Three years ago, the world witnessed the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. The October 7 tragedy was not a localized flare-up but an absolute depravity orchestrated by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s proxy Hamas.
Today, marking the third anniversary of this catastrophic event, we must look beyond the immediate tactical theater of war.
October 7 exposed a broader, deeply interconnected global reality, stripping away decades of diplomatic illusions to lay bare the true, unyielding nature of Israel’s enemies and the undeniable alignment of its real allies.
Playing politics with national security is measured in human lives
In 2025, the US House of Representatives uncovered that the Biden administration funded protests against the Netanyahu government between 2022 and 2023.
Additionally, reckless reporting during domestic disputes, including Haaretz’s sensationalized coverage of Israeli military pilots refusing to serve in March 2023, sent dangerous signals of weakness to Jerusalem’s adversaries, especially the Nazi-Islamist regime in Tehran.
Given the extensive, gleeful coverage of Haaretz reports across Iranian regime media, many Iranians believe these irresponsible actions directly emboldened the Islamic Republic and its proxies.
By creating the perception of a deeply fractured Israel, these demonstrations and reports ultimately helped incite the horrors of the October 7 massacre.
When media outlets and politicians play domestic politics with national security and international alliances, the consequences are directly measured in human lives.
The critical takeaway is that Israel must maintain absolute vigilance at all times, ensuring its adversaries never perceive any signal of internal fracture.
The jihadist mindset and the nuclear threat
The most critical lesson lies in understanding our enemy’s psychology.
Western policymakers consistently blunder by projecting their own rational, cost-benefit metrics onto religious fanatics, wrongly assuming every actor responds to economic incentives or fears territorial destruction. October 7 completely shattered this paradigm.
Hamas unleashed its unprecedented wave of slaughter, rape, and kidnapping, fully knowing the inevitable Israeli response and devastating cost to Gaza. Yet, they did it anyway.
Why? Because the jihadist mindset does not operate on material profit-and-loss logic; it operates on theological imperatives of destruction, martyrdom, and the eradication of the Jewish state. This behavior proves a larger existential danger.
If the Islamic Republic in Tehran acquires nuclear weapons, it will not hesitate to use them. A regime that views global annihilation as a precursor to apocalyptic redemption cannot be deterred by the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction, as you cannot deter an entity that welcomes death.
Therefore, containing or appeasing the head of the octopus is a suicidal strategy. For the sake of global survival, especially Israel’s, the Islamic Republic must be destroyed.
Antisemitism and the unbreakable Iranian-Jewish biblical bond
While the horrors of October 7 unleashed a wave of virulent antisemitism across Western cities, a remarkable counter-phenomenon occurred.
As radical leftists and Islamist sympathizers tore down posters of kidnapped Israeli children in London, Paris, and New York, Iranians stood firmly, vocally, and unapologetically alongside the Jewish people.
In the diaspora and clandestinely within Iran itself, Iranians became the steadfast allies of Israel during its darkest hour.
This is no historical coincidence, but proof that the 2,500-year-old biblical bond between Iranians and Jews remains steel-strong.
This relationship dates back to Cyrus the Great, who liberated the Jews from Babylon and helped rebuild the Holy Temple.
Decades of state-sponsored anti-Israel propaganda by the clerical regime have utterly failed to brainwash the Iranian nation. Today, facing a common oppressor, Iranians and Jews recognize that they are each other’s truest, most loyal friends.
Antisemitic protests by Islamists supported by the European left show that Europe has not changed since Theodor Herzl wrote The Jewish State in 1896.
Antisemitism is a human affliction comparable to latent tuberculosis. Large societies may carry the disease without openly expressing it, yet it can erupt into catastrophic violence, as the Holocaust demonstrated and the atrocities of October 7 revealed.
Western media, selective justice, and the silent slaughters
The sheer brutality of October 7 should have permanently shaken the global conscience. Instead, we witnessed a shameful display of selective justice and institutional antisemitism that blinded significant portions of Western media and governments.
Rather than standing firmly with a democracy under siege, major media outlets routinely echoed Hamas’s fabricated metrics and psychological warfare.
This hypocrisy becomes even more sickening when contrasted with how these same institutions treat the Iranian people. The very media outlets obsessively scrutinizing Israel’s defensive measures stood in total, complicit silence during the catastrophic slaughter of 50,000 Iranians on January 8-9, 2026.
When the Islamic Republic unleashed its full, unrestrained military brutality to crush domestic dissent, the world barely blinked. This double standard proves that human rights are weaponized as a political tool.
The lives of Iranians fighting for freedom and Jews fighting for survival are consistently minimized by a Western establishment eager to appease tyrants.
Netanyahu’s flawless wartime leadership
As a journalist who has monitored Middle Eastern geopolitics for years, I must state what the Western establishment refuses to admit: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proven himself to be one of history’s greatest wartime leaders.
Netanyahu has flawlessly managed an existential war initiated by the Islamic Nazis ruling Iran, executing a strategic counter-offensive that dismantled decades of hostile encirclement.
Following October 7, Netanyahu promised to permanently alter the geopolitical map of the Middle East, and he delivered. Under his resolute command, Hamas and Hezbollah have been fundamentally shattered, and the architect of terror, Hassan Nasrallah, was neutralized.
The Islamic Republic has effectively lost its grip on Syria, and Israel has boldly struck the head of the octopus directly on Iranian soil. Operating in lockstep with the decisive leadership of US President Donald Trump, the regime’s core military assets and clandestine nuclear installations have been severely dismantled.
The systematic elimination of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and the upper echelons of that command structure, the very executioners who butchered over 50,000 Iranians on January 8-9, 2026, served as a profound collective therapy for the Iranian nation.
Netanyahu must be given the time and unyielding support to finish the job and permanently liberate Israel and the free world from the Islamic Republic’s existential threat.
In 1979, some Iranians failed to appreciate the Shah, while others remained silent, and we are still paying the devastating price for that complacency today. I deeply hope that the people of Israel do not make the same historical blunder regarding Bibi.
Israel’s astounding resilience
Finally, this three-year war has shattered the myth of Israel’s vulnerability. Facing a multi-front assault from Iran’s proxies, enduring severe economic strains, and navigating intense international pressure, the resilience of Israel’s military, economy, and people has been nothing short of astonishing.
The enemies of Israel believed that a prolonged war of attrition would cause the Jewish state to collapse from within. They underestimated the profound societal cohesion that emerges when a nation fights an existential war.
Israel has navigated these immense challenges to emerge as an invincible military, intelligence, technological, and economic powerhouse. It has proven that it can dismantle terrorist infrastructure, decapitate enemy leadership, and sustain its society under conditions that would cause Western democracies to fracture.
Conclusion
The anniversary of October 7 is a somber reminder of the stakes we face. The head of the octopus in Tehran seeks the total erasure of both Israel and Western civilization. But this crisis has also revealed the blueprint for victory: an unbreakable alliance between the freedom-loving people of Iran and the resilient nation of Israel.
It is time for the West to abandon its failed policies, recognize its true friends, and join us in severing the head of terrorism’s octopus once and for all.
The writer is the communications director to Prince Reza Pahlavi and an Iranian journalist who previously served as editor-in-chief of news at Manoto TV, a UK-based Persian-language television network.