In regards to the recent letter to the editor titled “It’s not about oil — it’s about annihilation”:
While Rene Remund’s recent letter was cute, it was drastically misinformed. Whether that was by design, deceit or sheer ignorance, I felt it necessary to set the record straight on a few key points.
First, the author opens with a quote that isn’t even actually a real quote — “Allah commands us to destroy non-believers” — just to build a cartoonish caricature. In reality, Ayatollah Khomeini’s actual rhetoric from 1984 was about fighting perceived corruption, and Iran’s leadership officially issued a religious fatwa declaring that nuclear weapons are strictly prohibited (haram).
Second, the claim that Iran has built “long-range missiles” is repugnant to reality. Iran maintains a self-imposed 2,000-kilometer range cap on its operational ballistic missiles. They do not have active ICBMs capable of hitting North America, making the claim of an imminent home-front strike an absolutely ridiculous assertion.
Third, our own intelligence and military actions contradict the letter entirely. After U.S. and Israeli strikes crippled Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and the U.S. intelligence community testified that intelligence reports showed Iran was not actively assembling or building a nuclear warhead and did not pose an immediate nuclear threat. Suddenly, this “imminent threat” rhetoric was only got dialed up around the time of the Epstein files needing to be released until Trump’s daddy over in Israel told us it was an imminent threat. Again.
Finally, the political hypocrisy is off the charts. The author lectures local readers to “weed out zealots” at the ballot box. Yet the very candidate many local voters supported — Joe Kent, an actual conspiracy-touting zealot who lost to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez — was appointed as NCTC Director and ended up resigning his post in protest, acknowledging that Iran was not an active nuclear threat.
At the end of the day, the letter uses fake quotes, ignores missile range limits, skips over official U.S. intelligence, and overlooks local political history — all to whip up panic and distract everyday voters from real economic issues.
Brian Slater
Morton
