Israeli politician: assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was strategic mistake

Israeli politician: assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was strategic mistake

    Saturday, October 10, 2026   No comments

The Brief:

Yair Golan, leader of Israel’s Democrats party, has called the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei during the opening US-Israeli strikes on Iran on 28 February a strategic mistake, arguing that the killing did not serve Israel’s interests.

"I think, unequivocally, the elimination of Khamenei, the father, was a mistake, not because he didn’t deserve to die, only because it doesn’t serve the interests of the State of Israel," Golan said.

Khamenei was assassinated alongside members of his family, including a grandchild, and several senior Iranian officials, in the opening strikes of the US-Israeli war, and was succeeded by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei.

Golan also dismissed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated goal of toppling the Islamic Republic as "unrealistic."

The elder Khamenei had issued a religious ruling in 2003 prohibiting nuclear weapons, arguing that they violated Islamic principles.

The Analysis:

When Revenge Dressed as Strategy: The Khamenei Assassination and the Logic of Strategic Blindness

Strategic blindness rarely announces itself. It arrives disguised as strength — as decisive action, as righteous punishment, as the settling of old scores. The assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the opening US-Israeli strikes on 28 February has prompted one Israeli politician, Yair Golan, to name the disguise for what it is. His assessment — that killing Khamenei "doesn't serve the interests of the State of Israel" — cuts through the moral posturing surrounding the strike to ask the only question strategy ultimately answers: what did this actually accomplish?

The answer, by Golan's account, appears to be remarkably little. Khamenei's son now holds the office. The Islamic Republic stands. And a man who in 2003 issued a religious ruling prohibiting nuclear weapons on Islamic grounds is gone, replaced by a successor with no such publicly stated restraint. If the goal of an assassination is to weaken, deter, or transform an adversary, this one achieved the opposite on nearly every axis.

The Revenge Trap

Revenge and strategy pull in fundamentally different directions. Strategy is forward-looking: it asks what future you want to create and what moves get you there. Revenge is backward-looking: it asks what past wrong must be answered, regardless of consequence. When a state lets the latter masquerade as the former, it begins to treat the neutralization of an enemy — rather than the achievement of a desired outcome — as the objective itself. The target becomes the goal. That is the moment blindness sets in.

Killing a leader is emotionally satisfying in a way that negotiating with his successors never will be. But emotional satisfaction is not a geopolitical outcome. The killing of Khamenei alongside family members, including a grandchild, reads less like a precision strategic operation and more like a punitive strike — one that martyred a figure, consolidated succession around his son, and foreclosed whatever diplomatic architecture the elder's nuclear prohibition had quietly sustained.

Supremacism as Fog

Supremacism compounds the blindness by distorting the adversary's actual nature. If you believe your enemy's system is inherently fragile, illegitimate, and one decapitation strike away from collapse, then decapitation always looks rational. Netanyahu's stated aim of toppling the Islamic Republic — dismissed by Golan as "unrealistic" — rests precisely on this fantasy: that the regime is a hollow shell awaiting the right blow. Forty-plus years of survival through war, sanctions, and internal crisis suggests otherwise. A strategist who cannot see the enemy clearly cannot strike the enemy usefully.

Golan's phrase "not because he didn't deserve to die, only because it doesn't serve the interests of the State of Israel" is revealing in both directions. It concedes the moral case for the strike while insisting that morality is not strategy — and that conflating the two is how states squander their power. Assassinating a leader because he "deserved it" is a courtroom instinct, not a strategic one. And it is immoral built on the idea that you are valued any other people and all is acceptable as long as it achieves own interensts. That in the long, fails, always.

The Lesson

The bitter irony is that acts undertaken to display strength often reveal its limits. A power confident in its position does not need to decapitate its adversary's leadership; it can outmaneuver it. The rush to strike, the disregard for international law, the targeting of a religious figure and his family — these are the signatures of a politics governed by hubris rather than interest. Golan's public break with that politics suggests at least some in Israel are now performing the painful arithmetic the operation's planners declined to do. The question is whether the lesson arrives in time to matter, or only as the autopsy of a strategic failure.

The News:

Current Events: Ujjain and the Steady Erosion of Muslim Rights in Modi's India

Current Events: Ujjain and the Steady Erosion of Muslim Rights in Modi's India

    Friday, October 02, 2026   No comments

 When the Bulldozer Comes for the Mosque

The demolitions arrive quietly at first — a notice, a deadline, a municipal order about traffic flow. Then come the bulldozers, and then the batons.

In Ujjain, one of Hinduism's seven sacred cities and home to the famous Mahakal temple, authorities have begun removing part of the historic Shahi Masjid. The official explanation is mundane: road widening, part of the city's preparations for the Simhastha, the massive religious congregation that will draw tens of millions of pilgrims to the city in 2028. Historic mosques, it seems, stand in the way of progress.

The scene that accompanied the demolition was anything but mundane. Footage circulating from the site shows several police officers surrounding a single Muslim protester, striking him repeatedly with batons — and continuing to strike him after he falls to the ground. The image is a compact summary of a decade of Indian politics: a Muslim citizen objecting to the erosion of his community's patrimony, met not with dialogue but with state violence, carried out in full view of cameras and in the name of public order.

The Road Widening That Only Runs One Way

Infrastructure has become an unexpectedly revealing instrument of majoritarian politics in India. Again and again since 2014, encroachment-clearance drives, traffic projects, and beautification campaigns have targeted Muslim homes, shops, and places of worship — while equivalent structures owned by Hindus on the same streets remain untouched. In Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath made the bulldozer so central to his governance that the machine itself became a campaign mascot, its image emblazoned on election posters. Entire neighborhoods in Prayagraj, Saharanpur, and Kanpur watched homes of Muslims accused — often merely accused, never convicted — of crimes being reduced to rubble within hours.

The pattern repeated in Delhi's Jahangirpuri in 2022, where demolitions of Muslim-owned structures followed communal clashes and were halted only by a Supreme Court intervention. Critics have a name for it: "bulldozer justice," the substitution of municipal machinery for due process. When the accused are Muslim, the state skips the courtroom entirely and goes straight to the excavator.

Ujjain's Shahi Masjid now joins this long list. The mosque's centuries of history weigh nothing against a road project timed to a Hindu festival; the protester lying on the ground beneath police batons is simply the human cost of keeping that project on schedule.

Citizenship as a Conditional Privilege

The demolition in Ujjain is a local event, but it cannot be separated from the national architecture of exclusion built over the past decade.

The most dramatic example came in December 2019, when Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act. The law created a fast track to Indian citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan — pointedly omitting Muslims. On its face, the CAA is about immigrants. But government ministers had spent years speaking of a companion project, the National Register of Citizens, and the combination was understood immediately: a registry that demands proof of ancestry from every Indian, paired with a citizenship law that offers salvation to everyone except Muslims. As the logic runs, those who fail the paper test and cannot claim the CAA's shelter would face detention or statelessness.

The fear was not theoretical. In Assam, which conducted an NRC under Supreme Court supervision, nearly two million people — a disproportionate share of them Muslim, many of them poor and illiterate — were left off the final list in 2019, cast into a legal limbo of foreigners' tribunals where the burden of proof falls on the accused. Nationwide protests against the CAA-NRC project in late 2019 and early 2020 were met with a ferocious crackdown: police stormed university campuses, and in Delhi, communal violence that killed over fifty people — most of them Muslim — erupted as protests continued.

When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, it provided the pretext to clear the protest sites. The women of Delhi's Shaheen Bagh, who had kept a peaceful sit-in alive through the winter, went home. The citizenship machinery, however, merely paused.

The Loss of Institutional Shelter

What distinguishes the Modi era for India's roughly 200 million Muslims is not only episodic violence but the systematic withdrawal of institutional protection — the slow transformation of the state from a neutral arbiter into something closer to an interested party.

The courts, for decades the last refuge of India's minorities, have delivered a series of blows. In November 2019, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of building a Hindu temple at Ayodhya on the site where the Babri Masjid stood before a mob of Hindu nationalists demolished it in 1992 — a judgment that, whatever its legal reasoning, rewarded the destruction of a mosque with the consecration of a temple. In January 2024, Prime Minister Modi presided over the inauguration of the Ram Mandir at the very spot, an unprecedented merging of his office with a religious ceremony on contested ground. Encouraged by the precedent, claims have been filed over mosques in Varanasi and Mathura, and a lawsuit over mosques across India sits before the courts. Each generation of litigation moves the boundary of the unthinkable a little further.

Legislation has followed the same vector. The 2025 amendments to the Waqf Act restructured the administration of Muslim religious endowments in ways Muslim organizations warned would facilitate the transfer of waqf properties — including, they argued, land attached to mosques — to state control. Muslim lawmakers' objections were overridden; the bill passed on the strength of the government's numbers.

The police, meanwhile, have acquired a reputation for two speeds. When Muslims are victims — of lynchings by cow vigilantes, of pogroms like the 2020 Delhi riots or the 2023 violence in Haryana's Nuh — prosecutions are slow, hesitant, or quietly dropped. When Muslims are accused, bulldozers arrive within days. The baton strikes in Ujjain, continuing after the victim is prone and defenseless, are not an aberration but a routine whose brutality is usually edited out of the official account.

The Background Music of Hate

None of this occurs in a vacuum of rhetoric. Over the past decade, India's Muslims have endured a steady drumbeat of dehumanization from senior political figures and religious leaders — with near-total impunity. A union minister exhorted crowds to "shoot the traitors." A chief minister mused about "killing 100" in retaliation for one. At gatherings of Hindu religious figures, speakers have openly called for genocide against Muslims, advocated economic boycotts of Muslim businesses, and urged crowds to keep weapons at home — and prosecutors have declined to act. Social media, much of it generated from within the ruling party's own ecosystem, circulates conspiracy theories and calls for violence at industrial scale.

The violence has been physical as well as verbal. Mob lynchings in the name of cow protection became a signature atrocity of the Modi years: Mohammed Akhlaq, beaten to death in his home in 2015 over rumors about his refrigerator; Pehlu Khan, a dairy farmer murdered on a highway in 2017 while his killers filmed; Junaid Khan, a teenager stabbed on a train the same year. Karnataka banned Muslim girls from wearing the hijab in classrooms, and the courts let it stand. Muslim vendors have been driven from temple fairs, Muslim homes from mixed neighborhoods.

An Election, and What It Changed

To be fair to the record — a virtue this government rarely extends to its critics — the 2024 general election delivered a partial corrective. Denied an outright majority for the first time in a decade, the BJP was forced into coalition, and some of its allies balked at the most aggressive anti-Muslim measures. The national implementation of an NRC has been conspicuously postponed. Muslims voted in large numbers, and in places like Uttar Pradesh's Sambhal, their political weight proved decisive.

But the fundamental architecture remains. The CAA is law. The Waqf amendments are law. The temples rise where mosques stood. The bulldozers keep their schedules. And in Ujjain, a historic mosque loses a wall to a road project, and a man who objected is beaten to the ground by the very officers sworn to protect him.

The Simhastha of 2028 will be magnificent — widened roads, restored ghats, processions of the devout flowing smoothly past the gap where part of the Shahi Masjid once stood. The pilgrims will not be told what made the road so straight. They rarely are.

Media Review; Current Events: The $5,000 Anti-Communism Dividend

Media Review; Current Events: The $5,000 Anti-Communism Dividend

    Friday, October 02, 2026   No comments

Red Scare, Green Scare, and the Irony of Buying the Vote

There is a special kind of irony that doesn't just make you chuckle — it makes you rub your temples and stare quietly at the wall. Donald Trump, head of the United States government, has promised that if voters hand Congress to the Republicans, every adult citizen in the country will receive a $5,000 check. The stated purpose of this transaction? To stop communism.

Let that marinate. The plan to defeat an ideology famously associated with state-controlled redistribution of wealth is... having the state redistribute wealth. And the targets of this anti-communist crusade are telling: in recent cycles, "communism" has become the preferred slur against Muslim politicians climbing into American power — Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Two fears, packaged into one product: red scare meets green scare, sold at a single price.

The Twin Boogeyman

Consider what the word is being asked to do. El-Sayed, a physician and former public health official, ran for governor of Michigan on a platform of healthcare and water safety and now running for a US senate. Mamdani, a democratic socialist — note: socialist, not communist, which in Trump's telling is apparently a distinction the left "skipped" — won the New York mayoralty on rent freezes and buses. Their actual politics are standard progressive fare, the kind found across Scandinavia and, frankly, across much of American history.

But "progressive" doesn't test well as an attack. So the label gets laundered: Muslim candidate plus left economics equals "communism," a word that still carries the Cold War voltage needed to make voters flinch. It couples two anxieties at once — fear of a foreign ideology and fear of a religious minority — into one efficient package. You don't have to argue that El-Sayed's health policy is bad; you just have to imply he's a sleeper agent of a global movement that ended three decades ago. You don't have to debate Mamdani's housing plan; you just have to make "Muslim" and "communist" rhyme in the voter's ear, even though the actual combination is historically exotic — theocratic states and Marxist states have been, to put it mildly, not close.

Enter the $5,000 Check

And then comes the punchline. The man leading the charge against these supposed communists — the man whose movement has fused anti-communism and Islamophobia into a single campaign weapon — announces his own plan for direct government cash transfers to every American adult.

The communist label gets applied to Muslim politicians for supporting universal programs. The anti-communist solution is... a universal program. The federal government, under Republican control, will cut a check to the entire population to defeat the ideology of government checks. One almost admires the audacity: it takes a particular kind of political gymnast to warn that Zohran Mamdani will destroy America by making things affordable, then promise to buy every voter's loyalty with a stimulus payment signed by the state.

Strip away the ideological garnish and the structure is remarkably candid: a cash payment to voters, contingent on an electoral outcome, justified by the need to stop politicians whose crime is wanting to give people things. Historically, when a candidate dangles money in exchange for votes, we call it vote-buying, and it sits somewhere between "campaign finance scandal" and "criminal offense." Here it is simply scaled up — from the discreet envelope to a national sweepstakes — and aimed at the same constituencies told to fear "communist" handouts from the other side.

The Deeper Joke

The true irony isn't even the redistribution. It's that the whole performance reveals what it was always about. If communism can be redefined at will — stretched to cover a Muslim doctor in Michigan, a Muslim assemblyman in Queens, and anyone else whose policies threaten donors — then it was never an economic argument at all. It was a bludgeon. And bludgeons, it turns out, are indifferent to consistency. The same hand that labels El-Sayed a red menace can promise $5,000 to every household in Dearborn, Muslim voters included, no ideology quiz required.

Presidents, of course, don't get to appropriate money; Congress does. And the promise requires the very Republican Congress the checks are meant to purchase — a self-funding prophecy in which the bribed and the briber share a mailing address. The checks are likely as hypothetical as the communism they're meant to stop.

Still, if the envelopes do go out, every recipient should savor the moment. It may be the only time in American history when the government pays you $5,000 to be reminded that redistribution of wealth is tyranny — unless, apparently, you vote correctly, in which case it's patriotism. The red scare was never about the money. But the money, one suspects, was always the point.

Islamic Societies Review MONTHLY -- September 2026

Islamic Societies Review MONTHLY -- September 2026

    Thursday, October 01, 2026   No comments

   

ISR MONTHLY is a bulletin updating readers about news stories and analyses of the month. 

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Current Events: How Salafism Became Saudi Arabia's Weapon of Last Resort in Yemen

     Friday, September 25, 2026   No comments

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    Wednesday, September 23, 2026   No comments

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    Wednesday, September 23, 2026   No comments

The most consequential fact about the current war on Iran is not the eventual fate of any government in Tehran, nor the precise terms of...

Sanaa’s Southern Advance and the New "Capital for Capital" Equation

    Sunday, September 20, 2026   No comments

 

Escalation and the "Capital for Capital" Doctrine

As ground options have dwindled, the aerial dimension of the conflict has intensified dramatically. In a bid to halt the southern advance, Saudi warplanes have launched dozens of sorties over southern Taiz and western Lahj. When these strikes failed to disrupt Sanaa’s momentum, the Saudi-led coalition escalated its targeting to include strategic bridges, public roads, government buildings, schools, and civilian homes.

Media Review: How Fox News Amplifies Hostility Toward Those America's Wars Created

    Sunday, September 20, 2026   No comments

They'll Turn Anything Into a MosqueThere is a profound irony at the heart of contemporary American cultural politics: a fierce, often alarmist demand for cultural...

Media Review: China has privately urged Iran to rein in Ansarallah after Saudi appeal--Reuters Report

    Friday, September 18, 2026   No comments

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An Arms-First Strategy is Undermining Saudi Development and Regional Stability

    Friday, September 18, 2026   No comments

 The High Cost of Proxy Wars In the modern Middle East, the illusion that security can be purchased through advanced weaponry and proxy forces is rapidly...

Current Events: Saudi Arabia’s Emergency Defense Pacts Are Doomed to Fail

    Wednesday, September 16, 2026   No comments

In the shifting sands of Middle Eastern geopolitics, the gradual erosion of unconditional United States security guarantees has left Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) rulers scrambling...

Malaysia’s Cargo Ban and the True Measure of Global Leadership

    Tuesday, September 15, 2026   No comments

 Principles Over PosturingIn an era where global supply chains are frequently weaponized and diplomatic alliances are dictated by profit margins, the true measure of a...

How Enlightenment Hostility Toward Islam Informs Modern Political Rhetoric

    Sunday, September 13, 2026   No comments

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From Regime Change to a Single Sentence: The Irony and Impending Failure of Trump’s Iran Strategy

    Sunday, September 13, 2026   No comments

When the current administration first set its sights on Iran, the rhetoric was defined by maximalist, almost imperial ambitions. The stated goals were uncompromising: the...

Current Events: The Historic Significance of the 2026 BRICS New Delhi Declaration on Palestine and Lebanon

    Saturday, September 12, 2026   No comments

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    Friday, September 11, 2026   No comments

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Media Review: How the ‘Fait Accompli’ in Syria Undermines Saudi Arabia’s Narrative in Yemen and Beyond

    Thursday, September 10, 2026   No comments

As the Arabian Peninsula navigates one of its most perilous geopolitical crises in decades, the diplomatic and strategic contradictions at the heart of Saudi foreign...

Media review; French political analyst answers the question: is this "worst American decision since World War II"

    Monday, September 07, 2026   No comments

If the metric for the "worst American decision since World War II" is the sheer scale of damage to US prestige, the erosion of its deterrence, and the voluntary handover of global influence to its rivals, then the Trump administration’s handling of the war with Iran stands as a historic failure. According to French political analyst Pierre Haski, the United States was dragged into a senseless, horizonless conflict, transformed into a superpower flailing in what resembled a "barroom brawl"—striking without a clear objective and utterly clueless about how to end the fight.

This is the story of how that war unfolded, and how it reshaped the American political and economic landscape.

Chapter 1: The "Versailles Disaster" and the Political Backlash