by BELEN FERNANDEZ
Invoking God to bomb Iran, Trump is reviving a deadly tradition of religiously justified US violence.
After ordering the United States military to bomb Iran last month, US President Donald Trump made a brief address at the White House to laud the “massive precision strike” that had allegedly put a “stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror”.
The speech, which lasted less than four minutes, ended with the invocation of God’s name no fewer than five times in a span of seven seconds: “And I wanna just thank everybody and in particular, God. I wanna just say, ‘We love you God, and we love our great military – protect them.’ God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America.”
Of course, the terminology deployed in the speech was problematic before we even got to the rapid-fire mention of the Almighty by a man who has never been particularly religious. For one thing, Iran simply lacks the credentials to qualify as the world’s “number one state sponsor of terror”; that position is already occupied by the US itself, which, unlike Iran, has spent the entirety of its contemporary history bombing and otherwise antagonising folks in every last corner of the Earth.
The US has also continued to serve as the number one state sponsor of Israel, whose longstanding policy of terrorising Palestinians and other Arabs has now culminated in an all-out genocide in the Gaza Strip, as Israel seeks to annihilate the territory and its inhabitants along with it.
But anyway, “God bless Israel.”
This, to be sure, was not the first time that Trump relied on God to sign off on worldly events. Back in 2017, during the man’s first stint as president, the deity made various appearances in Trump’s official statement following a US military strike on Syria. God, it seems, just can’t get enough of war.
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