Donald Trump: A cancer upon the world that needs to be dealt with

It wouldn't be shocking to say that many global leaders hope that nature takes it course and Trump succumbs to age or a health issue that removes him from office and this world permanently.  

 
By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

Donald Trump is a walking catastrophe of a human being, a man so devoid of basic decency, empathy, or any shred of genuine humanity that his very existence feels like an insult to the human species. In essence, he is a cancer upon the world.

This is not hyperbole. It is the cold, observable truth about a narcissistic sociopath, a man-child whose every action radiates selfishness, megalomania, cruelty, and a chilling indifference to the suffering his words and actions leave in his wake. He doesn’t care about how his behaviour harms people—never has, never will.

To Trump, human beings are props to be used for his personal benefit, or obstacles to be overcome in the endless melodrama of his own ego. The pain and suffering, the death, the economic ruin, and the democratic erosion he has caused aren’t unfortunate side effects, they are foreseeable results that any truly intelligent person with an ounce of humanity could predict. But, ultimately, to him they are irrelevant, because nothing registers on his brain unless it flatters him and boosts his ego, or threatens his fragile, bloated self-image.

Look at the Middle East right now, teetering on the edge of a catastrophic war that could claim millions of lives. Before February 28 there was a tense peace among the nations of the region and oil was flowing freely through the Strait of Hormuz. But Trump’s reckless actions, launching an illegal and unprovoked war against Iran, in conjunction with Israel, his political posturing, his genocidal rhetoric, and his dangerous game of brinkmanship—culminating in a blockade of the Strait—are shoving the region toward chaos, and could drag in other nations affected by the crisis his actions have created. Oil flows have been disrupted, global supply chains strangled, and innocent people killed by American and Israeli attacks—all because of one man’s irrational, impulsive bullying style of “diplomacy”, and because his fragile ego demands attention.

Trump doesn’t lose sleep over the mothers burying children killed by US bombs, refugees fleeing US-Israeli attacks, or people being unable to afford food. Why would he? Compassion isn’t part of his emotional vocabulary. He’s too busy smirking in front of cameras, turning foreign policy into a reality TV spectacle, while real human lives are upended. His lack of humanity and his embrace of what can only be termed evil aren’t flaws he tries to hide, it’s who he is to the core. He revels in strength as a form of domination, never as a way to protect the vulnerable or uplift the weak. The suffering of innocents? Mere collateral damage in his quest for personal victory at all costs.

And then there is the economy. Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop antics are barrelling the world towards a global recession, stoking inflation, and will push interest rates higher with every chaotic tweet and every effort to make the Iranians succumb to his unconditional demands. Families worldwide are already feeling the squeeze—sky high gas prices, higher food prices, layoffs as businesses try to cut rising costs, and plans for the future put on hold due to uncertainty. Yet he charges ahead, indifferent to how his actions sow chaos and misery in the lives of ordinary people. This is the same man who, in his first term as president, displayed a chilling indifference to the fragile interconnectedness of our world, deliberately weaponizing personal vendettas against his political enemies in ways that left a trail of devastation among the vulnerable—both at home and abroad.

Trump doesn’t care about the single mother struggling to feed her kids because grocery costs spiked. He doesn’t care about the factory worker whose livelihood vanishes in a trade war he started. To him, humanity and compassion are not virtues but fatal weaknesses—signs of inferiority to be exploited and crushed. Those who dare display empathy deserve nothing less than public humiliation, served up like sacrificial lambs to feed his endless hunger for dominance. He mocks the merciful, belittles the decent, and gazes upon them with the cold contempt of a tyrant surveying peasants, reminding us all that in his dark vision of America, kindness is treason and strength means only the ruthless exercise of raw power.

The world is utterly sick of Donald Trump. From European capitals to Asian financial hubs, from Latin American streets to African villages feeling the indirect shocks of his actions, people watch the circus he has created with a mixture of horror and exhaustion. His antics aren’t just embarrassing anymore, they are dangerous. A superpower led by a man with the emotional maturity of a spoiled toddler, armed with nuclear codes and the world’s largest military, is a recipe for global instability and disarray far beyond what we are already enduring.

It would not be shocking to say that many global leaders secretly hope that nature takes it course and Trump succumbs to age or a health issue that removes him from office and this world permanently. They likely hope that this exhausting chapter in world history ends before the damage Trump has inflicted becomes irreversible. And they are likely joined by tens of millions around the world who feel similarly. It’s safe to say these would be the sentiments of people who are exhausted, who see one man-child holding the planet hostage, and who can’t wait until the Trumpian nightmare ends.

Americans who still possess a conscience—those who didn’t vote for him and those who now regret their vote—must confront the ugly reality. Under Trump, there is no politics as usual. What America faces is the outcome of a collective insanity, which has been building for years, that placed in the presidency a man who is dismantling their democracy brick by brick, while torching the world order that preserved a fragile global peace for eighty years. His pathological personality, serial lying, bombast, and dangerous rhetoric are not mere quirks. They are weaponized personality disorders that are laying waste to the very foundations of the imperfect civil society built from the ashes of World War Two.

This is a man who lies every time his lips move because truth threatens his fragile ego. Fact-checkers have tallied thousands of lies whenever he has spoken publicly or posted on social media, yet he doubles down with that signature smirk, daring anyone to call him out. His amorality is disgusting and dangerous. He praises dictators, cozies up to authoritarians, and treats democratic norms like inconvenient suggestions. Ethics? Accountability? According to Trump these are for suckers. He operates on pure transactional self-interest, where loyalty is demanded, and betrayal is met with venomous rage.

The truth is that the world is utterly sick of Donald Trump’s face, his grating voice, and that perpetual, menacing sneer that drips with entitlement and barely concealed insecurity. This is a man who has openly mocked the disabled, ridiculed war heroes, and degraded women through vulgar, boastful tirades that expose a vicious misogyny and a self-loathing he projects onto the entire world. His racism and bigotry are no longer whispered dog whistles but brazen, inflammatory rallying cries that deliberately summon humanity’s darkest tribal impulses. Trump channels a chilling, Hitlerian vision of dominance—a “fourth Reich” fantasy in which a white supremacist-tinged America demands global submission to him and his cabal of billionaire sycophants, who feed their insatiable greed and lust for unchecked power. He surrounds himself with loyal enablers who eagerly amplify his hatred, mainstream conspiracy theories, and display open contempt for every democratic institution that dares restrain his authoritarian ambitions. How can any decent person witness this rising threat without feeling a profound and urgent sense of revulsion?

Democracy in the US is itself under threat because to Trump, it’s not a sacred system of checks, balances, and peaceful transitions. It is a tool to be bent or broken when it doesn’t deliver what he craves. His actions are not just unravelling American democracy, but also the fragile post-World War Two order, pushing alliances to the brink of fracture, and inviting adversaries to exploit the global divisions he is creating.

The 33% of eligible American voters who knowingly returned Donald Trump to power—fully aware of the Access Hollywood tape, the endless scandals, the racial incitement, and his pathological lying—bear a heavy responsibility. The MAGA crowd decided that character didn’t matter, that racism, misogyny, and raw amorality were acceptable in a leader rather than disqualifiers. Their blind loyalty has created a frightening cult of personality that prizes grievance over governance and spectacle over substance, normalizing the abnormal, and handing the nation’s steering wheel to a drunk driver.

Americans who care about their nation—truly care, beyond partisan tribalism—must come together now to halt this madman before he destroys what’s left of their democracy, not to mention, the impact that unravelling of the US will have globally. It falls to them to rise above the noise and chaos that Trump peddles, and demand better. This isn’t about right versus left, it’s about sanity versus insanity, humanity versus nihilism.

The people of the US must unite across divides—progressives, moderates, conservatives who still believe in democracy and principles over personality. They must organize, vote, speak out, hold the people who enable Trump accountable. They must pressure Republican congressional representatives and senators to prioritize country over cult, lest the nation that is celebrating the 250th anniversary of its founding this year, comes apart at the seams. The world cannot afford three more years of the global danger Trump represents. His actions don’t just damage America, they endanger the entire world by amplifying irrationality and instability.

Donald Trump doesn’t represent America’s best. He enables its worst. He must be rejected, constrained, and if possible arrested, tried and convicted, if Americans are to reclaim the democracy he treats as his personal playground. Before it’s too late, before the pain spreads further, before the world pays an even steeper price, for one man’s profound lack of soul and dearth of humanity.

This maniac must be stopped. Americans who love their nation more than they fear discomfort must act decisively. The suffering Trump has caused and could yet unleash demands nothing less.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Erasing Palestine’s culture, history and public memory is part and parcel of Israel’s genocide in Gaza

Over 80% of the schools in in Gaza have been reduced to rubble—libraries, archives, publishing houses, and cultural centers . . . and centuries-old manuscripts in the Great Omari Mosque have been completely destroyed.

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

In his 1980 book, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera wrote, “The first step in liquidating a people … is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, and its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history.”

This chilling observation, drawn from the foundational logic of colonial erasure, precisely describes the century-long project of Zionism.

Founded in the late 19th century as a nationalist political ideology by ethnic European intellectuals like Theodor Herzl, who framed it explicitly as a secular political ideology rather than a religious imperative. Zionism sought to establish a Jewish state in historic Palestine through the systematic displacement of its indigenous inhabitants—Palestinian Muslims and Christians—and the erasure of their culture and history.

Far from an organic expression of Judaism, Zionism hijacked Jewish identity to pursue a supremacist agenda of demographic transformation and cultural obliteration. From its inception, the movement’s followers have pursued the goal of emptying Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants, and the erasure of Palestinian memory, history, and presence, employing mass violence, archival destruction, geographic renaming, and environmental camouflage as core tactics. This pattern, evident in the 1948 Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) and repeated in subsequent wars and the ongoing Gaza genocide, reveals Zionism not as a liberation movement but as a cancer on humanity, intent on annihilating a people by first annihilating their collective identity.

Zionism emerged not from ancient religious longing but from 19th-century European nationalist fervour. Herzl, a secular Austro-Hungarian journalist, articulated in his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat a political program for Jewish colonization of Palestine, viewing it as a “new society” to be built by European settlers while sidelining or removing the Palestinian majority. Early Zionist congresses, beginning in Basel in 1897, emphasized “transfer” of the indigenous population as a practical necessity, a euphemism for ethnic cleansing that became explicit policy.

This was no theological “return” of Jews to the Holy Land, where Jews had lived in peace with Muslims and Christians for centuries. It was a colonial enterprise by European Ashkenazi elites who claimed Jewish heritage while rejecting the Jewish religion. Prominent Jewish thinkers recognized this danger early. Albert Einstein, a vocal critic of Zionism, repeatedly rejected the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. In 1938, he declared his preference for “reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state,” warning that such a state would inflict “inner damage” on Judaism through “narrow nationalism.”

Jewish-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, similarly condemned Zionism’s embrace of exclusionary sovereignty. In her essays from the 1940s, she advocated a bi-national framework preserving Palestinian rights and decried the movement’s drift toward militarism and domination. Their stance culminated in a public letter published in The New York Times on December 4, 1948—signed by Einstein, Arendt, and 26 other prominent Jewish intellectuals—denouncing the “Freedom Party” (Herut) led by Menachem Begin as “closely akin to the Nazi and Fascist parties” of Europe for its terrorist methods and chauvinism. The letter warned that Begin’s vision foreshadowed a society built on oppression and violence, exposing the fascist undercurrents within Zionist factions even as Israel was being consolidated.

These warnings proved prophetic. The establishment of Israel in 1948 was founded on mass murder and ethnic cleansing—the Nakba in which Zionist terrorist militias, operating under Plan Dalet, systematically depopulated over 500 Palestinian villages and urban neighborhoods. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed in massacres such as Deir Yassin, where Irgun and Lehi terrorist gangs slaughtered hundreds of civilians, including women and children, as a deliberate terror tactic to induce flight. By war’s end, over 750,000 Palestinians—more than half the indigenous population—had been expelled or fled in terror, their homes looted and lands seized. To conceal these crimes, Zionist forces razed villages to the ground and planted forests over the ruins through the Jewish National Fund (JNF). Pine trees, alien to the Palestinian landscape, now blanket sites like those of Lubya (renamed Lavi) and hundreds of others, transforming sites of life into recreational parks that erased visual evidence of Palestinian existence. This planting of forests was not environmental stewardship but deliberate camouflage—a “greenwashing” of genocide, as documented in Israeli archives and eyewitness accounts.

Geographic erasure complemented physical destruction. Zionist authorities launched a comprehensive renaming campaign by assigning Hebrew names to thousands of Arab place names—villages, hills, rivers—to fabricate a narrative of continuous Jewish presence while severing Palestinian ties to the land. The Palestinian village of Asqalan became Ashkelon, and countless others followed suit under a 1949 Israeli government committee. This linguistic colonization mirrored the destruction of archives and libraries. In the “Great Book Robbery” of 1948-1949, Israeli librarians and soldiers systematically looted over 70,000 books, manuscripts, and newspapers from Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, and elsewhere, transferring them to the National Library or destroying them. Private collections documenting centuries of Palestinian culture—poetry, legal records, family histories—were pillaged or vanished, ensuring that future generations of Palestinians would inherit a blank slate.

This erasure was not confined to 1948. Israel instigated multiple wars to expand territory or consolidate demographic control. The 1956 Suez Crisis saw Israel invade Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in coordination with Britain and France, seizing Gaza and the Sinai before international pressure forced withdrawal, demonstrating Zionist willingness to launch aggressive campaigns against Israel’s Arab neighbours. In 1967, Israel was the aggressor in the Six-Day War, launching a surprise aerial assault that destroyed Egypt’s air force and seized the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and again displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. These conflicts, framed by Israel as “defensive”, were rooted in an expansionist doctrine, enabling further settlement and land expropriation while perpetuating the Palestinian refugee crisis that began with Israel’s creation in 1948. Subsequent invasions, including Lebanon in 1982, followed the pattern of pre-emptive aggression to neutralize resistance and secure the vision of a “Greater Israel.”

The Gaza genocide, unfolding with ferocious intensity since October 2023 as a “defensive” operation against Hamas, represents the culmination of this century-old strategy. Israeli forces have replicated the Nakba playbook on a compressed scale and with greater brutality, targeting not only lives but the infrastructure of memory and knowledge. All twelve universities in Gaza have been destroyed, their collection of knowledge obliterated. In addition, over 80% of the schools in in Gaza—over 500 institutions—have been reduced to rubble. Libraries, archives, publishing houses, and cultural centres lie in ruins—the Gaza Public Library, the Edward Said Library, and centuries-old manuscripts in the Great Omari Mosque have been completely destroyed. Mosques and churches, repositories of communal history, have been bombed, including the 7th-century Omari Mosque with its 13th-century library. 

This “scholasticide” also extends to human carriers of knowledge with at least 95 university professors, 261 teachers, and thousands of students—many of them children—have been killed, with journalists and story tellers systematically targeted by Israel. According to Euromed Human Rights Monitor, as of April 19th over 21,400 Palestinian children have been killed, with one study calculating that more than 300,000 children have been killed since October 2023. This ensures that future generations can’t reclaim or transmit their heritage, with UN experts and scholars noting this is not collateral damage but intentional annihilation of the fabric of Palestinian society.

Such actions align with the crime of genocide as defined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term in 1944. Lemkin described genocide as a “coordinated plan” to destroy a group’s “essential foundations of life”—not only through mass killing but by eradicating culture, language, religion, and national feelings so the group “withers and dies like plants that have suffered a blight.”

While the UN Genocide Convention emphasizes physical destruction, experts including the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and human rights organizations have applied this broader lens to Palestine, arguing that cultural erasure—destroying educational and religious sites, preventing knowledge transmission, and killing intellectuals—constitutes genocidal intent. In Gaza, the scale of scholasticide and heritage destruction, coupled with statements from Israeli officials invoking biblical erasure, fulfills Lemkin’s criteria with the intent to erase Palestinians and their identity.

Zionism’s legacy is thus one of calculated dehumanization and the erasure of Palestinian existence in all its forms. By liquidating Palestinian memory—through forests over villages, Hebrew names on maps, looted archives, and bombed universities—it has advanced halfway to total liquidation of the people. Yet Palestinian resilience persists, a testament to the ideology’s ultimate failure and the determination of Palestinians not to surrender to Zionist violence.

For more than a century, the supremacist project of Zionism has inflicted immeasurable suffering, hijacking Jewish ethics in service of colonial violence. Recognizing this political ideology for what it is—a cancer demanding confrontation—is essential to any just future for the region and humanity. Only by restoring Palestinian history, culture, and right of return, and opposing the Zionist ideology wherever it exists, can the cycle of erasure end and justice for the Palestinian people be achieved.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

FOR LEADERS WITHOUT SOULS

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

When injustice becomes law
resistance becomes a duty we draw
leaders who stand with the Israeli oppressor’s might
have shown their souls cloaked in darkest night.

When cruelty becomes normal and vile
compassion becomes radical, worth the while
national leaders who ally without shame
ignoring genocide, they play the devil’s game.

After more than two and a half years of Israel’s hell
in Gaza where innocents were murdered and fell
politicians refuse to criticize or break
their bond with Israel, for their own sake.

They remain its ally, steadfast they stand
refusing to condemn with blood on their hands
they’ve shown the world who has sold their soul
for a devil’s bargain, which they don’t control.

Gaza’s horrors still unfold, yet they look away
from the massacres that have darkened every day
their hearts are empty, their consciences sold
to embrace inhumanity, corruption and gold.

The evil in Gaza, they wilfully ignore
the cries of Palestinian kids dying, and the murderers’ roar
standing firmly with their Israeli ally they are proud
no souls within them, they are just a devil’s crowd.

These people are not horrified by these evil deeds
more than two and a half years later as Gaza still bleeds
for those with souls it is most horrifying to see
our so-called leaders complicit in genocidal atrocities.

They’ve shown the world who lacks a soul’s light
who has traded it all for the blackness of Lucifer’s night
for favours, alliances and trade they bend their knees
to a regime committing horrific evil, with complete impunity.

In halls of power our leaders are clear
they side with the devil’s acolytes, shedding no tears
the world now knows those who sold their souls
while deceit and injustice still take their deadly toll.

Yet some global leaders with moral compasses strong
have condemned Israel to the depths where they belong
they label its leaders as criminals to be convicted
who must burn in hell, and that assertion is not conflicted.

With righteous anger they raise their voices
against the Gaza genocide, making the choices
to stand for justice, for Palestinian rights
in the face of darkness and evil they bring the light.

These brave souls label the guilty ones clear
criminals who deserve to rot in eternal fear
to be condemned for the evil of their heinous crimes
while those who seek justice, advocating for better times.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

US-Israeli aggression has destabilized the Middle East and turned it into a powder keg

Through their actions, the United States and Israel have transformed the Middle East into a far more dangerous place, and established themselves as the biggest destabilizing force in the region.

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

These words, pronounced by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946, were meant to serve as an eternal indictment of aggressive war and a bulwark against the very atrocities it inevitably unleashes. They declared that the crime of starting an unprovoked conflict carries within it every subsequent horror—civilian slaughter, shattered societies, refugee crises, economic ruin, and the slow erosion of global order.

Today, in the wake of the collapse of the two-week ceasefire with Iran announced by President Donald Trump on April 7, 2026, Nuremberg’s verdict echoes with terrifying clarity. The agreement was precarious from the moment it was signed—a cynical pause designed not to end hostilities but to buy time for the continuation of a war of aggression launched by the United States and Israel on February 28. That original assault, and every violation of international law that has followed—including the breakdown of Pakistan-mediated peace talks in Islamabad over the weekend and the subsequent US threats to blockade the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping traffic—embodies the “accumulated evil” Nuremberg warned against. The ceasefire’s swift failure was not an unfortunate accident; it was the predictable consequence of a policy rooted in lawlessness, hubris, and an unshakable commitment to Israeli impunity.

Almost immediately after Trump’s announcement, Israeli forces expanded their strikes deep into Lebanon, hitting more than 100 targets in a single ten-minute barrage across commercial and residential districts of central Beirut. Lebanese health authorities now report civilian deaths climbing rapidly, with more than 280 killed over a 48 hour period alone—the highest single-day toll in the Israel-Hezbollah war—along with hundreds wounded and the overall displacement of more than 1.7 million Lebanese from the southern part of the country. In direct response, Iran once again closed the Strait of Hormuz and imposed tolls on shipping. The fragile truce, which Iranian officials explicitly insisted include an immediate end to the war in Lebanon, lies in ruins. However, Israel refuses to recognize that Lebanon was ever part of the agreement, exposing the selective and self-serving nature of the so-called peace deal.

This breach was not an aberration but the expected outcome of a pattern of bad faith negotiating that has defined Israeli and American policy in the region for years. Israel has violated every ceasefire it has ever agreed to—both in the recent past two and a half years and in the decades prior—including the so-called ceasefire with Hamas signed in October 2025, which it shattered with near-daily attacks, killing hundreds of Palestinians and racking up more than 2,000 documented violations by March 2026. The same pattern has played out repeatedly in Lebanon, where Israel stands accused of thousands of breaches of the 2024 ceasefire agreement. 

Netanyahu’s government and the Trump administration now claim the US-Iran truce “does not cover Lebanon,” but that self-serving caveat was never accepted by Tehran. The ceasefire was never meant to hold; it was merely a temporary pause in a war of aggression that Washington and Jerusalem launched—an operation that has already exacted a devastating human and strategic toll and that carries, in Nuremberg’s precise language, the accumulated evil of all the atrocities that have followed. 

The original assault on February 28 remains the root of the entire catastrophe. On that day, US and Israeli forces unleashed coordinated airstrikes across Iran in what was dubbed Operation Epic Fury. The attacks assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior officials, bombed nuclear and military sites, and indiscriminately killed civilians, including more than 165 girls and staff at an elementary school. There was no armed attack by Iran that could justify such action under Article 51 of the UN Charter, given that negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program were still active at the time. There was no imminent threat, no UN Security Council authorization, and no lawful claim of self-defence could be made by either the US or Israel. The strikes constituted a classic war of aggression—the “supreme international crime” condemned at Nuremberg as the crime that contains within itself the accumulated evil of all subsequent atrocities.

The legal violations are clear and damning. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter is unequivocal declaring that states must refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other state. The US-Israeli operation shattered that prohibition in the most flagrant manner. Legal scholars have repeatedly affirmed that pre-emptive wars of choice, launched while diplomacy was still underway, violate the post-1945 international order that was designed precisely to prevent such acts of naked aggression. The subsequent bombing of schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure only compounded the original crime. International humanitarian law—the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I—forbids attacks on objects indispensable to civilian survival and demands strict distinction between military and civilian targets. Deliberate or reckless strikes on health centres and schools are war crimes under any reasonable interpretation of the law. 

Compounding the legal atrocities is the incendiary rhetoric from the White House itself. Trump’s own social-media rants have escalated the criminality into genocidal territory. He threatened to make Iran “live in Hell,” promised attacks on power plants and bridges, and declared that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Under Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention, such statements can be seen as telegraphing intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national or ethnic group by inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction. Threatening to annihilate an ancient civilization—its people, culture, and millennia-old heritage—meets that legal threshold. Experts have already labelled these declarations as potential incitement to genocide and war crimes. 

The fact is that the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz was entirely manufactured by the US-Israeli initial act of aggression. Before February 28, commercial shipping was moving normally through the waterway that carries one-fifth of global oil and gas. Only after the bombs began falling did Iran assert control, reduce shipping volume, and begin collecting toll from ships that were allowed to pass. The closure was defensive and in reaction to US-Israeli aggression, not provocative. Iran’s re-closure of the waterway this week is the predictable consequence of Israel’s violation of the ceasefire’s Lebanon provisions and the mounting civilian slaughter there. 

Each additional provocation only deepens global sympathy for Iran and erodes Washington’s moral authority. This latest escalation follows directly on the breakdown of Pakistan-mediated peace talks in Islamabad, which collapsed without agreement over the weekend despite offering a genuine path to de-escalation. In the wake of that failure, the United States has now threatened a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping traffic—an act of economic warfare that further militarizes the chokepoint and exposes the hollowness of any American commitment to peace. 

The human and strategic costs of this military aggression are already staggering beyond imagination. Civilian deaths inside Iran exceed 2,000. Power plants, bridges, and homes remain in the cross hairs, and the global economic costs are mounting, with a potential to plunge 32 million in to poverty, and create a global recession Additionally, the latest Lebanese massacres—more than 280 dead in just two days—demonstrates that Israel has no intention of honouring even the limited truce it signed. Should the conflict reignite fully, the “accumulated evil” of the initial aggression will metastasize. Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, and the broader “Axis of Resistance” will be drawn in. Refugee flows, oil-price shocks, direct retaliation against US bases, and proxy wars across multiple borders would follow. 

The Persian Gulf and the Levant could erupt into a conflagration dwarfing any recent Middle East conflict, pulling in surrounding nations—Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states—in a vortex of retaliation none of them sought. This avoidable war with Iran could easily lead to a wider regional war with some analysts predicting it could even lead to World War 3, as alliances are tested and superpowers are drawn into the fray through cascading proxy conflicts and economic desperation.

Through their actions, the United States and Israel have transformed the Middle East into a far more dangerous place, and established themselves as the biggest destabilizing force in the region. Rather than acting as forces for stability or sincerely committing to peace, their unprovoked aggression has fuelled cycles of violence, resentment, and instability that threaten to engulf the entire region and far beyond. The war with Iran was completely avoidable, yet Washington and Jerusalem opted for missiles and bombs over bargaining in a display of arrogance that has now destabilized multiple borders simultaneously. This choice has not only violated international law but has also sacrificed the safety and lives of tens of millions of innocents on the altar of America’s unequivocal support to its genocidal Israeli ally. 

The main victims of this unholy alliance have been Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, whose lives hold little value in the pursuit of Israeli security objectives and America’s goal of controlling Middle-East oil. From the relentless violations and civilian slaughter in Gaza to the carnage in Lebanon and the war against Iran, these populations have borne the brunt of the suffering, with their homes destroyed, families torn apart, and futures obliterated to appease a rogue terrorist nation that operates with impunity while the US provides diplomatic cover, arms, and political support at every turn.

The evils of war are not abstract concepts to be debated in think tanks. They are visceral, devastating realities that destroy lives, communities, and the fragile fabric of international trust. Wars bring indiscriminate death to children and civilians, widespread population displacements that creates generations of refugees, economic collapse that ripples across continents, and a legacy of hatred that poisons societies for decades. 

In the current scenario American and Israeli actions pose an existential global threat, undermining the very foundations of global peace and security that have held since 1945. By flouting the UN Charter, committing what amount to war crimes, and declaring genocidal intent (as Israel actually commits genocide), they have set a dangerous precedent that could encourage other nations to engage in similar acts of aggression to achieve their geopolitical goals, leading to a breakdown of the global order and the very real prospect of uncontrollable escalation. 

Additionally, the risk of a wider war is not hypothetical. It is imminent, with the potential to draw the world into a conflict of unprecedented scale involving energy chokepoints, proxy armies, and nuclear-armed states. There is also the reality that Trump’s words and actions have thoroughly destroyed America’s reputation on the world stage. Once seen as a leading proponent of diplomacy and the rule of law, the US under Trump is now seen as unreliable, impulsive, belligerent and dangerous. His threats and the childish rampage that characterized his approach to Iran have marked what many describe as the end of the American century, leaving even its closest allies questioning whether they can trust Washington anymore. The world will ultimately pay for Trump’s Iran mess, as global stability hangs in the balance due to his reckless policies and the resulting chaos. A nation that even its allies don’t trust any more is a nation adrift, its moral authority in tatters and its alliances fraying at the seams. 

Canada’s response has been characteristically timid, reflecting the broader erosion of trust among traditional partners. Prime Minister Mark Carney has issued vague calls for “respect for international law and human rights” but has offered no specific condemnation of either Trump’s genocidal threats or Israel’s criminal actions either in Gaza, Iran or Lebanon. Ottawa appears content with platitudes about “deep concern” and “calls for restraint,” prioritizing economic and security ties with Washington over moral leadership. History will judge whether such silence amounts to complicity in the face of clear violations. 

In the end, the shattered ceasefire changes nothing fundamental. The war of aggression began on February 28, and its criminality persists. Civilian infrastructure still lies in ruins; hospitals and schools still bear the scars of illegal attacks. Genocide still continues in Gaza, while additional genocidal rhetoric still emanates from the White House. 

The Strait of Hormuz remains a flash point of America’s own making. And the risk of a wider war—engulfing neighbouring states in uncontrollable escalation—looms larger than ever. If the international community allows this precedent to stand, the UN Charter and the UN itself become meaningless, and Nuremberg’s verdict becomes a historical footnote. The greater danger is that Israeli sabotage of the ceasefire—coupled with the rising tide of Lebanese civilian deaths—will now be used as pretext for renewed attacks while the architects of the original aggression face no reckoning.

Only by naming the February 28 strikes, and every subsequent violation—including the collapse of mediated diplomacy and the provocative U.S. blockade threats—for what they are—an illegal, unprovoked war that has already produced war crimes and follows the example of the atrocities committed in the Gaza genocide—can we hope to avert the regional eruption that still threatens us all. The fault lies squarely with the United States and Israel. Until that reality is confronted through concrete international action, including accountability mechanisms that ensure no impunity for these aggressor nations, peace in the Persian Gulf and the Levant will remain a fragile and ultimately illusory hope. The Nuremberg principles demand nothing less: aggressors must face justice, or the accumulated evil of war will continue to consume us all.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.