I’ll remind you of two photographs you might have probably seen last week. The first one, taken at the NATO headquarters last week, showed only the Turkish flag, among 32 members of the organization, lowered to mourn the Iranian president’s death. The other one shows U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken flinching from a protester who approached him from behind, waving a sign that said "criminal" while he was testifying before the Senate committees.

Your president’s helicopter crashes, himself, the foreign minister, the regional governor and six other officials are dead; a population up and out on the streets; speculations filling the airwaves about whether it was an accident or an internal plot to eliminate Raisi from the list of possible candidates to replace Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – and only your neighbor Türkiye, with whom you make clear that you harbor not so friendly feelings about, shares your sorrow. Still unexpected by your neighbors, in your publication of your official acknowledgment of the global reactions, you fail to mention Türkiye.

Iran is, apparently, the only country that engages actively in a proxy war with Israel in order – supposedly – to support Palestinians against Zionist massacres in Gaza. The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, founded and funded by Iran during the 2006 Lebanon War, fires guided rockets and artillery shells at northern Israeli positions.

A big majority of European and American people support Palestinians, condemn the Israeli atrocities in Gaza and denounce their governments for their lack of active support of Palestinians; yet we don’t see any popular support for Iran and its proxy war against Israel anywhere in the world. No group, no student leader in Europe or the U.S. even mentions the name of Iran, let alone appreciation of what Hezbollah is doing in northern Israel.

These groups and student leaders go to lengths, at the risk of arrest by the police and expulsion from their schools, to protest the U.S. president and other politicians for their support of the Israeli genocide in Palestine but do not express their appreciation of Iran’s alleged support of Palestinians. If a protestor gets caught in "disorderly behavior" in a government building, they face not only expulsion, censure and reprimand but, depending on the state, also jail time. When a student is jailed for any reason, their scholarship from the school is also canceled. That practically means that you are kicked out of your school. If the police think that the action was not only disorderly but also riotous, then the protestor would spend years behind bars. To support Palestinians and to shout in Blinken’s face that he is a murderer and that he is a "butcher" of Gaza with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not easy; you have to take your fate into your own hands.

Yet, those young men and women do that again and again when Blinken shows up in Congress because they want their country, their politicians also join the others in isolating Israel.

Israel’s pariah status is obvious: its prime minister and some members of his Cabinet would be outcasts who would face arrest in 124 countries that recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). But 41 states have neither signed nor become parties to the Rome Statute, which created the ICC; I wonder if Netanyahu or any other of his accomplices would dare to travel to any of them, except his foster land, the US of A.

Now, at this point, I feel that I am at my wits' end: How come brave young European, American, Indonesian, Egyptian (or from any other country to this effect) men and women jeopardizing their future in their countries do not chant one, only one, slogan in support of Iran?

Could it be the fear we all (young and not so young) have in the back of our minds: The existing regime in Iran seems to be as genocidal as the one in Israel? Could it be the statement ground into our brains when the former president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said they would wipe Israel off the map?

I am not familiar with Netanyahu’s personal belief system to tell if he is as heretical as his Iranian counterpart to believe that humans can affect anything on their creator. However, his coalition partners, especially those three members of Itamar Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit Party and the people in the other religious Zionist parties believe that if you make God angry enough, he would give up and declare Armageddon and, as a gratitude to angering him, he would put Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and others into his heaven. They have their counterparts in Iran and in the political science texts, they are named as "Principlist." As the leader of those apocalyptic Muslims (if you can call them that), Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said if he razes the Jews from the face of the Earth, then the missing Mesiah, as the Iranian Shia believes, would appear and you know the rest!

No mullah in charge of the Iranian regime rescinded this outrageous monstrosity. No sane person who supports Palestinians should mention the name of Iran in the same sentence as Palestine. Genocide cannot be a response to genocide. You may criticize Israel, Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians as much as you can, and I’ll join you with all my heart, but cannot say anything like erasing Israel off the map.

(A note of clarification: Especially after the declaration of Joe Biden that he is also a Zionist like Netanyahu, we keep seeing a new definition of "Zionist Christians" as "those who espouse the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land." No, Sirs! You cannot fool either Christians nor, Muslims and Jews: Christian Zionists are those who are anticipating and hoping for a war to end all wars and a resulting Christian world that they claim will vanquish "evil." If they mean that Jews’ returning to Israel would be for the purpose of fulfillment of scriptural prophecy, then, yes, you are as evangelical as Mike Pence, former vice president of the United States.)

The ethnic cleansing of Muslims from Palestine is no different than the cleansing of Jews from Israel. Both are genocide, and it simply makes Netanyahu’s Israel and mullahs’ Iran both pariah states.