Sometimes one wonders about the connection of religion and morality. We currently have a trio of world leaders who are both heavily influenced by the Abrahamic faiths and recklessly murdering their fellow mortals. 

In the United States, instruments of President Trump’s power have been shooting citizens in their own neighbourhoods and bombing strangers in the Caribbean Sea. The president is the overwhelming favourite of evangelical Christians.

In Palestine, devoted followers of Judaism are committing what has widely been referred to as a genocide. As for the third member of the trio—Islam—we turn to Iran. There, a government headed by leaders of the faith no less, have just committed a horrific massacre of their own citizens for daring to dissent. 

The religions themselves don’t countenance killing of course. Quite the contrary. The Torah and the Bible, the holy books of Judaism and Christianity both state flatly “You shall not murder.” Islam’s book of faith, the Quran, says “It is not lawful for a believer to kill another except by mistake” and likens a murder to slaying all of humanity.

So while they are pretty clear that it is not the thing to do, they just don’t seem to be able to convince their followers. Germany, for example, was immersed in Christianity for over 1.200 years, yet committed the greatest atrocity in human history.

Iran has been Muslim for even longer and yet in this year of 2026 massacred thousands of its own people, most of them fellow Muslims. The estimates of the horror vary. The regime claims 3,117 died. The Human Rights Activists News Agency, which counts only victims it can identify, reports at least 6,800 deaths with an additional 11,744 cases under investigation. Former UN war crimes prosecutor Payam Akhavan estimates it could be in the tens of thousands. Time will reveal the awful toll.

We have recoiled at the brutality of Trump’s infamous ICE, but Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps makes ICE look like a bunch of sweethearts. Canada appropriately lists them as a terrorist entity under the Criminal Code.

The New York Times recently ran an article that described in sickening detail the brutalities that these thugs and their associates inflicted on thousands of their fellow Iranians. Soon after the protests started, the paper began receiving messages from an underground network of doctors and nurses, most sent through encrypted messaging apps. 

The Times surveyed medical workers in 14 cities and 11 provinces about their experiences treating wounded protesters. Many were threatened, interrogated or detained by the authorities.

They described hospital corridors and walls covered in blood. Bodies dismembered, brains and abdominal organs exposed by machete blows and bullet wounds. A child shot while in its mother’s arms, a grandmother shot beside her grandchild. Thousands of eye injuries requiring major surgeries. Many children seriously injured or killed. Facilities overwhelmed by injured and dying protesters. Wounds that indicated deliberate killings or the intent to inflict serious harm. They narrated a massacre.

Incredibly, even as I write, students at universities around Iran are back staging campus demonstrations calling for the overthrow of the government. The new protests are a testament to both the courage of the students and the gross incompetence of the country’s leadership.

The idea of nuclear weapons in the bloody hands of leaders who countenance such atrocities chills the blood. In 2015, the major nuclear powers signed a deal with Iran to restrain its nuclear program in return for sanctions relief and other considerations. President Trump sabotaged it. 

Now he’s threatening war. And, shades of President Bush and Iraq, he’s justifying it with lies. He claims Iran has restarted its nuclear program and has enough material to build a bomb within days, while developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of reaching the U.S. According to both American and European government officials, and international weapons monitoring groups, these claims are either unproven or outright false.

Nonetheless, if he can negotiate the Ayatollah out of developing nukes, without starting another war, I would be prepared to forgive him his initial blunder. I would even nominate him for the Nobel he so craves.