Iran International
As renewed fighting pushes Iran and the United States away from diplomacy and back toward full-scale confrontation, influential hardline voices in Tehran are openly arguing that political assassination and a more aggressive foreign policy are both justified and necessary.
The revenge-laden rhetoric that dominated the week-long mourning ceremonies for former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is rapidly evolving into something broader.
State media have published images depicting not only US officials but also European leaders, including France’s Emmanuel Macron and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, as targets.
On Monday, July 13, Ali Mahdian, a hardline seminarian and academic associated with the late Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, the ideological father of the ultraconservative Paydari Front, went further still, seeking to provide a religious justification for political assassination.
Writing in the Tehran municipality’s daily Hamshahri, Mahdian presented the killing of Western leaders and those he held responsible for the deaths of senior Iranian figures not as terrorism but as a “divine mission.”
Citing Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, he rejected the argument that a sovereign state should not engage in targeted killings. Referring to remarks by Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani, Mahdian even suggested that an actor inside the United States might carry out such an attack.
“This is a global wrath… an era in which the head of Satan must be cut off,” he concluded with an apocalyptic call to action. “Everyone must help: scholars, clerics, preachers, speakers, broadcasters, channel writers, officials, Iranians, Iraqis, everyone.”
The significance lies less in the practicality of his appeal than in how openly such arguments are now being advanced in an established state newspaper.
Late last week, US forces resumed strikes on Iranian military infrastructure, while Iran retaliated against American bases across the Persian Gulf. President Donald Trump announced a renewed blockade of Iranian shipping, saying the United States would keep the Strait of Hormuz open.
Tehran, meanwhile, says transit through the strait is no longer possible because of US military action and insists it retains control over the strategic waterway, while threatening further retaliation.
The same day, Kayhan offered a strategic counterpart to Mahdian’s theological argument.
In a commentary by Alireza Mashouri, introduced as a scholar of international relations, the newspaper called for Iran to abandon its longstanding policy of “strategic patience” in favour of what he termed “offensive diplomacy.”
“When a state exercises restraint, enemies do not see it as moral high ground or peace-loving nature; they calculate it as a lack of capability or will to respond,” he wrote.
Mashouri argued that Iran’s year of compliance after the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal convinced its adversaries that Tehran lacked the will to respond, paving the way for “maximum pressure,” targeted assassinations and progressively bolder military attacks.
“In global politics, there is no such thing as a moral ledger where a state is rewarded later for its past good behavior,” Mashouri wrote. “This does not mean starting a war; it means making the cost of aggression real for the enemy.”
None of this necessarily means that Tehran has adopted political assassination or uncontrolled escalation as formal policy.
Iran has a long history of violence against opposition figures and regional adversaries, but public appeals for the killing of sitting Western leaders represent a notable escalation in the language emerging from influential hardline circles.
More significant than the rhetoric itself may be the erosion of the political and ideological case for restraint. As US and Iranian forces exchange attacks and the dispute over Hormuz becomes another front in the war, hardline voices increasingly portray negotiation not as a means of protecting Iran but as proof of weakness.
What began as funeral rhetoric is becoming something more consequential: an argument that the era of strategic patience is over, and that peace now demands a justification war no longer does.
