Why I Speak Against the Attack on Iran — And Why It Has Nothing to Do With Religion

An appeal to reason, written for those who are tired of war being sold as righteousness A Clarification Before We Begin Let me be clear from the outset: I do not speak for any religion. I do not speak against any faith. I believe deeply that religion is — and must remain — a personal matter, a conversation between an individual and whatever they hold sacred. No faith, no scripture, and no clergy has the right to dictate how others choose to live their lives. I have condemned, and will continue to condemn, every genocide and persecution committed in the name of religion or ideology — the Holocaust of Jews by Nazi antisemites, the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits by militants in the 1990s, the targeting of Muslims by Hindutva extremists and Islamophobes around the world, the violence against Sikhs, against Christians, against Persians, against anyone whose identity made them a target. There are no hierarchies of suffering. All of it is wrong. All of it deserves to be named. So when I speak against the recent Israeli attack on Iran, I want you to understand: this is not a religious position. This is a human one. The World Is Not a Chessboard — But It Is Being Treated Like One We in Kashmir understand, perhaps better than most, what it feels like to be a piece on someone else’s chessboard. The British drew lines across our subcontinent with the casual arrogance of men who believed the world existed for their convenience. The Partition of 1947 — a wound that has never fully healed — was not born from the will of ordinary people in Lahore or Amritsar or Srinagar. It was born from imperial calculation, executed with breathtaking indifference to the 14 million people it displaced and the one million it killed. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was another such calculation. A letter written by British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour promised a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine — a land where Arab Palestinians had lived for centuries. It was a promise made by people who had no right to make it, about a land that was not theirs to give. The consequences — displacement, dispossession, and decades of unrelenting war — were as predictable as they were ignored. This is where the monster in the Middle East was born. Not from Judaism. Not from Islam. But from imperial arrogance and geopolitical convenience. The Nakba Was Not Justice In 1948, approximately 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes during what Palestinians call the Nakba — “the catastrophe.” Entire villages were depopulated. Families who had farmed the same land for generations became refugees overnight. Today, there are nearly 6 million registered Palestinian refugees globally, according to UNRWA. I believe that Jewish people who were historically expelled from their ancestral homeland have a legitimate and deeply human longing to return. But that claim does not — cannot — justify the dispossession of another people. The suffering of one group does not license the suffering of another. That is not justice. That is the recycling of injustice. Those of us in India who carry the stories of Partition in our families — of homes abandoned at midnight, of trains that carried the dead — know in our bones what it means to be made a refugee in the land your ancestors built. The Palestinians have been living that story for 75 years, and it is still being written, with bombs. Criticizing the Israeli Government Is Not Antisemitism Criticizing the Netanyahu administration and the Zionist political project that has driven its most extreme decisions is not antisemitism. Conflating the two is a deliberate and well-documented tactic to silence legitimate scrutiny. The record is not a matter of opinion. The International Court of Justice ruled in January 2024 that it was “plausible” that Israel was committing acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention in Gaza. Over 34,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza between October 2023 and May 2024, with more than 70% of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The UN has documented repeated strikes on schools, hospitals, and refugee camps — all facilities that carry explicit protections under international humanitarian law. Israel has been in non-compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 242 — which calls for withdrawal from occupied territories — since 1967. That is nearly six decades. One cannot bomb schools and call it self-defense. One cannot blockade food and medicine from 2.3 million people and call it security. These are not political opinions. These are documented violations of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter. The Attack on Iran: Why It Matters for All of Us The escalation of Israeli military action toward Iran — strikes on Iranian soil, the assassination of political and military leaders, the broader campaign of regional destabilization — is not a bilateral conflict that the rest of us can watch from a safe distance. It is a powder keg placed at the center of the most volatile region on earth. Sovereignty is not a technicality. Iran is a sovereign nation. The assassination of its political and military leaders on its own soil, without any declaration of war or UN authorization, is a violation of international law. If we accept this precedent — that powerful nations may kill the leaders of nations they dislike, whenever they choose — then sovereignty means nothing. Countries like India, which navigates complex relationships with multiple powerful neighbors, should be among the most alarmed by the normalization of this logic. Today it is Iran. The precedent does not come with a boundary. The humanitarian fallout will reach us. A full-scale conflict involving Iran would not stay contained within its borders. It would draw in regional actors, destabilize Gulf oil supplies, trigger refugee flows of historic proportions, and send shockwaves through global economies. India has approximately 9 million workers in the Gulf region, remitting billions of dollars annually. We import a significant share of our oil from the same geography. The people of Kashmir, already living at the intersection of multiple fault lines, would not be shielded from the fallout. The American military complex is not a stabilizing force. The United States has a documented history of destabilizing sovereign nations in pursuit of resources and strategic dominance. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 — justified by fabricated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction — killed over 200,000 Iraqi civilians and created the conditions for the rise of ISIS. The sanctions regimes on Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba have produced enormous civilian suffering without achieving their stated goals. The pursuit of Venezuelan President Maduro — whatever one’s view of his governance — signals that American foreign policy treats sovereignty as optional when resources or leverage are at stake. This is not an indictment of the American people. It is an indictment of a foreign policy apparatus that operates on its own logic, answering to weapons manufacturers and strategic interests rather than to democratic values. A Note to Those in Kashmir Kashmir has been a living laboratory of what happens when geopolitical interests override human rights for long enough. For decades, ordinary Kashmiris have been caught between competing nationalisms — pawns in a larger game played by governments in New Delhi, Islamabad, and occasionally Washington and Beijing. The suffering of Kashmiri Pandits, driven from their homes in the 1990s by a campaign of targeted violence, demands acknowledgment and justice that has never fully been delivered. So does the suffering of Kashmiri Muslims who have faced enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, and collective punishment. Both of these truths exist. Both deserve to be held. Because the alternative — the logic of competing victimhoods, where each side’s historical suffering justifies inflicting more suffering on the other — is a logic with no exit. We in this part of the world know this better than almost anyone. When I look at Gaza, at Iran, at the broader Middle East, I see the same pattern: ordinary people bearing the price of decisions made by powerful men who will never stand in a bombed street or identify a child’s body. The people of Kashmir have been bearing that price for generations. It is not religion that creates solidarity across these geographies. It is the shared experience of being expendable. Violence Cannot Win What Only Justice Can History is consistent on this point: you cannot bomb an ideology out of existence. America spent twenty years and more than $2 trillion in Afghanistan. The Taliban returned to power within weeks of the withdrawal. Israel has conducted multiple large-scale military campaigns in Gaza over the past two decades. Each one has produced more extremism, not less. Each strike that kills a child creates a generation that remembers. Religious extremism — of every variety, in every faith — is not primarily a military problem. It is a problem of humiliation, dispossession, and the slow death of hope. It grows where people have been stripped of dignity and given no legitimate path forward. You do not uproot it with airstrikes. You uproot it — imperfectly, slowly, incompletely — with justice. With the recognition that no human being’s suffering is acceptable simply because their cause is inconvenient. A people who believe they have nothing to lose are dangerous. Not because of their religion, but because of their despair. No Idea Is Above Criticism. No Person Is Infallible. Political Zionism is not above criticism. Political Islam is not above criticism. American exceptionalism is not above criticism. Hindu nationalism is not above criticism. The decisions of the Indian state in Kashmir are not above criticism. The actions of Kashmiri militants in the 1990s are not above criticism. Criticism is not hatred. Accountability is not bigotry. The moment we place any ideology, any government, or any political movement beyond legitimate scrutiny, we have surrendered the thing that makes civilization possible: the capacity to be wrong, and to correct ourselves. No leader is infallible. Not Netanyahu. Not Khamenei. Not any religious figure, spiritual authority, or elected official. Infallibility is a quality we assign to God — and even that, different traditions dispute. When we grant it to human beings, we have created the conditions for every atrocity committed in the name of a leader, a nation, or a faith. Religion Cannot Be the World’s Binding Agent There are over 4,000 distinct religions and belief systems practiced on earth today. There has never been a consensus on which is correct, or whether any are, and there never will be — not without a coercion so massive it would dwarf every tyranny in history. Any political project that attempts to organize a state or a geopolitical order around a single religious identity will produce exclusion, persecution, and violence against everyone who doesn’t fit. This is not an argument against religion. Religion gives billions of people meaning, community, moral grounding, and comfort in suffering. These are profound and irreplaceable gifts. The argument is simpler: what works in the private sphere — personal faith, community practice, spiritual life — does not translate into governance. The public square must be governed by principles every human being can share regardless of what they believe about God: dignity, equality, accountability, and justice. What I Stand For I stand for a world where sovereignty is respected by powerful nations and small ones alike. Where international law is not a tool applied selectively to enemies and ignored for allies. Where religion stays personal, and never becomes a license to persecute, a border to enforce, or a weapon to wield. Where criticism of governments and ideologies is never conflated with hatred of the people who follow them. Where ordinary people — in Gaza, in Tehran, in Srinagar, in Amritsar, in New Delhi — are not sacrificed for the ambitions of the powerful. This is why I speak against the attack on Iran. Not out of religious sympathy for the Iranian government, whose own record on human rights I do not defend. But because I believe in a world governed by law rather than by appetite. And because I know — from our own history on this subcontinent — what happens when that principle is treated as optional. The Only Path Forward Is Reason We live in an era designed to make us furious and keep us that way. Algorithms reward outrage. Every conflict is flattened into two sides. Every nuance is treated as betrayal. Speaking against a government’s actions becomes synonymous with hatred of its people. Resist this. The people of Iran did not choose to be bombed. The people of Palestine did not choose to be blockaded. The people of Kashmir did not choose to be caught in the crossfire of competing nationalisms. And the people of Israel did not choose to be led by men whose escalations have made them less safe with every passing year. Across every border, every faith, every flag — we owe each other the basic human courtesy of seeing the person before the category. Of asking whose interests are truly being served before we choose a side. Of understanding that the only forces that benefit from permanent war are the ones selling the weapons. That is the conversation I am trying to have. I hope you will have it with me. Written with the conviction that peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice.