By Dr. Kevin Barrett, Veterans Today Editor, for Tehran Times
The previous century (20th c.e., 14th h.) featured innumerable martyrs. But only a few of their names have been chiseled prominently into the tablets of world history. Mahatma Gandhi, John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Sayyid Qutb were all murdered for standing up against evil. None were saints, much less prophets or imams. All led imperfect lives and had personal as well as intellectual flaws. Yet each became emblematic of a different facet of the struggle for God and the good against the forces of Satan that dominate the so-called modern world.
Gandhi’s life symbolized the struggle against imperialism and colonialism and the yearning to overcome violence. The Kennedies died standing up for American ideals of justice and decency against their greatest enemies, Zionists and the military-industrial complex. Malcolm and Martin waged religiously-based struggles against racism and imperialism, and were murdered for doing so. And Sayyid Qutb, for his part, saw that the modern secular West is essentially satanic, sought an Islamic alternative, and paid with his life.
Lured to Baghdad with a phony invitation to peace negotiations, Soleimani was ambushed by gutless drone operators who would need to wear adult diapers and leg irons if they ever faced actual combat.
Though the 21st/15th century, like its predecessors, has witnessed far too many martyrs, only one name is currently rising to world-historical status: that of General Qassem Soleimani, commander and inspiration of the Axis of Resistance that is transforming the Muslim East and, with it, the world. On January 3, 2020, General Soleimani was murdered in the most odiously cowardly fashion imaginable. Lured to Baghdad with a phony invitation to peace negotiations, Soleimani was ambushed by gutless drone operators who would need to wear adult diapers and leg irons if they ever faced actual combat. Their even more cowardly commander-in-chief who authorized the slaughter, a certain Donald J. Trump, had avoided the Vietnam-era draft by claiming to have a vague problem with his foot. Trump—a certified narcissist, sociopath, dullard, and child-molesting rapist pervert—relayed the order to kill Gen. Soleimani from Trump’s boss, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose intelligence service had employed Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to obtain blackmail material documenting Trump’s criminal sex habits.
There are several reasons why Hajj Qassem Soleimani’s martyrdom rises to world-historical stature. The first, as already suggested, is the emblematic evil of his murderers. Just as Hossein’s martyrdom was underlined by the evil of Yazid, Gen. Soleimani’s death at the hands of the most villainous cowards imaginable creates a striking chiaroscuro effect in which the darkness of the forces of evil emphasizes the bright, shining light of the martyr who stood against them.
That same “moral chiaroscuro” shines a dazzling halo around Soleimani’s battle with another avatar of sheer evil: the pitiless terrorists of Daesh. The entire world, with the exception of Daesh’s Zionist and American sponsors, cheered as the brave General repeatedly helicoptered behind enemy lines to rally Kurdish, Iraqi, and Syrian forces fighting the head-choppers and liver-eaters who had sullied the good name of Islam with their insane, drug-addled, US-mind-controlled bloodbaths.
Due to his legendary courage, General Soleimani was loved and admired by nearly everyone, including many of his enemies. Even neocon-friendly Gen. Petraeus, who was nearly driven out of his mind by Soleimani’s military and strategic genius as they clashed in Iraq, reacted ambivalently to the latter’s murder, voicing barely-disguised admiration as he admitted that the martyred General had “played his hand well.”
Indeed, in the long annals of military history, it would be hard to find a commander who, with a level of courage that stunned ally and enemy alike, continued to personally visit the most sanguinary war fronts under circumstances of the most extreme peril the way Hajj Soleimani did. Obviously Gen. Soleimani knew he would almost certainly be martyred. He was undoubtedly surprised that it took so long. From his extensive time on the bloodiest fronts of 1980s Iran’s imposed war against Saddam Hossein’s aggression, to his battles with the biggest and nastiest US and mafia-backed drug gangs of Baluchistan, to his front-lines on-the-ground leadership of the many and various struggles against the US-Zionist-Daesh axis of evil, Gen. Soleimani should have, on the basis of cold actuarial calculations, died hundreds if not thousands of times. His survival until 2020 is so improbable it can only be considered miraculous.
General Soleimani’s legendary charisma and optimistic can-do attitude inspired his troops, his allies, and even foreign heads of state. In 2012, the General met Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad at the presidential palace in Damascus. At that moment, the plot against Syria, hatched by Zionist extremist Jeffrey Feltman, author of the 2005 Hariri assassination among other atrocities, was in full swing. General Soleimani told President Assad that Iran would offer him sanctuary if he wished to step down. If, on the other hand, he wanted to fight, Iran would stand by its long-time friend. Inspired by Gen. Soleimani, the Syrian leader chose to stay and fight a David-vs.-Goliath battle against the Zionist-American regime change effort.
That uphill battle might have been hopeless had Gen. Soleimani not paid a visit to Russian president Putin in 2015. A Russian witness to the encounter says Putin was greatly impressed by the Iranian General: “I can even say that without the meeting, (Putin) wouldn’t have committed to Assad the same way.”1
Gen. Soleimani’s talent for inspiring Davids to rise up against Goliaths and win was also evident in Lebanon and Syria. The General’s advice and support was an essential ingredient in the emergence of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Ansarullah movement in Yemen. Both groups seemingly came out of nowhere to strike devastating blows against the twin scourges of Zionism and imperialism, somehow winning battles against vastly bigger, better-armed, better-funded opponents. Lebanon’s defeat of Israel in the 33 Day War of 2006, and Ansarullah’s defeat of the Anglo-Zionist Empire’s proxies Saudi Arabia and the UAE, were among the most unlikely David-vs.-Goliath triumphs in military history. Such grossly improbable victories might have been downright impossible without the daring, charismatic genius of General Qassem Soleimani.
Indeed, the against-all-odds career of Gen. Soleimani parallels the miraculous triumphs of the the Prophet Muhammad (saas) and his allies against the formidably powerful Meccan oligarchy. The Qur’anic injunction to resist evil and defend the good, and to fight with utmost exertion in the cause of God, trusting that He will help with unseen forces even on the most unequal battlefields, defines and describes the career of the martyred General. Such genuinely Islamic warriors have been rare in most eras, and even more rare in ours.
Finally, any serious discussion of Gen. Soleimani’s legacy cannot ignore his stature as the towering giant of the anti-Zionist struggle—the defining clash of our time, which Sheikh Imran Hosein among other eschatologists identifies with the end times (akhir uz-zaman). Virtually all Christian as well as Muslim eschatologists explicitly or implicitly identify Zionism with Antichrist (Dajjal). But while Sheikh Imran Hosein and other Muslims correctly argue that all people of God must stand against the lying, criminal, genocidal Zionist Antichrist, today’s deviant and misguided Christian eschatologists generally support Zionism on the grounds that the more Antichrist prospers, the faster Jesus will come back to defeat him!
The satanically-inspired bogus Christians and bogus Muslims who fail in their duty to wage jihad against the Zionist Antichrist, neglecting to raise their voices much less their swords and allowing the genocide of Palestine to proceed, will have to answer to God for their crimes of omission. Today, many of them can plead ignorance: The Zionists have grossly distorted history. They have turned the entire mainstream media into a mendacious propaganda factory, using the proceeds of their global usury racket to brainwash most of the world’s population.
But as the world gradually awakens to the shocking truth about the 20th century world wars, the Zionist assassinations of the Kennedies and controlled demolitions on 9/11, the century-long terrorist genocide of the Palestinians, and the enablement of these and so many other crimes through the establishment of the worst criminal dictatorship in history thanks to ubiquitous Zionist usury, more and more citizens of the world, whatever their nominal national or religious affiliation, will gradually come to understand General Qassem Soleimani’s heroic stature in the struggle of good against evil. A living legend in his own time, and an even bigger legend just one year after his martyrdom, General Soleimani’s halo will, insha’Allah, continue to shine ever-brighter, inspiring millions to rise up against evil and struggle in the cause of God.
1Arash Azizi, The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the U.S., and Iran’s Global Ambitions. London: Oneworld, 2020. pp. 241-242. (Note: This is a hostile biography by a sycophantic imperial propagandist, but it is unfortunately the only semi-scholarly book currently available available in English on the life and career of Gen. Soleimani.)