On September 11, 2001, nineteen men boarded four commercial aircraft and murdered nearly three thousand people, including several dozen Muslims, because they had been told, by men who claimed to speak for God, that this act would earn them each a one-on-one audience with Allah and seventy-two companions in paradise. The men who made that promise were not martyrs. They were sitting safely on the ground, and they had no intention of changing that.
That promise was not religion. It was blasphemy.
Blasphemy is not just crude mockery of the divine. At its core, blasphemy means making false official statements on God’s behalf — putting God’s name and approval on violence, hatred, and dehumanization of other human beings. When an Al Qaeda recruiter told nineteen men that God wanted them to fly planes into buildings, he wasn’t transmitting divine will. He was fabricating it, and using that fabrication to get other people killed for his political agenda while he stayed alive. That’s what blasphemy is.
And it’s not only Al Qaeda. During the Iran-Iraq War, Ayatollah Khomeini sent children to the front lines wearing plastic keys around their necks. The clerics told them these keys would unlock the gates of Paradise, their reward for walking ahead of the Revolutionary Guard’s armored vehicles to detonate the mines with their bodies. A grown man looked a child in the face, handed him a piece of molded plastic, told him God had arranged this honor for him, and sent him forward to die. That is the definition of using God’s name in vain. That is blasphemy.
Islamic law has a term for the crime of warring against God: moharebeh. The Iranian regime knows the word well; it uses it constantly, as the charge leveled at protesters and dissidents before they are sentenced to hang. Here is what that reveals: the same ayatollahs who sent children to clear minefields with plastic keys around their necks, who told those children that God personally arranged their deaths, turn around and execute young Iranians for moharebeh — warring against God. They wield the charge as a weapon against the innocent while committing the very crime themselves. If lying to a child about God’s will in order to use his body as a human mine-detector is not warring against God, then the term has no meaning at all.
This is not a problem confined to one country or one movement. “Patriarch” Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church has spent the last several years providing theological cover for Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest against Ukraine, declaring it a holy war and calling on Russian Christians to see the slaughter of Ukrainian civilians as God’s work. The Russian Orthodox Church has a two-thousand-year history. Kirill has spent his tenure turning it into a propaganda organ for a gangster state. Every time he invokes God’s blessing on Russian tanks and Russian missiles, he commits the same sin as the Al Qaeda recruiters who sent men to their deaths with promises of paradise: he puts God’s name on his own evil, and calls it faith.
The method is always the same. These men take the authority of God and use it as a weapon to recruit killers, to send children to die, to justify conquest, while keeping themselves safely out of harm’s way. The cleric who straps a plastic key around a twelve-year-old’s neck does not himself walk ahead of the tanks. The imam who promises paradise for murdering Jews is in no hurry to collect that reward himself. This is not faith. It is fraud.
Now here is the strategic question: what do we do about it?
The instinct in polite circles, in op-ed pages, in diplomatic corridors, in interfaith dialogue sessions, is to respond with reasoned counter-argument. That instinct is losing us the war against jihadist terror and the broader campaign to delegitimize Israel and the Jewish people. During the Second World War, American propagandists did not respond to Japanese aggression with policy papers. They produced visceral, emotionally devastating imagery that made ordinary Americans feel, in their gut, who the enemy was and what was at stake. Germany lost the First World War in part because it sent professors to make intellectual arguments while the other side distributed cartoons of brutish “Huns” bayoneting women and children. Hitler, of all people, understood this failure clearly, and his movement corrected for it. Hamas has read those chapters too. They know that the man on the street is not moved by footnotes. He is moved by images and slogans.
We need to stop playing the game we are losing and start playing the game we can win. The weapon that works here is not the counter-argument. It is the exposure. And the most devastating exposure is to take these men’s own religious vocabulary — moharebeh, blasphemy, takfiri (one who weaponizes religion for personal gain), mufsid (evildoer) — and make it stick to them publicly, forcefully, and without apology.
Name them. Post their pictures. Quote their words alongside the religious and legal definitions that condemn them. Make clear to every audience that these men are not martyrs, not holy men, not representatives of anything sacred — they are frauds, and the tradition they claim to represent has words for what they are. Strip them of the religious credibility that is their only real currency.
This is the public relations equivalent of what the Roman soldier was trained to do: get inside the enemy’s reach, where his weapons can’t function, and finish the fight at close range. The blasphemy charge gets us inside. It takes the one asset these men have — the claim to speak for God — and turns it into a liability. You don’t need to be a Muslim to call a man a mufsid. You just need to be right. And in every case described here, we are right.
There is a universal moral framework that underlies every major civilization,in what the ancient world called Natural Law, what Hindus call Dharma. The Ten Commandments are one expression of it. Every serious moral tradition on earth converges on basic prohibitions: do not murder the innocent, do not lie, do not use the divine to justify the profane. The men described in this article are not on the opposite side of a political argument. They are outside every moral framework that has ever existed.
The prophet Isaiah had no patience for those who called evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20). He did not suggest nuanced dialogue with the idolaters of his day. He named them and condemned them in language that has echoed for twenty-eight centuries. We have the same obligation and, if we are willing to use it, the same tool.
Name the blasphemers. Use their own words against them. And do not stop until their credibility is ash.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Israel365 News.
