How Iran is a victim of US-Israeli terrorism
Submitted by Belen Fernandez on Mon, 03/16/2026 - 18:56
When Trump blasts Tehran as 'the world's number one state sponsor of terror', he might as well be looking in the mirror
Mourners cry during the funeral of children killed in an attack on a primary school in Minab, Iran, on 3 March 2026 (Amirhossein Khorgooei/ISNA/AFP) Off My first visit to Iran took place in September 2015, when I attended a conference in Tehran on the subject of “Iranian terror victims” - ranging, in this case, from the thousands of Iranians killed by the pathological regime-change cult known as the Mojahedin-e Khalq, to the Iranian scientists assassinated with the apparently not-so-secret help of the Israeli Mossad.
I had ended up at the conference by accident, as the email invitation that had materialised in my inbox was addressed not to me, but to one General Mirza Aslam Beg, who, a Google search revealed, happened to be the former head of the armed forces of Pakistan.
Via prolonged pleading with the event organisers, I finagled an invitation for myself, as well - and after a frantic sorting of my Iranian visa, I found myself on a plane bound for Tehran in the company of a reformed right-wing politician from Spain, another conference invitee.
By way of small talk, he informed me that he had advised Iran’s ambassador to Madrid that it would behoove the Islamic Republic to acquire a nuclear weapon. His suggestion had been shot down on religious grounds.
At the conference, I spoke with Shohreh Pirani, the widow of Iranian scientist Dariush Rezaeinejad, fatally shot outside his home in 2011 at the age of 35. Pirani and her four-year-old daughter had witnessed the assassination, but despite the ensuing psychological trauma, Pirani assured me she felt nothing but pity for her husband’s killers. After all, she reasoned, such acts of terrorism were unquestionably driven by desperation.
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Fast forward to the present moment, and the number of Iranian victims of terrorism has skyrocketed in accordance with the unprovoked and downright psychopathic war launched against the country by the United States and Israel on 28 February.
More than 3,000 Iranians have been killed in the assault, including over 1,400 civilians. The administration of US President Donald Trump has unleashed an incoherent litany of excuses for why the Iranian government must be taken out, with Trump singlehandedly staging one of the most impressive cases of emotional projection in history: “They’re sick people. They’re mentally ill. Sick people. They are angry. They are crazy. They are sick.”
Western narrative
Among the very first casualties of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran were the more than 170 people, most of them schoolgirls, massacred in an attack on an elementary school in the city of Minab. Needless to say, one can imagine the apoplectic uproar that would have ensued had Iran managed to kill even one American schoolgirl.
In Minab, on the other hand, US media outlets did their best to refrain from reporting too extensively on the incident until it became absolutely unavoidable, while conservative lobbyist Matt Schlapp offered his own utterly charming two cents by suggesting that the girls were better off dead than “alive in a burka”.
But even now, the cold-blooded mass murder perpetrated in Minab and beyond has not put a dent in the western narrative that it is in fact the Iranians who are the “terrorists”.
Nor is Iran the one that has spent more than two years fuelling Israel's genocide in the Gaza Strip with billions upon billions of dollars in aid and weaponry
One pet accusation that US officials delight in invoking as proof of Iran’s alleged terroristic orientation is the “Death to America” slogan that frequently features at Iranian political rallies - as though it is somehow more of a crime to pronounce these few words in opposition to US foreign policy and imperialism, than it is to physically sow death and destruction across the entire globe.
The US has devoted its contemporary history to wreaking carnage everywhere from Vietnam and Afghanistan to El Salvador and Nicaragua - whether by do-it-yourself military assault, or by training, funding and equipping right-wing armies and death squads with a penchant for slaughtering peasants.
Nor is Iran the one that has spent more than two years fuelling Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip with billions upon billions of dollars in aid and weaponry. The official death toll in Gaza has surpassed 72,000, although the true number is undoubtedly astronomically higher.
In other words, when Trump blasts Iran as “the world’s number one state sponsor of terror”, he might as well be looking in the mirror. In addition to Gaza, the US is also underwriting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s continuing terrorisation of Lebanon, which has risen to unprecedented levels following the launch of the war on Iran.
Climate of fear
The definition of “terrorism”, as per Encyclopedia Britannica, is “the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective”. And there’s no denying that that’s precisely what the US and Israel are up to by literally bombing the living daylights out of Iran, turning the sky black and triggering toxic rain.
My last visit to Iran was in 2016, when I spent two weeks in the mind-blowing architectural gem of Isfahan, now also under maniacal US-Israeli assault. As an American citizen, I was technically required to have an official minder at all times, but months of negotiations with a friendly female Iranian travel agent bore fruit, and I was ultimately assigned an equally friendly male guide for just one day.
Who threatens the Arab world: Iran or the US and Israel? Read More »
In between gawking at the stupefying beauty of Isfahan’s Naqsh-e Jahan Square and availing myself of the obligatory photo op in front of some “Down With USA” posters, I made a few more friends in the city.
One was a bookseller named Hadi, who invited me to a weekly book fair in an underground parking lot and forcibly gifted me various texts, including Ho Chi Minh on Revolution and a colossal hardback Farsi-English translation of the 13th-century Persian poet Saadi Shirazi’s works. Hadi also accompanied me on an excursion to Mount Soffeh, south of Isfahan, which he insisted I could not leave Iran without seeing.
Another friend was Hamid, a former volleyball player who invited me to go jogging with him along the river and who - despite harbouring no affection whatsoever for the Iranian government - blamed US sanctions for funding cuts to Iranian sports teams and the premature end to his volleyball career.
Of course, decades of US sanctions have made life hell for Iranians in many other more existential ways, including by inhibiting public access to various necessary medications - amounting to another effective weapon in the US arsenal, even during the absence of all-out war on Iran.
But now that the US and its Israeli partner-in-crime are massacring Iranian schoolgirls without batting an eye, and otherwise undertaking the “calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear”, it’s high time we call out the real terrorists.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
War on Iran Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29
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