This article originally appeared in the National Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Joe Adam George, March 12, 2026
In his book “From Auschwitz to Tehran,” Eran Hermoni recounts a meeting in October 2000 between Spanish prime minister José María Aznar and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As Khamenei prepared tea, Aznar asked him a direct question: “When you wake up in the morning, what is the first thing you think about?”
Khamenei stirred his cup and replied bluntly: “To eliminate Israel.”
The remark was revealing, but not surprising. The Islamic Republic’s revolutionary ideology has long framed its struggle as civilizational — a conflict not only with Israel but with the West itself. Khamenei frequently described western civilization as “deceitful, hypocritical and filled with lies,” rhetoric that helped justify Tehran’s decades-long campaign of terror and subversion abroad.
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Joe Adam George is a national security analyst with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Canada research lead on Islamist extremism with the Middle East Forum in the U.S.
