and the fact that Iran’s attack was de facto de-escalatory while Israel’s was designed to provoke retaliation. Cameron’s exclusive focus on Iran’s 301 weapons versus the 1 missile Israel used in its embassy assassination allowed him to accuse Iran of being “reckless and dangerous”. Of course, Israel’s missile attack was not “dangerous”, because danger implies potential harm, and Israel’s act was not potential, but actually lethal. This is how the eloquent minister uses quibbles to absolve Israel.
“The medium is the message” is a phrase coined in the ‘60s. It is the whole package of Sky News, the Etonian accent, that honed aura of apparent reasonableness and knowing whereof he speaks, that is meant to make Cameron’s speech the definitive word on Iran’s retaliation. But again, Gaza has changed all that, and it is no longer conspiratorial to view pat denunciations of Israel’s enemies with suspicion. Cameron had but one purpose in going out on a limb against Iran, which was to lend an English upper crust voice to Israel’s existential propaganda of an innocent Israel and an evil Iran. He did so for the simple reason that the UK and Israel are staunch allies. But what was Singapore’s reason for taking the same position?
The “Iranian Proxies” Myth
In 2005, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei uttered the words: "Palestine belongs to Palestinians, and the fate of Palestine should also be determined by the Palestinian people". In 2012, he expressed confidence that "the superfluous and fake Zionist (regime) will disappear from the landscape.” Iran does not accept the legitimacy of the Jewish state. And neither do 27 other UN member nations, including our neighbors, Malaysia and Indonesia. None of these governments wishes a long life for the current régime in Tel Aviv, but they have also never harbored intentions to topple it through military intervention. The Israeli claim that Iran is out to “destroy” Israel has no basis in any act or statement from Iran.
Owing to the inconvenient fact that Iran never attacked Israel before April 13th, it has been necessary to construct a cognitive edifice in which Iran has been continuously “threatening” Israel and the region through its so-called “proxies”. It is claimed that the “Houthis” of Yemen, the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units, Hamas and Hezbollah are all “Iran’s terrorist proxies”, and this cliché has become so ingrained in the Western collective consciousness that describing any entity as “Iran-backed” is sufficient to brand it as “terrorist” and “antisemitic”.
Israeli propaganda is accepted as fact not because we all find the Jewish State particularly trustworthy. It is because the Zionist ideology is so firmly embedded in the institutional West, and especially in the Ivy League universities which we assume to be the pinnacles of learning, with their postgraduate “Schools” where our leaders are professionally incubated. Lee Hsien Loong and Lawrence Wong may come from disparate social backgrounds, but they are united as alumni of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Israel’s control of Western institutions is so robust that a Google search of “Iranian Proxies” will return not Israeli articles and studies, but those from the American University, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, the Wilson Center etc. These august and allegedly “independent” and “non-partisan” institutions of political scholarship all have ties to Israel, as well as to the US military, the CIA, the oil and arms industries and a US Congress which is renowned for its submission to the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC).
“Research fellows” from the above institutions are fixtures on Channel News Asia (CNA), the news network upon which English-educated Singaporeans depend for their understanding of geopolitical events, and all of these pundits will tell you that Hezbollah is a “terrorist proxy” of Iran. Israeli leaders, however, know better. Former Israeli PM Ehud Barak said in 2006: “When we entered Lebanon… there was no Hezbollah. We were accepted with perfumed rice and flowers by the Shi’a in the south. It was our presence there that created Hezbollah.” Another Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, said in 1987 that it was Israel that “let the genie out of the bottle”. Even with their abhorrent euphemisms for Israeli military aggression, these two ministers’ statements yet give us kernels of the truth. Israel has invaded Lebanon 6 times – in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, 2006 and now in October 2024. In the wake of the Lebanese government’s perennial failure to deter the Israelis, Hezbollah the political party was formed in 1982, and its armed militia came into being in 1985 to liberate the country through military means. In 2006, Hezbollah finally succeeded in expelling the IDF from all Lebanese territories except for a sliver of land known as the Shebaa Farms. There is no doubt that they will do so again this time.
Like Hamas, Hezbollah is a national resistance movement with zero ties to international terrorism. On the contrary, Hezbollah has continually defended the southern border of Lebanon from incursions by Al Qaeda and ISIS, and the organization is esteemed by much of the country’s Maronite Christians who view it as protecting them from both “Islamist” and Jewish State terror. Since October 7th, Hezbollah assumed the additional mission of launching measured attacks on IDF facilities in northern Israel with the sole purpose of deterring Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and this effort has earned it the assassination of its Secretary General and the massive bombardment and invasion of Lebanon that is currently underway.
The fact that Hezbollah is a Shi’ite organization is an organic consequence of the fact that the southern part of Lebanon through which Israel invades is predominantly Shi’a. Lebanon is a poor country, and Hezbollah has few financial resources. Iran is a Shi’a state with much better resources, and it is said to allocate about US$700 million in annual aid to Hezbollah, an organization with which it enjoys spiritual and cultural kinship, but which is engaged in its own struggle for the defense and basic sustenance of its people. Unsurprisingly, Hezbollah’s leaders are wont to praise and thank “the great nation of Iran”, and they would surely come to the defense of Iran if it were attacked.
Hezbollah is Iran’s ally, not its proxy. Iran does not need “proxies” to “destroy Israel”, because while both Iran and Hezbollah would be very happy if Israel disappeared, neither of them are suicidal or stupid enough to think they can remove Israel by force. Both the Iranian government and Hezbollah are concerned primarily with their people’s livelihoods which are struggling under the weight of direct and secondary sanctions, and the last thing they seek is an escalation with Israel which could invite the military fire and brimstone of the world’s greatest superpower, which is precisely the outcome sought by the Israeli leadership and the reason it keeps upping the ante in its provocations of Iran.
The thesis that Iran’s strategic objective is to “destroy” Israel lies at the heart of the readiness to “condemn” Iran’s April 13th retaliatory strike. The question is whether Singapore’s leaders really believe this fiction, or are they instead complicit in Israel’s information warfare. The 3rd possibility is that they are simply guided by an instinct to go along with “the West” and not worry too much about the details. None of these possibilities is comforting.
The Bond Between the West and Israel
With American politicians, the question of whether one is gullible or complicit with Israel settles itself along ideological and also racial lines. Those who share Barack Obama’s views tend to be people “of color” to whom the Jewish State’s ideals are problematic. In a political establishment where criticism of Israel is career suicide, they will push back obliquely by supporting the Iran Nuclear Deal, But even though they do not think Israel is a just actor, they will still approve military aid to Israel. Such people hold their noses and make themselves complicit with Israel even as they attempt to mitigate the harm they know they are enabling. Since they do not dare “out” themselves, it is impossible to know their number.
On the other side of the divide is the Republican career politician, either genetically White or sympathetic to White identity protectionism, and possibly also an Evangelical Christian. Such a person reveres Israel. Even if he or she had the intellectual capacity to realize that the narrative of Iran’s military threat to Israel was false, he/she would still be among those Senators and House Representatives who granted Netanyahu a solemn address to the Joint Houses of Congress and rewarded him with thunderous applause as he told lie after debunked lie about Hamas while claiming absurdly that Israel “sanctifies life”.
Ridicule has poured in from all quarters of the globe for the 58 standing ovations and 79 total rounds of applause given by the legislature of the nation that brands itself as the beacon of freedom, human rights and democracy, for a man that the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is seeking to arrest for his role in “war crimes and crimes against humanity”, whose government is in violation of multiple court orders issued by the ICJ to prevent the crime of genocide, and whose nation the ICJ has determined to be an “apartheid state” illegally occupying Palestinian lands.
What most commentators miss is that it would be impossible for these Senators and House Representatives not to applaud Netanyahu. It is true that no matter how many times Gazan parents have to rummage through the debris of their destroyed homes searching for scraps of the flesh of their blown-up children to put in garbage bags for burial, Republican congressmen will still complain bitterly when Biden temporarily holds up a shipment of 2,000 lb. bombs to Israel. But no American politician views himself or herself as a criminal, and merely to preserve their own sanity these people must constantly blinker their eyes and convince themselves, whether in private monologue or in liturgical congressional ceremony that Israeli narratives are truthful. For such people Israel can do no wrong, and no price is too high for defending the Jewish State.
The traditional American ruling class supports Israel unconditionally because there is a blood bond between them, not their own blood, but the blood of others spilt so that they could have their nations. Settler-colonialism is the act of displacing the existing inhabitants of a territory by expelling and killing them or undoing the conditions necessary to sustain their lives, followed by “settling” in the cleared territories and justifying one’s actions by supremacist claims to a Manifest Destiny or to a Land promised by God Himself. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza is but the logical extension of Israel’s uniquely ruthless brand of settler-colonialism.
In the history of the world, there have been only 5 settler-colonial nations – the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel. In the learning institutions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it has become fashionable to begin webinars with a “land acknowledgement” such as: “We broadcast today from the traditional, ancestral, current and unceded lands of” such and such a displaced indigenous tribe. The word “unceded” is particularly cogent. It means: “you took our lands by force”. To US Republicans, land acknowledgements are reviled as “woke” drivel, but left-leaning American institutions use them, and one even served as the preamble to the Democratic Party’s 2024 Platform. But the word “unceded” is never used in US land acknowledgements. To Israel, it is likewise anathema to point out that not only the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, but the entire territory of Israel proper are all unceded territories.
The threat Iran poses to Israel is not physical but cognitive, because Iran never tires of reminding the world that the Israeli nation is founded upon criminal violence and property theft. And in fact, Iran’s position of uncompromising principle even as it seeks improved relations with the West is nothing less than the hallmark of a great nation.
Israel responds to Iran’s ideological challenge by enlisting the West to treat Iran as a rogue state, and the US to threaten Iran with annihilation. In this dangerous charade, US Republicans tend to identify fully with Israel primarily because there is little difference between the “core foundational myths” upon which the American nation is based and the foundational myth of Israel as a “Land without a People for a People without a Land”. Hence, many Republicans view Iran as an existential threat to America and relish the fantasy of destroying Iran militarily, or at least throttling the Iranian economy with sanctions. Democrats, on the other hand, tend to oppose ethnic supremacy, and some of them may privately sympathize with the Iranian narrative even as they pay lip service to the fantastical notion that Iran is the US’ No. 1 adversary, but again we will never know because Democrat politicians and their Republican counterparts are both trapped in a never-ending contest to prove to their common donors that each is the more staunchly pro-Israel.
As for Europe, it cannot but follow in the footsteps of the US and Israel since it is the wellspring of both the American and the Israeli settler-colonialists. And Europe is also the home of centuries of antisemitism and expulsions of Jews. The heavy burden on Europe’s collective conscience provides its own stimulus for unwavering support of Israel. Thus the “Western nations” are Israel’s natural allies, and we can understand why they affirmed their “solidarity” with Israel after Iran’s retaliation. By the same token, it is obvious why the rest of the world knew that Iran was not the condemnable party in this exchange.
In lockstep with the Western nations, Singapore rushed to condemn Iran within 24 hours after Iran’s retaliation, clearly before it had time to make an independent assessment of the facts, without considering Iran’s advance warnings and avoidance of killing, and in total disregard of the context of decades of Israeli attacks against Iran. When Singapore aligns itself so fully with the Anglophone settler-colonial states and the Europeans with their antisemitic baggage, when it openly embraces Western double standards that shout to the world that Israel can commit any aggression it pleases but Iran may not defend itself, and when it distinguishes itself so conspicuously from the sensibilities of the Global South, then it is forcefully contradicting its own claim that “Singapore’s multi-religious plural society can be a source of hope in this diverse world”.
Against a normal state, Iran’s April 14th retaliation would have served the purposes of deterrence and de-escalation. But Israel is not a normal state. It is one that glorifies death and destruction. It will keep upping the ante until Iran’s restraint becomes untenable. When that day happens and if it leads to regional or even world catastrophe, Singapore’s consistent enabling of Israel’s impunity will have contributed to this outcome.
Post-Script
On October 1st, 2024, Iran launched some 180 missiles at 3 Israeli airbases. The strikes were in response to an accumulation of Israeli terrorist acts. First there was the assassination of Hamas’ political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31st. Secondly, during the 2 weeks preceding Iran’s strike Israel had orchestrated the indiscriminate “pager terror attack” which injured 2,800 and killed 12, and the “walkie-talkie terror attack” which killed another 30 and injured 750 all over Lebanese society. An untold number of the victims were civil administrators, relatives of fighters and even children, and could not be construed as legitimate military targets. Shortly thereafter, Israel began bombing densely populated areas all over Lebanon on a massive scale, killing more than 1,000 Lebanese, overwhelmingly civilians, including 28 healthcare workers in a single day, with the number of killed quickly doubling to over 2,000 within 3 days after Iran’s strike. Israel’s assault on Lebanon also caused the displacement of 1 million economically vulnerable civilians, all as it continued to launch daily bombardments that claimed hundreds of civilian lives in the West Bank and Gaza. The straw that broke the camel’s back was Israel’s dropping of around 85 2,000-lb bombs to obliterate 6 high-rise residential buildings in southern Beirut, killing over 400 residents along with 6 Lebanese and Iranian resistance commanders, including Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.
In exclusively targeting the airbases from which Israel’s atrocities were launched, Iran rightfully invoked its right to self-defense as well the defense of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians who lack any protection against relentless bombardment by the heaviest non-nuclear bombs on the planet. Once again, Iran’s attack appeared to cause no casualties, and yet it still earned a condemnation from the G7, who had nothing to say about Israel’s indiscriminate mass killings and maimings of civilians in the days preceding.
But there has been an important shift between April and October 2024. Israel seems to have finally crossed a red line that makes it impossible for anyone outside of the G7 cocoon to pretend that it is a normal state. The Gulf States, who are all US allies or states “friendly” to the US, have jointly declared that they will not allow US and Israeli aircraft to traverse their airspace on the way to bombing Iran. The French president has called for a worldwide ban on arms sales to Israel. A Google search on world reactions to Iran’s strike for the first time ever returns articles that give Iran a voice, such as the one from Reuters entitled: Tehran says G7 statement on Iran's missile attack on Israel is 'biased’”. And Singapore has this time refrained from framing Iran’s retaliation as a “dangerous escalation”.
The Straits Times
But while our Foreign Ministry has finally joined the rest of the world in distancing itself from the hypocrisy of the G7 “lonely-hearts club”, the Straits Times is still carrying water for Israel in the war of morale, claiming absurdly that the capability of Iran’s missiles to reach Israel is now “limited”, that Iran’s weapons are “no longer credible”, and that “Iran’s deterrence in the region has been eroding for some time”. The very opposite is true. This time Iran gave much less advance warning of its attack, and Israeli claims of shooting down most of the missiles are flatly contradicted by videos taken by Bedouin nomads in the Negev desert, which show many missiles one after the other impacting the ground without resistance. With each new aerial attack, Iran shocks Israel not only by its ability to penetrate anywhere into Israel, but by the continual fading away of voices opposed to Iran, and the growing elation around the world that finally someone is courageous enough to deal serious blows to Israeli impunity, unlike the masses of the world’s leaders who wring their hands and blow a lot of hot air, but do nothing.
If Iran’s deterrence is “eroding”, it is only because of the boundless psychopathy of an Israeli leadership which even its patron, the US, is impotent to rein in. But history tells us that escalating tyrannical cruelty is unsustainable. Like it or not, Iran and its “proxies” are the vanguard of a new world order which prioritizes equal rights for all instead of the interests of the Western élites, but the Straits Times is still busy peddling the myths of settler-colonialist invincibility and the impotence of resistance, even as Israel proves to us daily that it is a rogue nation.
We must be thankful that under Singapore’s new leadership the MFA has tacitly acknowledged that it is not Iran’s retaliation but Israel’s brutality that is reprehensible. It is time for the editors of that powerful perception shaping tool we know as the Straits Times to understand in turn that enabling Israel’s impunity is passé, that the responsible message to convey to Israel is that it is not as strong as it thinks, and that it is time to renounce violence for its own sake and the sake of humankind.
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