It is both astonishing and disheartening how the world continues to turn a blind eye to the calculated manipulations of Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who has turned state violence into a political lifeline. Chijioke Dike’s essay, brimming with glorified accounts of Israeli airstrikes and intelligence operations, is not an objective analysis of Middle East security. Rather, it is a disturbingly romanticized endorsement of unprovoked aggression, lawlessness, and warmongering, conveniently omitting the human cost and the deeper political rot behind it all.
Let us begin with the plain truth: Iran is not the aggressor in this crisis. It is the one being encircled, sanctioned, infiltrated, and attacked by a nuclear-armed Israel, a state that has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), refuses IAEA inspections, and stockpiles an estimated 80 to 90 nuclear warheads. Meanwhile, Iran, under relentless international scrutiny, possesses not a confirmed single nuclear bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), not Iranian propaganda, but a UN body, has repeatedly confirmed this. What Iran does possess is the will to assert its sovereignty and resist being dictated to by Western-backed regimes in its own region.
Netanyahu, facing ongoing criminal trials for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, has made war his personal shield. When his “judicial overhaul” triggered mass protests in Israel, the largest in the country’s history, and with his legal day of reckoning drawing near, the October 7th Hamas attack emerged like a godsend. That the Israeli intelligence community, with its globally renowned surveillance systems, failed to prevent such a breach at its most fortified border continues to raise eyebrows. Many now suspect October 7th was either allowed to happen or cynically exploited to justify a genocidal campaign in Gaza and reset Netanyahu’s political calculus.
Almost overnight, the massive anti-Netanyahu movement disappeared under war hysteria. The Israeli press fell in line. His coalition tightened around him. The world, distracted by horrifying images from Gaza, forgot the reason Israelis had taken to the streets in the first place, corruption and creeping authoritarianism. Netanyahu, who should have been standing trial, became a “wartime leader.”
When domestic outrage threatened to resurface, as Israeli northern towns were evacuated under Hezbollah rocket fire, Netanyahu pivoted again, dragging the U.S. into escalations with Iran. First through Biden, who was hesitant but cornered. Now through Trump, whom he appears to be using as a political battering ram just as his corruption trial resumes. This latest strike on Iran, cloaked in national security rhetoric, is nothing more than a desperate ploy to derail nuclear talks, harden regional hostilities, and once again buy time to delay his reckoning in court.
And Dike calls this strategy “courageous”? He calls drone assassinations, violations of sovereign airspace, and the murder of scientists and civilians “necessary”? No. These are not acts of defence. They are the calculated moves of a man cornered by law and emboldened by silence. This is not Entebbe, this is Enron with missiles.
Let’s also confront the grotesque fiction that Iran is isolated or hated by the Islamic world. Iran is a founding member of BRICS+, maintains robust relations with Russia, China, Iraq, Syria, Venezuela, and major powers across Asia and Africa. The Abraham Accords, paraded by some as a sign of Arab-Israeli reconciliation, are elite diplomatic arrangements that do not reflect the will of the Arab street, where sympathy for Palestine and contempt for Israeli apartheid remain overwhelming. Iran is not seeking domination, it is seeking a balance in a region overrun by Western military bases and proxy governments.
It is equally dishonest to label Iran’s support for Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis as destabilization, while ignoring the sheer scale of Israel’s state-sponsored destruction. In 2024 alone, over 137,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, according to UN data. Entire neighborhoods turned to rubble. Hospitals bombed. Journalists and aid workers targeted. And yet, Dike demands we cheer on the very regime responsible for this carnage as it sets its sights on Tehran.
If Israel truly sought peace, it would open its nuclear program to IAEA inspection. It would stop violating international law with impunity. It would seek diplomacy, not dominance. But Israel, under Netanyahu, does not want peace. It wants submission. And Iran refuses to kneel.
Chijioke Dike’s invocation of the Holocaust and Talmudic references is intellectually manipulative. Historical trauma does not give any nation a blank cheque to brutalize others. To invoke “Never Again” while committing atrocities in Gaza and threatening annihilation in Tehran is not just hypocrisy, it is moral inversion. The world must stop treating Israel’s historical suffering as an eternal license to commit present-day crimes.
And then there’s the insult to our intelligence: citing apocalyptic fiction by Joel Rosenberg as though prophecy justifies policy. This isn’t geopolitics, it’s messianic fantasy masquerading as strategy. Fiction cannot be the foundation for airstrikes. Eschatology cannot replace diplomacy. If Netanyahu’s military decisions are being influenced by end-time thrillers, then Israel, and the region, are in even more danger than we thought.
So let’s be clear. Iran has every right to defend its territory, to enrich uranium for civilian use, and to resist a regional order that demands its subjugation. It has not dropped bombs on Tel Aviv. It has not assassinated Israeli scientists. It has not blockaded another nation or ethnically cleansed a population. Israel has.
Netanyahu’s reign will end, whether through law, history, or consequence. But how many lives must be lost before the world stops enabling his last stand? How long will international institutions, journalists, and world leaders continue to provide him cover while he plays arsonist to an already inflamed region?
Iran will endure. It has endured centuries of empire, invasion, and upheaval. What it must not be forced to endure, in silence, is a narrative that erases its rights, ignores its restraint, and sanctifies the war crimes of a man who should be sitting in a courtroom, not a war room.
If we are to speak of justice, then let us begin by recognizing who truly profits from war, who desperately fears peace, and who will burn the region down just to escape the reach of his own nation’s laws. That man is not in Tehran. He is in Jerusalem, clinging to power by the trigger of a bomb. And the world must finally say, enough.
By Hon. Chimazuru “Oblong” Nnadi-Oforgu
OBLONG MEDIA UNLIMITED 
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