The Middle East is currently experiencing significant turmoil, and as Christian Zionists who advocate for "America First" are likely drawing the U.S. into a wider war, both presidential candidates and the current president have largely refrained from making any significant statements on the issue.

Could the apocalypse be upon us? Is the coming Messiah’s hypothetical landing pad in Israel more important than peace in the region? We'll review this sorry state of affairs both strategically and theologically. 

As most of you will undoubtedly be aware by the time this piece comes out, Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, was assassinated via missile strike last week in an attack that is obviously being attributed to Israel.

The assassination itself shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. Haniyeh has had a target on his back for sometime now, and, in the wake of the October 7 attacks, Israel did announce that it was going to attempt to assassinate all of Hamas's leadership, both political and military. But what makes the story particularly interesting is the timing and location of the assassination.

First, the location.

The attack is being seen as a particularly grievous offense because it was carried out in the heart of Iran’s capital, Tehran, during the inauguration of the new Iranian President. The execution of this attack during a presidential inauguration in the Iranian capital, which one would expect to be one of the most secure locations in the country, is an embarrassing security failure that is likely to trigger a major retaliatory response. More on that shortly.

Second, the timing.

The murder of Haniyeh came as Biden’s CIA director William Burns (WEF, Bilderberg, Munich Security Council) was in Rome meeting negotiators from Qatar and Egypt to discuss a ceasefire. Trey Yingst, in a surprisingly journalistic segment on “Fox and Friends,” laid things out in a way that addressed the gravity of the situation without the typical obligatory whitewashing to make Israel look good.

For those listening to the audio version, I’ll include the transcript below:

Trey Yingst: And I want to talk about this week and how rapidly things have changed on Sunday. CIA Director William Burns was in Rome, and he was meeting with Qatari and Egyptian negotiators. And the officials that we talked to were hopeful that a cease-fire agreement was about to happen between Israel and Hamas. Within a few hours after that meeting, Hamas released a statement saying the Israelis were going back on their promises and those conversations started to fall apart.

Now, just days later, the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, the head negotiator for the organization, was killed in a targeted assassination in Tehran. This is an indication that cease-fire talks are basically off the table, and I do want to just quickly read you a statement from the Qatari prime minister, the man who has been responsible for a lot of the negotiations taking place, and he had an extensive statement this morning but he asks one question here, and it's an important question in all of this.

He says, “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?”

An end to the war in Gaza is not going to happen. In the immediate aftermath of the killing of the top official from Hamas, you still have more than 100 hostages inside Gaza. No end in sight. No diplomatic solution is now on the table to end the conflict there. As you noted, there are tens of thousands of Israelis displaced in the northern part of this country. 

In case you didn’t catch it, Yingst referred to Haniyeh as a “head negotiator.”

I only mention this because it seems, and maybe it’s just me, that if you assassinate one side of an ongoing negotiation, that’ll probably complicate the negotiations a bit, right? It calls into question whether these negotiations were ever seriously on the table at all.

Naturally, the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei (not to be confused with the Ayatollah of Rocknrolla), has ordered retaliation directly against Israel due to how damaging this strike is to the national honor of Iran.

Of course, our greatest ally never comes out and takes credit for their frequent cloak-and-dagger activities, but I don’t think anyone is refuting that Israel carried out this assassination, and certainly, they aren’t denying it either.

For anyone who balks at my assertion that Israel has historically had no qualms with committing deadly and subversive operations, I’d point to the Lavon Affair as but one of many such cases where our greatest ally partook in behavior we’d consider detestable were it coming from any other nation.

The Lavon Affair, which took place in October of 1954, was a botched Mossad false flag operation in which a group of Egyptian Jews were recruited by Israeli military intelligence to plant bombs inside Egyptian, American, and British-owned targets in Alexandria and Cairo, but were caught red-handed before the operation could be carried out. The purpose of this operation was to instigate conflict between Egypt and the West, while also motivating Britain to maintain a military presence in the Suez Canal.

Real Godly stuff, am I right?

Despite the undisputable evidence, Israel denied its involvement for over 50 years, until 2005, when then-Israeli President Moshe Katsav decided to honor the three surviving members with certificates of appreciation. The USS Liberty incident, a false flag that killed 34 and injured 171 American soldiers, serves as another example of the West's cover-up of fatal Israeli skullduggery.

I only bring these examples up to highlight the fact that when Mossad, Shin Bet, or the IDF carry out morally reprehensible acts, they tend to just deny it, and in turn, the Western governments allow them to get away with it, only acknowledging their misdeeds once substantial time has passed, if at all. That is exactly what seems to be happening with the assassination of Haniyeh.

And to be clear, I’m not saying that the murder of a single member of the Hamas leadership is comparable to the deaths of American soldiers on the USS Liberty, but when you consider that this assassination will likely cause the region to move towards a greater conflict, one that will inevitably lead to military and civilian casualties—not to mention that it was carried out while feigning interest in a ceasefire agreement—the situation begins to take on much more gravity than the simple killing of one extremist.

Anticipating Greater Conflict

The deadly state of affairs in the Middle East has been characterized by a series of escalations, beginning with the tragic but preventable events of October 7th. Of course, we’re ignoring the preceding decades of atrocities and building tension, but for the sake of simplicity, let's start with 10/7.

There were the initial attacks by Hamas, followed by Israel’s sustained response, the sending of American carrier strike groups into the Eastern Mediterranean to provide tactical support and to intimidate Iran and its proxies from escalating the conflict into a wider war, the outbreak of war in the Red Sea with the Houthis, Hezbollah just itching to rain missiles on Tel Aviv, and now we have the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran to potentially act as the inciting incident—the striking of the match—so to speak, that will ignite the powder keg that is the Middle East.

Now we not only have the Ayatollah assuring us that a response is imminent, but Hezbollah is testing out its missile systems by hitting various targets in northern Israel. This idea that Hezbollah is an insignificant force is highly misleading; it has tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of missiles aimed at various Israeli cities.

The most notable aspect of all this? The deafening, cataclysmic silence of Western leadership regarding this highly volatile situation.

Biden has been largely kept out of sight since the debate, after which he was summarily forced out of the race by the Democrat establishment.

In my attempt to find literally anything regarding Biden’s stance on the assassination, I found a public appearance where he managed, as always, to avoid any questions, and I also found a rather curt statement regarding an alleged phone call that he and Kamala apparently had with Netanyahu in the aftermath.

The public appearance was a press conference meant to celebrate the release of several hostages by Russia, something the corporate news media is treating as some heroic deed on the part of Biden, as if he parachuted into the Russian prison and freed the hostages himself. The truth is that the release was part of a large, multinational deal to exchange prisoners, largely initiated by Putin in an effort to bring home Russians.

Here is what I found to be the most heartwarming portion of that presser:

You'll notice the complete absence of any substantive questions or remarks about the Middle East and the very real threat of war that the U.S. will undoubtedly be involved in. They only wheel him out of whatever closet they keep him in to awkwardly embrace little girls and make weird comments, then promptly stuff him back in.

The other piece of information I discovered was that he and Kamala reportedly had a call with Netanyahu.

Now, it’s important to note that it wasn’t Biden himself coming out and briefing the press on this highly consequential phone call, it was yet another statement issued in his name.

President Biden spoke today with Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel. The President reaffirmed his commitment to Israel’s security against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

The President discussed efforts to support Israel’s defense against threats, including against ballistic missiles and drones, to include new defensive U.S. military deployments. Together with this commitment to Israel’s defense, the President stressed the importance of ongoing efforts to de-escalate broader tensions in the region. Vice President Harris also joined the call.

There you have it. I hope that this “readout” has sufficiently allayed all of your concerns, as it has mine.

I love the last sentence where they attempt to make Kamala seem relevant—that she “joined the call,” but it’s uncertain if she said anything or just happened to be in the room. Honestly, it’s uncertain if this call ever actually even happened at all; we just have to take their word for it, and even if we do, all we can extrapolate from this is that the Biden Administration—and from the sounds of it—a hypothetical Harris administration as well, plans to continue arming and funding Israel unimpeded.

For her part, the newly anointed Kamala Harris hasn’t even mentioned anything substantive policy-wise, let alone made her position known on how she intends to handle the Middle East.

Trump, on the other hand—and I know this will draw the ire of those who refuse to ever look at Trump with a critical eye—has made it clear that he thinks Biden and Harris haven’t done enough to support Israel! Which is a rather wild accusation considering the fact that the Biden administration has basically given Israel everything it’s asked for and a seemingly endless go-ahead to do whatever it wants in the region.

Now, I'm not dismissing the possibility that Trump is playing this intricate and unfathomable 5D chess game against Israel's deep state; I sincerely hope that this is the case. However, considering the situation from a bicameral perspective, or from an outsider's perspective, it is true that Trump, like Biden and Harris, hasn't really addressed how he would handle this situation; all we have to go on is a series of unceasing displays of loyalty to Israel.

To be fair, and to play devil’s advocate against the above criticism, the United States body politic and electoral system is as captured by the pro-Israel lobby as it ever has been, with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spending tens of millions of dollars to fund supportive Congressional election campaigns, and helping to unseat pro-Palestine candidates and officials. So it’s not a stretch to say that paying this kind of lip service to Israel is just an unavoidable reality in the game of American politics, especially when playing at the Presidential level.

Guys like Michael Tracey—whom I do actually respect as one of the few remaining real journalists despite our differences of opinion—will cite this seemingly unrequited love for Israel by Trump as proof that a second term will see U.S. bombs continuing to be dropped by Israel across the Middle East, but I would counter that rather valid concern by pointing to an interview Trump recently did with Israel Hayom, where he urged Israel to “finish the job” rather than drawing out a prolonged offensive. In that same interview, he laid out how he effectively rendered Iran too broke to fund any militants. The article/interview really is worth a read or watch.

My point: Just because he appears to be outwardly supporting Israel (which includes its own entrenched national deep state), doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to allow this conflict to proliferate. It’s better to be on friendly terms with the various parties we may feel inclined to view as our “enemies,” and I don’t believe that there’s anyone Trump won’t at least try to make a deal with.

Consider the first term, when we saw Trump maintaining healthy, amicable relationships with almost all of our perceived enemies (with the obvious exceptions of Baghdadi and Soleimani, whom he surgically removed rather than initiating the kind of slow, grinding conflict preferred by the US security state).

So, even though he hasn't made an outright statement about the recent turn of events and how a second Trump administration might handle them, there are a series of hints, previous statements, and past behaviors we can look to.

The exact opposite is true of Kamala Harris, who has so far managed to completely avoid any talk of policy or statecraft, opting instead to highlight her ethnicity and gender.

It’s safe to assume that a Harris administration would include many of the same personnel as the Biden administration, in addition to some new faces and firms from San Francisco (more on that in my next piece), but as the saying goes, “personnel is policy,” and none of Harris’s personnel choices—especially Josh Shapiro—seem to indicate that Harris’s posture toward Israel and the rapidly escalating conflict in the Middle East will be different from Biden’s in any meaningful way.

As the situation progresses, we’ll just have to hope that there is some kind of plan in place to cool things off in the Middle East before a wider war erupts. We’ll also have to hope that these hacks who pass as journalists—on both sides of the political aisle, mainstream and independent alike—start to actually ask substantive questions rather than acting as propagandists whose only job is to boost morale in their respective echo chambers by repeating well established talking points ad nauseum.

Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.

If you enjoyed this contribution to Badlands Media, please consider checking out more of Ryan’s work for free at the Post-Liberal.

Badlands Media will always put out our content for free, but you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter. Help our collective of citizen journalists take back the narrative from the MSM. We are the news now.