I am an Iranian American. The leader of my adopted country is bombing my country of birth and threatening to send it — and its people — “back to the Stone Ages.” I am watching one government endanger the very people who nurtured me as a young man, enabling me to come here, build a family, and contribute meaningfully to this nation’s economy and technological advancement. I write this fully aware that our secretary of state finds it important to scrutinize dissenting voices, even among naturalized Americans. So be it.
The war on Iran is illegal and immoral — there are no Iranian weapons capable of reaching American soil, and no credible evidence has been presented to suggest an imminent threat. By and large, Americans are decent people. Many see this war for what it is. A majority oppose it, and those in power know that.
So how is such a war justified? A prominent Christian Zionist pastor, Franklin Graham, claims that Persians — by which he means the people of modern Iran — seek to murder Jews. He invokes the story of Esther, recounting how a Jewish queen and her cousin thwarted a plot against their people in ancient Persia about 2,500 years ago. From this, he implies a moral justification for today’s war.
This is a misleading and selective retelling. It omits that the same biblical account also describes the killing of 75,000 Iranian Persians by the Iranian Jews in the aftermath. It ignores that the traditional burial site of Esther and Mordecai lies in present-day Iran, in the city of Hamadan — respected by Iranians across religious lines. It overlooks that Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire, liberated the Jews from Babylon, supported their return to Jerusalem and funded the rebuilding of their temple. These are not obscure facts; they are foundational to our shared story.
The distortion uses religion as a tool to inflame hate and justify violence. Such rhetoric echoes in official statements as well — in prayers for destruction, in invocations of divine sanction for war and in casual references to catastrophic violence.
Religious and public leaders must be held accountable when they weaponize belief to justify suffering. Condemnation from moral authorities, including Pope Leo XIV, has been important — but it is not enough. The media, too, must do more than simply report these claims. It must challenge them.
Silence, or neutrality in the face of such distortion, is complicity.
— Mehran Arbab, Chicago
Displacement of people
Our military campaign in Iran, along with Israel’s goal of eradicating Hezbollah in Lebanon, is displacing people throughout the Middle East. Who are we to lecture our European allies about limiting migration of people, when our own actions, along with Israel’s, have created this humanitarian crisis?
— Silvana Santilli, Oak Park
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Let president end threat
Reading some of Friday’s letters, I wonder if the writers are too young to remember or if they have memory loss when it comes to Iran’s threat to America. I remember watching on a daily basis the status of the hostages taken in Iran in 1979, who remained hostages for 444 days. Let’s not forget 9/11, when nearly 3,000 people died due to a terrorist attack on our country. Let’s remember Oct. 7, 2023, when Israel was attacked by Hamas, which is financed by Iran.
Do we need to wait until we are decimated in our own country? The threat has been there for 47 years. Let the president end it.
— Patricia Bonk, Midlothian
Hegseth’s decision-making
As Robert Geist’s letter “Soldiers will follow Hegseth” (April 3) reached print, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unceremoniously fired revered Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George; Gen. David Hodne, head of Army training; and Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., the Army’s chief chaplain. All this a month into a war of choice going terribly wrong.
The Army has been senselessly thrown into chaos. U.S. military morale is in free fall. Hegseth may just have made the biggest military leadership mistake in U.S. history.
Geist might view Hegseth as a military leader he could follow. But if so, it’s doubtful a single active Army soldier would be following behind Geist.
— Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn
Wait out the fluctuations
Watching the wild fluctuations of the markets clearly amazes me because they turn on a dime and dramatically go up and down whenever President Donald Trump says something or posts something on Truth Social.
I find this unnerving to a certain extent, because I would not trust anything coming from him. He is a consistent liar, makes exaggerations and often contradicts himself.
I am not an economist and do not own any stocks directly, but I am aware that my annuities and pensions are affected by market turmoil. My advice to those who own stocks? Just hold on to them for the long term until this highly unpredictable man is out of the White House.
— Larry Vigon, Chicago
The Democrats’ hypocrisy
How ironic is it that the Democrats in Congress are denying they are responsible for the government shutdown, yet are saying they won’t fund the Department of Homeland Security till their demands are met? Then again, there is U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., who advocated for the Jeffrey Epstein files to be released, but does not want the files on his involvement with an alleged Chinese spy released.
— Al Zvinakis, Lemont
Republicans doing nothing
How do you negotiate without skilled diplomats? How do you start a war without understanding your opponent and the consequences of your actions? How do you justify the accidental killing of scores of children and the displacement of millions? How do you explain that a major threat to the global economy can be caused by one mentally unstable man?
All of this could have been avoided had Congress taken a more forceful role with this president. But that has not happened.
The majority of Americans do not want a war, do not want higher prices, are concerned about climate change and want immigration reform that doesn’t include storm troopers. Many Americans cannot afford housing or medical care. Pretty much all of us are exhausted by political polarization, lies and misinformation, and are disgusted by video game memes and artificial intelligence-generated videos put up by the White House that demonstrate a complete lack of humanity — as if “humanity” demonstrates weakness.
Here’s what weakness is: people who feel so inadequate and fearful deep inside that they need to inflict pain and cruelty on others. When these people come into power, very bad things happen.
Over the past year, we’ve watched the U.S. Agency for International Development shuttered and hundreds of thousands die as a result. We’ve watched this administration blow up fishermen, kidnap the president of Venezuela, threaten to invade Greenland, start a war in the Middle East, refuse to help end a war in Ukraine, reward Russia, threaten to take over Cuba and denigrate NATO, whose soldiers died alongside ours on behalf of our war in Afghanistan.
We’ve watched a president who is motivated by weakness rather than by strength and by greed rather than charity. We’ve watched him dismantle our democracy, piece by piece, along with the East Wing of the White House. The only ones who have tried to stop him are independent judges — and often too late to undo the damage. The toll this has taken on Americans and on our standing in the world is incalculable and will certainly come back to bite us.
That Republican members of Congress have nothing to restrain him means one of two things: They see him for who he is but are too fearful to speak up, or they don’t see him for who he is.
This citizen honestly does not know which is worse.
— Francesca Kelly, Highland Park
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