War Crimes and the Phantasms of Mark Levin

Zionist radio show host ignores international law and the Constitution.

Mark Levin, on a recent episode of his syndicated radio show, launched into a high-pitched tirade over growing criticism of President Trump’s ill-conceived attack of Iran. Levin stated a number of falsehoods as he defended the illegal and unconstitutional effort to topple the elected government of Iran. Below, I point out where the neocon and former chief of staff for Attorney General Edwin Meese strayed from the facts. Levin’s remarks are italicized.

Now we have a country that wants to build nuclear weapons and blow us off the face of the earth and I am personally getting sick and tired of people saying why are we doing this. Do you think we just picked Iran out of a hat?

Iran has stated on numerous occasions it does not possess nor is it attempting to build a nuclear weapon. “Iran has repeatedly said its nuclear program only serves peaceful purposes. Nuclear weapons have no place in our nuclear doctrine,” stated Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani. In the mid-1990s, the late Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran assassinated by Trump, issued a fatwa stating the use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islamic law. Khamenei reiterated this stance during a meeting with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in August 2005.

According to Dr. Saeid Golkar of Norwich University, a fatwa is a legal ruling or opinion provided by a qualified mujtahid, an Islamic jurist, in response to a question or issue concerning Islamic law, or sharia. As Golka notes, fatwas may be revised through the principle of “maslahat” (modification or suspension) in response to political and technological changes. Iran has yet to do this, although political figures such as Kamal Kharrazi and Ismail Baghaei, the latter an Iranian diplomat and spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Iran, have argued in favor of modifying Khamenei’s fatwa.

According to the Arms Control Association,

Neither U.S. President Donald Trump nor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented any evidence of an ongoing weaponization effort and, in a March 2 press conference, IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said “we don’t see a structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons” in Iran. The following day, in an interview with CNN, Grossi was asked if “the Iranians were days or weeks away from building a bomb.” His response was “no.”

They told us what they want to do. They killed Americans for half a century. They tried to assassinate our president and other officials. They tried to assassinate Ivanka Trump. We’re the United States of America, we’re going to sit on our asses for this?

Levin’s claim Iran tried to assassinate Trump is fallacious. He based the accusation on the arrest of Iranians in an alleged murder-for-hire plot. Farhad Shakeri of Iran, Carlisle Rivera of Brooklyn, New York, and Jonathan Loadholt, of Staten Island, New York, were named in a criminal complaint in 2024. Conveniently, the alleged mastermind of the plot was “hunted down and killed” amid Operation Epic Fury, according to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

“This is another one of those schemes that Israel and other countries are designing to promote Iranophobia,” President Masoud Pezeshkian told NBC News in January. “Iran has never attempted to nor does it plan to assassinate anyone,” unlike the Israelis and Americans.

While the US government insists there is evidence of an Iran-linked plot to murder Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, in retaliation for President Trump’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani during his first term, there is no proof of this. The allegation that a suspect allegedly connected to Iran’s IRGC stems from reporting and court-related claims, not a public finding that Iran itself planned the attack.

The accusation Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of “hundreds of Americans” in Iraq during resistance to occupation is unsubstantiated. “Virtually all attacks against U.S. forces since the 2003 invasion had come from Baathist, Sunni, and other anti-Iranian groups,” writes Stephen Zunes. “Of the more than 10,000 suspected insurgents arrested in U.S. counter-insurgency sweeps prior to the first U.S. withdrawal in 2011, the relatively few foreigners among them were Arabs, not Iranians.”

Furthermore, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, compiled by America’s sixteen intelligence agencies, minimized Iran’s participation in Iraq’s violence and instability. “Yet it was at this point [in 2007] that the George W. Bush Administration began making the case that Iran had become the principal foreign threat to U.S. forces in Iraq.”

U.S. officials originally claimed to have documents, computer files, confessions by captured Iranians, and evidence that Iranian officials were caught with explosives. None of this was ever made public, however, raising doubts as to whether such evidence even existed in the first place.

In the lead-up to the Iran attack, the Trump administration argued that Iran has killed more Americans “than any other enemy in recent history.”

The claim deserves more scrutiny than it’s getting. The idea that Iran is the “number one killer of Americans over recent decades” is not a fact. It is a framing—one that depends on collapsing a specific, contested history into a clean superlative that the evidence doesn’t support… What’s left is this: if Iran has cost American lives, then degrading or destroying the regime becomes a rational investment. The logic sounds clean. The recent record says it isn’t.

Hezbollah killed 241 Marines in their barracks. That’s Iran. Hezbollah killed over a hundred of our people in two embassies in Africa. I can go down the list. We lost more people by not taking Iran then we are by taking on Iran.

According to to Caspar Weinberger, then United States Secretary of Defense, there is no knowledge of who bombed the Marine barracks in Beirut on October 23, 1983. Hezbollah was implicated in the bombing, although there was not a consensus that the Lebanese paramilitary group formed in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon existed at the time. Instead, blame for the attack was pinned on the Amal Movement, a Lebanese political party and militia affiliated mainly with the Shia community of Lebanon.

It should be noted that former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky accused the Israeli intelligence agency of knowing the specific time and location of the bombing, but only gave general information to the Americans of the attack, information which was worthless. In his 1990 book, By Way of Deception, Ostrovsky writes that Mossad decided not to pass information it had to the Americans, arguing it was the responsibility of Mossad to protect the interests of Israel, not America. So much for the special relationship.

In Freeing the World to Death, the late William Blum wrote that the Reagan administration sent Marines into Lebanon

and you only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers—women and children and farmers and housewives—in those villages around Beirut …. As a result of that… we became kind of a Satan in the minds of those who are deeply resentful. That is what precipitated the taking of our hostages and that is what has precipitated some of the terrorist attacks.

The former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, wrote in his memoir that the “U.S.S. New Jersey started hurling 16-inch shells into the mountains above Beirut, in World War II style, as if we were softening up the beaches on some Pacific atoll prior to an invasion. What we tend to overlook in such situations is that other people will react much as we would.”

For me to take a position like this I am a warmonger, I’m Israel First? Don’t put our kids on the line. We have no draft, we have no ground forces. I don’t know how much cleaner can you fight a war?

Levin’s claim the Iran attack was “clean” is throughly discounted by the facts. Official statistics, which are open to revision, put the combined deaths in Iran and Lebanon due to attacks by the United States and Israel at nearly 10,000 killed and more than 47,000 wounded, primarily civilians. A missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, resulted in the deaths of at least 168 schoolchildren and many others.

In Lebanon, Israel has demolished entire villages in response to Israel Katz, minister of defense, calling for the destruction of “all houses” in border villages “in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza.”

Rights groups… have said these mass remote detonations could amount to wanton destruction: a war crime. The laws of war prohibit the deliberate destruction of civilian homes, except when necessary for lawful military reasons.

Trump has threatened to blow up power plants and bridges and turn the country into “hell” if Iran does not capitulate. “Over the next two to three weeks, we are going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong,” Trump said. He posted a video of the destruction of a major bridge, promising “Much more to follow!” Hegseth said there would be “death and destruction from the sky all day long” and promised to ignore “stupid rules of engagement,” in other words the Geneva Conventions and international law.

For the Levin, the wanton destruction of civilian lives and infrastructure is a “clean” attempt to take out Iran. As a Zionist, he rejects heeding to the laws of war and discounts the murder of women and children. As a supposed constitutional scholar, Levin ignores the Constitution, which states, in Article I, Section 8, that Congress has the sole power to declare war, not a president manipulated by neocons and Zionists like Mark Levin.

https://anotherdayintheempire.substack.com/p/war-crimes-and-the-phantasms-of-mark