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“The real divide,” Tucker Carlson declared Friday, “isn’t between people who support Israel and people who support Iran or the Palestinians. The real divide is between those who casually encourage violence, and those who seek to prevent it — between warmongers and peacemakers. Who are the warmongers? They would include anyone who’s calling Donald Trump today to demand air strikes and other direct US military involvement in a war with Iran. On that list: Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rupert Murdoch, Ike Perlmutter and Miriam Adelson. At some point they will all have to answer for this, but you should know their names now.”

Well, not exactly, as Levin, for one, has sharply disputed Carlson’s claim, but the idea that Israel is carrying out unprovoked warmongering assault against an innocent Islamic Republic of Iran isn’t limited to Carlson alone. Candace Owens, who shares with Carlson the mantle of being the highest-profile newly minted post-Oct. 7 antisemite, put it a bit more crudely than Carlson did: “Get ready, white American men! It’s time for you to go die for Israel again. If you don’t want to die for Israel then you are an antisemite. Sign up to die in Iran for Netanyahu today, or just admit you hate Jews. Trust the science.”

No Americans, white or otherwise, have died for Israel, unless one considers all the wars that the U.S. has waged since 9/11, or perhaps in Candace’s mind since 1941, as being for Israel or the Jews. In reality, however, as Israel (not actually America at all) has struck Iran over the last few days, it was not acting out of an unprovoked “warmongering” impulse. There has been much discussion of whether Iran was really developing a nuclear bomb, and how close it was to doing so, but quite aside from the question of nukes, for many years the Islamic Republic has made no secret of its determination to destroy Israel.

As far back as Nov. 2012, a huge billboard on Tehran’s Niayesh highway depicted a missile with the legend, “Destination Tel Aviv.” It attracted little attention from the Iranians who drove by it. Over the previous three decades of living in the Islamic Republic, they had become accustomed to a steady barrage of bellicose anti-Israel rhetoric. From the moment the Iranian mullahs took power, they had been outspoken about their hostility to Israel. The Ayatollah Khomeini dubbed Israel “the Little Satan” and once declared, “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”

The Islamic Republic has been determined from its inception to make sure that happened. It set out to make good on its aggressive rhetoric in the early 1980s by creating Hizballah as a permanent force set against the Jewish state. During the 2006 Israeli-Hizballah conflict, Iranian forces directly aided Hizballah, and two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were killed fighting alongside Hizballah in Lebanon.  Hundreds of Iranian soldiers aided Hizballah in firing missiles into Israel.

Iran’s proxy war against Israel didn’t begin after Oct. 7. As far back as March 2009, Iran was shipping weapons to Gaza through Sudan—until Israeli forces carried out airstrikes against the shipments. Two years later, Israeli commandos boarded a cargo ship flying the Liberian flag. On it they found, in containers that were labeled as carrying cotton and lentils, mortar shells and Chinese-made anti-ship missiles bound for Hamas. Instruction manuals were written in Farsi. The cargo had been loaded in the Syrian port of Latakia; then the ship had made its way to Turkey before attempting to pass by Israeli defenses and get its cargo to Hamas.

On July 18, 2012, a caller to Bulgaria’s tourist office warned that a group of Israeli tourists who were just arriving would be “welcomed by two bombs.” When the tourists duly arrived at Bulgaria’s Burgas International Airport, they boarded a bus to their hotel—and seven people were killed and over thirty more wounded when a bomb tore through that bus.

Benjamin Netanyahu immediately pointed to the mullahs and accused them of carrying out terror attacks against Israelis all over the globe: “All signs point towards Iran. Over the last few months we have seen Iran’s attempts to attack Israelis in Thailand, India, Georgia, Kenya, Cyprus and other countries. Exactly 18 years to the day after the horrendous attack on the Jewish Community Center in Argentina, deadly Iranian terrorism continues to strike at innocent people. This is a global Iranian terror onslaught and Israel will react firmly to it.”

Nearly thirteen years later, that Iranian terror onslaught continues, and Israel is finally taking decisive action to end it once and for all. The Jewish state deserves the gratitude of the free world.