Two female students pose for a selfie on graduation day at the University of Tehran
Peter Oborne and Irfan Chowdhury – Middle East Eye April 13, 2026
Two conceptual fallacies lie at the heart of the illegal American–Israeli assault on Iran.
The first is the idea that Iran is a barbaric country, stuck in the Middle Ages, and incapable of fitting in with the modern world. As Trump put it when asked why striking Iranian bridges and power plants would not be a war crime. He replied: “They’re animals.”
The second mistake concerns the belief that the United States represents western civilisation.
In this article we subject these basic assumptions to scrutiny by examining the intellectual accomplishments and capacity of leading figures on both sides.
We show that Iran’s leadership is far more sophisticated, intelligent, literate and accomplished than Trump’s United States
Let’s start with a comparison between Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s former supreme leader who was assassinated by the United States in the early hours of the war, and US President Donald Trump.
Khamenei was a Marja – an expert in Islamic jurisprudence in Twelver Shi’a Islam. The nearest British comparison might be king’s counsel or a high court judge.
The late supreme leader was also a superb linguist, fluent not just in his native Persian but also Arabic, Azeri and Turkish. He also knew a fair amount of English.
He was an enthusiast of Persian poetry but also read widely across western literature: Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Dante Alighieri, John Steinbeck and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
In an interview he gave to Iran’s state-run television network in 2004, he stated:”In my opinion, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables is the best novel that has been written.” Pretty good judgment.
Stark contrast
The contrast between Khamenei and the man who ordered his assassination is telling. Tony Schwartz, who ghostwrote Trump: The Art of the Deal, speculated that Trump had never read a single book in his adult life.
In Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Trump’s biographer, Michael Wolff, stated: “Some believed [during his first term in office] that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.”
The comparison between Dr Ali Larijani, Iran’s assassinated secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and his closest US counterpart, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is very telling. Hegseth did study at Princeton, one of the most celebrated universities. But his academic record simply does not match up to Larijan
Larijani obtained his PhD on Kantian mathematics and subsequently wrote three books on Kant.
Here’s Israeli journalist Gid’on Lev on Larijani: “Even while serving in government over decades, he has never abandoned what appears to be his greatest passion: philosophy.”
Lev called him “a brilliant thinker who combines, in an unusual way, a life of contemplation with a life of action – no small feat. In his writings, Larijani tries to defend the basic premises of his extreme religious worldview using the rules of western philosophy, and he often advances arguments that are genuinely thought-provoking.”
The comparison between Larijani and the former Fox News presenter, drunkard and bigot Pete Hegseth is simply embarrassing.
Dr Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, got his PhD in political thought from the University of Kent. His doctoral thesis examines the intersection of western-style liberal democracy and Islamic governance. Intellectually he operates on a higher plane than his US counterpart, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is a denier of man-made climate change.
We now turn to an examination of the delinquent crop of White House or Trumpian publicists: Karoline Leavitt, Stephen Miller and Senator Lindsey Graham.
The nearest to an Iranian equivalent is Seyed Mohammad Marandi. Marandi, who one of us has known for nearly two decades, completed his doctorate on the poet Byron at the University of Birmingham, and now teaches English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran.
Unlike so many of the trivial people who flourish at the Trump White House, Professor Marandi has real-life experience, serving his country in the terrible Iran-Iraq War, during which he survived two chemical weapons attacks.
He has consistently offered far more coherent and accurate analysis of the likely course of the war on Iran than Trump’s spokespeople.
The high intellectual calibre of the Iranian political leadership is a reflection on the Iranian education system.
Intellectual colossus
Educational standards were dreadful under the US-backed Shah. Since the Islamic revolution they have improved prodigiously. For example, the percentage of female STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) graduates exceeds the United States, according to figures from Unesco.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran led to a huge increase in women in higher education. Before the Islamic Revolution, most Iranian women and men were illiterate, whereas now, the vast majority can read and write.
According to national census data, in 1966, only 17.42 percent of the Iranian female population was literate, and 39.19 percent of the male population was literate. In 1976, these figures were 47.49 percent for men and 35.48 percent for women.
By contrast, in 1986 – post-revolution – the women’s literacy rate had climbed to 52.1 percent. The second post-revolutionary national census in 1996 showed that 74.2 percent of the Iranian female population over the age of six were literate, and this figure was 74.7 percent for men.
The 2006 census revealed that 80.3 percent of the total female population over the age of six was literate; the corresponding figure for the male population was 88.7 percent. In 2022, UNESCO estimated Iran’s female literacy rate at 99 percent among ages 15-24.
Norman Finkelstein taught John Stuart Mill at the Imam Sadiq University in Iran, in 2014. He said: “It was a very satisfying teaching experience… The religious scholars were definitely very smart, and very serious.
“It was kind of Plato’s Republic, and this is the guardian Philosopher Kings, and you had a sense that these people took ideas very seriously, and you can have a good conversation with them.”
Finkelstein recalled a conversation with a student who did not have a mobile phone: “I asked ‘why don’t you own a cell phone?’, and he says, ‘why do you need a cell phone? All it enables you to do is to talk to people horizontally all around you, whereas if you read a book you can have a direct connection to God.’ And I thought that was pretty impressive. I don’t hear young people saying things like that. It was […] a special moment.”
Of course, there are massive human rights violations in Iran, but it’s not the haven of backwardness that the US loves to depict.
Flawed analysis
Trump has called Iran “a nation of terror and hate”, and has said: “You’re talking about a country that’s been evil for 47 years.”
Asked about reports that the US had bombed a desalination plant in Iran, he responded: “They [the Iranians] are among the most evil people ever on earth.”
In US and Israeli discourse, Iran is a monolithically evil country that represents the antithesis of civilisation.
We suggest that this flawed analysis helps to explain why the United States has been out-thought, outmanoevred and outclassed by the Iranians ever since the US and Israel launched their barbaric assault five weeks ago.
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Peter Oborne’s new book, Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza, was recently published by Or Books. Oborne won best commentary/blogging in both 2022 and 2017, and was also named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Drum Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye. He was also named as British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His latest book is The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam, published in May by Simon & Schuster. His previous books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism.
Irfan Chowdhury is a freelance writer and PhD student at the University of Brighton. His PhD is titled: ‘How systematic were the British Army’s war crimes in Iraq between 2003 and 2009? An investigation into Britain’s abuse of underage Iraqi boys’.His articles have been published in Declassified UK, Middle East Monitor, Bella Caledonia, Iraq Now, Mondoweiss, Roar News, Peace News, Liberated Texts, and Norman Finkelstein’s website.
The US represents the ‘civilisation’ of the Khazars.
The barbaric US does represent western civilisation as we descend into barbarism. We adopted the cruelest models of neoliberalism in which a few gain extraordinary wealth at the cost of the many, and now not only is neoliberalism about to bring down western economies it is about to bring down western civilisation. Misrule has robbed the masses to the point of poverty and homelessness and now the elitists need plunder and booty from abroad and they have become animals in search of it.
An excellent and informative article, undermined by the criticism of Marco Rubio for his “denial of Man-Made climate change”. Do Messrs Oborne and Chowdhury still believe that carbon dioxide causes Global Warming? Do they support Net Zero measures which are destroying significant parts of the UK economy, even though carbon dioxide has been shown in multiple studies to be a vital essential for agriculture, tree growth and growing plants etc.?
Well Iran today is not occupied by the crypto jew class…..Once they takeover everything goes into decline.
To think that this intellectual giant was murdered by a lout who looks like a superannuated nightclub bouncer makes me so angry. Mind you, Trump was also an aspiring writer and poet. He didn’t model himself too much on Jane Austen, though. I believe one of his short stories included a passage about “grabbing women by the *****.” Very romantic, don’t you think?
“A nation of terror and hate.” A nation that has been evil since created in 1948.This sounds like our greatest ally in the ME….jewistan
Decades of anti-Iran propaganda on the Jewtube/NYT led to the current disaster.
Iran has oil, and the USA should of allied with Iran.
But the USA foolishly allied with Israel, because Jews own the media.
Amerikans are stupid goy mules being led by the nose to perdition.
All Jews involved should be rounded up and put to death for the current war.
Trump and Netanyahu should be put to death for their massive crimes.
The current pope should be put to death for not damning Israel and the USA. Trump is directly attacking Pope who barely says a thing about Gaza. the pope is a fraud
the pope criticizes Iran, what about the log in his own eye
Agreed, it is embarrassing comparing the two, but you lost me at man made climate change. Your credibility disappeared.
In saying that “They’re animals.”, Trump has exposed himself to be as base and depraved as his Zionist doner class, along with his boss, Netanyahu – all very seriously infected with their exclusivity and entitlement complexes giving them a false sense of superiority. Just in saying this, he has added to the unification and resolve in most Muslim nations on the globe against the US and Israel, as well in the Asian block of nations fed up with the murdering and plundering US-UK-Israeli-Western-led juggernaut. Then we see the Western facture where even in the US the resolve is against Israel and the US.
Trump, no doubt, was advised to spread the hate against Zionist foes, such that perhaps Israeli leaders would not appear so isolated in propagating their hate and genocidal passions. Likely, their AI told them before the 2023 the destruction of Gaza, that they would have to exhibit their alleged superior and entitled orientations to their foes in the most terrorizing and ruthless of ways, all for psychological dominance over them. The Zio plan has always been for Israel to grown while at the same time providing the pretext for the Western powers to seize and control Middle East oil and gas resources.
Either by AI, or by some diabolical sociopathic advice, for Zionist Israel, which is the mythical Davidic leader of most of the Jewish people around the globe, the Gaza genocide was not just meant for immediate land clearances, but was also designed as a terrorist operation to those in their foes in Iran and in the Middle East who oppose Israeli expansionism – all very Nazi like on their Lebensraum-way to a bloody Stalingrad. Puppet leaders in places like Lebanon would have reason to be neutral in the face of such Israeli ruthlessness. The threat of no quarter to the leaders of Iran who were impervious to Western Epstein-style controls, was sure to be effective. So, they must have thought – because as we now know, Gaza was a very “planned” operation.
The problem is that neither AI, or the “superior” Zionist 3D chess players, are infallible. They clearly had on no idea what really would happen by wearing their unresolved inner hates and hang-ups on their sleeves, while slaughtering anyone who opposed their will, along with all of the helpless human beings in their way, making them seem to themselves as rats to be exterminated. They had no clear idea what that Nazi-like insignia of ruthless racial or ethnic supremacy would do in the minds of the Iranian people to ignite their own resolve, and what it would do in the minds of hundreds of millions of people around the globe. Clearly, they only considered the overall effects of such psychological warfare tactics intending to inspire an uncompromising resolve in the Israeli people before the great march over the faces of those alleged “inferior animals” occupying the lands such superior people deserve. Despite the fact that so few Israelis and Jews are Aramaic descendants, but that the Arabs are, the religious Jews and Christian Zionists conveniently forget that the promise of Levant was for all of Aramaic descendants. The entire Israeli venture is a ruthless, diabolical, genocidal land grab.
In appearing ruthless and domineering in the extreme, the Israelis are advertising to the world that is the way all Jews really are. But what can you expect in being trapped in an exclusive, race-and-money-based creed of “the chosen”, devoid of any real religious or psychological forgiveness and reconciliation mechanism for their own wrong against outsiders or for the wrongs of outsiders against them? Would not such an exclusiveness, and such entitlement and superiority complexes not give them generations of stored up hate and hostility to all who oppose their designs and they deem as inferior? Was it the case that the Zionists completely understood the Nazis and that they actually admired them?
Even if the Bilderberg powers are supreme in the West, and choose to pull out all stops and support Trump, mostly in order to ensure Western control of Iranian oil and gas, along with trying to save the petrodollar, while using the war to stimulate the economy, and once-again to enable the US to train its military in current battle conditions, and to upgrade its war industry, the legacy of that Rothschild/Rockefeller-controlled group has been the destruction of the West. They can ignore, but we cannot ignore their willful destruction efforts, which include: globalist nation deconstruction, economic degrowth, the cancel-culture mainly against Christianity, the ruination of the family system, depopulation polices entailing now a demographic nightmare, the CO2 climate hoax, the UN Agenda pretexts for end of basic rights, the Covid plandemic, spiralling debt, galloping inflation, widespread social fragmentation and alienation, and the nullification of any real hope for a better world, or even a better nation, for our surviving younger generations.
Likely their AI, or the Zio chess masters also foresaw before they executed the Gaza genocide that Iran could not be defeated using conventional warfare, although with a quick decapitation of the leadership, the chance of a coup may be better. That would alternative to war would only be one scenario which could be played out, and they would have been able to foresee that it was far more likely that the extreme terror tactics demonstrating the ruthlessness of Israel and the US would also be necessary for any such a capitulation. Secondly, it would be apparent to them that if there was no expected capitulation as expected, and conventional methods were not going to win the day in any war, including carpet bombing as in Iraq, then the blatancy of the Gaza genocide, would become psychologically a normalizing event in the West, necessary if they had to pull out all of the stops and use some of the weapons of mass destruction in the US and Israeli arsenals.
Until consciences have been deadened to the human bestiality unleased in modern wars, or as with initial reactions to such things as abortion or killing off other classes of unwanted people, it is always necessary to find ways to dehumanise the victims in the minds of the squeamish. Calling them subhuman, or “animals” is part of the psychological propaganda process, in preparation for a war.
If our nations outside of the US and Israel come out in full support of the war against Iran, and the continued usurpations of territories for Israel, then we will know that the Western ruling class as represented by everyone who attended the Bilderberger are not only the enemies of Iran, but also the enemies of everyone who is a human being and a child of God – and our marching orders against them ought to be very fixed.
@ Yukon … spot on.
Zion Don the Con is a completely corrupt, deeply compromised, depraved, low rent, buffoonish thug. And don’t even get me started on Satanyahjoo…
I got a good laugh at Don the Con calling people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens “low IQ” and “stupid” when the overly-pliable jabbering imbecile Chump comes off as dumber than dog shit and soaked to the gills on mid-grade whiskey….and an ambulatory pick-a-hole gloryhole for whatever slobbering yid wants to have at it….
“As Trump put it when asked why striking Iranian bridges and power plants would not be a war crime. He replied: ‘They’re animals.'”
Is that what his Talmud religion say. How dare the goy animals resist the chosen ones of Satan!