Beneath the rhetoric of liberation and security lies the violent logic of far-right ideology, now mainstreamed into the architecture of American and Israeli statecraft.
When the first
bombs fell on Tehran in the early hours of February 28, the language from
Washington and Tel Aviv was grimly familiar. Iran was an existential threat.
Its nuclear ambitions imperiled civilization. The Iranian people yearned for
liberation. The strikes, we were assured, were precise, intelligence-driven,
surgical. Within hours, over 165 schoolgirls lay dead in the rubble of the
Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab. Their textbooks were pulled from the
wreckage alongside severed limbs. The liberators had arrived.
What is
unfolding across the Middle East is not, as its architects insist, a defensive
operation or a humanitarian intervention. It is an act of violent extremism —
white supremacist in its civilizational logic, far-right Zionist in its
territorial ambitions, and catastrophic in its consequences for global peace.
The culture-centered approach to communication, which I have developed across
decades of community-based research, offers a framework for naming what
mainstream commentary refuses to name: the bombing of Iran is the mainstreaming
of extremist ideology into the very architecture of foreign policy.
The
culture-centered approach (CCA) theorizes violent extremism not as the aberrant
behavior of marginalized radicals but as a structural phenomenon rooted in the
communicative strategies of dominant power. Extremism, in this framework, is
understood through the interplay of structure, culture, and agency. Structures
of power — military-industrial complexes, settler colonial states, neoliberal
governance architectures — produce the material conditions for violence.
Culture is mobilized as the communicative infrastructure through which that
violence is legitimized, naturalized, and rendered invisible. And agency, the
capacity of communities to resist and reimagine, is systematically erased from
the dominant narrative.
Apply this
framework to the bombing of Iran, and the contours of extremism become
unmistakable. The structural dimension is the US-Israel military-industrial
nexus, an arrangement in which American weapons manufacturers, intelligence
agencies, and political donors operate in seamless coordination with the
Israeli security state. The unprecedented scale of this assault — over 1,200
bombs in the first 24 hours, nearly 2,000 targets struck within nine days, the
deployment of B-2 stealth bombers dropping 2,000-pound penetrator munitions on
a country that was actively engaged in diplomatic negotiations — reveals a war
machine that was never waiting for diplomacy to succeed. The military buildup
described as the largest in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq was
assembled while Oman’s foreign minister was telling the world that a peace deal
was “within our reach.” The structure was always oriented toward destruction.
The cultural
dimension — the communicative work of legitimation — is where white supremacist
logic does its most insidious work. The narrative framework deployed to justify
the bombing of Iran draws on a deep grammar of racial hierarchy. Iran is
positioned as civilizationally backward, theocratic, irrational — incapable of
the reasoned self-governance that Western liberal democracies supposedly
embody. The Iranian people are cast as victims not of American sanctions, not
of decades of economic warfare, not of a CIA-orchestrated coup that installed a
dictator in 1953, but of their own cultural and religious deficiencies. They
need to be rescued. Trump’s declaration that the bombing represented “the
greatest chance” for Iranians to “take back” their country reproduces the
oldest colonial fantasy: that the violence of empire is a gift to the
colonized.
This is the
communicative architecture of white supremacy operating at the level of
geopolitics. It is the same logic that justified the destruction of Iraq, the
bombing of Libya, the drone wars across the Global South. It positions white
Western states as rational actors whose violence is always defensive, always
proportionate, always regrettable but necessary. And it positions brown and
Black nations as threats whose sovereignty is always conditional, always
contingent on compliance with Western demands. When Defense Secretary Pete
Hegseth told reporters that American forces were delivering “death and
destruction from the sky all day long” and boasted that “we are punching them
while they are down, which is exactly how it should be,” he was not describing
a security operation. He was articulating, in plain language, the sadistic
pleasure of racialized dominance.
Married to
this white supremacist architecture is the far-right Zionism that has captured
Israeli politics and, through it, American foreign policy. The Zionism that
animates the Netanyahu government is not the broad-tent political movement of
earlier decades but an explicitly ethnonationalist project rooted in
territorial maximalism, demographic engineering, and permanent war. It is a
Zionism that has absorbed the settler colonial logic of the Israeli far right —
figures like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, who speak openly of ethnic
cleansing and Greater Israel — and fused it with the evangelical Christian
nationalism of the American right. This convergence produces a foreign policy
in which the destruction of Iran is not merely a strategic objective but an
eschatological one, a civilizational imperative dressed in the language of
security.
The CCA
insists on centering the voices that dominant communicative structures
systematically erase. In the ruins of Minab, those voices belong to the
families of 165 schoolgirls whose deaths barely registered in the American news
cycle. They belong to the residents of Tehran queueing for bread and water as
bombs fall on their neighborhoods. They belong to the Bahrainis whose capital
was struck by Iranian drones in retaliation for hosting American military bases
they never consented to. They belong to the workers at oil facilities in Tehran
and Alborz whose deaths were dismissed as collateral in Israel’s campaign to
cripple Iranian “military infrastructure.” The erasure of these voices is not
incidental to the war; it is constitutive of it. The war can only proceed
because these lives do not register as fully grievable within the communicative
architecture of white supremacy.
What makes
this moment particularly dangerous is the degree to which far-right extremism
has been mainstreamed into the formal institutions of governance. The bombing
of Iran was not carried out by a rogue militia or a non-state actor. It was
authorized by the President of the United States, coordinated with the Prime
Minister of Israel, and executed by the combined military forces of two
nuclear-armed states. The negotiations with Iran — in which Oman’s foreign
minister reported breakthrough agreements on zero stockpiling of enriched
uranium and comprehensive IAEA verification — were abandoned not because
diplomacy had failed but because the far-right coalition governing both
countries was never invested in its success. The demand for zero enrichment,
the insistence on dismantling all nuclear infrastructure, the refusal to
discuss sanctions relief — these were not negotiating positions. They were the
terms of surrender that no sovereign nation would accept, designed to provide
the pretext for a war that had already been decided upon.
The
consequences now ripple across the region and the globe. Iran has launched
retaliatory strikes across nine countries. Dubai’s airport, the world’s busiest
for international travel, has been shut indefinitely. The Strait of Hormuz,
through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes, faces closure.
Hospitals and schools across Iran continue to be bombed. Lebanon is under
renewed Israeli bombardment. The spectre of a wider regional conflagration, one
that could draw in Russia, China, and the Gulf states, looms over every
headline. This cascading catastrophe is not an unintended consequence of policy
failure. It is the predictable, indeed the intended, product of an extremist
ideology that has captured the machinery of state power.
The
culture-centered approach demands that we refuse the communicative inversions
through which this violence is legitimized. When empire calls its aggression
“defense,” we must name it as aggression. When it calls the bombing of
elementary schools “precision strikes,” we must name it as the murder of
children. When it frames the destruction of a sovereign nation as liberation,
we must name it as conquest. And when it presents the far-right ideologies
driving this war as mainstream centrism, we must insist on calling them what
they are: white supremacist extremism and far-right Zionism, operating not at
the margins of politics but at its very center.
The IAEA has
stated that there is no proof Iran is building a nuclear weapon. US
intelligence agencies assessed that Iran had yet to restart a weapons program.
Iran’s nuclear program was suspended by fatwa in 2003. The 2015 JCPOA,
painstakingly negotiated over twenty months, demonstrated that diplomacy could
constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions without a single bomb being dropped. Trump
withdrew from that agreement. And now the same political formation that
destroyed the diplomatic framework has used the resulting uncertainty as
justification for a war of annihilation. This is the circular logic of
extremism: create the crisis, then weaponize the crisis to justify the violence
you intended all along.
We have seen
this playbook before — in Iraq, where fabricated intelligence about weapons of
mass destruction provided cover for a war that killed hundreds of thousands.
But the current moment is more dangerous because the extremist forces driving
it are more openly in power, more explicitly ideological, and more willing to
articulate their ambitions in the language of civilizational war. When Hegseth
speaks of “unleashing American power” with rules of engagement “designed not to
shackle it,” he is describing the deliberate removal of the legal and ethical
constraints that are supposed to distinguish a military from a death squad.
When Human Rights Watch calls for war crimes investigations, the demand falls
on ears that have already rejected the jurisdiction of international law.
The crisis
engulfing the Middle East is a product of violent extremism. Not the extremism
of a shadowy network hiding in caves, but the extremism of men in suits and
military uniforms, sitting in the White House and the Knesset, commanding the
most sophisticated weapons systems ever devised. The culture-centered approach
teaches us that the most dangerous forms of extremism are those that have been
so thoroughly mainstreamed that they no longer appear extreme — that they pass
as policy, as strategy, as the rational calculus of national interest. The
bombing of Iran is that extremism, laid bare. The question now is whether the
world will name it as such, or whether the communicative machinery of empire
will succeed, once again, in transforming mass violence into the unremarkable
business of statecraft.