Destroying the Dome of the Rock
===============================

Destroying the Dome of the Rock is a scenario John Kiriakou raised unprompted on 22 October 2025, and to which he attached the largest prediction he makes anywhere in the corpus.

How it came up

Kiriakou introduced it himself, at the end of a discussion of the Gaza ceasefire. "May I add something too? You know, Tucker Carlson has been more and more outspoken about Israel, and he's making a lot of enemies, especially on the pro-Zionist right."

"Lately he's been talking about both the notion of greater Israel, as well as this Zionist extremist plan to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site in Islam, and to build what would be the third temple."

Crazy, and mainstream

His assessment of the people who hold the plan and of its standing are separate judgements, and he makes both. "Those people are crazy. They're crazy. But it's entered the mainstream of Israeli scholarship."

The distinction matters to the argument. An idea can be deranged and still be respectable, and it is the respectability rather than the derangement that makes it dangerous.

The precedent

The historical anchor is a visit rather than a demolition. Ariel Sharon's appearance at the site, he notes, "was enough to trigger the second intifada", which sets the scale for what removing the building entirely would do.

The prediction

Kiriakou endorsed Carlson's conclusion without reservation. "He said the other day, and I agree with him wholeheartedly, to destroy the Dome of the Rock would be the event that starts World War Three. Easy as that."

He then added a second forecast that runs in the opposite direction from the first. "And by the way, I think it would probably be the beginning of the end of the Israeli government and all of its support."

That is the sense in which he says, disconcertingly, "in a way I hope they do it", not because he wants the war, but because he believes the act would destroy the political position of the people who committed it, exactly as the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas destroyed the Taliban's.

See also

- The Bamiyan Precedent
- Israel-United States relations
- Famine in Gaza
- Kiriakou's mother's 2008 trip to Israel
