|
U.S. military commanders have reportedly been invoking extremist Christian rhetoric to push war on Iran, selling the conflict to American troops as an existential "holy war" in apocalyptic language that experts fear could exacerbate the violence and death toll of military operations. Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, attributes the rise in extremism at the Pentagon to U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who "has created a template that the only approved member of the U.S. military is to be straight, Christian, nationalist and male." Weinstein warns that "whenever you attach an extremist aspect of any religious faith to that machinery responsible for war … we end up with one thing: oceans and oceans of blood."
|
|
James Talarico, the Democratic nominee from Texas, hopes to counter what he sees as a conservative takeover of the American church.
|
|
Iran has selected Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his father Ali Khamenei as Iran's supreme leader. The elder Khamenei was assassinated in a joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike on February 28. Iran selected the "hard-liner" Mojtaba Khamenei in defiance of President Trump, who has repeatedly claimed he can choose Iran's next leader. His selection also contradicts the Islamic Republic's previous resistance to hereditary succession. "The war changed everything," says Iranian American political analyst Hooman Majd, who adds that Iran's leadership sees the conflict as "existential" and is therefore carrying out retaliatory attacks throughout the region to "make it painful economically and in many other ways for the United States and for Israel to continue the war."
Meanwhile, preliminary investigations by The New York Times, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International indicate that the U.S. military carried out the strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran, that killed over 100 young girls. "It is a war against people," says Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard, who is calling for the school massacre to be investigated as a war crime.
"Iran is going to be changed forever," says Majd, rejecting claims from U.S. leaders that military intervention has created the conditions for a civilian uprising. "For them to be able to rise up and take control of the government is just a pipe dream. I mean, how are they supposed to do that when they're being killed or are running away from missiles almost on a daily basis?"
|
|
(Second column, 12th story, link)
Related stories:
VIDEO SHOWS KILLING OF THIRD US CITIZEN BY AGENTS...
|
|
(First column, 5th story, link)
Related stories:
The Don ripped for behavior at dignified transfer: 'Take your [expletive] hat off'...
Camouflage and crudites...
Stranded Americans Say They Were Abandoned...
UPDATES...
|
|
