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The Mullahs Can Survive Bombs — They Can’t Survive Memes
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei waves during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, May 20, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
For years, Western commentators have wondered aloud why the vast resources of Israel’s public diplomacy efforts — Hasbara, as it’s often called — have so consistently fallen flat — earnest explainer videos; carefully captioned infographics; appeals to reason and international law. All are tragically ineffective when faced with an enemy that thrives not on truth, but on narrative — and whose audiences see weakness not as a prompt for sympathy, but as an invitation to strike.
But something has shifted. Quietly, almost accidentally, a far more potent weapon has entered the battlefield: mockery. Not just commentary or explanation — but relentless, humiliating, viral ridicule. Suddenly, Iranian officials are being memed into irrelevance. Their threats turned into TikTok soundbites. Their propaganda met not with a counter-lecture, but a clown nose.
And it is working.
Because while the Islamic world has long postured around the notion of honor, there is one thing that has always cut deeper than military failure: public humiliation. Regimes can survive defeat. They can survive sanctions. But they do not survive becoming a joke.
Look back to 2009, when protestors in Iran chanted “Where is my vote?” after the stolen election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. What did the regime fear most? Not the demonstrations — those were violently suppressed. It was the Twitter hashtags, the jokes about their fake democracy, the collapse of the regime’s dignity in the eyes of their own people.
Dictatorships cling to power through fear. But fear only functions so long as people believe in the myth of strength. Once that illusion is broken — once a regime is laughed at — the spell is broken. The emperor has no clothes, and worse, he has been turned into a meme with auto-tuned music and poor subtitles.
Which brings us to today. Israel, long accused of losing the PR war, has begun to win it in a most unexpected fashion. Not by out-explaining. Not by out-arguing. But by out-mocking.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has just watched its crown jewel of nuclear secrecy, the Fordow facility, get flattened — and what’s circulating online? Not solemn analyses. Not Security Council resolutions. But a thousand perfectly timed TikToks with dancing soldiers, laugh tracks, and slow-zoom edits of confused ayatollahs. One could almost feel sorry for them — if they hadn’t brought this all upon themselves.
This isn’t just cultural pushback. It is psychological warfare at its finest. Because terrorism — and its state sponsors – rely on a performative narrative. They need to be feared. They need to be taken seriously. A suicide bomber is only powerful when framed as tragic, not idiotic. A supreme leader only commands loyalty when he’s seen as divine, not daft.
And so, for once, the West — and particularly Israel — has grasped a crucial truth: mockery is deterrence. Not instead of military action, but in tandem with it. A drone strike may eliminate a general. A meme may eliminate a myth. It is, in its own way, the most subversive act imaginable: to make the tyrant funny. To expose the man behind the beard. To show that the most feared actors in the Middle East can, with a few edits, become as ridiculous as a washed-up villain in a low-budget film.
The Hamas leadership in Gaza must face similar humiliation. Their battle cries turned into Instagram reels. Their martyrs repurposed as cautionary punchlines. It is not for naught that we have seen the rise of the comedic Jewish influencer, the one able to infantalize their moral superiority.
There is, of course, danger in this. Satire must not replace strategy. The West cannot meme its way out of hard decisions. But it would do well to remember that strength is not just about military power. It is also about psychological dominance — about never allowing the enemy to believe they have the upper hand in narrative, identity, or dignity.
Israel, for all its previous struggles in the digital battlefield, may have stumbled into something revolutionary. By embracing the power of mockery — by mocking the mullahs, the militias, the martyrdom cult — it has begun to rob them of their most precious asset: fear.
And as history has shown us, regimes can survive almost anything.
But ridicule? That’s fatal.
Meira Cowland Kolatch is a political commentator, international speaker, host of the podcast The Meira K Show, and founder of Young Voices for Israel. www.MeiraK.com
The post The Mullahs Can Survive Bombs — They Can’t Survive Memes first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Germany’s Halt to Arms Exports to Israel Is Response to Gaza Expansion Plans, Chancellor Says
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz attends a cabinet meeting at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Aug. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Liesa Johannssen
Germany’s decision to curb arms exports to Israel comes in response to Israel’s plan to expand its operations in the Gaza Strip, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Sunday in an interview with public broadcaster ARD.
“We cannot deliver weapons into a conflict that is now being pursued exclusively by military means,” Merz said. “We want to help diplomatically, and we are doing so.”
The worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and Israel’s plans to expand military control over the enclave have pushed Germany to take this historically fraught step.
The chancellor said in the interview that the expansion of Israel’s operations in Gaza could claim hundreds of thousands of civilian lives and would require the evacuation of the entire city of Gaza.
“Where are these people supposed to go?” Merz said. “We can’t do that, we won’t do that, and I will not do that.”
Nevertheless, the principles of Germany’s Israel policy remain unchanged, the chancellor said.
“Germany has stood firmly by Israel’s side for 80 years. That will not change,” Merz said.
Germany is Israel’s second-biggest weapons supplier after the US and has long been one of its staunchest supporters, principally because of its historical guilt for the Nazi Holocaust – a policy known as the “Staatsraison.”
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Newsom Calls Trump’s $1 Billion UCLA Settlement Offer Extortion, Says California Won’t Bow
California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks at a press conference, accompanied by members of the Texas Democratic legislators, at the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, California, U.S., August 8, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
California Governor Gavin Newsom said on Saturday that a $1 billion settlement offer by President Donald Trump’s administration for UCLA amounted to political extortion to which the state will not bow.
The University of California says it is reviewing a $1 billion settlement offer by the Trump administration for UCLA after the government froze hundreds of millions of dollars in funding over pro-Palestinian protests.
UCLA, which is part of the University of California system, said this week the government froze $584 million in funding. Trump has threatened to cut federal funds for universities over anti-Israel student protests.
“Donald Trump has weaponized the DOJ (Department of Justice) to kneecap America’s #1 public university system — freezing medical & science funding until @UCLA pays his $1 billion ransom,” the office of Newsom, a Democrat, said in a post.
“California won’t bow to Trump’s disgusting political extortion,” it added.
“This isn’t about protecting Jewish students – it’s a billion-dollar political shakedown from the pay-to-play president.”
The government alleges universities, including UCLA, allowed antisemitism during the protests and in doing so violated Jewish and Israeli students’ civil rights. The White House had no immediate comment beyond the offer.
Experts have raised free speech and academic freedom concerns over the Republican president’s threats. The University of California says paying such a large settlement would “completely devastate” the institution.
Large demonstrations took place at UCLA last year. Last week, UCLA agreed to pay over $6 million to settle a lawsuit by some students and a professor who alleged antisemitism. It was also sued this year over a 2024 violent mob attack on pro-Palestinian protesters.
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Trump Nominates State Dept Spokeswoman Bruce as US Deputy Representative to UN
FILE PHOTO: U.S. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce speaks during her first press briefing at the State Department in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo
President Donald Trump said on Saturday he was nominating State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce as the next US deputy representative to the United Nations.
Bruce has been the State Department spokesperson since Trump took office in January.
In a post on social media in which Trump announced her nomination, the president said she did a “fantastic job” as State Department spokesperson. Bruce will need to be confirmed for the role by the US Senate, where Trump’s Republican Party holds a majority.
During press briefings, she has defended the Trump administration’s foreign policy decisions ranging from an immigration crackdown and visa revocations to US responses to Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza, including a widely condemned armed private aid operation in the Palestinian territory.
Bruce was previously a political contributor and commentator on Fox News for over 20 years.
She has also authored books like “Fear Itself: Exposing the Left’s Mind-Killing Agenda” that criticized liberals and left-leaning viewpoints.
In a post after Trump’s announcement, Bruce thanked him and suggested that the role was a “few weeks” away. Neither Trump nor Bruce mentioned an exact timeline in their online posts.
“Now I’m blessed that in the next few weeks my commitment to advancing America First leadership and values continues on the global stage in this new post,” Bruce wrote on X.
Trump has picked former White House national security adviser Mike Waltz to be his U.N. envoy. Waltz’s Senate confirmation for that role, wherein he will be Bruce’s boss, is still due.
Waltz was Trump’s national security adviser until he was ousted on May 1 after he was caught up in a March scandal involving a Signal chat among top Trump national security aides on military strikes in Yemen. Trump then nominated Waltz as his U.N. ambassador.