Johnson: US Must Wage War With Iran Because of Its “Misguided Religion”

Top Republican leaders are spewing blatant Islamophobia to justify the U.S. and Israel’s horrific war on Iran, drawing condemnation from Muslim rights advocates.

In one instance of patently hateful comments, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said Wednesday that Iranians have a “misguided religion” that seeks the destruction of the U.S.

“[Iranians] want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and they’d like to take us out as well. We’re the Great Satan in their analogy and their misguided religion, and there is no way to appease them,” he said. “And in defiance of every president since Jimmy Carter, the Iranian regime has pursued the means to acquire a nuclear weapon, so they could take that madness and that ideology to its full conclusion.”

Officials have used this dangerous rhetoric since the beginning of what could be a prolonged war against Iran, a majority Muslim country which has seen over a thousand civilians slaughtered so far in the ongoing US-Israeli operation, human rights groups say.

“Mike Johnson’s claim that Iranians follow a ‘misguided religion’ that leads them to hate America is a dangerous, irresponsible and hypocritical expression of bigotry that is completely inappropriate for the Speaker of the House,” said the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in a statement calling for Johnson to retract his remarks.

“Such rhetoric echoes some of the darkest chapters of our history, when religious and ethnic minorities were demonized to justify discrimination and war,” the group said. “Accusing others of religious fanaticism while turning religious fanaticism into U.S. government policy is the height of hypocrisy.”

American officials have long held bigoted views against majority Muslim countries as well as Muslims within the U.S. Islamophobes believe that Muslims are inherently violent and therefore must be suppressed and killed. Islamophobic incidents surged in the U.S. amid Israel and the U.S.’s genocide in Gaza.

Further, Johnson repeats a lie that U.S. officials have told over and over again. U.S. spies assessed last year that Iran has not pursued a nuclear weapon since 2003 at least, and the International Atomic Energy Agency said this week that there is no proof that Iran was trying to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have also repeated hateful anti-Muslim rhetoric in recent days to justify their carpet bombing of Iran and killing of civilians en masse.

“Iran is run by lunatics. Religious fanatic lunatics,” Rubio said in remarks to the press on Tuesday. “They have an ambition to have nuclear weapons. They intend to develop those nuclear weapons behind a program of missiles and drones and terrorism that the world will not be able to touch them, for fear of those things.”

“Crazy regimes like Iran hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions cannot have nuclear weapons. It’s common sense,” said Hegseth in a press conference on Monday. “Many have said it, but it takes guts to actually enforce it, and our president has guts.”

Hegseth is an avowed Christian nationalist. He has tattoos referencing the Crusaders, who launched a religious war against Muslims, a tattoo that is unequivocally Islamophobic, and once called for a new U.S.-led Crusade in his 2020 book, American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free.

Christian nationalism, which embraces Islamophobia as a key tenet, is well-represented in the Trump administration. On Tuesday, independent journalist Jonathan Larsen reported that a combat unit commander told officers at a briefing on Monday that President Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to complaints filed with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

The commander’s remarks also drew condemnation from CAIR.

“Every American should be deeply disturbed by the ‘holy war’ rhetoric that Secretary Hegseth, Benjamin Netanyahu and even some U.S. military commanders are reportedly using to justify the war on Iran,” said CAIR in a statement released on Tuesday. “Mr. Hegseth’s derisive comments about ‘Islamist prophetic delusions,’ an apparent reference to Shia beliefs about religious figures arising near the end times, was unacceptable.”