Most of the world’s Jew-haters are cowards. They repost antisemitic memes from anonymous accounts at 2 a.m. They scream “Free Palestine” at campus protests and go home to their dorms. They tear down hostage posters on their lunch break and post the video for likes. They would never sacrifice their own comfort, let alone their lives, for the cause of destroying Israel. Their hatred is real, but it is cheap.
The Iranians are different.
The Iranian regime spent decades pouring its nation’s wealth, its diplomatic standing, and ultimately the lives of its own people into a single obsessive project: the destruction of Israel and the war against America. Its currency and economy are collapsing and its citizens are suffering. Khamenei himself, along with many of the regime’s senior figures, paid with their lives. And still they do not stop. What kind of hatred drives a civilization to destroy itself in pursuit of another people’s annihilation?
The Bible’s most terrifying enemy is not Pharaoh, not the Philistines, not the Babylonians. It is Amalek. From the moment they appear in Exodus, attacking the Israelites from behind as they fled Egypt, Amalek occupies a unique category of evil. God does not merely command Israel to fight them. He commands Israel to remember them forever, and to ultimately erase their name from history.
Why such a singular obsession with one nation among so many enemies? What is it about Amalek that demands this permanent, transgenerational response?
The Sages explain that most enemies of Israel were motivated by self-interest, however evil: land, resources, pride, fear. Amalek was different. Amalek attacked without provocation, without strategic logic, and without any real prospect of gain. Rashi cites the Sages’ parable: Amalek is like someone who jumps into a scalding hot bath. He himself is burned terribly, but he cools the water for others who come after. He accomplishes nothing for himself. He gains nothing. He simply absorbs enormous suffering in order to make the destruction of others slightly easier.
This is the essence of Amalek: a hatred so consuming that it is willing to self-destruct in order to take Israel down with it. The Nazis fit this description, sacrificing close to ten million Germans in pursuit of their genocidal goal of destroying the Jewish people. They continued killing even as the Wehrmacht collapsed on the Eastern Front and defeat became inevitable. The mission of Jewish destruction was never halted. It took priority over everything, including their own survival.
By this measure, the Iranian mullahs are clearly Amalek.
What is it that drives the Iranians to fight the Jewish people this way? Why are they willing to sacrifice everything in their war against us?
The word Islam comes from the Arabic root s-l-m, and its meaning is not complicated: submission. The central act of the Muslim believer, as defined by Islamic theology itself, is the complete surrender of human will to divine authority. The ideal Muslim is one who has fully subdued his own desires, reasoning, and choices to the absolute command of God.
The Quran presents Abraham as the model of this posture: “When his Lord said to him, Submit, he said, I submit to the Lord of the worlds.” Similarly, the Qur’an teaches that true faith means accepting God’s decree without inner resistance: “It is not for a believing man or woman, when God and His Messenger have decided a matter, to have any choice about their affair.” These verses illustrate a central theme in Islamic theology: the highest religious state is complete submission of the human will to divine authority.
The well-known hadith of Muhammad, recorded in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, teaches that Islam is built upon five foundational acts: bearing witness to God’s oneness and Muhammad’s prophethood, prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage. In classical Islamic thought, these are not personal devotional practices. They are expressions of obedience that structure every dimension of life, public and private. The Quran makes the chain of command explicit: “O you who believe, obey God and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you.” The religious ideal that emerges is a community defined entirely by disciplined submission to divine law, with no space left for individual conscience or genuine choice.
This is why the extreme cruelty of the Iranian regime is not a corruption of their religion. It is an expression of it. When Iranian morality police beat women to death for refusing to wear the hijab, when the regime funds terror proxies to massacre civilians across the Middle East, they are not going rogue. They are imitating, as faithfully as they know how, a deity they believe demands total submission from every human being on earth. The cruelty is the point. In their theology, there is no other way.
The Bible teaches something entirely different.
In the very first pages of Genesis, God creates the human being b’tzelem Elohim, in His own image, with the capacity to choose, to reason, and to enter into a genuine relationship with his Creator. This is the Bible’s opening statement about what a human being is. Man is neither a subject nor a servant. Man is a free agent, made in the image of a God who wants to be chosen, not merely obeyed.
That vision runs through the entire Bible. At Sinai, God does not conquer Israel and impose His law on a defeated people. He invites a free nation into a covenant, and they respond not with submission but with na’aseh v’nishma, “we will do and we will hear” (Exodus 24:7). Centuries later, Moses stands before the people and delivers God’s challenge in the plainest possible terms:
The entire covenantal relationship rests on that word: choose. This is what separates the Biblical God from the Islamic God of submission. Our God does not want subjects. He wants partners, who freely choose to stand before Him and say: we will do and we will hear.
When God commands us to love Him, it is not a contradiction. Love cannot be coerced. A God who demands love is a God who believes His creations are capable of giving it freely. God wants our love, but He wants us to choose to give it to Him.
Maimonides writes that “Permission is given to every person. If he wishes to incline himself to the good path and be righteous, the choice is his; if he wishes to incline himself to the bad path and be wicked, the choice is his.” Free will is not just part of Jewish theology. It is the foundation on which everything else is built.
This is why the State of Israel, from the radical Shiite perspective, is not merely a political problem or a territorial dispute. It is a theological threat. Israel is a living demonstration that a people rooted in the Bible’s vision of freedom and covenant can build a thriving, creative, powerful civilization. Israel’s success destroys the Iranian mullah’s theology. Every hospital, every university, every startup, every free election, every synagogue full of Jews learning Torah on their own land—all of it is an indictment of everything Iran represents. Iran’s rage toward Israel is not incidental. It flows directly from what Israel is.
Iran’s collapse is more than a military defeat, though it is certainly that. It is the beginning of the end of an ideology. The Amalek-like force that was willing to burn itself to the ground in order to cool the water for Israel’s other enemies is now broken. Israel dismantled Iran’s ring of fire, piece by piece, from Hezbollah in the north to Hamas in Gaza to the Houthis in Yemen. What Tehran spent decades building, Israel destroyed over the last two years. This is not just a geopolitical realignment; it is a victory of the Bible over the dark theology of radical Islam.
God promises that Amalek will ultimately be erased, that the memory of those who hate Israel without reason and without limit will be blotted out from under heaven. We are watching that promise be fulfilled in real time.
What comes after Amalek? Isaiah painted the picture for us:
The people of Israel will not conquer other nations and force them to come to Jerusalem. Isaiah does not envision a time when other peoples will submit to the Jewish people. He describes choice. The nations turn to each other and say: come, let us go up. Free people, drawn to the God of Israel not by the sword but by the witness of what His people built on His land.
That is the world God promised. We are building it right now.
