By David R. Parsons, ICEJ Senior Vice President & Spokesman

The current war pitting Israel and the United States against the Iranian regime is actually a continuation of Jerusalem’s 12-day conflict with Tehran last June, which Washington joined for one day to carry out Operation Midnight Hammer. Together, these military campaigns mark several notable firsts that are of great significance for the region and the entire world.

A Long-Overdue Response
For starters, it marks the first time since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 that Iran has been made to pay a price on its own soil for its decades of orchestrating terror, violence and murder around the globe. Sure, they fought an eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, but that was largely confined to a border dispute over oil fields. Here, we are speaking about how the world, for 47 long years, allowed the Ayatollahs to draw innocent blood, spread fear and radical ideologies, arm and train terror militias, fuel uprisings, target diplomats and embassies, and stage bombings against civilians worldwide.

The bill of indictment against Iran is long and grim! For instance:
The 52 Americans held hostage for 444 frightening days in 1979-80;
The 241 US Marines and 58 French troops bombed in Beirut in 1983;
The 29 people killed in 1992’s bombing of Israel’s Embassy in Buenos Aires;
Another 85 killed in the 1994 blast at the city’s Jewish community center; The 1996 Khobar Towers blast in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 US personnel;
Over 600 US troops killed by Iran-backed militias in Iraq from 2003 to 2011.

Iran has held Lebanon hostage through Hizbullah for 43 years. It aided the Assad regime’s slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Syrians in that nation’s brutal civil war. It enabled the Houthi rebels to spread carnage and divide Yemen by force and terror. It has destabilised Iraq, and sought to undermine the monarchy in Jordan. And it has staged or attempted terror attacks, bombings and assassination plots on all continents, including in Argentina, Bulgaria, France, Georgia, India, Kenya, Peru, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, and many other nations.

Lest we forget, Iran also has brutally repressed and killed its own people over such menial violations as improper dress.

Last but certainly not least, the Iranian regime has drained its country’s resources for the openly expressed purpose of wiping Israel off the map.

To that end, the Iranian regime has spent the last 47 years building up a “ring of fire” around Israel through the arming, training and funding of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the West Bank and Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon, multiple Shi’ite militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and other regional proxy terror militias. And it has lied to the world about its renegade nuclear weapons program, hiding its secret enrichment plants deep underground and enriching uranium to levels only used for military purposes. They were caught with designs for nuclear triggers and atomic warheads. They built a vast ballistic missile program, using their space program as cover to develop longer range rocket engines.

Yet when Israel and the US launched their latest military campaign against the Iranian regime, some had the audacity to ask: Where was the imminent threat?

They are asking the wrong question! The real question is: Why did it take so long?

Why did it take 47 long years for the world, and especially the West, to finally make Iran pay a price on its own soil for all of its evil and carnage? Were we intimated by their radicalism? Were we just plain cowards?

Surely, by the time American and Israeli war planes descended on Iran three weeks ago, the mad clerical regime in Tehran had already given us five decades worth of casus belli.

Now I get that many of my fellow Americans are reluctance to get involved in “forever wars” in the Middle East, especially after the painful experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. But here there is a good possibility of a swifter end to the regime in Tehran because the vast majority of the Iranian people also want them gone.

At the same time, we must realise that basic Islamic eschatology foresees Muslims waging perpetual war against Jews and infidels until Judgment Day. So, whether we like it or not, radical Muslims – both Sunni and Shi’ite – have declared a forever war on the West, and their track record in modern times cries out “woe” to those who would ignore it. As the old adage goes: If you don’t go solve the problems of the Middle East, the problems of the Middle East will come to you.

A Proud Alliance
The other significant ‘first’ in this war is that for the first time American soldiers are fighting side-by-side with Israeli troops in an active war. This is actually a huge surprise for me personally. I have spent the last 35 years as a full-time Christian advocate for Israel, ever since I arrived in Washington in 1991 to volunteer with a small Christian organisation registered with Congress to lobby for strong US-Israel relations.

In those early days, I quickly learned the mantra that “Israel seeks to defend itself by itself”, they were just asking the US for help with the means to protect their country. In that regard, Israel has always been Washington’s best ally and never asked Americans soldiers to risk their lives for Israel. So, this current war marks a huge shift for both nations, and for me as an American.

In truth, I am actually proud of my country and our president, Donald Trump, for coming alongside Israel to face down this global menace. I do  not think America should be the world’s policeman, and better if the US guarantees the free flow of Middle East oil than Russia or China. But there is something deeper in play here, and it has to do with America’s founding principles and our destiny as a nation.

The Declaration of Independence includes these precious words penned by Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Many argue these days about whether America was founded as a Christian nation. What cannot be disputed is that our Founding Fathers did believe in a Creator God whose hand of Providence was on their endeavours. And they committed themselves to the biblical principle of Imago Dei – the notion that all men are created in God’s image, that we are all equal in His sight, and that we will all give account for our lives before Him one day.

This guiding principle originates in Genesis 9:1-7, and teaches us that humans have moral agency and an incentive to act uprightly towards each other, because God is watching us. And of great note, we received this guiding light from Israel. Indeed, it lies at the heart of the Judeo-Christian values which have inspired and upheld Western societies for generations.

Now America did have a serious problem in that it did not treat black African slaves as created equal by God, and our entire nation – North and South – paid a great price in the Civil War for compromising again and again over the cruel institution of slavery. In his famous Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln distilled that whole conflict as a fight over whether this “new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal… can long endure.”

But once that failing was resolved, America has played a unique role in the world as guardians of the principle of human equality and freedom. We beat back the tyranny of the Nazis, which saw Jews as inferior humans that needed to be eradicated. We stood down the Soviet Communists, who sought to enslave the world under an atheistic Marxism that directly challenged the biblical principle that mankind is a special creation of God.

And in this hour, it is only appropriate that we stand by Israel, the source of this life-affirming principle, to fight the dark apocalyptic ideology of the radical Ayatollahs in Tehran. After all, they seek to ignite a global conflagration which they believe will end up massacring 80% of the world’s population so they can rule over their Sunni rivals and the entire world. As for Israel and the Jews, they would get completely annihilated along the way.

My friends, that is an evil which calls for a response. Pre-emption, even! Yet we waited almost five decades to respond, with compromise after compromise over their evil agenda. Now, the whole world is paying a price in the spike of oil and gas prices. We must blame ourselves and our leaders for never directly challenging Iran in a way that would have caused them to abandon this destructive ideology.

So, I am proud that America has joined Israel in this battle. It is wholly appropriate, as the truths which undergird this war are “self evident”. And oddly, this alliance of our two nations was foreseen by the Ayatollahs themselves long ago. The reason they have always raged against the “Great Satan” and the “Little Satan” is because they knew from the start America and Israel were the only nations that could truly stand in their way.

May we press on to victory together!

Cover Photo: Israeli F-35s on their way to strike Iran-IDF photo