With Iran’s massive missile strike on Israel on Tuesday — the day before the Jewish high holiday of Rosh Hashanah begins — the possibility of war between the two countries has increased exponentially.
The Israeli military reported that despite Iran’s launch of 180 missiles aimed at Israeli targets, following an earlier barrage in April — with Iran saying this one was in retaliation for Israel assassinating Hezbollah, Hamas and Iranian military leaders— there were no reported casualties.
Most missiles were destroyed by Israel’s air defences.
But given Israel’s military policy of responding to attacks by its enemies with larger counter attacks, and with Israeli forces now in southern Lebanon fighting Hezbollah, full-scale war may be inevitable.
Unlike the U.S., Canada is not a major player in what is happening militarily, but it’s time for the Trudeau government to recognize that its pro forma calls for a ceasefire are irrelevant to the facts on the ground.
Iran — not the terrorist proxies it funds, trains and equips across the Mideast, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and other terror groups in Iraq, Syria and Bahrain — has always been the head of the snake when it comes to terrorist attacks on both Israel and Arab nations in the Mideast.
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas reject a two-state solution with an independent Palestine living in peace beside a secure Israel, that will never happen no matter who is in charge until Iran is defanged.
Internally, Iran’s theocratic, brutal dictators terrorize their own people, imprisoning, torturing and murdering those fighting for basic human rights, including women and girls for defying Iran’s medieval dress codes and prohibition of such simple pleasures as singing and dancing in public.
When we say Iran is the snake in the Mideast; we do not mean its people — we mean its leaders.
The solution is not regime change imposed by Western military powers. We’ve seen how that leads to disaster in the Mideast.
The people of Iran must free themselves from the monsters who rule them.
But what the Trudeau government can do is to finally recognize that Israel is defending us when it confronts Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism and change our Mideast foreign policy to recognize reality.