Hamas and Iran Have a *Lot* in Common

Experts have pontificated over whether Iran had a hand in planning the October 7 attack. But perhaps more significant is the common ideology that Tehran’s rulers and Hamas share, composed of equal parts misogyny, anti-Semitism, and Islamism. Death, to them, is an aspiration rather than a destiny to forestall. And so their subjects become expendable pawns whose demise is never a loss. …

Both Hamas and the Iranian regime are at war with the West and, as such, with all the laws devised in the West, including the laws of war. The most brutal of the Islamic Republic’s anti-riot thugs do not come to the scene of demonstrations dressed in the uniforms of the police or the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They come as what the protesters call “civilian dressers,” just as Hamas terrorists have done throughout this war to blend in with the public. Both use ambulances to penetrate the ranks of their opponents, to snatch prisoners, or to get away from hostile crowds. They share not a secret manual but a playbook of the lawless, in which nothing is forbidden if it advances the cause of the “righteous,” among whom Tehran and Hamas count themselves.

And yet, what Iran’s regime has done for more than four decades to create a new crop of zealots in its own image has backfired. Iran’s younger generations show a moral clarity that other nations in the region, and even the throngs on the streets of London and New York, do not demonstrate with regard to Hamas’s malevolent program. If Iranians have always been distinct from their predominantly Arab neighbors by virtue of race, religion, and language, now they are distinct in a new way: They are the only people in the region among whom such a large number reject the call for Israel’s destruction.

[I’d credit that to two reasons. One, the establishment of Israel had nothing to do with any Iranian territorial issues, imagined or real. Two, the mullahs have used the Palestinians for decades as a reason for the repression of Iranians, and as a result the Iranians hate the Palestinians as much as they do the mullahs. — Ed]