The People Running This War Believe It Will End the World, and They Might Be Right

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation received over 200 complaints from service members at more than 50 military installations across every branch of the US armed forces in the first week of the Iran war, according to MRFF founder Mikey Weinstein, who told independent journalist Jonathan Larsen that a combat-unit commander had instructed his NCOs to tell their subordinates that "President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth." The commander cited the Book of Revelation and urged troops to spread the word that the war was "all part of God's divine plan," and Weinstein described the officers in question as displaying "unrestricted euphoria" and being "especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be, zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become." The initial complainant was himself a Christian, an NCO representing 15 troops, 11 of whom were Christian, who were disturbed not by religious expression but by their commanding officers framing an active military operation as a vehicle for the biblical apocalypse.

Thirty members of Congress, led by Representatives Jared Huffman, Jamie Raskin, and Chrissy Houlahan, sent a formal letter to DOD Inspector General Platte B. Moring III requesting an investigation. The letter stated: "If accurate, these outrageous statements, justifying a war based on interpretations of biblical prophecies, and informing troops that they are risking their lives to advance a specific religious vision, raises not only glaring Constitutional concerns, but potential violations of Department of Defense regulations regarding religious neutrality." Nancy Pelosi, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Pramila Jayapal were among the signatories. The AP ran the story on March 20, 17 days after it broke, leading with the framing that the allegations "remain unverified" and noting that Weinstein declined to provide documentation citing retaliation fears. That framing became the dominant angle when the Washington Post and PBS picked up the wire. The New York Times has not published a single article on the MRFF complaints, the congressional investigation request, or the end-times rhetoric within the US military. CNN covered the adjacent story of Hegseth's broader Christian nationalist rhetoric without reporting the specific complaints from troops. Fox News covered end-times theology exclusively as Iran's problem, framing Shia eschatology as fanaticism while saying nothing about the mirror-image Christian eschatology being preached by American officers to American soldiers on American bases.

MSNBC ran an opinion piece on March 4 that took the complaints seriously. Democracy Now conducted an extended interview with Weinstein on March 9. The Intercept's Natasha Lennard framed it within the broader pattern of Christian nationalist capture of the military. Military.com published straight reporting within days. Al Jazeera ran the broadest framing, connecting the military rhetoric to Rubio, Netanyahu, and Huckabee. Middle East Eye, TRT World, The New Arab, and Asia Times all covered it. The MRFF is a legitimate, decades-old organization and 30 sitting members of Congress found the complaints credible enough to demand a formal investigation from the Inspector General, and yet a congressional demand for an IG investigation into apocalyptic rhetoric within the armed forces during an active, unauthorized war didn't make the front page of a single major American newspaper.

The Secretary of Defense has a crusader's cross tattooed across his chest

Pete Hegseth, the man overseeing this war from the Pentagon, has a Jerusalem Cross tattooed across his chest, the symbol of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, large enough that historian Matt Lodder noted "it's interesting it's so large... this isn't supposed to be hidden." On his inner right bicep he has "Deus Vult", Latin for "God wills it," the rallying cry of the First Crusade in 1096 that sent armies to slaughter Muslims and Jews across the Levant. That tattoo, not the Jerusalem Cross as Hegseth has repeatedly and falsely claimed, is the one that got him flagged as an insider threat by Sgt. DeRicko Gaither, head of National Guard security, before Biden's inauguration. Gaither wrote to his superior: "This information is quite disturbing, sir. This falls along the lines of (an) Insider Threat." He later clarified: "Just so we are clear. This has NOTHING to do with the Jerusalem Cross tattoo on his chest. This has everything to do with the 'DEUS VULT' Tattoo on his inner bicep." Hegseth also has the Arabic word "kafir" (infidel) tattooed on his arm, revealed in March 2025, and a cross pierced by a sword referencing Matthew 10:34 ("I came not to bring peace, but a sword") with "Yeshua" beneath it, gotten in Bethlehem.

Historian Thomas Lecaque told New Lines Magazine: "There is no version of Deus Vult that means anything other than Crusader fanboy." Medieval historian Eleanor Janega called it "a call to religious violence, expressly linked to a horrific episode in history." Researcher Andrew Elliott said: "I have never seen Deus Vult used outside far-right culture... except in video games." The same symbols appeared in Anders Breivik's manifesto, at the 2017 Charlottesville rally, and at the January 6 Capitol riot.

These are not hidden beliefs Hegseth tries to keep separate from his official role. His 2020 book American Crusade explicitly argued "Our present moment is much like the 11th century... We need an American Crusade," described Islam as "an enemy of the west," called Trump a "Crusader in Chief," and closed with the words "Deus Vult." He drunkenly shouted "Kill all Muslims" at a 2015 veterans event. In 2018, he said that reconstructing the Temple Mount, which would require the destruction of Al-Aqsa Mosque, was possible. Since becoming Secretary of Defense he has instituted monthly Christian worship services at the Pentagon, inserted Bible verses into Pentagon promotional videos, hosted Doug Wilson, a far-right pastor who has defended slavery and called for American theocracy, at Pentagon prayer gatherings, and described the Iran war by saying "We're fighting religious fanatics who seek a nuclear capability in order for some religious Armageddon." Georgetown professor Matthew D. Taylor warned: "This is exactly the kind of scenario that people like me were warning about before the election."

The US Ambassador to Israel is inspecting the animals for the apocalypse

On May 7, 2025, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee made a historic official visit to the Israeli settlement of Shiloh in the occupied West Bank, the first time a sitting US ambassador held an official government meeting with the Yesha Council, the umbrella body for West Bank settlements. He began his tour by viewing five red heifers being raised at the site "in accordance with the biblical commandment and in preparation for the future building of the Temple." He posed for photographs with the animals and prayed at the site of the biblical Tabernacle. He told reporters: "It's a great honor to be here. It's a thrill to come to these biblical sites and to see where it was that God did important, great and miraculous things."

The red heifer is the centerpiece of a purification ritual described in the Book of Numbers that dispensationalist Christians and ultranationalist Israelis believe is a prerequisite for rebuilding the Third Temple on the Temple Mount, the site currently occupied by Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third holiest site. For Christian Zionists like Huckabee, rebuilding the Temple is necessary to trigger the Second Coming of Christ. The five heifers were imported from a Texas ranch in September 2022 by Byron Stinson, an evangelical Christian working with Boneh Israel and the Temple Institute, flown to Israel classified as "pets" to circumvent livestock import restrictions, with the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture circumventing its own standard protocols to approve the imports. On July 1, 2025, a practice run of the red heifer burning ceremony was held on a hilltop in northern Israel, a rehearsal for the ritual that would, according to its organizers, set the preconditions for destroying one of Islam's holiest sites and replacing it with a Jewish temple.

CNN covered Huckabee's nomination, his "take it all" comments, his Western Wall visit, his Gaza visits, and never once mentioned the red heifers or the Shiloh settlement visit. NBC News ran a piece about Huckabee claiming Israel has a "God-given right" to the land and referenced his "Christian Zionist beliefs" without ever explaining what those beliefs actually entail in terms of Third Temple theology or why they matter. Fox News sent reporters to Shiloh when Sarah Huckabee Sanders' children found coins on an archaeological dig at the exact same site where the red heifers are being raised, and the resulting article described Shiloh as "the ancient biblical capital" without mentioning the animals being prepared for a ritual that would require the demolition of Al-Aqsa. The Elder of Ziyon blog noted the gap explicitly: "The red heifer detail was barely mentioned in English language sources but was major news in Arab sites." Al Jazeera published 18 paragraphs on the Texas-to-Israel heifer pipeline, the government involvement, and the implications for Al-Aqsa. American corporate media decided the US ambassador's personal investment in a theological project that would require the destruction of the third holiest site in Islam was not something American audiences needed to know about.

Netanyahu scrubs the apocalypse from his English transcripts

Benjamin Netanyahu launched the war on Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of Remembrance that falls immediately before Purim, when Jews traditionally recite Deuteronomy 25:17-19, the commandment to "blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under the heavens." His pre-recorded Hebrew address to the Israeli public that night referenced the Purim story of Haman, the Persian official who plotted to destroy all Jews in the Persian Empire, and declared: "Twenty-five hundred years ago, in ancient Persia, a tyrant rose against us with the very same goal, to utterly destroy our people. Today as well, on Purim, the lot has fallen, and in the end this evil regime will fall too." He told Israelis: "This time we don't just remember and read, this time we do," a direct invocation of the Amalek commandment to annihilate an entire people, men, women, children, and livestock. Days later at a strike site in Beit Shemesh, he repeated it: "We read in this week's Torah portion, 'Remember what Amalek did to you.' We remember, and we act."

The English translations released to world media scrubbed the Amalek references entirely. Substack writer Edo Amin documented the specific passages that appeared in the Hebrew but vanished from the official English transcripts, a dual-language strategy in which Netanyahu communicates apocalyptic, genocidal religious framing to his domestic audience while presenting sanitized versions to the international press. Ultra-orthodox Minister Orit Struk confirmed that Netanyahu explicitly linked the operation's launch timing to the Shabbat Zachor religious observance during a phone call on the first day. Corporate media outlets with access to Hebrew speakers, translation desks, and decades of Middle East bureau infrastructure reported his English statements without checking the Hebrew originals, and in doing so helped maintain the fiction that a man invoking the biblical commandment for total destruction of a people was conducting a rational military operation rather than, by his own words, fulfilling religious prophecy.

This was not new for Netanyahu. He first invoked Amalek on October 28, 2023 while inciting soldiers during the Gaza campaign, repeated it in a letter to troops on November 3, and South Africa cited both instances at the International Court of Justice in the genocide case. The court found the genocide claims "plausible." He named the Iran operation "Am K'lavi" (Rising Lion), from Numbers 23:24, a verse about a lion that "rests not till it has feasted on prey and drunk the blood of the slain," which he had quoted at the International Bible Competition on May 1, 2025, six weeks before operations began. As the first strikes hit Iran, he handwrote the verse on paper and placed it between the stones at the Western Wall. He described wrapping himself in a tallit before ordering the strikes and told the Jerusalem Post he feels he is on "a historic and spiritual mission," citing his late father: "What matters is that the people of Israel have the necessary powers needed to remove the threat of destruction from Iran... That is what he chose to say after 100 years. Do you understand? I am on a mission." In September 2024, he told cameras that "the era of the Messiah will come." He has rebranded the war as the "War of Redemption." In 2012, he gave President Obama a copy of the Book of Esther as "background reading" on Iran.

His coalition partners are, if anything, more explicit. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, a convicted supporter of the Kach terrorist organization and admirer of the late racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, has visited the Al-Aqsa compound at least six times as minister, prayed loudly on the Temple Mount on Tisha B'Av in August 2025 in deliberate violation of the decades-old status quo, and declared "We are the owners of the Temple Mount." Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared at a May 2025 rally the government's intention to "expand Israel's borders, bring about complete redemption, and rebuild the Temple." The UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway sanctioned both men for inciting extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights. Settler incursions into the Al-Aqsa compound have risen from 5,000 annually in 2009 to over 57,000 in 2024, with twice-daily incursions now routine under police protection.

The war is already being used to restrict access to Al-Aqsa

Since the bombing campaign began, Israel has cancelled Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa, citing Iranian retaliatory strikes, closed all Old City holy sites, and barred access to anyone except residents and shop owners. During Ramadan, authorities announced no more than 10,000 Palestinians from the West Bank could attend prayers, a fraction of the mosque's half-million capacity. Eight Arab and Islamic countries formally condemned the closures. Senior imam Sheikh Ikrima Sabri said: "The occupation authorities are exploiting any occasion to close Al-Aqsa, and this is completely unjustified." On March 20, Iranian missile debris landed less than a kilometer from the Temple Mount.

The Temple Institute has prepared over 60 sacred Temple vessels, priestly garments for a new generation of Levitical priests already in training, and operational blueprints for construction to modern standards. They claim the Third Temple could be completed start-to-finish in less than one year once a building permit is obtained. The only outstanding prerequisite is the ritually pure red heifer, which is now potentially available via the Texas imports that Ambassador Huckabee went to inspect. Hamas spokesman Abu Ubaida explicitly cited "bringing red cows" to the Holy Land as part of Hamas's stated motivation for the October 7 attacks. Palestine's Foreign Ministry condemned an AI-generated video circulating on extremist Hebrew platforms titled "Next Year in Jerusalem" showing Al-Aqsa being bombed and replaced by a Third Temple. Jordan reintroduced military conscription in February 2026, which analysts at DAWN interpret as preparation for "all potential scenarios" with Israel, because the Hashemite Kingdom has served as custodian of Jerusalem's Muslim and Christian holy sites since 1924 and takes that role seriously enough to draft its citizens over it.

Nobody can say with certainty what Israel's government intends for Al-Aqsa. But the people in that government have stated, on camera, that they want to rebuild the Temple, that they consider themselves owners of the Temple Mount, and that they are working toward "complete redemption." The Tucker Carlson segment from March 5 featuring Israeli Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi discussing a scenario in which a strike on Al-Aqsa could be blamed on Iran was inflammatory and unverified, and Mizrachi responded by framing the Third Temple as a messianic-era aspiration rather than an operational plan. But a war that is already being used to close Al-Aqsa, conducted jointly with a government whose ministers have called for the Temple's reconstruction, while the US ambassador personally inspects the ritual animals and the Secretary of Defense has publicly endorsed the reconstruction of the Temple Mount, creates conditions that would make such an action possible whether or not it is currently planned. Analysts who study the settler movement's incremental approach, which mirrors the staged takeover of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron (first time-sharing, then spatial division, then full control), have been warning for years that the playbook is already in motion. The war just accelerated the timeline.

The man on a mission has nuclear weapons

On March 10, retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, told Democracy Now that he had listened to Netanyahu speaking in Hebrew to political allies including Ben Gvir and Smotrich, and that at the end of those remarks, Netanyahu "essentially said that if it went south, if it went bad, he was prepared to show the Iranians something they had never seen before." Wilkerson interpreted this as a reference to nuclear weapons and drew a direct parallel to 1973, when Prime Minister Golda Meir told a BBC reporter, without equivocation, that Israel would use nuclear weapons during the Yom Kippur War. "We're back at that point again," Wilkerson said, "and for probably a far more dangerous situation."

Four days later, Trump's own AI and crypto czar David Sacks warned on the "All-In" podcast that the administration must "worry about Israel escalating the war by contemplating using a nuclear weapon," calling the scenario "truly catastrophic" and urging the US to "declare victory and get out." Fortune reported that Sacks also described Iran's ability to target desalination plants serving 100 million Gulf residents, rendering the region "almost uninhabitable." Trump dismissed the concern entirely: "Israel wouldn't do that. Israel would never do that."

Jacobin published a full analysis titled "Israel Has Nuclear Weapons. It May Use Them," citing MIT professor emeritus Ted Postol, a former Pentagon adviser, who claimed Israeli missile defense intercept rates are "below 5 percent," a figure that contradicts the official 87 percent claim and, if accurate, means Israel's conventional defenses could be overwhelmed by sustained Iranian barrages. The National Security Journal laid out four specific nuclear threshold scenarios: state collapse through enemy breakthrough, catastrophic sustained bombardment with failing defenses, a WMD attack on population centers, or loss of second-strike capability. The article assessed that Israel has not yet crossed that threshold but noted that several of the four scenarios are plausible if the war drags on, and that Israel's geographic vulnerability (roughly the size of New Jersey) means its threshold is lower than that of larger nuclear powers.

CNN ran at least 10 articles about Iran's nuclear program in the first three weeks of the war and gave the Sacks warning a brief entry in a live blog. The Washington Post published two strong articles about Israel's nuclear hypocrisy in June 2025 and has not followed up during the actual war while running over 10 pieces on Iran's nuclear program. Fox News published multiple articles framing Iran's nuclear program as an "urgent threat" and nothing about the only actual nuclear arsenal in the theater of operations. The New York Times, Reuters, AP, BBC, and The Guardian returned zero results for coverage of Israel's nuclear weapons as a risk in the current conflict. The Wilkerson interview, in which a former Colin Powell chief of staff said on the record that Netanyahu is ready to use a nuclear weapon, was picked up by zero corporate American outlets. A sitting Trump administration official warning publicly about Israeli nuclear escalation was covered by Newsweek, Haaretz, Fortune, and the Times of Israel, but not the New York Times, not the Washington Post, not CNN in any meaningful way, and not Fox.

The asymmetry tells the story. The only country in the Middle East that actually possesses nuclear weapons, led by a man who invokes the biblical commandment for total annihilation, who describes himself as being on a divine mission, whose own allies have been warned by a retired US colonel and a sitting Trump adviser may resort to nuclear weapons, is receiving virtually no scrutiny from outlets that run daily coverage about a nuclear program that has never produced a single warhead.

The alliance cracked, briefly, on March 19

Netanyahu's messianic self-image finally caused a visible rupture with his evangelical base on March 19, when he told a Jerusalem press conference that "Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan. Because if you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good," using historian Will Durant to argue that democracies must reassert their will to defend themselves. Joshua Haymes, a Pete Hegseth associate, responded publicly: "Any Nation that blasphemes the Name of Jesus Christ is not an ally, much less our 'greatest ally.'" Netanyahu walked it back within 24 hours, posting that the comments were "fake news about my attitude towards Christians." The incident exposed something that the dispensationalist alliance has always depended on obscuring: Netanyahu does not believe what Huckabee believes. Huckabee inspects the red heifers because he thinks they'll bring Jesus back. Netanyahu quotes the Torah because he thinks God promised him Greater Israel.

What the pattern looks like when you lay it out

The Secretary of Defense has a crusader's cross on his chest, "God wills it" on his arm, "infidel" in Arabic on his bicep, hosted a pro-slavery theocrat at Pentagon prayer services, runs monthly Christian worship from the building where he oversees the war, and wrote a book calling for a new crusade that closes with the rallying cry of the army that sacked Jerusalem in 1099. The US Ambassador to Israel visited an illegal settlement to personally inspect the animals being prepared for a ritual that dispensationalist theology holds will trigger the Second Coming, and not one major American newspaper reported it. Commanders across every branch of the military told their troops the war was ordained by God to cause Armageddon, 30 members of Congress demanded an investigation, and the paper of record didn't publish a word. The Prime Minister of Israel launched the war on the Sabbath when Jews recite the commandment to annihilate Amalek, invoked that commandment on camera, scrubbed it from the English translations, named the operation after a biblical verse about a lion drinking the blood of the slain, placed that verse in the Western Wall as the first bombs fell, described himself as being on a divine mission, and rebranded the conflict as the "War of Redemption" while his coalition partners called for rebuilding the Third Temple on the ruins of Al-Aqsa. A retired colonel who served as Colin Powell's chief of staff said on the record that Netanyahu is prepared to use a nuclear weapon. A sitting Trump adviser said on a podcast that Israel might use a nuclear weapon. The President of the United States said "Israel would never do that" and moved on. And the outlets that Americans rely on for information about the war being fought in their name with their money ran 10 articles apiece about Iran's nuclear program (which never produced a weapon) while publishing zero standalone investigations of the only nuclear arsenal actually in play, controlled by a man who believes he is on a mission from God.

The people who believe this war will end the world are the Secretary of Defense, the Ambassador, the Prime Minister, and the commanders giving orders to troops. The question that corporate media refuses to ask, because the answer implicates the people who own the networks and fund the campaigns, is whether a war being prosecuted by people who want the apocalypse to happen can be expected to end before it does.

-- dingo__dog