The Trump administration's decision to declare war on Iran was unlawful and illegitimate from the outset. It was a blatant assault on an Islamic country that disregarded every international norm barring one state from attacking another without global consensus. That is precisely why most of the world, including Washington's own NATO allies, refused to join the campaign. And it is why the administration never sought, let alone received, a green light from the American people or their representatives in Congress. Trump's America simply proceeded with aggression, killing innocents and children including schoolgirls in a land that produced towering scholars of Islam such as Imam Muslim, al-Bukhari, and al-Tirmidhi. This followed years of full American military and political support for the Zionist entity's genocidal massacres in Gaza and across the blessed land of Palestine, support that continues to this day.

Not content with these violations, the administration pushed further still, rebelling against human values and universally recognized norms. Recently, Trump threatened that the United States would strike Iranian civilian infrastructure every time Tehran fired on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. "Any time the Islamic Republic of Iran fires on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether by missile, rocket shell, drone, or any other means or weapon," he wrote on social media, "the United States will bomb and destroy one bridge or one power plant." In doing so, Trump's America, a self-proclaimed leader of the free world has installed a new international order built on the law of the jungle, one that recognizes no law and no shared human values, and that renounces even the divine laws, including the Christianity which Trump and his administration claim to profess. Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court unambiguously states that deliberately directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects that are not military targets is a war crime. A promise to bomb a power plant or a bridge in retaliation for an unrelated military action is a promise to commit a war crime.

Even most American voters see through it. Recent polling shows 56% of American believe the war on Iran serves the Zionist entity before it serves the United States and only 29% think it serves the interests of the United States. An administration that calls itself democratic, that claims to rule in the people's name and serve their interests rather than its own, has ignored both global opinion and the opinion of its own electorate. In doing so it has begun to resemble the dictatorial regimes of the Islamic world it claims to be liberating from oppression.

And still the administration squanders taxpayers' money on a war, taxpayers never approved. The cost of military operations against Iran has already reached $37.5 billion, even as the Department of War (Pentagon) demands another $67 billion, warning that Congress's refusal would cripple military readiness. Defense Secretary Hegseth says the additional funds, layered onto a proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget, would replenish munitions, harden defenses against drones and missiles, and keep training programs and salaries flowing.

That money could have gone to education, health care, and the other vital sectors now starved of funding. Instead of baby formula and food for the poor - benefits so deeply cut that a government shutdown followed - taxpayer dollars are buying munitions from weapons manufacturers tied to the Republican Party, munitions dropped on civilians in Gaza and Iran, used to destroy bridges in Iran and southern Lebanon, and to knock out power stations and plunge people into darkness, exactly as Trump promised the Iranian people. This is not the pursuit of humanity's good. It is the pursuit of destruction, and of dragging human beings back into a new dark age.

Muslims in America, and every rational person in this country, have a duty to condemn the decision-makers and the deep state behind these policies, along with everyone in the administration who carries out their will. These crimes belong to the decision-makers and not to the American people as a whole, precisely because America claims to be a democracy that governs in the name of its people, not in the name of profiteering elites who grow rich on war, or of criminal Zionist groups pursuing ethnic cleansing and genocide.