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iran
'What a Coincidence': Netanyahu Corruption Trial Adjourned as Israel Bombs Syria
"Last month it was Iran, now Syria! All thanks to free U.S. military supplies," said one observer.
Jul 16, 2025
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's testimony in his criminal corruption trial was cut short Wednesday as Israeli airstrikes pounded Damascus, the Syrian capital, despite considerable efforts by that country's rulers to appease Israel.
Al Jazeera reported Israeli strikes targeted the Syrian Defense Ministry headquarters and the vicinity of the Syrian Presidential Palace, killing at least one person and wounding 18 others in a dramatic escalation that followed Israel's threat to intervene in clashes between government forces and Druze militants in and around the southern city of Suwayda. There are approximately 700,000 Druze—an Abrahamic religion descended from a branch of Shia Islam—in Syria, 250,000 in Lebanon, and 145,000 in Israel.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on the social media site X that "warnings in Damascus have ended—now painful blows will come."
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) "will continue to operate forcefully in Suwayda to destroy the forces that attacked the Druze until their complete withdrawal," Katz added.
Huge explosions were seen in Damascus as Israel bombed Syria’s defence ministry during a live Al Jazeera broadcast nearby.
[image or embed]
— aljazeera.com (@aljazeera.com) July 16, 2025 at 5:53 AM
The Syrian Interior Ministry subsequently announced a cease-fire agreement for Suwayda. Druze religious leader Sheikh Yousef Jarbou confirmed the deal "to completely halt all military operations in Suwayda by all parties" and "to fully integrate Suwayda into the Syrian state."
Syria is the third country bombed by Israel within the past 24 hours. IDF airstrikes targeting the resistance group Hezbollah, including one on a camp housing Syrian refugees, killed 12 people in eastern Lebanon Tuesday amid the ongoing 21-month annihilation of Gaza that has left more than 211,000 Palestinians dead, injured, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The attacks also follow last month's unprovoked Israeli and U.S. bombing of Iran, including the country's civilian nuclear facilities.
The timing of Wednesday's strikes raised eyebrows, especially given Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa's painstaking efforts to avoid conflict with Israel. These include not retaliating for the hundreds of Israeli airstrikes in Syria since last year, cutting off arms supply lines to Hezbollah, and expressing a willingness to hammer out a peace deal with Israel—with which Damascus has technically been at war since 1948.
The conciliatory stance of al-Sharaa—who in 2012 created the al-Qaeda-backed al-Nusra Front to fight and ultimately overthrow the dynastic regime of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—prompted the Trump administration to lift long-nstanding sanctions on Damascus. The U.S. administration also removed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an offshoot of al-Nusra Front formerly led by al-Sharaa, from its list of foreign terrorist organizations.
As was the case with Israel's June bombing of Iran and alleged stonewalling of an agreement to end the Gaza war and secure the return of Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas, numerous observers accused Netanyahu of bombing yet another country in a bid to stay in power by forestalling a reckoning in his three cases of alleged criminal bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. If fully convicted, the prime minister faces up to 10 years behind bars.
"Israel could end the Gaza war, sit and talk with Syria and Saudi Arabia, and even manage its issues with Turkey through direct channels it already has," Middle East Eye Turkey bureau chief Ragıp Soylu wrote on X. "But Netanyahu chooses to distract its public from the corruption trial by keeping Israel in perpetual war with its neighbors."
Others accused Netanyahu of ordering the attack on Syria in a bid to keep Shas, the far-right ultra-Orthodox Jewish political party, from leaving his government.
"It didn't work. Shas is leaving anyway," Israeli-American academic Shaiel Ben-Ephraim noted on X. "No one believes him and he is willing to kill people everywhere to get his way."
Netanyahu—who in addition to his domestic criminal trial is also wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza—denies any corruption.
In language that echoes his own description of efforts to hold him accountable in the United States, U.S. President Donald Trump has called the cases against Netanyahu a "witch hunt" and called for their dismissal. In an unusual show of support, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee attended Wednesday's session of Netanyahu's trial in Tel Aviv District Court.
"This whole trial is wrong," Huckabee asserted, according to Axios.
Netanyahu stands accused of accepting more than $200,000 in gifts from wealthy businessmen, and of a quid pro quo in which he provided a telecom titan hundreds of millions of dollars worth of regulatory relief in exchange for favorable coverage.
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I Love America—Now Trump Has Bombed My Family in Iran
Since my country’s leaders and its intelligence community have regularly reaffirmed that Iran is not a nuclear threat, why would Donald Trump, as well as Republican Senators like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, so casually betray that community and the trust of the American people?
Jul 11, 2025
We bombed Iran and, despite a temporary cessation of hostilities, it’s likely that President Donald Trump and his counterpart in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, intend to drag the United States into yet another destabilizing effort in the Middle East, perhaps the most dangerous one yet. As an Iranian American, I feel as if my greatest fears are now being realized.
Like many Iranian Americans, I love this country and the many blessings that it’s provided my family — so much so that I proudly chose to wear the uniform of its Navy. I’ll never forget the immense sense of pride I felt, on July 31st, 1996, when I was sworn into the United States Navy, or the unparalleled sense of responsibility I experienced when I wore my uniform for the first time as an American sailor graduating from boot camp at the Recruit Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois, in 1997. I then had the honor of being selected as the first Iranian American to serve as a member of the United States Navy Presidential Honor Guard in Washington, D.C. And on every one of those occasions, my loved ones, Iranian immigrants all, proudly stood by my side, beaming with joy as I embarked on what I viewed as a sacred commitment to serve the nation that I love.
We Have to Remember Who We’re Meant to Be
Like many immigrant families, mine came to the United States in search of peace, prosperity, and the possibility of becoming part of the fabric of the country that had given the world the Bill of Rights and the sacred tenet of “equal justice under the law”; the country that had given history George Washington, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others; the nation that had served as a safe harbor for German refugees like Albert Einstein and Hollywood film director Billy Wilder fleeing Nazi persecution; the great nation that did indeed free the world from the scourge of Hitler and the Third Reich in World War II, and later landed the first men on the surface of the moon. No nation has had so much potential to do good in the world as we do in the United States of America. Our Founding Fathers, imperfect as they might have been, passed on to us the proposition that liberty and human dignity are anything but idle words — that they are, in fact, fundamental human values written in the very hearts of every person. In short, they passed on to us a promise: that all men, every soul, in fact, is endowed by our Creator with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Nor did those founders suggest that such sacrosanct, if now seemingly self-evident, values stopped at American shores. They were all too aware that, for centuries, imperial forces had pillaged and wreaked havoc globally on smaller, defenseless countries and on civilizations virtually everywhere. Throughout the centuries, such imperial powers had risen by way of their strength, if not their virtue, and fallen thanks to their global misadventures. And let’s be clear, by any metric you want to mention, the United States is indeed a global imperial force at an all-too-critical crossroads. The question is: Will we allow parasitic and nefarious entities and interests to drain us of our resources, cajole us into breaking yet more international laws, and turn us into a global pariah while betraying the great founding promise of our republic?
With Donald Trump at the helm of state, the answer is likely to be a resounding yes.
Why the Con, Don?
In order to understand the peril in which we find ourselves as a nation, we need look no further than Trump’s recent betrayal of his own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Just three months ago, she testified before Congress that, according to the assessment of the intelligence community, Iran had not made the decision to weaponize its nuclear program.
When asked about Gabbard’s assessment recently, Trump quipped, “I don’t care what she said,” as if she had merely been offering an opinion of her own, not testifying about a multi-agency conclusion that Iran was not a nuclear threat. In fact, as a matter of religious edict, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, had declared a “fatwa,” ruling that the potential global devastation of nuclear weapons violated the very tenets of the Islamic faith and that his country was forbidden to develop such weaponry.
For my part, more than 25 years ago, as a young sailor on active duty, I found myself recruited by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Defense HUMINT Service (now the Defense Clandestine Service) specifically because of my Persian-Farsi skills and cultural knowledge. Even then, it was widely reported that our government had a wealth of intelligence capabilities when it came to determining the exact scale, scope, and goals, not to speak of mindset and shoe sizes of the Iranian leadership, especially when it came to their military and nuclear capabilities.
It’s Never Actually Been About Nukes or Regime Change
To be clear, I’m no fan of the repressive Iranian regime and wholeheartedly reject its fundamentalist ideology. At the same time, since my country’s leaders and its intelligence community have regularly reaffirmed that Iran is not a nuclear threat, why would Donald Trump, as well as Republican Senators like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, so casually betray that community and the trust of the American people?
Why would the Trump administration allow itself to appear to be so schizophrenic by moving the goalposts on what has often seemed like a daily basis? The answer: such head fakes and confusion are part of their strategy. Chaos is the point, a crucial aspect of the psychological tactics deployed against the American public to distract us from their end game. My guess is that, not unlike Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brain worm, Donald Trump and many of the corporate oligarchs who support him suffer from a parasitic infection — a murderous devotion to Israeli Prime Minister (and International Criminal Court-charged war criminal) Benjamin Netanyahu’s master plan for the Middle East. He, of course, seeks to destabilize that entire region and expand the borders of Israel into countries like Lebanon, Syria, and even possibly the Iranian peripheries. That scheme, called “The Greater Israel Plan,” has been the decades-long aim of radical right-wing elements in the Israeli government.
The modern iteration of that strategy was commissioned by Netanyahu himself. As Jonathan Granoff asks at The Hill:
“Why does [Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud Party] make no credible effort at building a better future for Palestinian people, knowing it serves only to align their interests more closely with Hamas? And why amid all the chaos strike Iran and aggravate the risk of wider war? Where does Israel’s policy of violent coercion rather than cooperation and an ever-widening reliance on military force come from?”
And he answers those questions this way: “It actually has an identifiable source. In 1996, Netanyahu, then Likud party leader, commissioned the policy document ‘A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,’ whose lead drafters were neoconservatives Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, co-architects of the disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.”
The desire to implement just that end-game scenario by hardline members of the Israeli government is the only reasonable way to explain the otherwise confounding actions of both the Trump and Netanyahu governments. A rational person could argue that the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the Trump campaign in 2024 by pro-Israel billionaires like Miriam Adelson were a mere pittance when compared with the possibility of stealing so much in the way of land and resources in the Middle East. You could also be forgiven for imagining Benjamin Netanyahu, seduced by the wicked wiles of that infamous crew, considering the constricted borders of Israel and thinking: Why not? Why shouldn’t I take it?
Of course, I’m hardly the first person to notice the strange, almost cultish loyalty of so many of our elected officials to his dangerous way of thinking. For instance, in his book Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed The World, investigative journalist Christopher Lee Bollyn wrote: “Today, the United States of America is by all appearances an Israeli-occupied state. The U.S. Congress dutifully authorizes the annual payment of an immense tribute to Israel, some three thousand million dollars a year.”
Bollyn certainly offers a striking explanation for the events now taking place before our eyes, the voluntary death spiral into which we, as a nation, have been thrust at least in part by the radical Netanyahu government and his death-cult devotees led by the current American president.
Blowback: It’s Not Good for Israel Either
In the same way that Donald Trump’s greed-fueled ambitions far outweigh any desire to do right by the United States, Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychopathic schemes in pursuit of his end game have only served to degrade the international reputation of Israel, making it (outside of the United States) essentially a pariah nation. Even within this country, the Trump administration’s kowtowing to the whims of Netanyahu’s regime, from an unprecedented crackdown on free speech (supposedly to quell “anti-semitism”) to defunding major universities, has earned a massive backlash from both the left and the right.
What makes all of this so tragic is that the state of Israel, through its citizenry, has the capacity to do so much good in this world of ours. My Jewish friends all have a keen sense of justice and a deep sense of compassion towards the plight of the oppressed, values that have been handed down to them, particularly from Holocaust survivors who witnessed the abject evil wrought upon humanity by men with messiah complexes who were without honor or virtue. And that’s exactly why Israelis should, in the end, reject the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, so that their country can indeed once again become a cherished safe haven for the Jewish people living alongside the future nation of Palestine.
In that regard, one could easily make the case that the greatest threat to the nation of Israel is Benjamin Netanyahu. In his years of public life, due to his unrepentant acts of horror and violence, especially in his latest tenure as prime minister, even American support for Israel has cratered. And the global decline is starker yet, with European nations like Ireland, Luxembourg, and Spain now considering massive embargoes of the Israeli state.
Freedom Is Not Free, Can America Survive?
In 1997, when I was stationed in Washington D.C., my friend Jeff (Smitty) Smith’s little brother came to visit him from Missouri. Smitty and I took him around D.C. and finally came to the then-newly-built Korean War Memorial. If you’ve been there, then you know that the stark and hallowed message of that memorial is: “Freedom Is Not Free,” words chiseled in stone. On seeing this, Smitty’s brother was taken aback, and asked, “What does that mean?” Then 19 years old, I hadn’t really thought about that, but it hit me instantly. “I think it means,” I told him, “that our American soldiers are willing to pay the ultimate price for our freedom.”
I thought of that day again as I was writing this, how in the age of Donald Trump we’ve betrayed the sacrifices of all those generations and how far we’ve fallen as a nation. After I reached out to my editor, Tom Engelhardt, with my ideas for this piece, my mom asked me if it was “safe” to write such an article while Trump was president. After all, he and his goon squad, to their everlasting shame, have gone to the ends of the earth to crush free speech, especially any criticism of Israel or the administration’s nefarious deeds writ large. (Just ask Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who dared coauthor an op-ed questioning the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Netanyahu regime, only to quickly find herself disappeared off the street by masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security and imprisoned by the American government.)
In truth, that such thoughts even entered my mother’s mind or mine made me first sad and then ticked off. But certain patterns of history seem all too tragically repetitive. When an imperial power is in peril, unless there is a significant course correction, potential tyrants can take control, with the urge to destroy sovereign nations abroad and crush sacred freedoms at home.
In truth, though, it doesn’t have to be that way for us. Yes, we are now governed by wildly lesser men than the great ones of our past. Which is why none of us should cede any ground, when it comes to patriotism or the very idea of national security, to the likes of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth who mistake violence and jingoism for love of country. Such lesser men have the urge to manipulate the immense levers of power in their own favor while using those same levers to crush the righteous dissent of the American people.
This is no longer a matter of right versus left, but of uniting all people of peace and goodwill to reclaim the promise of our founding, ensuring that the precious future aspirations of all peoples, be they Americans, Israelis, or Iranians, not be crushed within the grip of a death cult of End Times fundamentalists who, like Heath Ledger’s Joker in the Batman film The Dark Knight, would happily engulf human civilization in flames and laugh as the world around them burns.
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For a Different Kind of Apocalypse—From LA to Tehran
Instead of pushing us close to the brink of Armageddon through military escalations at home and abroad animated by religious fundamentalism, U.S. policymakers must find the courage to lead us toward world peace through diplomacy and climate repair.
Jul 03, 2025
As an Iranian American Christian from Los Angeles, I watch with alarm as a fringe religious prophecy creeps into the highest levels of American policy. What may sound like a spiritual metaphor—biblical End Times, Armageddon, divine vengeance—is now inspiring large-scale political decisions, putting lives at risk from LA to Gaza to Tehran.
After Hamas killed over a thousand Israelis and took hundreds captive on October 7, 2023, Israel has dropped the equivalent of several nuclear bombs on the Gaza Strip’s mass incarcerated Palestinian refugee enclave—with the U.S. supplying about 68% of Israel’s foreign-origin weaponry in this war. Amnesty International describes Israel’s response to October 7 as a genocide—killings “with the specific intent of destroying Palestinians in Gaza.”
In April 2024 in LA, masked vigilantes attacked UCLA’s nonviolent pro-Palestinian encampment for three hours with wood, metal, and fireworks before LAPD intervened. At the beginning of this year, Angelenos were devastated by the Eaton and Palisades Fires—worsened by global warming—taking dozens of lives, destroying thousands of homes, and creating eerie orange skies above Los Angeles.
The thought of my U.S. taxpayer dollars funding bombing campaigns of my ancestral homeland that could eventually become nuclear, threatening the beautiful ancient city of Isfahan that I visited in my childhood, is unbearable.
Now, the world is in the throes of President Donald Trump’s chaotic second term. Shortly after his inauguration, he once again withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accords—while LA was ablaze. More recently, as Angelenos have protested the federal government’s inhumane mass deportation campaign, which has lately targeted Iranian nationals, the Trump administration majorly escalated by sending in thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles.
On June 13, while the U.S. and Iran were in the middle of diplomatic negotiations around reinstating Obama-era restraints on Iran’s nuclear energy program, Israel under Prime Minister BenjaminNetanyahu, still waging a genocide on Gaza and facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court as of November 2024, began a large-scale attack on Iran. This represented the most significant attack on Iran since the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988—culminating in the killings of at least 600 Iranians, including many civilians and children. In response, Iran attacked Israel with retaliatory strikes that killed dozens of Israelis.
In a televised address on Sunday, June 22, President Trump reported that the United States military under his command bombed three sites in Iran housing the country’s nuclear energy program, including Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, entering the U.S. into Israel’s offensive attack. He even at one point raised the possibility of a U.S. nuclear strike on Iran in the future. On Monday, June 23, Iran retaliated against the U.S. by launching limited missile strikes directed at an American military base in Qatar, with no casualties. Later that day on social media, Trump announced a cease-fire deal between Israel and Iran. Though both nations continued to exchange fire shortly after the cease-fire went into effect, Israel and Iran are now experiencing a fragile peace. Trump and Netanyahu have purportedly agreed to end the war in Gaza within two weeks of the U.S. strikes on Iran, and the U.S. and Iran are expected to talk during the week of June 30.
This conflict has deeply impacted Angelenos, including my own family. LA is home to the largest Iranian diaspora globally, known as “Tehrangeles.” As an Iranian American, I don’t see Iran as a geopolitical adversary; it’s home to my loved ones and heritage. Israel concentrated many of its airstrikes in Tehran—the most populous city in Western Asia—including airstrikes in my own cousin’s neighborhood. The escalation of this conflict, including Trump’s call on Iranians in Tehran to “evacuate immediately,” forced my cousin and disabled U.S. citizen grandmother to flee Tehran to Northern Iran. It was a strange feeling when I last spoke to my grandmother before her internet went out, hearing her say in Farsi, “Ma ra zadan”—“They hit us.” The thought of my U.S. taxpayer dollars funding bombing campaigns of my ancestral homeland that could eventually become nuclear, threatening the beautiful ancient city of Isfahan that I visited in my childhood, is unbearable. After all, Iran is filled with rich world history—including the most widely accepted site of the tomb of Prophet Daniel of the Bible, who I am named after.
How did we get to this escalating polycrisis of destruction? In part, because white Christian nationalist leaders have embraced a belief in the End Times—an extremist theology that now holds wide political sway according to religion scholar Bradley Onishi. Texas megachurch pastor, founder of influential political lobbying organization Christians United for Israel, and Trump adviser John Hagee preaches that warfare between Israel, Palestine, and Iran is part of a biblically predicted Battle of Armageddon, in which the U.S. must militarily support Israel to be reunited with God in the Rapture. He cites Ezekiel 38 and 39, an Old Testament prophecy that says a restored Israel in the End Times will be attacked by a nation called Gog, supported by Persia (modern-day Iran). In retaliation, a vengeful God of Israel would decimate Gog and Persia through brute force “to cleanse the land.” In Hagee’s words, Iran is “already in the hit list in Ezekiel 38.” This prophecy also talks of climate destruction during this violent vision of the End Times, including “torrents of rain, hailstones, and burning sulfur.” These ideas are no longer confined to pulpits—they are shaping real-world policy. Even former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that God sent Trump to save Israel from Iran.
If we must turn to apocalyptic scripture to understand the future, then why don’t we skip ahead to Revelation 21: the creation of a “new heaven and a new Earth,” including a “new Jerusalem,” where “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Los Angeles and our world are enduring too much grief to bear. Instead of pushing us close to the brink of Armageddon through military escalations at home and abroad animated by religious fundamentalism, U.S. policymakers must find the courage to lead us toward world peace through diplomacy and climate repair. That means reinstating the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran of zero weaponization, as opposed to an unrealistic goal of zero enrichment. It means pushing for an immediate, permanent cease-fire between the U.S., Israel, Palestine, and Iran, and it means reentering the U.S. into the Paris climate accords.
My faith teaches redemption, not vengeance. As God promises in the Bible, “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
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