TEHRAN – Think about how, over the past fifty years, Western leaders—especially in Europe—have repeatedly shouted “democracy” and “no to violence.”

For example, whenever a major drug trafficker in the Middle East was captured by a country’s police and judiciary and sentenced to death, European and American media would immediately, in coordinated fashion, launch a press assault on that country over the execution, denouncing it as medieval.

For roughly a month now, however, Trump has taken what used to be the “law of the jungle” and turned it into a kind of “pirate law” at sea: his military is executing several people in the Caribbean almost every day—without trial and without proven guilt—effectively turning what used to be “summary executions in the field” into “executions at sea.”

After such repeated breaches of law by Trump, and with European governments rubbing shoulders in acquiescence, how can organizations like Amnesty International still find the nerve to preach humanity and human rights in Middle Eastern countries?

He and his ally, Netanyahu, having slaughtered more than twenty thousand children in Gaza, shamelessly offer one another the Nobel Peace Prize. When that infamous slogan of executioners such as Hitler and Genghis Khan—“peace through strength”—reaches our ears, we become ever more convinced that, in the real world, we are living inside a chapter from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.