We are hearing a lot about “decapitation strikes” these days. Trumpenstein “decapitated” Venezuela by kidnapping its president, Nicolas Maduro. UkraiNATO tried to “decapitate” Russia through its failed drone strike on Putin. Ziomedia are floating the notion of “decapitating” Iran by killing its Supreme Leader. And of course Israel has recently “decapitated” Hezbollah and Hamas.
Will Trump “decapitate” Denmark by ordering a drone strike on its Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen? Will he “decapitate” Norway by ordering the assassination of Jonas Gahr Støre, who Trump holds responsible for failing to give him a Nobel Peace Prize? Will he “decapitate” Canada by killing Mark Carney, who recently gave a speech at Davos that Trump didn’t like?
In rare instances, decapitation strikes can work. That can happen when the new leadership that replaces the murdered former leader pursues a diametrically opposed policy. For example, Lyndon Johnson, an Israeli asset, presided over Israel’s development of nuclear weapons and its 1967 war of territorial expansion. Had Israel not decapitated the US by killing John F. Kennedy, none of that would have happened.
“Decapitating” a dangerous president-in-waiting can also work, especially if you blame the killing on your enemies. That is what Israel did when it framed an innocent, hypnotized Palestinian patsy for the murder of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.
But more often than not, decapitation doesn’t work. For a long list of examples, read Ronan Bergman’s book Rise and Kill First, which documents Israel’s outrageous history of political assassinations, including decapitations and decapitation attempts. To the extent that Bergman’s assassinations chronicle has a thesis, it is that the leaders who replace those murdered by Israel are generally even more dedicated and talented than their martyred predecessors.
And that shouldn’t surprise us. People get angry when you kill their leaders. That’s especially the case in cultures featuring a cult of martyrdom. In those cultures, good people struck down by bad people are the ultimate heroes, and anyone who dies “in the path of God” is lionized and assured a glorious and ecstatic eternity. Kill one, and a thousand line up behind the martyr and steel themselves for battle.
That is what has happened in Iran in the wake of Trump’s murder of Gen. Soleimani in January 2020, Israel’s suspected murder of President Ebrahim Raisi in May 2024, its murder of top IRGC commander Hossein Salami among other leaders and scientists in June 2025, and the recent wave of killings of police officers and innocent bystanders alike by ISIS-like captagon-crazed Zio-American Pavlavian death squads earlier this month. In all those cases, countless millions of Iranians came out in the streets to honor their martyrs and send a message: Kill a leader, and a thousand others join the battle.
By plotting to kill Putin and the Supreme Leader of Iran, the Zionist-occupied USA is playing with fire. Russia really believes “what’s the use of a world without Russia” and would indeed, if pushed far enough, use those radioactive tidal wave weapons that would render the US eastern and western seaboards permanently uninhabitable. Likewise, Iranians don’t fear death, know there’s no better use of life than to die for a good cause, and could plausibly reach the point that inflicting massive pain on their Israeli and American enemies, even at the cost of their cities and millions of lives, would be the right thing and indeed only thing left to do. Remember, every Iranian (or Palestinian or Lebanese or Yemeni or Iraqi or Afghan etc. etc.) who dies resisting evil is a hero and a martyr. The Qur’an tells us that “fitnah (in this case meaning ‘the chaotic meaninglessness of life under injustice’) is worse than killing.” If given a choice between living under extreme injustice and killing at least some perpetrators, even at great cost, a Muslim will kill the perpetrators of injustice. Nominal Muslims who won’t are not following their religion, nor worthy of their humanity. (The same, of course, is true for all human beings, but non-Muslims don’t have the advantage of a clear message explaining such things in unmistakeable terms.)
So “decapitation strikes” against societies made up of real human beings in general—and those who have become real human beings in part by following Qur’anic guidance in particular—are guaranteed to be counterproductive. Sun Tzu correctly observed that the way to win a war is to convince the enemy to stop fighting. Creating martyrs is the worst possible way to do that.
Decapitation is also gauche, uncivilized, barbaric, and impractical in that it removes the very people who could sign an armistice. You need those people in place to sign the peace agreement and convince their followers to stop fighting. That’s one of the reasons why throughout most of history, assassinating leaders has been taboo among societies with even the faintest shred of civility or honor. The “Ismaili assassins,” the namesake of assassination, were made notorious by their enemies, whose stories about their predilection for murdering leaders were powerful propaganda arguments that those assassins must have been the complete scum of the earth to do such things.
In short, murdering leaders is generally counterproductive, disgusting, and reprehensible. But…are there any circumstances where “decapitation” might be defensible?
One obvious example would be “a mad president, shredding the Constitution, with an itchy finger on the nuclear button, who cannot be removed by the 25th amendment.” Former FBI director James Comey notoriously suggested that a certain dangerous lunatic with the initials DJT be “seashelled.” At the time I thought that story was bizarrely humorous. I’m not laughing now.
Today, there are two groups with strong motivations to terminate Trump by any means necessary: the Americans, and possibly the Israelis. By “the Americans,” I mean those in the Deep State who take seriously their oath to the Constitution and their duty to safeguard the United States and its interests. Trump is destroying America and its empire, which no longer bothers me, but ought to bother those who have not lost faith in such things.
The Israelis have a different motive for the same act: They are undoubtedly contemplating killing Trump and blaming Iran. That would create the pretext for once again hijacking the American military for Israel’s wars against regional enemies, as happened after the Israelis attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. When madman Trump bleats “if anything happens to me, nuke Iran” I’m sure the Israeli assassination orchestrators are listening and licking their chops.
So both American Deep State patriots and Israelis have strong motivations to terminate the orange lunatic. I mean for real this time, not like the totally fake-and-gay “ear nick heard round the world” fake blood WWF-style PR stunt in July 2024.
So the questions remain: Will they actually do it? If so, which party? And how?
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