Mark Hitchcock: Invisible Battle Raging Behind The Iran War

Invisible Battle Raging Behind The Iran War

Mark Hitchcock

All eyes in the world today are on Iran, the Middle East, and that slender Strait of Hormuz. The world is holding its collective breath, wondering when the oil prices at the pump will begin to fall, and if Iran is willing to give in or stubbornly continue its pursuit of the nuclear finish line.

Iran’s dogged refusal to surrender, even in the face of the threat of catastrophic destruction, is evidence that it values its radical theology above everything else.

What we can see on the surface today in Iran is bad enough, but behind the physical war, the Bible tells us that there is a spiritual war raging in the Middle East, with Iran at the center of the enemy’s strategy to oppose Israel and create chaos in the region.

Iran is Satan’s sinister agent to try to destroy God’s covenant people and drive them from their land.

The book of Daniel tells us about demonic spiritual warfare 2,500 years ago, involving a high-ranking demon called the Prince of “Persia”—the ancient name for modern-day Iran. This dark, demonic overlord was in charge of controlling and influencing Persia and its leaders in Daniel’s day, holding sway over this consequential region.

Daniel’s ancient prophecy helps us gain insight into the invisible spiritual war that’s still raging today in modern Iran. After all, if there was a demonic Prince of Persia in 530 BC, we could be sure that the same territorial demon is behind what’s happening there today. This demonic force in Iran is stimulating and stirring their strategy and stubbornness, inspiring their ideology, aggravating their antisemitism, and activating their anger.

 Ephesians 6:12 pulls back the veil, allowing us to peer into this unseen world, into this invisible army of evil spiritual forces: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

The Prince of Persia has not gone away. Forces of good and evil are all around us behind the flimsy facade of this world, enabling, empowering, and energizing everything that’s happening today in Iran.

The Prince of Persia has been working there for the last 2,500 years, but in the last 47 years, he has experienced his greatest success. The people of Iran are imprisoned in the equivalent of a national concentration camp, under the oppressive iron fist of a radical ideology. Joel Rosenberg aptly referred to this Mullah regime in Iran as an “apocalyptic, genocidal death cult.”

This demonic Persian prince is energizing the erroneous eschatology that drives their avowed anti-Semitism and “Mahdi” theology, which thrives on chaos and conflict and drives them to hate the United States and Israel. They seek terror and confusion to hotwire their version of the apocalypse. It’s even turning them against former allies as they shoot missiles into neighboring nations!

Dr. Hormoz Shariat, known as the Billy Graham of Iran, not long ago said something fascinating. He referred to the Prince of Persia as a spirit of delay. And what do we see from Iran today? Tehran has refined a strategy built on violence, delay, and deception. Constant negotiations, never-ending talks, and ceasefires. The Prince of Persia is still a spirit of delay, but it’s also a spirit of destruction and hatred.

I also believe that this Prince of Persia is drawing Iran into an alliance with Russia and Turkey, as described in the prophetic battle of Gog and Magog (Ezekiel 38-39).

The real battle we see today is not what we see with our eyes. There is an invisible battle raging behind the thin facade of this world. Just as in Daniel 10, God and His angelic hosts will win in the end. God’s sovereign plans will prevail as they always do. His will can never be thwarted. No delay can keep Him from bringing His will to pass. That’s true in the Middle East, and it’s true every day in your life and in mine.

Canada Says Critics Don’t Understand Its Surveillance Bill

Canada Says Critics Don’t Understand Its Surveillance Bill

Canada’s Public Safety Minister is telling Apple, Meta, and Signal that they don’t understand his own surveillance bill. They understand it fine. That’s the problem.

• Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, would force telecoms, internet companies, and social media platforms to rebuild their systems so police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) can access user data more easily during investigations.

  It would also require providers to stockpile metadata on every subscriber for up to a year, regardless of whether those people are suspected of anything.

  The bill has the backing of police chiefs across the country and CSIS, who have long argued they are stymied by outdated legislation in a digital world.

  The government describes this as organizing information “like a filing cabinet, where certain types of information would be available with legal authorization.”

  That filing cabinet contains a year’s worth of data showing where every Canadian goes, when they go there, and who they communicate with. On a mobile network, that metadata includes which cell towers each phone connects to and when. Retained at scale, it amounts to a comprehensive surveillance map of the population.

  Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said at a press conference Wednesday that tech companies are “using this as an opportunity to double down.” He added that “Tech giants are misinterpreting some of the safeguards that are already built in, including on ensuring that encryption is not in any way interrupted as part of Bill-22.”

  The bill would also allow the federal government to secretly order companies to weaken encryption or create backdoors and Meta’s Robyn Greene told the committee that if the government quietly mandates changes to a platform’s security architecture, Meta would be legally prohibited from telling its own users. Secret orders to weaken security, with a gag clause preventing disclosure. The government calls this “encryption-neutral.”

  
  

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W.H.O Fears Ebola May Be Spreading Faster and Further Than First Thought

Nobody Panic (Yet) — W.H.O Fears Ebola May Be Spreading Faster and Further Than First Thought

Simon Kent

As the world watches the Ebola outbreak which has claimed 131 lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a World Health Organization (W.H.O). representative warned Tuesday the deadly malady may be disseminating faster than first thought.

W.H.O. representative Dr Anne Ancia told the BBC the more the agency investigates, the clearer it becomes that cases have spread to other areas at a scale and speed not previously predicted..

Officials said more than 513 cases were suspected in DR Congo as of Tuesday, while one person has died in neighbouring Uganda.

The emergence of cases in urban areas, the deaths of healthcare workers, significant population movement in the area and a lack of vaccines and therapeutics are the main cited reasons for growing fears, AP reports.

The warning comes after W.H.O. chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared the outbreak a global emergency last week and said he was “deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic,” as Breitbart News reported.

But modelling by the London-based MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis as reported by the BBC suggested there had been “substantial” under-detection, and it could not rule out there had already been more than 1,000 cases.

There is no vaccine for the strain of Ebola virus fuelling the latest rise in cases, but the WHO is evaluating whether other drugs may provide protection.

Speaking to BBC World Service Newsday, Ancia said DR Congo’s Ituri province, the epicentre of the outbreak, is a “very unsecured area with lots of movement of population”, making it difficult for the agency to investigate and help control the disease.

She continued: “The more we are investigating this outbreak, the more we realise that it has already disseminated at least a little bit across border and also in other provinces.”

The outbreak has spread to the province of South Kivu, where the population has been affected by a humanitarian crisis for many years, she added in her BBC interview

Neighboring Uganda is also reporting cases.

Israel Warns of Escalating Terror Threat in West Bank

Israel Warns of Escalating Terror Threat in West Bank as Iran, Turkey, Hamas Seek to Stoke Extremism

by Ailin Vilches Arguello

Israeli security officials have warned of a rapidly deteriorating security situation in the West Bank, citing deepening Iranian and Turkish involvement alongside Hamas efforts to expand terrorist infrastructure and orchestrate attacks across the territory.

According to the Israeli news outlet Walla, defense officials point to a growing role by Iran, Turkey, and Hamas in financing, directing, and sustaining terrorism, while also leveraging Gaza-linked networks to expand coordination, incitement, and operational activity across the West Bank.

With Israeli communities in the West Bank steadily expanding, the local military command is under significant strain, operating with 22 battalions while confronting a wide range of security challenges, including dismantling terrorist infrastructure, disrupting terrorist financing channels, locating weapons caches, protecting settlements, and stopping arms smuggling from Jordan.

Israeli officials have previously warned that large-scale terrorist attacks targeting local communities could serve as a destabilizing flashpoint amid the wars in Gaza and Iran. 

Last year, Israeli forces uncovered documents suggesting Hamas is actively preparing plans for raids on settlements in the area.

Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, arrested six Arab Israeli citizens last month suspected of transferring millions of shekels from Hamas’s Turkish branch into the West Bank as part of an underground terrorist financing network believed to have smuggled more than three million shekels to fund attacks against Israel.

Experts also point to a growing threat from the Jenin Brigades in the northern West Bank — an alliance of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas operatives that has transformed refugee camps into bases for shootings, bombings, and ambushes. 

The group’s operations are reportedly sustained by a complex financing system that moves Iranian funds through Palestinian banking channels, siphons off Israeli-collected tax revenues, and makes use of international facilitators.

“By sustaining this West Bank front through Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad networks, Tehran forces Israel to fight simultaneously across multiple fronts, drains resources that could otherwise consolidate gains in Gaza, and keeps the Palestinian issue politically radioactive enough to sabotage broader Arab-Israeli alignment,” Jose Lev Alvarez, a writing fellow at the Middle East Forum think tank, explained in a recent article.

“Tehran [then] advances its axis-of-resistance doctrine at minimal cost — no Iranian boots, no direct missile exchanges, just calibrated chaos designed to obstruct any credible day-after plan for Gaza and derail normalization agreements with Saudi Arabia or Gulf states demanding Palestinian stability,” he continued. 

Last year, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) warned that Iran was driving a growing terrorist threat in the West Bank, with concerns that Iranian-backed arms smuggling could enable an Oct. 7-style attack.

Israeli intelligence and security forces have since intensified operations across the territory amid fears that Iranian-supplied weapons are increasingly reaching Palestinian terrorists and escalating the risk of a large-scale assault.

Israeli intelligence assessments have also warned that terrorists operating in the West Bank are believed to possess weapons capable of breaching Israeli defenses, including what officials described as “standard Iranian weapons.”

According to Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, Israeli officials should be closely monitoring the West Bank as Hamas regroups and rearms in the Gaza Strip after more than two years of war.

“Hamas and its allied factions understand that igniting violence in the territory would divert Israel’s attention during a critical time of rebuilding the group’s infrastructure in Gaza,” Truzman told The Algemeiner last year.

“The release of convicted terrorists to the West Bank under the [Israel-Hamas] ceasefire agreement may be a factor in the resurgence of organized violence in the territory,” he continued.

According to a survey released last year by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, 70 percent of all respondents — and 81 percent of Jewish respondents — expressed fear of an Oct. 7-style attack coming from the West Bank. In contrast, 53 percent of Arab respondents said they were not worried about such an attack.

In response to these concerns, the IDF has established a special command to address potential threats in the West Bank and launched a nearly unprecedented counterterror operation in the northern part of the territory.

'Counterfeit Deceptions'

Five Apocalypses, One Author: How the World Manufactures End Times to Bury the Real One

JD RUCKER

It is the strange privilege of this generation to live through the apocalypse five different times before breakfast. Open any browser tab. Aliens are about to be disclosed. Artificial intelligence will either save humanity or extinguish it by Tuesday. The climate has eight years left, then six, then four, then fifty, then eight again. A novel pathogen is one bat-sneeze away from collapsing civilization. And a coalition of well-meaning clergy is preparing the world for a unified spiritual future where, conveniently, no one has to repent of anything in particular.

No prior generation has been fed this many endings simultaneously. That is not an accident. It is a feature.

The prophet Daniel was told something curious about the time of the end. The angel did not warn him about ignorance. He warned him about its opposite: “But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” (Daniel 12:4). The end-times signature is not a darkening of information but a flood of it, and a generation drowning in the current. Knowledge increases. Wisdom does not. And in that gap, counterfeits flourish.

To be clear, even counterfeits can be part of the actual end times. I would be remiss to say that AI, for example, will not be a tool of the Principalities and Powers to deceive and control us in the end. But there’s a difference between recognizing the components and adhering to the fearmongering of each individual incident. We have the Bible and the prophecies therein to let us see things for how they really are.

The Cosmic Counterfeit

In February 2026, President Trump directed the Pentagon to begin releasing government files related to UFOs, UAPs, and “alien and extraterrestrial life.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed the Pentagon would comply. Congress folded three separate UAP transparency provisions into the FY2026 NDAA. NASA continues to fund astrobiology research with announcements of “potential biosignatures” timed for maximum cultural penetration. Hollywood is preparing a Spielberg film titled “Disclosure Day.” Even Barack Obama showed up on a podcast to opine that aliens are probably real.

The merger of UFO disclosure and astrobiology is the cleanest counterfeit on the menu, because it strikes directly at Genesis. The Bible opens with a claim that man was made uniquely in the image of God, on a planet uniquely prepared for him, in a cosmos uniquely declaring God’s glory. Every “we are not alone” headline is a quiet renegotiation of that claim. The implication is never spoken aloud, but it does not need to be. If life is everywhere, then man is nothing special. If man is nothing special, then the Incarnation is provincial mythology. And if the Incarnation is mythology, then the Cross is theater.

Scripture is not silent on what often appears in our skies. Paul wrote that we wrestle “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The intelligences behind these phenomena are not new arrivals from Zeta Reticuli. They are old, fallen, and patient. The disclosure narrative is preparing the world to receive a deception that requires an alternative origin story for humanity, and the groundwork is being laid in congressional hearings while believers argue about whether to take it seriously.

The Machine Counterfeit

Silicon Valley no longer pretends its language is secular. The men building artificial intelligence speak openly in religious cadences about “alignment,” “sentience,” “the singularity,” and the moral obligations of machines. Doom-prophets warn of extinction. Utopians promise paradise. Both demand the same thing: that humanity submit to a global governance regime competent enough to manage the new god being summoned in their data centers....

The five counterfeits look unrelated only if you study them in isolation. Step back, and the pattern is unmistakable. Each one names a threat. Each one defines salvation as submission to a global authority. Each one delegitimizes any local, traditional, Biblical resistance. And each one trains the population to see Christians who will not bow as the obstacle to humanity’s survival.

Paul was specific about what is coming. He warned of a working “with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivability of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie” (2 Thessalonians 2:9-11). The strong delusion is singular in Paul’s grammar but plural in its execution. It is not one lie. It is an ecosystem.

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