8 ms·
I work with and know a lot of Shia (non-Iranian) Muslims and listening to them talk about this assassination I'm convinced that the likelihood of attempted terr
by Cipater 7mo ago
I work with and know a lot of Shia (non-Iranian) Muslims and listening to them talk about this assassination I'm convinced that the likelihood of attempted terror attacks against the US has increased significantly.
The non-Iranian part is key. Millions of muslims around the world viewed the Iranian theocracy as the only power in the world fighting for Islam. They are devastated.
- echelon_musk 7mo agoI can't recommend Heretic by Ayaan Hirsi Ali enough.
- CoastalCoder 7mo agoFor those of us who haven't read it, could you explain why it's salient on this topic?
- dotancohen 7mo agoIt's an English language book aimed for Westerner readers. It purports to argue that the core strategy for spreading Islam - terror - is not compatible with Western values. It also states that other features of Islam are incompatible with Western values, such as repression of women. The book argues that since these ideologies are incompatible with Western values, they must be abandoned. However, the abandonment argument is only valid if one already accepts Western values as an axiom - which being an English-language book most of the readers would agree with. These readers will perceive the book to promote the reform of Islam into a religion that resembles a modern Christian denomination, just with different idols and prayers and holidays. However those who do not come from the perspective of modern Christian values and as axiomic, will reject the argument outright. This is the Muslim population who might read it.
- ndsipa_pomu 7mo agoYou seem to be mixing up "Western values" and "Christian values" whereas Christian values are very much against the accumulation of wealth, whereas "Western values" seem to be all about worshipping wealth to the exclusion of all other considerations and even worshipping those who deliberately exploit others to amass an ungodly amount of wealth.
- dotancohen 7mo agoIf you think that small difference means that Western values are not Christian values, then you have no idea how large the gulf between your values and Islamic values are. Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?
- ndsipa_pomu 7mo agoThose values seem to be exactly the ones being discarded by the Christo-fascists of the USA. My point is that the so-called Christian values are nothing to do with the reported teachings of Jesus and instead are used to justify the exact opposite.
- dotancohen 7mo agoI did not realize that the point of discussion had changed to specifically Christo-fascists of the USA. My point still stands in regard to the vast majority of Christians you will meet. One thing that I can not stand about some modern fanatics is the representation of 1% of a population as if they represent the whole. Don't bring up Christo-fascists of the USA as representative of Christian values. That's highjacking the subject to your pet cause.
- CoastalCoder 7mo agoThis is an awesome discussion. It's showing that we need to make some finer distinctions to meaningfully engage with each other on the topic. It beats the heck out of each side assuming bad-faith.
- anon291 7mo agoTo be totally frank, Islam is the odd one out. You can call it 'Western' values or 'Christian' values or whatever in order to make it seem chauvinistic all you want, but the simple truth is that these values are often shared by many other religions and places. As an example, look at the success of the Indian Hindus and the Chinese / East Asian Buddhists in the United States and across the globe. For a reverse example, contrary to popular belief, Christians, Sikhs, and Jains in Hindu-majority India are actually richer and more educated on average. Time and time again, if you go look at the data, you'll find that Islam is almost always the odd one out. The Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Taoists, etc can all be made to get along with Christians or 'the West'. There is really only one pretty much universally problematic religion, and that's Islam. You can argue this point all you want, but the entirety of Islamic history shows it to be true. You can again (correctly, in some cases) point out various bad actions from Christians (or Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, etc), but the simple truth is this: it's pretty easy today, in 2025, to imagine how to get along with these people. In places with diverse populations and migrants from these places, there is barely any violent religious conflict. At most you get some fundies in a tizzy over someone else doing their thing. The only one that consistently performs violence is Islam. And that's something Muslims need to figure out. They don't need to abandon their religion. And they certainly do not need to be harmed for their beliefs. But, they do need to figure out how to integrate with the rest of the world in 2025 in a pluralistic global society.
- Cipater 7mo agoI don't think doctrinal reformation is possible with Islam. The Qur'an is totally prescriptive. It contains direct legal commands, judicial rules and explicit government principles which are all binding and considered as direct divine speech. I think Westernisation and an increase in the number of "casual" muslims is and will continue to be the moderating effect. Think of what is happening in Europe (as the clearest example) with the influx of Muslim immigrants who raise increasingly more assimilated children as the blueprint.
- delichon 7mo agoThe cultural gulf between left and right in the US is expanding rather than being assimilated or adapting. There is nothing stopping the same thing from happening between immigrants and natives in the EU. Both cases involve fundamentaly irecconcilable values, and it just depends on which values prove more viral.
- stickfigure 7mo agoI'm not sure the left/right cultural gulf will last beyond Trump. I'm not even sure it's still alive now, with Trump's approval ratings in the toilet. The US political system takes time to cycle and isn't on the same schedule as the political pendulum.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- reactordev 7mo agoI was just saying this to someone this morning. Iran’s theocracy was the only one that has withstood the Middle East political wars in Jordan, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. To rephrase it… if The Middle East was the UK, Iran would be British. If the Middle East was the US. Iran would be California.
- quotz 7mo ago> The Middle East was the UK, Iran would be British. Did you mean England perhaps, not "British"?
- krapht 7mo agoWhy? Is Scotland innocent?
- ndsipa_pomu 7mo agoScotland is almost certainly innocent, though the Scottish people may not be. Anyhow, the worst crimes of colonialism/genocide were mainly conducted by the English (including invading/killing plenty of Scottish, Welsh and Irish people).
- breppp 7mo agoJordan political system is much older than Iran, as well as the Saudis and others. Iran theocracy is a new phenomena in the Middle East, ushering the implementation era of political Islam, later continued by ISIS, Hamas and the milder Qatar and current Turkey
- dotancohen 7mo ago[flagged]
- dj_rock 7mo agoThe Catholic Church exerted strong influence in Quebec until the 1950s. Of course since then Quebec has become the most secular region in North America.
- everdrive 7mo agoWell except for all those Shia in Iraq who more closely followed Ali al-Sistani. I still imagine they're not very happy all the same though.
- UltraSane 7mo agoSunni Muslims hate the Iranian regime and consider Shia to be heretics
- inglor_cz 7mo agoThis is not completely true. The Iranian regime gained some credibility in the Sunni world by strongly supporting the Palestinian cause. You can bet that every anti-war demonstration in the West now will have as many Palestinian flags as flags of the Iranian Islamic Republic. Stranger coalitions have been put together by politics...
- UltraSane 7mo agoOh boy flying the flag of the Islamic Republic in the US would get so much blowback. Everyone knows how incredibly evil it is. It recently killed at least 20,000 protestors to stay in power.
- chasd00 7mo agoThere were Hamas flags in the streets of NYC on Oct 8th 2023. Some people will gladly support anything.
- mfru 7mo agoI hope the people doing the blowback also blowback against flying US flags, a country that is famously responsible for so, so many deaths.
- UltraSane 7mo agoYou think flying the US flag INSIDE the US will have blowback?
- Cipater 7mo agoEvery single one of them? There are many Sunnis who view their leadership as "traitors to the cause" and respected Iranian defiance especially against Israel. It's far from black and white.
- TacticalCoder 7mo ago[flagged]
- throw0101c 7mo ago>> Millions of muslims around the world viewed the Iranian theocracy as the only power in the world fighting for Islam. They are devastated. > They are devastated but they are were totally quiet on the unarmed thirty thousands+ protesters the islamist iranian regime killed in a matter of days a few weeks ago. One person's protestor is another's insurrectionist. See also the folks on January 6: (now-pardoned) patriots trying to 'stop the steal', or crazies trying to overthrow the government?
- Recurecur 7mo agoYou should read up on “false equivalence”…
- I-M-S 7mo agoI believe the OP's point was precisely that there's no objective true and false equivalence - there's just forces trying to impose a narrative which one is which.
- throw0101c 7mo ago> You should read up on “false equivalence”… You should read up on "Terrorists or Freedom Fighters": * https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/terrorists-or-freedom-fighters-terrorism-protest-and-power-p-54-67 https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/terroris... * https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/no-volume/on-terrorists-and-freedom-fighters/ https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/no-volume/on-terrorists-a...
- HDThoreaun 7mo agoThe US didn’t mass kill Jan 6ers.
- 7mo ago
- markus_zhang 7mo agoThe "good" part is that Sunni Muslims probably won't have the same feeling, or do they? But I agree with the assessment. I'd definitely avoid large public events. Darn the world is becoming more and more chaotic and we are just waiting for China to put up the last piece to make it into 19th Europe.
- CoastalCoder 7mo ago> China to put up the last piece to make it into 19th Europe. Could you elaborate for us non-historians?
- bluedevil2k 7mo agoTaking over Taiwan.
- dotancohen 7mo agoSunni Muslims generally oppose Shias in Muslim-internal matters, and vice versa. But they both generally support the other in matters against non-Muslims.
- armenarmen 7mo agoArab Bedouin proverb "I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousin; I and my brother and my cousin against the world”
- rayiner 7mo agoSunni Muslims will be upset too, because Israel was involved.
- markus_zhang 7mo agoUpset enough to get into terrorism?
- rayiner 7mo ago
- kjfarm 7mo agoI think the responses are very diverse throughout the region. Got example, in Karachi protestors gathered outside a consulate https://apnews.com/article/pakistan-protesters-attacked-us-consulate-karachi-iran-a3cc0c3c6f126cc54a657f61d312a203 https://apnews.com/article/pakistan-protesters-attacked-us-c... But inside Tehran (and in my neighborhood of D.C.) there have been celebrations https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/world/middleeast/iran-khameni-celebrations.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/world/middleeast/iran-kha...
- Cipater 7mo agoAny celebrations are an indicator but are far from the entire picture. Wouldn't there be celebrations in the US if Trump died? What conclusions would you draw from that?
- muzani 7mo agoExactly. Oddly enough most countries have politics split down the middle. A left and right. Up and down. Rarely even a 2/3 majority. If you wanted to find people celebrating, you'd find people celebrating. But my opinion is more often than not, you have two bad guys fighting each other for the top spot. They don't support Option B because they're dumb, they support B because Option A would sell his mom for power, while Option C would just become a puppet to A.
- estearum 7mo agoIt's a lot easier to agree Current Guy Bad than it is to agree on who Next Guy should be
- rayiner 7mo agoJudging by George W. Bush’s approval rating right after 9/11, it probably wouldn’t be very many.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- somenameforme 7mo agoThe most interesting thing to me is that he was apparently assassinated while working at his office. It's not like the US/Israeli actions were a secret, yet he seemingly made no effort to secure himself. It's hard not to see this as an intentional martyrdom. So it will be interesting to see whether his calculations were correct, or whether the US' were. The one thing I think must be true is that I can't imagine an 86 year old cleric was an especially effective leader. So assassinating him is quite the gamble. I'd love to know what the military's chatbots thought about this idea.
- Cipater 7mo ago>I'd love to know what the military's chatbots thought about this idea. What a mad world we're hurtling ourselves into.
- mindslight 7mo ago"You're thinking about this just like a professional warfighter would" I'd say the main contemporary dynamic of the times is hallucination. Not necessary by LLMs per se, but rather by the humans wielding them to mainline their own bullshit. In a way Grump himself is just society's own embodied hallucination from decades of Republican marketing hopium. Some scraps of dignity are surely about to trickle down any day now, once those mean libuhruls are out of the way. (the "warfighter" terminology-coddling obviously coming from the user prompt)
- wiseowise 7mo agoProphets are more dangerous when they're dead. At 86 he would either die from old age or fighting "imperialistic, evil" Israel/US.
- _DeadFred_ 7mo agoThis Prophet believed/taught that school girls should be raped before they are executed for not wearing hats so that they can't get into heaven (believing God would judge a child for being raped). Should a believer/teacher of such things even be called a prophet? Old boy was straight trash with a horrific morality.
- vovavili 7mo agoI have seen major celebrations here in a major Dutch city. If anything, my bet is that overall balance of Muslim opinion on the West has probably shifted to be more favorable.
- jojobas 7mo agoBoth can be true at the same time.
- dotancohen 7mo agoAre you suggesting that the US should appease Muslim ideology, under threat of terror?
- Cipater 7mo agoNo, I am telling you about people's sentiments. You are not required to do anything with the information.
- nerdyadventurer 7mo agoThis is not about Muslim idealogy at all, it is US want to play god on who to have nukes or not. Similar to Libiya WMD.
- Kinrany 7mo agoMen have been trying to decide who's allowed to own big sticks forever, there's no "playing god" involved
- spaghetdefects 7mo ago[flagged]
- lm28469 7mo ago> Muslim idealogy If you can't differentiate muslims from islamists you can probably keep your comments for yourself...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- dotancohen 7mo agoIf you can not recognise that Muslims overwhelmingly support Islamist extremists, then maybe you should not tell others who have quite the experience in the matter, to keep their comments to themselves.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jimmydoe 7mo agoAnyone live in a metro in a major western country should feel legitimately feared, the chance of lone wolf just 100x-ed.
- ndsipa_pomu 7mo agoThis is likely what the USA fascists want - some Islamic terrorist attacks (possibly false flag operations) will provide a justification for removing non-whites from the USA.
- rayiner 7mo ago> The non-Iranian part is key. Millions of muslims around the world viewed the Iranian theocracy as the only power in the world fighting for Islam Yup. My Bangladeshi relatives who have no stake in Iran are upset. I suspect the lady who cuts my daughter’s hair—who was an accountant back in Iran and celebrated when Jimmy Carter died—is over the moon.
- anon291 7mo agoWe cannot continue like this where one religion gets to get mad whenever they do not achieve utter dominance.
- jpster 7mo ago> the likelihood of attempted terror attacks against the US has increased significantly. And one wonders if a terror attack on US soil would be the justification POTUS uses to cancel elections
- spaghetdefects 7mo agoTerror attacks? I think you mean self-defense, as the US/Israel just bombed Iran with no justification at all. That is a terror attack.
- ChoGGi 7mo agoWell, no they were trying to get Epstein out of his bunker... I mean free the oil from the people, err no, the people from the regime. Someone start playing fortunate son.
- encoderer 7mo ago[flagged]
- spaghetdefects 7mo agoIsrael murdered the indigenous population of Palestine, Iran possibly (zero proof has been produced) killed some Zionist spies. These are not the same, Israel is our enemy, not Iran.
- throwawayheui57 7mo ago> killed some Zionist spies. These are not the same. Be careful, you still need some moral credibility left, to defend the Palestinians with.
- rayiner 7mo agoI’m quite sympathetic to the general assertion that the U.S. launches unprovoked attacks on random countries that didn’t attack the U.S. Iraq being the most egregious example. But Iran is perhaps the least sympathetic actor on that front. Iran has been attacking the U.S. and its proxies for no reason for decades: https://www.britannica.com/event/1983-Beirut-barracks-bombings https://www.britannica.com/event/1983-Beirut-barracks-bombin.... Tehran is a thousand miles away from Tel Aviv. Iran has no rational self-interest in whatever is going on between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Iran got itself involved in that conflict because it inexplicably chose to involve itself in that conflict.
- weregiraffe 7mo agoOh, so they ARE in fact death cultists! Thanks for confirming that, I guess there's a lot more work for bombs.
- SegfaultSeagull 7mo agoFirst, the Islamic Republic was not “the only power fighting for Islam.” It was fighting to expand Iranian state power under a religious banner. There’s a difference. The regime’s foreign policy has consistently followed geopolitical logic: expanding influence through proxies in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Gaza (Hamas and PIJ), Iraq (Shi’a militias), Syria (Assad), and Yemen (Houthis). That’s empire-building through asymmetric warfare, not some abstract defense of the global ummah. Second, Islam itself is not a single centralized political bloc. The idea that “millions of Muslims” saw Tehran as their champion ignores deep sectarian and national divides. Sunni-majority states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, and Turkey have spent decades actively countering Iranian influence. Many Arabs view Persian expansionism with suspicion for historical reasons that predate modern geopolitics by centuries. Even within Shi’a communities outside Iran, loyalty to Tehran is far from universal. Third, the Islamic Republic’s model is explicitly totalitarian: clerical rule, suppression of dissent, morality police, imprisonment of reformers, execution of protesters. Calling that “fighting for Islam” collapses a complex global religion into one revolutionary state ideology. Many Muslims—Sunni and Shi’a—despise the regime precisely because it fuses religion with authoritarian control. As for retaliation risk: yes, whenever a regime that funds proxy groups is hit, the risk of attempted attacks rises. That’s true by definition. But that risk has existed for decades already because of the regime’s own strategy of exporting violence. The question isn’t whether risk increases from zero. It’s whether removing a state sponsor that systematically arms, trains, and finances militant networks reduces long-term capacity for global destabilization. Iran was not some neutral spiritual defender of the faith. It was a regional power using religion as a mobilizing ideology while building a cross-border militia network. That distinction matters.
- jo6gwb 7mo agoWell that's an awfully Islamophobic take. Never has a condition been so aptly named. This morning's terror attack in Austin was perpetuated by one wearing a "property of Allah" shirt. The world need not continue to live with and accept Islamic barbarism, and the people of the US will not bend to the sword of the Mullahs or your Shia coworkers.
- Cipater 7mo agoPeople are what they are. You can take the information I have provided into consideration when you build your internal worldview or you can ignore it. There is no call to action here. It's just data.
- anon291 7mo agoand millions of Orthodox Jews view Israel as defending Judaism. So what? Maybe all the people who are willing to shoot and kill for their holy book should be put into an area and bomb each other to death Would make a good reality tv show and an excellent warning on the danger of religious fundamentalism.
- steve-atx-7600 7mo agoSounds like you should report them to the fbi then
- Cipater 7mo agoYou seem to have misread my comment. None of the people I know and have spoken to are capable of or even thinking of violent retaliation. I am extrapolating from their sentiments that someone out there will be moved to violence.
- nailer 7mo agoThe fact that millions of muslims worshipped a terrorist is not sufficient justification to submit to terrorism.