Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. With the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Today on Breakpoint, apologist Abdou Murray, author of the new book Fake ID, describes how the war in Iran has exposed two blind spots, one diplomatic, one technological, but both share a common root. Here's Abdu Murray. On February 28, 2026, the first day of U.
S. Israeli strikes on Iran, a Tomahawk cruise missile hit the Shahjara Tayyeba Girls' Elementary School in Minab. killing at least one hundred sixty five people. Most of them were girls between the ages of seven and twelve. Ironically, women and girls spearheaded Iran's most significant recent uprisings, and the regime killed thousands in response.
Now, in the effort to strike that regime, it was girls in a classroom who paid the price. Not deliberately, but Yeah. The regime denies its women dignity. The fog of war, made foggier by automation. did the same.
As a former Shiite Muslim I understand the weight these deaths carry in the souls of Tehran's hardliners. I fear our leader's ignorance of that weight fosters a critical misunderstanding of how and when this conflict might end. In six eighty AD, Hussein, Muhammad's grandson and the third Shiite Imam, chose death for himself and his family over submission to the unjust Umayyad Caliph Yazid at the battle of Karbala. For Shiites, this isn't ancient history. It's a living moral code.
Suffering at the hands of a vastly superior force doesn't signal defeat, it confirms righteousness. This is why some Shiite Muslims self flagellate during Ashura, drawing blood in visceral identification with Hussein's sacrifice. The practice is controversial, with notable clerics condemning it, but the theology of willing, redemptive suffering remains etched in Shiite Islam, coloring the hardliner's approach to this conflict. Not every Shiite leader reads Karbala the way Tehran does. Yet the Hardliners and their allied militias see this war as the new battle of Karbala, where even catastrophic losses can be endured.
For example, after Iran's supreme leader Khomeini was killed in the opening strikes, the axis of resistance didn't collapse. They declared victory or martyrdom as equally desirable outcomes. Khomeini himself had framed the coming conflict as confrontation through the lens of His son Mujtiba, now supreme leader, represents an even more radical apocalyptic wing, one that views all casualties as sacred martyrdom. This creates a paradox that neither practical negotiation nor shock and awe can resolve. The regime will grieve the children of Minab.
But like the zealots Muslims who draw their own blood to identify with Hussein's sufferings, the hardliners will frame those deaths as blood spilled to galvanize resistance. Overwhelming force doesn't quench this ideology, it stokes it. Western nations resolve conflicts through cost-benefit analysis, casualty thresholds, economic pressure, negotiated surrender. But the hardliners don't calculate that way. While the nation's welfare matters, it is not the primary cause worth fighting for.
The religious ideology is, even if it means letting the nation burn in the process. Ayatollah Khomeini called the ceasefire ending the Iran-Iraq war worse than drinking from a poisoned chalice. That mindset diverges widely from the despots like Muamar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, whose motivations were mere power and self-interest. Viewing the access of resistance through purely secular lenses will leave us perpetually misreading their moves. all of us, Americans and Iranians alike, will live with the consequences.
That the Minob School strike resulted from over-reliance on soulless AI punctuates the point. Preliminary investigations suggest the Defense Intelligence Agency still classified the school as part of an adjacent military compound, a classification not updated since the school was walled off and repurposed around twenty sixteen. The Pentagon's AI-assisted MAVEN smart system processed those outdated coordinates at machine speed. The US struck over one thousand targets in the first twenty four hours. If human beings struggle to grasp the spiritual realities driving this conflict, a machine has no chance.
It has no understanding of the soul of the enemy, because it has no soul of its own. It processed stale intelligence at a speed that outpaced moral discernment. And speed without understanding is not efficiency. Its recklessness. The hardliners' ideology is not shared by most Iranians.
The protests, led by women, fueled by a hunger for dignity, prove that. The Iranian people deserve better than a regime that would leverage their suffering for its theology. And the decisions about who lives and who dies should never be outsourced to a machine that cannot tell the difference between a military base and a classroom. that the conflict has begun is immutable. What can be changed is our understanding of our adversary and how that informs our leaders' decisions going forward.
Surprisingly, the Shiite conviction that willing suffering for a righteous cause has cosmic significance echoes something deep in the Christian story, creating an unexpected bridge for genuine conversations with our Shiite Muslim friends and neighbors. Christ's redemptive suffering runs deeper. At Calvary, Jesus suffered to defeat sin and death themselves. enemies no earthly regime can resist and no algorithm can target. The cross's victory is not over political adversaries, but over the very condition that makes us adversaries in the first place.
But the risen Christ did not leverage any one else's death for his cause. He offered his own. Amid this conflict, we need more than threat assessments, better firepower, and smarter yet soulless machines. We need the wisdom to understand the soul of a conflict. And that requires having one.
That was Abdou Murray. If these daily commentaries help you make sense of today's culture, please leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for a version of this commentary that you can download and share with others, go to breakpoint.org. Hi, I'm Dave from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I grew up in the church but left when I was 19.
I stayed away for the next 50 years when I lost my wife to a heart attack. The church helped me through my grief and I realized my deeper need for the Lord. I was listening to breakpoint commentaries and subsequently became a Coulson Fellow. I felt led to invest in the kingdom through the Coulson Center because the mission is too important to ignore. Please prayerfully consider joining myself and over a thousand others in becoming a Cornerstone Partner.
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