The moral fibre and resilience of the Islamic Republic of Iran: A continuum of Persian civilisation

A 1978 poster titled “Ashura: Victory of Blood Over the Sword”.

The argument that the Islamic Republic of Iran, established in the wake of the Iranian revolution of 1979, has a moral compass will come as a shock to many of the propagandized people of the West.

Iran supports the Palestinian cause. It sees the Palestinians as the victims of a decades long programme of ethnic cleansing instigated by Zionist Israel which is backed by the United States. It also supported left wing liberation movements in South Africa and Central America. Israel was at the same time supporting Apartheid South Africa and training right-wing death squads in Latin America.

The Iranian Constitution has a clause making it mandatory to set aside funding for liberation movements. This is something not understood by the West and most Westerners who absorb all the conflated anti-Islamic propaganda of the Western Mainstream Media.

The accusation that Iran is the greatest sponsor of global terror is untrue. Most terrorist acts committed by militant Muslim groups are by Sunni organisations such as al-Qaeda and ISIS. Iran's Shia ally -not proxy- in Lebanon, Hezbollah exists simply because of Zionist Israel's coveting of Lebanese territory up to the River Litani.

The West cannot digest the fact that far from introducing a regressive and unenlightened culture as they believe all Islamic societies do, Iran has maintained a scientific culture alongside the culture of poetry and philosophy. The educational qualifications of many of their political leaders attests to this. The late Ali Larijani for instance was a scholar who wrote three books on Immanuel Kant's philosophy including one which focused on the mathematical method in Kantian philosophy.

Iran's contemporary achievements in science can be ascertained from the amount of patents registered by its citizens, the contributions of its academic community to journals on physics, and of course from its ballistic missile and drone-making programmes.

Iran has a multi-layered moral base which is simplistically distorted in the West as a medieval hardline attitude against females and gays. They have no idea that Iranian women undertake almost the full gamut of occupations from taxi drivers to university professors. They do not all wear hijab and are not forced to. Their literacy rate is far in excess of the time of the Shah when rural illiteracy was widespread.

The West refuses to believe that Iran has for decades declined to make a nuclear bomb just as it refused to retaliate against Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and civilian populations during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Both decisions, fatwas respectively by Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei, were based on the view that usage of both in war is un-islamic.

Iran may be a theocratic state, but it has layers of democratic institutions and decision-making processes which cannot rationally have it pigeonholed as a despotic state ruled by a single dictatorial cleric. It is certainly more democratic than the absolutist monarchies of the Gulf region who are allies of the United States and subservient to Israeli interests.

Iran's lengthy heritage goes back to the Achaemenid Empire and its famous kings such as Cyrus, Xerxes, and Darius. Persia also produced many scholars and poets during the highwater mark of Islamic achievement. They include the polymath Omar Khayyam.

Belatedly, Iran is now being acknowledged in Western media as a "civilizational state" -not only because of the aforementioned history, but because of the resilience of its political and military leadership in the face of a criminal war of aggression launched on it by the United States at the behest of the State of Israel and its lobby.

Its people -including many who are not supporters of the Islamic form of government- have also been resilient and have rallied to their leaders as they have seen scores of innocent civilians killed by American and Israeli bombs in deliberate attacks on population centres and non-military infrastructure.

This rallying around the flag in the face of an external aggressor is not a new phenomenon. But the resilience of the Iranian population who have staged rallies at squares, thoroughfares and bridges in defiance of American and Israeli bombing ought to inform Western audiences about a national psyche that is infused not only with a pride in being Persian but also from being a Shia nation for hundreds of years.

The resultant synthesis of Iranian culture and Shia Islam has imbued the country's people with the spirit of martyrdom for the cause of honour and liberation.

They are after all the "children of Imam Husayn", the grandson of Islam's Prophet, who sacrificed himself and his followers at the Battle of Karbala against an unjust ruler.

And in this existential war against what they consider to be the "unjust" regimes of America and Israel, they are willing to endure sacrifices which the average Westerner is unable to comprehend.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

My lecture on the landmark Bonny amphibious operation to the participants on this year's Naval Warfare Course (NWC 10) at the Naval War College Nigeria on April 8th, 2026

I had the honour and pleasure this morning to have delivered an online lecture on the landmark Bonny amphibious operation to the participants on this year's Naval Warfare Course (NWC 10) at the Naval War College Nigeria.

The lecture was presented to 34 participants as part of the Module on Naval History. The participating officers are mainly from the Nigerian Navy but with a component from the Nigerian Army, Nigerian Air force and foreign allied navies, coming this year from Ghana, Cameroon and Liberia. They are generally middle cadre officers i.e. Lieutenant Commanders, Commanders and their equivalents in the other armed services.

My thanks go to Captain Ikenna Okoloagu, the Sponsor Director of the lecture, as well as other staff at the college including Commodore Akinrisola Obisesan and Brigadier General S.O. Agada who spoke after I had concluded my lecture by fielding questions from the participants.

NB.

My article "The Bonny Landing: The anatomy of Black Africa’s first amphibious operation, July to September 1967" was published in the August 2024 edition of The Mariner's Mirror, the international journal of the Society for Nautical Research.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a Law Lecturer and Writer based in London, England.

Thirty Five Years Have Passed Since I was Called To The Bar of England and Wales

A photograph of me on Call Night at the Middle Temple, left, and a record of my Call to the Bar of England & Wales in the Daily Telegraph, Tuesday, February 5^th, 1991.

Last month marked 35 years since my Call to the Bar of England and Wales at the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple during Michaelmas Term, 1991.

I had been among the pioneer intake of the Bar Vocational Course which had been inaugurated by the Council of Legal Education (CLE) at the Inns of Court, School of Law (ICSL). The CLE, a supervisory body established to by the four Inns of Court to regulate the legal education of barristers in England and Wales, founded the School in 1852.

Call Night did not only signify the passing of formal assessments, it represented the culmination of keeping dining terms, that is, attending 12 formal dinners at my Inn, the Middle Temple.

The origins of the Middle Temple lie in the acquisition by lawyers in the 14^th century of land that had once been the site of the headquarters of the Knights Templar before their overthrow and abolishment. King James I formal granted the Temple estate to the Inns of Court by letters patent in 1608. This Charter established that the land be used to educate and accommodate lawyers in perpetuity.

Among the famous members of the Middle Temple were the writers Charles Dickens and John Buchan.

I was called at Middle Temple Hall, an Elizabethan building which survived the Great Fire of London in 1666.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is based in London, England.

Lieutenant Commander Emmanuel Makinde: A Military Attache in Mess Dress

Lieutenant Commander Emmanuel Makinde, the Deputy Defence Adviser at the Nigerian High Commission in London, photographed in the early 1970s at a function organised by the military section of the High Commission. (Image: Makinde Family Archive).

My father’s mess dress, modelled on that of the Royal Navy, consisted of the following:

. A mess jacket with aiguillettes, an ornamental braided cord ending with aiglets (metal tips), and shoulder boards

. A white waistcoat

. A white dress shirt with wing collar and black bow tie

. High-waisted, plain navy blue trousers

. Black dress shoes

Lieutenant Commander Makinde’s task as a naval attaché was to serve as the primary liaison figure between the Nigerian Navy and Britain’s maritime forces. This included his keeping abreast of the completing of the construction of two corvettes ordered by the Nigerian Navy by the British shipbuilding firm Vosper Thornycroft. NNS Otobo and NNS Dorina were commissioned in Portsmouth respectively on May 25^th, 1971 and December 8^th, 1972.

His liaison duties also covered the refurbishment of NNS Nigeria, the flagship of the Nigerian Navy. He attended the re-commissioning ceremony at Cammel Laird’s yard in Birkenhead, Merseyside on April 28th, 1972. Present at that event was the retired Captain James Rawe, the ex-Royal Navy Nigerian Navy pioneer who became the Principal Staff Officer and Commander of the Naval Base, Apapa. Rawe had planned the amphibious landings orchestrated by the Nigerian Navy during the Nigerian Civil War. My father arranged for the visit made by Rawe to Nigeria to naval installations in Lagos, Port Harcourt and Calabar in 1973.

My Father’s 18-month-long posting to London ended in April, 1973.

Lieutenant Commander Makinde, who had previously served as the Flag Lieutenant and Flag Secretary to the Chief of Naval Staff, went on to become the Director of Naval Supplies.

He retired in 1982 at the rank of Captain.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Iran Will Be No Pushover In A War With The United States And Israel

 

Infographic by the Institute For The Study of War.

As Alastair Crooke, a former senior British diplomat and MI6 officer, often reminds in the interviews he has recently conducted, Iran is a vast territory in which missile cities are widely dispersed. Missiles are fired from underground and not through mobile launchers. They operate autonomously and can endure even after the loss of command and control structures, something similar to the Soviet-invented "Dead Hand" system which ensures retaliatory nuclear missile strikes even if the top leadership is destroyed.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

COMMENTARY: Israel at the centre of a U.S. war against Iran

Image credit: Adobe Stock.

If a catastrophic, no-holds-barred war breaks out between the United States and Iran and thousands of American troops are killed by Iranian ballistic missile attacks on US bases in the Gulf region and on U.S. Navy vessels within range of the Iranian coastline, an angered American population will need to reflect on why such a conflict broke out.

They will need to ask the following questions:

1. Does Iran pose a threat to American national security?
2. How many Iranian-allied Shia militias in Iraq and Lebanon have carried out attacks on defenceless American citizens?
3. What is the true reason why Iran was threatened and attacked?

The answers are:

1. No, Iran does not pose any threat whatsoever to America. It has not invaded another country for over 200 years, and it has only responded to attacks on it when:

. Invaded by the Western and Sunni Arab backed action by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussien in 1980
. The Donald Trump-approved assassination of General Qassem Soleimani
. The Donald Trump approved preemptive attack on Iran in June 2025 and the US bombing of Iranian nuclear energy development sites.

2. A range of statistical data shows that attacks on Western civilian targets by Muslim extremists have come from Sunni groups of the al-Qaeda variety -the very groups supported by the CIA and Israeli intelligence in various theatre conflicts such as the ‘dirty war’ in Syria.

3. America's reason for attacking Iran is because of pressure from the State of Israel and Zionist lobby groups in the United States.

This is a plain and simple fact.

Zionist Israel operates under an ideology which entails that Israel must expand it territory which was ruthlessly taken from Palestinian inhabitants and must maintain undisputed military and economic hegemony in the region.

Iran is hated by Israel because it backs the Palestinian cause. It also backs Hezbollah, the Shia Lebanese party, which has prevented Israel from expanding its border into southern Lebanon up to the Litani River.

Now, the U.S. Senator named Lindsay Graham recently invoked the name of the late President Ronald Reagan in an attempt to pressure Trump into acting against Iran.

What Graham does not grasp is that Ronald Reagan correctly believed that the United States had been lured into Lebanon by the Israelis when embarked on a murderous invasion of that country in the early 1980s. When American (and French) troops were massacred by Shia forces in Beirut (a reponse to massacres of Shia civilians when U.S. navy carriers were shelling the Bekaa valley), Reagan did not spark an all out war against Lebanon - he withdrew American forces because he realised that Israel wanted to use the U.S. to wage war against Lebanon on Israel's behalf.

Subsequent U.S. Presidents have been unable to resist Israeli pressure aimed at luring the United States into West Asia to fight wars on its behalf. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and “Operation Timber Sycamore”, the CIA orchestrated covert war against the secular Ba'athist government in Syria begun in 2011, are two examples.

Iran has been targeted for destruction by Israeli interests for decades. Binyamin Netanyahu has long spearheaded this campaign since the 1990s, continually and erroneously citing Iran being on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. Other Israeli leaders have also called for the same. For instance, in 2003 when the United States was on the verge of attacking Iraq, the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called on America to disarm “Iran, Libya and Syria”.

Pro-Zionist think tanks have also promoted the idea of attacking Iran. These include the now defunct neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which was co-founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan and the Israeli-affiliated Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), which produced the 1996 document titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”.

The recollections of retired U.S. Army General Wesley Clark pertaining to what he described as the “hijacking” of U.S. foreign policy by neoconservative figures in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks are also revealing. Clark told of how former colleagues at the Pentagon alerted him to the existence of a secret memorandum detailing how the United States was going to “take out seven countries in five years”. They were to be Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.

The rationale here was to bring down key states who were opposed to Israeli domination of the Middle East. Iraq, Syria and Libya were led by secular Arab nationalist governments, while Lebanon’s Shia Hezbollah military force resisted Israeli expansion and Shia Iran supported Hezbollah, as well as the cause of Palestine.

These pressures to remould the Middle East in a way to favour Zionist hegemony go far back to the time of the creation of Israel. for instance in on March 31^st, 1948, the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States presented a paper entitled “Force Requirements for Palestine”, part of which read that 'Zionist strategy will seek to involve (the United States) in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives.'

But this warning went unheeded.

In 2019 wrote the following in an essay I titled "An Examination of the History of the Pro-Zionist Lobby":

'Many of America’s most important military commanders at that time were of the opinion that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would adversely affect the strategic interests of the United States in “the Near and Middle East” and that Zionists would lobby the American government to pursue actions and policies that would not be in the country’s interests. This was clearly the opinion of General George Marshall, a Chief of Army Staff, who later as Secretary of State clashed with President Harry Truman over US recognition of Israel.'

Sadly, this blind obedience of the U.S. political and military class to the interests of a foreign state is leading America into an abyss from which it will be unlikely to recover because its leaders are bought off and/or blackmailed to act against its own national interests.

 © Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

 Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

A critique of Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s claim that Britain has been “colonised” by immigrants who are draining resources from the state

In an interview with Sky News, the English billionaire businessman Jim Ratcliffe claimed that Britain has been "colonised" by immigrants who are draining resources from the state.

But what does "colonised" mean?

. Do these "colonisers" control the levers of political power? No, they don't.

. Do many of these "colonisers" come from countries which were exploited by the British Empire when it colonised a good deal of the earth? Yes, they do.

. Do many of these recent "colonisers" come from countries where Britain participated in or supported illegal overt and covert wars overseen by the U.S. Empire? Yes, they do.

. Are many of these "colonisers" used as cheap labour? Yes, they are.

. Do the majority of these "colonisers" pay business and income taxes? Yes, they do.

. Do these "colonisers" staff vital institutions such as the National Health Service as doctors and nurses where they are overrepresented, albeit underrepresented as senior management in its bureaucracy? Yes, they do.

. Meanwhile after "draining" resources from the nations where these "colonisers" originate during the era colonisation and now through the usurious global financial system and corporate primacy in the age of neoliberalism, this odious tax exile and his supporters wallow in their self-satisfied "telling-it-like-it-is" delusion.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.