America wants you to worry about the wrong fundamentalists
Photo courtesy of Alen Bešlija/Pexels
Since Feb. 28, 2026, the United States and Israel have begun co-writing the next bloody chapter in the already overwhelmingly violent regional story of the Middle East. The nascent war in Iran was initiated through joint attacks targeting Iranian government officials, artillery and military assets, and elementary school children in a manner truly befitting U.S.-Israeli aggression. The attacks, referred to respectively as Operation Epic Fury and Operation Lions Roar by the U.S. and Israel per a Lamron news article published last week, have spun into a regional war that is now calling for the deployment of American troops.
So far the war faces an abysmally low approval rating from the American public. Journalist G. Elliot Morris compared and averaged polls from eight different pollsters through Mar. 6—the result: just 38 percent of Americans support the war in Iran. Morris points out that “No president in modern polling history has launched a major military operation with the public already against him,” citing the numbers gathered from operations in the region ranging from the Gulf War in 1991 to the war in Afghanistan after 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, none of which fell below 70 percent.
Much like these other highly controversial and needlessly gruesome campaigns (to put it gently) in the Middle East, the task of manufacturing consent for action like this in part draws from the same seemingly bottomless well of Islamophobic rhetoric. It would be foolish to imagine that the historic uptick in Islamophobia—tracked by the Center for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and reaching a shocking number of complaints in 2025 with a tally of “8,683…the highest since it began publishing data in 1996”—is purely coincidental.
Comments made by high-ranking administration officials confirm that the unprecedented hike in anti-Muslim, anti-Arab discrimination echoes the rhetoric of vitriolic, extremist Christian U.S. leadership set on war with an Islamic state. Take, for example, the words of Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Iran last Tuesday, quoted by truthout: “Iran is run by lunatics. Religious fanatic lunatics…They intend to develop those nuclear weapons behind a program of missiles and drones and terrorism that the world will not be able to touch them, for fear of those things.” The same article quotes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, making more specifically Islamophobic remarks: “Crazy regimes like Iran hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions cannot have nuclear weapons. It’s common sense.”
It sure does take a fundamentalist to know a fundamentalist. Hegseth is the gaudy icon of Christian nationalism in the high levels of U.S. military and foreign policy; in a piece discussing Hegseth’s background and questionable religious affiliations following his extremely narrow senate confirmation last year, Democracy Now! summarized the controversy as such: “Hegseth has endorsed leaders in the community and their beliefs that the church possesses supremacy over worldly affairs, antebellum slavery was a ‘beneficent American institution’ and the U.S.'s global war on terror is a modern-day iteration of the medieval Crusades.” He even published a book titled American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, which its Wikipedia page succinctly describes as targeting those who Hegseth considers to be “America’s enemies”—among them, of course, is the entire religion of Islam.
It comes as less of a shock, then, that a man who considers himself to be a contemporary “crusader” has in his ranks numerous high-ranking military officials who have openly preached to U.S. troops facing deployment the higher purpose of the Iran war in bringing about the second coming of Christ. This is unfortunately not a joke; an article in The Guardian noted “more than 200 complaints” made to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) reporting the “‘...unrestricted euphoria of their commanders’ who perceive a ‘biblically-sanctioned’ war that is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian ‘End Times.’” The reports also said that one commander specifically named Donald Trump as the divine catalyst for Armageddon.
Founder of MRFF Mikey Weinstein warned, in an interview with Democracy Now!, that “Whenever you attach an extremist aspect of any religious faith to that machinery, we end up with one thing: oceans and oceans of blood.” This is one prophecy that is guaranteed; already, according to Reuters as of Mar. 10, 2026, the death toll in Iran was at least 1,230, including the 175 lives taken in the U.S.’s strike on an all-girls’ elementary school on Feb. 28. Hundreds more have been killed in Lebanon, with Reuters’ estimate placing the number at 486 lives as of Mar. 10, and still more from nine other countries have been killed, including seven Americans that we know of so far.
So as oily black clouds gather over Iran while parents bury their children, as U.S. troops await the word of a war-mongering Christian nationalist leadership to decide their fate, I am left with no question as to which fundamentalists pose the real threat.