Cyrus the Great is alive

When Donald Trump came to Jerusalem this past October after a ceasefire was put into place between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, I put up the largest billboards in the nation declaring, “King Cyrus Is Alive.” They were reported on around the world. In Iran, one article even asked, “Is he King Cyrus, or is he Esther?”

The Jewish people celebrated a miracle brought about by one person, Esther, who dared to confront the spirit of Amalek—the spirit of evil calling for the annihilation of the Jewish people. This is the same spirit now operating through the demon-possessed mullahs in Iran, who believe they can usher in the 12th descendant of Mohammed through an apocalypse and force every person on the planet to bow to Islam.

Today, both the Persian people and the Jewish people are celebrating a Purim miracle.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has ruled Iran for decades with an iron fist, is dead. His secret Saturday breakfast meeting with top officials received a wake-up call from hell.

Among those reportedly killed are Gen. Hussein Salami, commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; Gen. Mohammad Baqeri, chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces; Gen. Gholam Ali Rashid, deputy commander-in-chief of the Iranian Armed Forces; Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the IRGC Aerospace Force; Gen. Mehdi Rabbani, deputy of operations of the Armed Forces of Iran; Gen. Gholamreza Mehrabi, deputy director of Intelligence for the General Staff; Gen. Davud Sheikhiyan, commander of the Air Force Division of the IRGC Aerospace Force; and Gen. Masud Shanei, chief of staff to the slain IRGC Commander-in-Chief.

Trump’s war on the jihadists of Iran, “Operation Epic Fury,” is absolutely and fantastically righteous, as is Israel’s “Roaring Lion” operation.

No president has been willing to confront Iran over the deaths of U.S. citizens, not even Ronald Reagan. I was with the Marines in 1983 in Beirut, when 231 of them were killed by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah. Reagan did nothing.

Conservative political commentator and podcaster Tucker Carlson, responding to the Iran attack on the ground, said Trump’s war is “absolutely disgusting and evil.”

He has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of genocide against the Palestinians by invoking the biblical account of Amalek. What he does not understand is that during every massacre, the Jewish people say the same thing. This is not a call to genocide; it is a vow to wipe out the ideology of evil.

If Carlson had been alive in the 1940s, he would have said the same thing in December 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war against Hitler.

I flew to Israel knowing the war was coming, both to stand with the Jewish people in their time of need and to report on the war, telling the truth alongside Melissa Francis, who organized the debate between Carlson and Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel.

The war looks like a scene out of the 1995 Mel Gibson film “Braveheart,” with Persians crying, “Freedom.”

Israeli forces killed 40 top Iranian officials within the opening minute of the salvo. Today, hundreds of millions of Persians are rejoicing, along with the families of more than 30,000 mostly young people who were murdered for protesting. Help is truly on the way.

This moment also reads like a page from the Book of Esther, where Mordechai—an Israelite from the tribe of Benjamin—cries out, “You’ve come to your position for such a time as this,” as he confronts Haman the Amalekite and his plot to exterminate all Jews in the Persian Empire.

Carlson embraces an antisemitic ideology known as replacement theology, which rejects the promises in the Bible that God made to the Jewish people. The church in Germany embraced the same belief. As a result, it joined the Nazi Party, placed swastikas beneath the altar and claimed that God must have sent the chancellor simply because the trains ran on time.

The former president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was reportedly killed this weekend along with his bodyguard, and I once met for an hour at his hotel in New York. He claimed that the reason Iranians die at 62 while Zionists live to 82 is because Jews poison rats and release them into crops.

When I asked if this was a joke, he replied: “You need to read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It will open your eyes.”

© JNS.