A Feasibility Study for a “Leadership Elimination” Project

Mahjoub Fadl Badri
I was a bright yet naïve boy when I once dreamt of a plan to eliminate the leadership of Israel after the defeat that is politely referred to as the “setback”. In my imagination, the targets were Prime Minister Golda Meir, the one-eyed General Moshe Dayan, Minister of Defence, and Abba Eban, the Foreign Minister. In my childish view, that would have been enough to resolve the Palestinian question once and for all.
They all died later, of course, without my ever carrying out my plan — yet that did not resolve the Arab cause, which at the time was considered central.
I will not trouble you with the fanciful notions that occupied my young mind about how such an imagined elimination might occur. My childish scheme was to travel to the occupied territories, somehow manage to gather the intended targets onto a single aeroplane, and then bring that aeroplane down with a slingshot, which happened to be the only weapon available to me!
I later realised the absurdity of that childish idea and its utter lack of practicality, even if it had somehow succeeded. But the question remains:
Who will convince the tyrants of today — America and Israel — that my childish notion was pointless?
Today we see Netanyahu persuading Trump that the world would be better if Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were eliminated — that afterwards “everything would become wonderful”.
Now the elderly and ailing Supreme Leader has passed away, and the situation has grown even darker. Perhaps Netanyahu and Trump themselves may eventually feel that his presence had actually been better for them and for the region. After all, the late Supreme Leader had issued a fatwa prohibiting the possession of nuclear weapons, and it is not yet known whether his successor will uphold that ruling or issue another that contradicts it. The matter now lies in the hands of the new Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Ali Khamenei.
Nor have the new tyrants learned anything — much like the Bourbon kings, who “learned nothing and forgot nothing”. They previously killed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Dr Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, and later Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar, yet the hand of Hamas remains firmly on the trigger.
Imam Hassan al-Banna was assassinated, yet the idea of the Muslim Brotherhood persists.
Osama bin Laden was killed, but Al-Qaeda did not disappear.
This is true of many ideas — however flawed they may be — whose founders died while their ideas continued to live on. The Zionist idea of establishing a Jewish state and the Marxist idea are obvious examples. Their proponents may have died long ago, yet their ideas still survive in one form or another.
Amid the American-Israeli war against Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood has been declared a terrorist organisation. Thus, the constant in their thinking — and the reality clear to us — is the targeting of Islam, wherever it may be found, regardless of whether its adherents are Sunni or Shia.
Yet their efforts will fail, and their arrows will miss their mark. God Almighty did not create the universe in order to hand over its governance to one of His creatures — nor to a self-styled deity named Trump.
Returning to my earlier thought: it now seems to me that the childish idea I had as a boy — in a village in northern Sudan where every building was made of mud, where there was neither electricity nor running water — was wiser than the ideas of the occupant of the White House in Washington, D.C., where research centres in every field abound, yet apparently no proper technical or economic feasibility study has been conducted for his war against Iran.
Such a study would undoubtedly tell him that assassinating the Supreme Leader will not win the war. Instead, it would lead his people into disaster — a wretched destination indeed.
It would also remind him that Iran rests upon a civilisation stretching deep into history, most recently represented by the Sassanid Empire, founded in 241 CE and later entering Islam in 651 CE. It is not a state formed merely from a few united states in 1776, following the annihilation of indigenous peoples, and later recognised by the British coloniser in 1783.
Mr Trump, Islam is more sacred and deeper than any organisation that carries its name and strives — sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly — to follow its path.
We Muslims are convinced of this.
But who will convince the Pharaohs of our age — and how many are there?

Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=12034