Middle East Madness > The History of Iran and Israel since 1979 - Ben Shapiro; Turkey moves toward theocracy; What led to Israel's attack on Iran?

 

Ben Shapiro Nailed it: This is Exactly What the World Must Know About Israel and Iran

written by Phil Schneider June 17, 2025 3.9K views

The modern Arab-Israeli conflict has been going on in the Land of Israel for around 150 years. But the Israel-Iran conflict is just 45 years old. Iran had nothing to do with Israel’s first few wars in 1948, 1956, 1967 or 1973. Egypt was Israel’s main nemesis. Syria and Jordan also fought to destroy Israel. 

Meanwhile, there were still tens of thousands of Jews who lived in Iran in relative calm and peace, as opposed to nearly every other country in the Middle East where Jews fled or were basically kicked out of. 

Before 1979, before the big revolution of the Ayatollahs in Iran, Iran was actually one of the most modernized countries in the Middle East. Large American companies had invested tens of millions of dollars in Iran in order to take part in the modernization of the country. But the opposition to the westernization and modernizing trends was also growing. 

In 1979, the revolution toppled the pro-Western Shah, the reigning monarch who was loved or hated by nearly everyone in Iran. The radical Islamic haters took over and since then, they have steadily used the enormous resources that Iran has in order to build a massive terror infrastructure inside of Iran and across the Middle East.

The Ayatollahs were always crystal clear about their intention. The Zionist enterprise was their main target. Yes, they fought a bloody war with Iraq in the 80’s. But Iran was not yet ready to take on Israel. That required more time, until they could build up their reactors, and steadily grow their proxies to become the behemoths of terror that the Hizbullah and Hamas became. 

Tens of miles of terror tunnels took years and billions of dollars to build up in Gaza. 140,000 missiles in Lebanon cannot be delivered in a few months. They required smuggling via Syria over a matter of years. Most of all, building up an atomic bomb and enriching uranium required the collusion of foreign countries and feckless leadership around the world to be asleep at the wheel. Iran used the Biden/Blinken Chamberlain-like foreign policy of appeasement to advance their devilish schemes. 

Thank G-d, Israel has a leader in Benjamin Netanyahu who has never stopped focusing on the #1 threat facing Israel and the Jewish people. And thank G-d that Israel has the talented pilots and soldiers of the secret service to take down the Iranian threat.

Iran will soon be in a place where they can choose if they are prepared to turn the clock backwards to a time when there was peace and tranquility between Jews and Iranians. The rule of the Ayatollahs is about to end – if the Iranian people overthrow their leadership once and for all. This will probably be their best chance. 

Turkey to censor Qur’an translations; critics call it ‘state-enforced Islam that endangers religious freedom’

Jun 18, 2025 12:30 pm By Christine Douglass-Williams16 Comments

Nothing else could be expected but the further Islamization of Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule. Critics call the new censoring of Qur’an translations “state-enforced Islam that endangers religious freedom.” The more Islamized a country becomes, that is exactly what happens.

Erdogan has made no secret of his aim to revive the Ottoman Empire, with himself as caliph. He openly supports the Taliban; Hamas; and Syrian jihad leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (aka Ahmed Al Sharaa). The Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs, the Diyanet, reports directly to Erdogan. It wouldn’t be long before Turkey becomes a direct menace to Israel and other Western countries.

Turkey has no place in NATO.

Turkish authority granted power to censor Quran translations

by Elmas Topcu, DW, June 15, 2025:

Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs, known as the Diyanet, is one of the country’s most influential authorities. According to its own figures, it employs over 140,000 people and offers religious services in more than 100 countries. Founded in 1924, the Diyanet has reported directly to Islamic-conservative president Recep Tayyip Erdogan since 2018. Its annual budget of around €3 billion ($3.47 billion) also exceeds those of several ministries, including the Ministry of Interior.

The Diyanet manages 90,000 mosques across the country, organizes Quran courses, cultural events and annual pilgrimages, and coordinates slaughters for the Feast of Sacrifice. It also trains imams and deploys them both at home and abroad. Its foundation is active in 150 countries and reaches millions of people through educational programs and scholarships worldwide.

New authority over Quran translations

In recent years, the Diyanet’s powers have expanded. Most recently, a new law that went into effect on June 4 granted the authority to interpret translations of the Quran. If these “do not correspond to the basic characteristics of Islam,” they may be banned. “Problematic copies” that have already been published can be confiscated and destroyed. This also applies to digital texts, audio, and video recordings online.

Previously, President Erdogan had granted this authority by decree, which allowed the Diyanet to classify some translations as “untruthful.” But the decree was struck down by the Constitutional Court. But the new law has ensured that the Diyanet’s power would indeed be constitutional.

Critics allege censorship

In Muslim-majority countries, heads of state regularly invoke Islam to justify their actions. For example, in Iraq, the once secular Saddam Hussein used religious tenets to justify his autocratic measures and war with Iran. In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been accused of using the push for more religious openness as an excuse to crack down on his political opponents. And as the Middle East Institute has noted, Erdogan’s political party, the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, “maintains the loyalty of its base through a historical narrative of religion and nationalism.”

Now theologians critical of the government allege that Turkey’s new law amounts to censorship, calling it state-enforced Islam that endangers religious freedom……

Does this mean Turkey is now a theocracy? I believe that is Erdogan's goal; first Turkey, then the Ottoman Empire.

Key Advance in Iran’s Nuclear Program

Led Israel to Attack

Jun 18, 2025 4:00 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald17 Comments

Israel recently learned from its agents inside Iran — presumably native informants working with Mossad — that Iran’s nuclear scientists had successfully completed tests of their design of a nuclear weapon. This meant that Iran was potentially only weeks away from being able to produce such a weapon, and that intolerable threat had to be dealt with without delay. More on Israel’s discovery that prompted the attack, can be found here: 

Israel found Iran carried out key tests for nuke design ahead of strikes — report

Times of Israel, June 15, 2025:

Ahead of its strikes on Iran, Israel discovered that the Islamic Republic’s scientists had conducted successful experiments in the design process of a nuclear weapon, bringing it weeks away from being able to produce a bomb if it chose to do so, according to a Hebrew media report Sunday.

This “golden information” was presented by intelligence officials to the political leadership before the decision was made to carry out preemptive strikes Friday, along with the concern that Israel didn’t know everything and that Tehran could be at an even more advanced stage in building a nuclear bomb than the available information showed, Army Radio reported, citing unnamed security officials.

According to the report, Iran gathered scientists and split them into several working groups to labor in secret on components of the process of weaponizing nuclear material into an actual explosive device, beginning around the end of 2023 or the start of 2024 — shortly after Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, which sparked the ongoing war in Gaza.

This aspect of designing a nuclear device ran in parallel to Iran’s enrichment of uranium to levels that have no use for civilian purposes, but are required to build a nuclear bomb. According to an International Atomic Energy Agency report at the end of May, Iran’s stockpile of uranium, if enriched further, was enough to build nine nuclear weapons.

The Israel Defense Forces managed to monitor the secret weapons process, which left Jerusalem with no doubt that Iran had decided to build a nuclear weapon after the massacre in southern Israel, Army Radio said.

A senior Israeli military official said Saturday that “all the scientists eliminated in the opening strikes had, over the years, been involved in developing the nuclear detonation device.”

The IDF named nine Iranian nuclear scientists it assassinated in the opening strikes, and detailed its efforts to kill them.

They were named as: Fereydoon Abbasi, expert in nuclear engineering; Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, expert in physics; Akbar Motalebi Zadeh, expert in chemical engineering; Saeed Barji, expert in materials engineering; Amir Hassan Fakhahi, expert in physics; Abd al-Hamid Minoushehr, expert in reactor physics; Mansour Asgari, expert in physics; Ahmad Reza Zolfaghari Daryani, expert in nuclear engineering; and Ali Bakhouei Katirimi, expert in mechanics.

“All the scientists and experts who were eliminated were significant sources of knowledge in the Iranian nuclear project, and had decades of cumulative experience in the development of nuclear weapons,” the IDF said….

Think of the extraordinary level of planning by the IDF to know exactly where each of those nine scientists lived in Tehran, a city of 9.5 million people, and exactly, too, where each of them would be on a particular day at a particular time.

It likely will take not days, but weeks, to completely end Iran’s nuclear threat, and to destroy as well its vast arsenal of ballistic missiles and its ballistic missile factories. In order to sufficiently damage or destroy the uranium enrichment facilities built underground at Natanz, and those built inside a mountain at Fordow. These sites will have to be repeatedly hit so as to smash through their thick cement walls; should the Americans decide to provide Israel with their largest — 30,000 pound — bunker-buster bombs, and the bombers able to deliver them, this could hasten that destruction.

Meanwhile, Iranian physicists and engineers trained in nuclear physics are likely to be rethinking their career choices. Perhaps teaching high school science classes would be, in every respect, a better choice.

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