On June 14, as Minnesota police sought a man who

allegedly murdered

a state lawmaker and her husband and shot another and his wife, I was working security in front of an Arizona synagogue, wearing body armour and packing a pistol and pepper spray. As they arrived, members of the congregation, worried by a recent

Molotov cocktail attack

on Jews in Boulder, Colo.,

the double murder

at the Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. and tensions over the war between Israel and Iran, thanked me for accepting the rabbi’s request to help out. Well, of course; my wife was inside. Adding to fears were the “No Kings” protests — some of which

turned into riots

— scheduled that day nationwide.

Which is to say, sweating through my bullet-proof vest under the southwestern sun wasn’t directly connected to the Minnesota incident, but both are evidence of the country’s problem with political violence.

Reporting on the assassinations in Minnesota, the BBC

turned for comment

to Jenna Stocker, editor of Thinking Minnesota, a political publication in a state that’s known for its

niceness

. According to Stocker, “Some people even here in Minnesota have really let politics guide their thinking and how they feel about their neighbours, their friends and their relatives,” and this has fractured society and driven people into hostile camps.

The BBC added that Thinking Minnesota’s parent organization, the Center of the American Experiment, “was firebombed last year in what think-tank officials called a politically motivated attack.”

Stocker is right that political partisanship is dominating people’s identities and poisoning relationships. A

study

published in February in the journal Political Psychology reported that, in America, “Political identity outweighs all other social identities in informing citizens’ attitudes and projected behaviours towards others.” That is, being a Republican or a Democrat is more important to Americans than shared racial, religious or class identities. Interestingly, the researchers also found that hostility towards political opponents motivates people more strongly than loyalty to their own side. Anger drives political polarization, and Americans can see the results in the arson attacks, bombings, shootings and riots throughout the country.

Concern for the deteriorating political climate in the United States led my wife and I to take a week-long defensive

pistol training course

at Gunsite Academy, one of the top-ranked firearms training schools in the United States. As a political writer, correspondence in my inbox can get a little — or a lot — hostile. My wife, who is Jewish, has similar concerns about surging antisemitic violence, which is often carried out by people who convince themselves that every person wearing a Star of David is responsible for all the flaws, real or imagined, of the State of Israel. Those were reasons enough for us to spend days in the desert running through shooting techniques and combat simulations.

One fellow attendee at Gunsite was a man who helps train volunteers to protect synagogues, schools and community events. Demand for his organization’s services is, unfortunately, booming, and it turned out that he knows my wife’s rabbi, who himself has attended Gunsite with several congregants.

Other people are equally concerned about the violent turn in the country. After the Minnesota killings,

NPR reported

that threats against federal lawmakers have soared in recent years. “Members from both parties have repeatedly called for Congress to allow lawmakers to spend more money on personal security,” noted NPR.

Frankly, though, while no one should be targeted by violence, it’s difficult to care much about the security of government officials who have played a key role in spurring it on.

Democrats unleashed the power of the state on political enemies with

politicized prosecutions

of then-candidate Donald Trump and pressured the banking industry to

deny financial services

to their opponents. As the American Civil Liberties Union

warned

in defence of the National Rifle Association, “The NRA has a right, like all other advocacy organizations, to pursue their mission free from reprisals by government officials who disagree with its political viewpoint.”

Returned to office, Trump’s Republicans followed suit by targeting

the opposition press

and suspending the

security clearances

of law firms associated with the Democratic party. “Punishing firms for their choice of clients or the nature of their legal work cannot help but intimidate the legal community, discouraging attorneys from taking on cases that may be politically unpopular or present a challenge to those in power,”

cautioned

the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Meanwhile, American government has become so large, intrusive and punitive that many Americans believe they can’t afford to lose elections. We now must ask permission of officialdom to start businesses, take certain jobs and renovate our homes.

Politicians raise the political stakes and abuse their authority to punish critics. They tell their followers that opponents are “

deplorables

” or “

enemies of the people

,” “

fascists

” or “

communists

,” and far too many take them seriously. The results, in a growing number of cases, have been

violent

,

bloody

and tragic.

After the murderous attacks in Minnesota, Pennsylvania Gov.

Josh Shapiro commented

, “This is unacceptable — we all have a responsibility to stand up and work to defeat the political violence that is tearing through our country. America is better than this.”

Shapiro survived an attack in April, when the Pennsylvania governor’s

residence was firebombed

on the first night of Passover. Since then, he’s called for Americans to turn down the temperature on politics across the board without blaming any one group. That’s wise, given that it’s easy to find both victims and perpetrators of violence from across the political spectrum, including Democrats, Republicans and denizens of the lunatic fringes. Last month, a California fertility clinic was

bombed

by an “anti-natalist.” True to his anti-life ideology, he died in the blast.

Turning down the political heat would be a welcome change. The best way to start would be to make the government less important and easier to ignore. People who can lead their lives with minimal impact from the outcomes of ballot tallies and the whims of politicians are unlikely to view those with different political views as dangerous enemies to be destroyed. They can shrug their shoulders and carry on.

That won’t satisfy those on the lunatic fringe and it won’t erase the hatred of bigots. I’m sure I’ll spend more time in front of the synagogue guarding against threats that will, hopefully, never materialize. But, to reduce political violence, the first step is to reduce the importance of politics.

National Post

• J.D. Tuccille: The most dangerous of moments for America
• J.D. Tuccille: Having made the case for political violence, American moral crusaders deliver it

“The decision by the (British) to colonise/conquer Australia … was the original sin,”

declared the tweet earlier this month

. “Britain gaining Australia for Britain was theft. Open and shut.” Its adamant author, a retired Irish civil servant, was responding to a recent podcast in which I discuss colonization with the former deputy prime minister of Australia, John Anderson. What the Irishman said of Down Under, he’d no doubt say of the True North, too.

But it’s really not that simple.

In settled societies like Australia and Canada, there are property laws defining who owns what, and where disputes arise there are judicial authorities to decide. Similarly, between national societies there are treaties comprising international law, which defines borders and establishes courts to arbitrate. Law creates rights.

A right is a claim to an important element of human flourishing, which is backed up by the social institutions of law, police and courts. One such element is the freedom to build a life out of a set of material resources. Where we live cheek by jowl with other people, and where resources don’t abound, those people pose a threat to our freedom, since what we currently have in our hands they might well like to take into theirs. This kind of situation is susceptible to constant conflict, and since constant conflict doesn’t allow for much flourishing at all — except for thugs and warlords — societies have learned the wisdom of creating rules about who has the freedom to use particular things, and to back up those rules by threatening to punish thieves. Those rules or laws, supported by social authority and the threat of punishment, create rights to own things — rights to property.

Suppose, then, a situation where members of two very different societies encounter one another for the first time. Since these societies have made no treaties with each other, there is no international law to regulate their interactions. The freedom of each to use resources such as land is highly insecure, for neither party has a legal right to property. So, where members of one society trespass on the territory of the other — taking it, settling on it and exploiting it for their own purposes — no right has been violated.

Still, an injustice may have been done. But only if we don’t follow Thomas Hobbes in thinking that justice springs into life on the back of contracts or treaties — only if we move in the direction of Thomas Aquinas, believing instead in universal moral principles built into the nature of things, which precede social conventions. One such principle is that we ought not take from other people things in which they have invested their time and effort, or on which their social life has come to depend, or which they need to survive.

While natural moral rules such as these do provide a framework for governing interactions in the absence of commonly recognized law, they’re much more contingent and less stable than legal rights. This is because whether I respect your freedom or invade it depends on whether I estimate that you have more than you need and I have less. Even if I make my estimate conscientiously, your estimate might well differ from mine and there is no overarching authority to arbitrate between us. What’s more, not everyone is conscientious and some — whatever their skin colour or ethnicity — will be propelled by greed or by the unfair, egoistic assumption that the life of someone else is worth less than their own.

To this already unstable mix must be added the incomprehension, uncertainty, mistrust and fear that naturally arise when two culturally alien peoples, speaking entirely different languages, collide with one another. Under such volatile conditions — and in the absence of any commonly restraining law — friction, conflict, defeat and conquest are, tragically, almost inevitable.

Almost, but not entirely. Sometimes, it suits alien peoples to co-operate because they have reciprocal interests. In a new study of early relations between the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and Indigenous peoples on the coast of British Columbia, “The Vancouver Island Treaties and the Evolving Principles of Indigenous Title,” the historian Ted Binnema reveals that land itself was not a bone of contention. While the company wanted to trade and gain access to natural resources, the Natives wanted the goods and opportunities that the British brought — including blankets, weapons, wage-labour and medical services.

They also wanted security. The peoples of the Pacific Northwest subsisted on salmon, which perishes quickly unless processed. Processing was labour-intensive, requiring far more work than women alone could provide. So, all of them depended on slave-labour. Consequently, slave-raiding and war were endemic. The HBC, however, made it clear that it wouldn’t tolerate warfare on its doorstep. As a result, the Native peoples coveted the security and status that proximity to the company’s trading posts offered. And when the foreigners cleared and cultivated land, or mined coal, they had no complaint, for land and the black stuff weren’t what mattered most to them. Moreover, when they wanted to establish reservations, the company complied. It wasn’t until the HBC first offered compensation in the 1850s that the Natives began to demand it. After all, when one set of them seized from another what did matter — slaves — they weren’t in the habit of paying.

This reminds us that relations between colonizers and Indigenous peoples weren’t always characterized by conflict. In many cases, and for long periods, they co-operated to their mutual benefit. But it also shows us that the value of land differs not only between cultures, but over time. Even if it were true that, in the early 1800s, the territorial expansion of European settlement in British Columbia did deprive Indigenous peoples of their livelihood by trespassing on their fishing or hunting grounds, to surrender huge tracts of territory to them in 2025 is not to unravel history and restore the past. That’s because what mattered in the past was not land but subsistence. And British colonization replaced traditional means of subsistence with new alternatives — trading, farming and wage-earning. Now, through the Canadian state, it offers welfare payments, too.

In the early 21st century, control over land means something quite different from what it meant in 1800. Its value has changed. Then, it meant access to fishing or hunting grounds and thereby the means of survival. Now, it means the lucrative ownership of resources for exploitation or development, which the Vancouver islanders in the 19th century could not imagine and did not value. So, to grant “Native title” to Indigenous peoples today is not to uphold a historic legal right, for such a thing didn’t exist. Nor is it to restore things to where they were, replacing like with like. It’s to create a novel, unequal privilege.

National Post

Nigel Biggar is Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas and author of the bestselling book, “Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning” (2024).

• Nigel Biggar: The narcissism of anti-colonialism
• Nigel Biggar: British Empire unfairly maligned

As global instability grows and international threats evolve, Canada can no longer afford to underinvest in its national defence. The government’s renewed commitment to strengthening the Canadian Armed Forces is timely — and long overdue. But as we debate where to allocate dollars, we must remember one fundamental truth: national defence isn’t just about equipment or infrastructure. It’s about people.

Canada’s military strength depends not only on ships, jets, and munitions — but on the human beings behind them. Recruitment, retention and readiness are impossible to achieve if we neglect the well-being of those who serve — and their families.

In my role as CEO of the Together We Stand Foundation, one of Canada’s few national charities dedicated to supporting serving military families, I’ve visited 15 operational bases across the country. The conversations I’ve had reveal a consistent, sobering reality: many military families face significant challenges — challenges that would be daunting for any Canadian household. These include inadequate housing, limited access to health care, unaffordable childcare, and even food insecurity.

These struggles aren’t the result of poor leadership within the military. They stem from decades of national complacency — a belief that our geography and global alliances would insulate us from harm. That belief no longer holds.

We often describe our military as an insurance policy — a safeguard we hope never to use. But an insurance policy is only as strong as the people who uphold it.

Right now, Canada’s armed forces are under-resourced and stretched dangerously thin. We’re more than 20,000 personnel short — and that’s based on a target that’s already lower than what our global commitments demand. Even more concerning, we’re losing experienced members in the critical middle ranks — those essential to mentoring and training the next generation. Today, Canada has fewer troops than the Arkansas National Guard. Ammunition reserves are running low, and equipment across the Navy, Army and Air Force is aging. While much of the public conversation focuses on procurement and infrastructure — rightly so — we’re still not talking enough about our most essential asset: people.

We need individuals motivated to enlist, willing to serve, and prepared to sacrifice. But they will only step forward — and stay — if their families are supported. Would you take a job knowing it meant frequent relocations, no access to a family doctor, limited child-care options and few job opportunities for your spouse? Would you agree to deploy for months on end, knowing your loved ones are left behind with rising bills and little support?

These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re the day-to-day realities for many military families in Canada.

Yes, financial literacy and budgeting matters — but no family serving their country should have to choose between heating their home and putting food on the table, or drive hours just to see a doctor. Better pay helps, but it’s not enough when military spouses are repeatedly forced to put their careers on hold. Until we tackle the deeper issues — housing shortages, spousal employment, health-care access, and child care — families will continue to carry an unfair burden. No amount of budgeting can fix a system that leaves them behind.

In any successful organization, people are the foundation. The same is true of the military. If we want a strong, capable Canadian Armed Forces, we need to build systems that support military families. That includes:

• Affordable, modern housing across the country

• Access to health care on or near bases

• Reliable, affordable child care

• Portable, meaningful employment for military spouses

• Education incentives for military children

Yes, many Canadians face these issues — but military families face them with one critical difference: they’re required to move. Just as they finally secure a doctor, affordable housing, or a spot in child care — they’re posted elsewhere. The very nature of military life compounds these challenges and makes sustainable solutions more urgent. This isn’t just about fairness — it’s about operational readiness and national security.

We’re encouraged by the federal government’s renewed focus on defence and its commitment to investing more. But if we truly want to meet our NATO target of two per cent of GDP, we must ensure our military is one people want to join — and can afford to stay in.

That starts with families.

As a civilian, a charity leader, and a proud Canadian, I’m committed to working with government, military leadership and military families themselves to turn good intentions into lasting change.

Supporting military families isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s a national imperative. Their stability is our security.

Special to National Post

Rick Seymour CEO, Together We Stand Foundation; Recipient, King Charles III Coronation Medal

• Michel Maisonneuve: Canada’s military can’t be fixed with cash alone
• Canada’s boutique military: ‘Should we not be able to defend ourselves?’

It’s June: the western world’s Holy Month of Pride, and, as such, we must all be on our best behaviour so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of gender activists — you know, the ones that occupy the latter half of the expanding LGBTQ2S+ acronym.

Unfortunately, the United Kingdom’s Carrot Cottage Rabbit Rescue somehow missed this memo. The registered charity

drew the ire of Irish comedian

and transgender rights activist Aidan Comerford this week, following an online attack by anonymous activists whose work caught Comerford’s attention. Comerford, whose X bio notes that he “generally tweets about what transphobia looks like,” astutely observed that the charity was committing the cardinal sin of following unapproved social media accounts on X.

The

accounts in question, noticed Comerford on June 14, were gender critical

— the horror! — and allegedly included one

“recent detransitioner in the USA.”

 But wait, it gets even more dire. The charity also

named a rabbit after comedian Ricky Gervais

— that terrible funny man who offended millions with his profane jokes, including about transwomen — and then had the audacity to

interact with X founder Elon Musk

.

One can surely sympathize with Comerford, whose valuable work defending the LGBT community from, umm, a rabbit charity, has landed him the unfortunate nickname “

Watership Clown

.”

“There’s a registered British rabbit rescue charity, of all things, that is currently marketing itself based on the criticism it is getting for following and courting the support of the anti-trans movement. You do have to wonder about humanity,”

Comerford posted to X on Tuesday, once

he realized that his smear campaign against the animal rescue workers had stunningly backfired.

Carrot Cottage Rabbit Rescue, whose X bio notes that it exists “for the sole purpose of saving rabbits,” has

more than tripled

its social media following after Comerford’s attempt to ignite an online furor. Donations are flowing, and even J.K. Rowling, the most famous gender-critical woman in the world, got involved.

“We should all chip in to get one of the rabbits named Magdalen Berns. (Comerford’s) head would burst open like a microwaved egg,”

Rowling posted to X

on Monday. Berns is the late,

fondly remembered

, British woman- and lesbian-rights advocate who died of brain cancer in 2019.

A day later, Carrot Cottage Rabbit Rescue named two delightfully cute bunnies

“Joanne” and “Kathleen,”

sparking rumours about their namesakes’ identities (J.K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock, two more prominent “transphobic” women’s rights advocates in the U.K.). Will this charity ever stop doing evil?

For its actions, attempts have been made to punish the rescue. On June 13, it

announced

: “We have just received official correspondence from the charity commission stating that they have received a number of complaints ‘ALLEGING’ that we are engaging in transphobia, following transphobic accounts and that we are posting antisemitism posts on the social media platform X. It’s time to take legal advice as these allegations are false and intended to damage the charity, ultimately putting bunnies at risk. What a sad world we live in.”

The charity later posted a direct response to Comerford

in a parodic video

, which has since been deleted, juxtaposing bunnies eating strawberries and hopping with Comerford’s angry and accusatory posts to the organization.

What a refreshing response: no grovelling, no apology and no begging for the public to believe that the charity staff are not bigots. Instead, they laughed at the attack of a perpetually aggrieved activist and the potential of an incoming cancellation mob he hoped to summon — all to destroy the reputations of persons volunteering their time to save the lives of bunnies.

Instead of capitulating, the charity put Comerford’s impotence on full display.

“After calling an immediate trustee meeting we have decided to add a complaint procedure to our website, as advised by the charity commission,” read a

post

by Carrot Cottage Rabbit Rescue on June 13, hours after their announcement about complaint allegations. “We have reviewed our policies and are happy that they are working. Our stance remains. We are apolitical until such time we choose to move towards changing rabbit welfare legislation, then our political stance will still solely reflect rabbit welfare.

“A follow is not (an) endorsement of your political views, as we are building a community to save rabbits, not a following, we will continue to follow back our supporters without discrimination.”

The charity told the National Post that they have seen a large increase in donations over the past week.

Perhaps Carrot Cottage Rabbit Rescue could start a side business as a consulting firm for those who are facing cancellation attempts. They’ve demonstrated what our increasingly post cancel-culture world can look like: a world where indignant cry-bullies are told to bugger off and mind their own problems. If their unhinged behaviour towards an animal rescue organization is any clue, it seems that they must have quite a few.

The bunnies, by contrast, now have a lot fewer problems — all thanks to Comerford’s fruitless rage.

National Post

Last week, some 4,000 participants from over 40 countries

demanded

humanitarian aid access to Gaza, via Egypt’s heavily fortified border crossing at Rafah. An advance group of 200 (including a number of Canadians) was stopped by Egyptian police,

indifferent to emotional pleas

for their cooperation on behalf of their Gazan “brethren.” The incident ended with

casual brutality

meted out to some, others detained or deported.

This, according to the Global March to Gaza’s spokesperson, was “completely unexpected.” Not if the march leaders had done their homework. Egypt does not consider Hamas or Hamas’s supporters its “brethren.” Au contraire. Hamas is guided in its Islamist vision and visceral hatred of Israel and Jews by the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt was ruled by Brotherhood avatar Mohamed Morsi from 2012 to 2013. It

did not go well

. Egyptians consider themselves

well shot of the group

. In fact, it is designated as a foreign terrorist organization not only in Egypt, but in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Syria (under Assad), Bahrain,

Jordan

and the United Arab Emirates.

The Muslim Brotherhood represents a genre of political Islam that is as ideologically totalitarian as communism, and equally focused on the subjugation of the West. A powerful movement founded in Egypt a century ago, its affiliates have

a spectrum of strategies

to reach their supremacist goal, from the open violence of Hamas in the Arab world, to the “bottom-up Islamization” favoured in university

Middle Eastern Studies

departments and advocacy institutions such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (

CAIR

) in the United States and the

Muslim Association of Canada

(MAC).

Brotherhood apologists dumb down its violent wing and core jihadism, but its

own literature

exposes the chilling truth. The group’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, once

declared:

“It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

In 2014,

Tom Quiggin

, a former Privy Council intelligence analyst and court-recognized expert on terrorism,

authored a study

that “intended to focus public attention on the requirement to have a national level discussion on the Muslim Brotherhood and its role in Canada.” It was not welcomed by the Liberal Party under Islamo-reverent Justin Trudeau, who came to power shortly after its publication. Attacked as a smear against Canadian Muslims by the National Council of Canadian Muslims (formerly CAIR-CAN), the report’s recommendation for an investigation into the Brotherhood was quickly subsumed under the general heading of “Islamophobia.” References to the group gently sank beneath the bar of permissible discourse.

Nevertheless, investigations carried out elsewhere are available to us. For example, in 2021 a European Parliament committee produced an

in-depth analysis

of Muslim Brotherhood activity in Europe. More recently, a classified French report the group’s plan to take over Europe was

leaked

to France’s Le Figaro; writing on the subject, the Free Press’s  Simone Rodan-Benzaquen

observed

, “The Brotherhood operates as a political project. Its goal is not sudden revolution, but gradual transformation.… And it is not coming just for France. It is coming for all of the West.”

The U.S. has known all about the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology since a

damning 1991 memorandum

by the group detailing its Islamist aims and methods surfaced in the next decade during the Hamas-centric

Holy Land Foundation trial

. Before the Trump era, a cone of silence, similar to Canada’s, had been placed over it. (Barack Obama naively believed he could make the Brotherhood an ally.)

In 2017, Congress held a 

hearing

on whether the Muslim Brotherhood should be designated as a foreign terrorist organization, but a proposal to criminalize it

failed to materialize

due to divisions in Trump’s first administration. Now, lawmakers are trying again: early this month, a

new bill

was introduced to Congress with promising bicameral support.

Unfortunately, the chances of Canada’s present government following suit — or even committing to a Europe-style investigation — are nugatory to nil.

My certainty springs from the concerning fact that on June 6, in Ottawa, Prime Minister Mark Carney chose MAC as his audience for a multiculturalism-themed Eid al-Adha

address

. A George Washington University report by the school’s

Program on Extremism found that

MAC proudly

self-identifies

as a Muslim Brotherhood legacy group. The Brotherhood also

hosts foreign speakers

whose discourse features antisemitism, misogyny and homophobia.

At his address, Carney equated MAC values with Canadian values.

Backlash

ensued; more than one observer noted that MAC had been investigated by the Canada Revenue Agency which, in a 2021 audit document,

alleged

that some MAC directors and employees were involved in “an apparent Hamas support network.”

It’s one thing for woke, virtue-signalling global marchers to be shrouded in ignorance. We can mock their credulity. The same appearance of ignorance is inexcusable in a nation’s leader. Was Carney deliberately messaging acceptance of the Muslim Brotherhood’s claim for social inclusion under the aegis of multiculturalism? If so, that too is inexcusable, but also makes no sense. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has, like the Brotherhood, spawned numerous terrorist offshoots — Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad — was (finally)

designated

by Canada as a terrorist entity in 2024. Yet there is precious little daylight between the triumphalist end games of both IRGC and the Muslim Brotherhood.

A saving grace in the era of Soviet-sponsored infiltration of the West was our freedom to educate ourselves about communism’s dangers without being accused of “Marxophobia.” It’s past time we had that same freedom to hold a “national level discussion” on the Muslim Brotherhood.

National Post

kaybarb@gmail.com

X: @BarbaraRKay

• Joe Adam George: Islamist group using Canada to plot caliphate schemes must be banned
• Joe Adam George: Another conference featuring bigoted Islamist coming to Canada

The world has a moral obligation to end the war between Israel and Iran — and only the United States can achieve this. Donald Trump may have campaigned on a pledge to undo America’s wartime entanglements, but the election is over — it’s time to be president now.

On Thursday, The White House indicated

it could take two weeks

to decide whether the U.S. will join Israel in striking Iran. That is two weeks too many.

As he threatens and taunts Tehran, President Trump is ultimately avoiding the inevitable — a strike (limited or sustained) to make good on his promise to end the mullahs’ nuclear ambitions. This is an objective that is both morally urgent and legitimate. It’s also mostly actionable and achievable. We know where the nukes are buried and we know how to hit them. And hard.

True, there’s no guarantee the 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs required to demolish the thousands of centrifuges at the Fordo fuel enrichment plant near Tehran will fully neutralize their targets. But there’s every likelihood that they will — at least over time.

American pilots will be required to drop those bombs on Iran and with them brings the risk of American casualties.

Goaded by doves on both the left and right,

the American public will have little tolerance for missing U.S. airmen or coffins cloaked in U.S. flags. But this war has already been decidedly destructive — not Ukraine levels, but with the potential to get there. Quickly. This is why Trump cannot wait weeks to take action — the body count, particularly over the long term, will only keep on growing. And with it the potential for the loss of American lives.

With

so many Iranian launchers now destroyed

— Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put the number at “half” this week — fewer missiles are now raining down in Israeli cities each day. But as evidenced by attacks on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and Soroka hospital in the desert town of Beer Sheba, the missiles that are being launched are far more destructive and deadly.

Thursday, for instance,

saw Iran deploy “cluster bombs” for the first time against Israel.

Each of these weapons releases dozens of smaller “bomblets,” whose range can extend upwards of 10 square miles. Military analysts are now worried about the

possible use of long-range Khorramshahr-4 ballistic missiles against Israel.

The Khorramshahr is solid- rather than liquid-fuelled, making it safer and easier to handle for Iranian technicians — further denting Israel’s already vulnerable prevention and deterrence advantage.

The missiles’ success — and subsequent casualty numbers — are certain to ratchet up Israeli retaliatory efforts. Iran will likely then respond with strikes the size of Soroka or the Stock Exchange. Should this tit-for-tat succeed, the conflict could easily evolve into a protracted war similar to the one waged in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah. This may already have happened: On Friday, Israel’s military chief Eyal Zamir told Israelis “We must be ready for a prolonged campaign”

as attempts at negotiations failed across European capitals.

Ultimately, of course, Israel destroyed nearly all of Hezbollah’s military capabilities —

along with a couple thousand Hezbollah cell phones and pagers.

But the year-long war — and its daily barrages of missiles — rendered much of the country’s north uninhabitable. Indeed, thousands of Israelis remain without permanent homes.

Transfer this scenario to Tel Aviv — one of the world’s most densely populated cities — and the results would be chaotic, if not catastrophic. Many of those impacted by Hezbollah rockets fled Israel’s north for Tel Aviv last year — but as Iran targets the entirety of Israel, there is nowhere for Tel Avivis to flee. This is a situation that could not be more combustible — particularly for Israelis already fed up with 20 months of war with Hamas in Gaza. For now, at least, Israelis remain committed to Netanyahu’s Iranian strategy. But ongoing

mass-casualty

events like the ones we saw this week could spark talks of regime change in Jerusalem, as well.

Scenes of civil unrest are also unfolding in Tehran — with the potential to devolve far more quickly. Unlike in Israel, order exists in Iran not to achieve public safety — but as a tool for mass control. And the regime has been losing control for years.

More than half of all Iranians sat out of last year’s presidential

election, for instance, the lowest-ever turnout since the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

This is an act of extraordinary bravery in a nation where voting is a compulsory display of both fealty and fear. Such bravery has similarly been displayed since the war with Israel began as Iranians —

both at home and abroad

— begin to manifest the regime change mantra many never believed possible.

But even as regime change becomes possible, is it actually desirable? And is it Israel’s role to foment it? Here, too, is where only America can make a difference.

Despite denials this week by Israeli President Isaac Herzog

that Jerusalem is aiming to oust the Ayatollah, Prime Minister Netanyahu is speaking a very different language.

He repeatedly urged Iranians this week to rise up against their leadership; “This is the time, your hour of freedom is near, it’s happening now,”

he told the London-based news agency Iran International.

But then what? While Israel must prevent its war with Iran from turning into its war with Hezbollah, President Trump has his eyes on Libya, and the decade of tribal conflict that followed

American intervention a decade ago.

But Libya combusted as a consequence of the Arab Spring, fuelled by aid from wealthy Gulf-State enablers. Iran has no such regional support — only a “superpower” can make a difference and that means the U.S. The only way for Trump to avoid a protracted play in Iran is to embark on a short and surgical one. And he should. Soon.

This is likely to achieve the most important goal for everyone — an end to Iran’s nukes along with the potential for an end to the Islamic Republic. The first Israel and America can and must make happen; the second, however, only Iranians can achieve for themselves.

David Christopher Kaufman is a columnist and editor at the New York Post.

• NP View: Farewell to Iran’s terrorist regime
• Adam Zivo: Canadians stuck in Israel abandoned by embassy that closes at 4:30 p.m.

We are at a decisive moment in the history of the Jews. “Never Again!” was the rallying cry of the Jewish people after approximately half the world’s Jews were gassed and incinerated in the death camps of the Third Reich, s

ix million Jews, along with at least six-million non Jews who were
also murdered by the Nazis (including three million Soviet POWs and as many as 500,000 Romani).
The Jews did not have a state in the 25 centuries between the Persian occupation of the kingdom of Judea of Saul and David and Solomon, and the creation of the State of Israel as an explicitly Jewish country in 1948. For all of that time, the Jews were reviled as “rootless cosmopolitans, usurers and sharpers” because they were excluded from the professions. They had no place of safety from the perennial evils of antisemitism. As Jewish scholar Dara Horn has written, the world “loves dead Jews.” Those that retained a sense of optimistic goodwill, like Anne Frank, expiated the rest of us.

The wars inflicted upon Israel by its Arab neighbours in 1948, 1967, and 1973 — while the existence of the Jewish state was contested — did not aim to kill the entire Jewish people. King Hussein of Jordan and President Sadat of Egypt were civilized statesmen who ultimately composed their differences with Israel. The fanatical Islamic pseudo-theocracy in Iran openly and proudly espouses its objective of destroying the Jewish state and its Jewish population. This is the first existential challenge the Jews have faced since the defeat of the Nazis.

War is odious and tragic, but the spectacle of Israel which has

1.33 per cent

of Iran’s landmass and

10.7 per cent

of its population emancipating itself from the spectre of nuclear destruction by hammering this evil regime is edifying, and the whole world should salute the courage and the determination of the Jewish State and the solidarity with it of the United States.

It is inexpressibly disappointing to see the spread of spurious moral relativism over events in the Middle East. Calls for a ceasefire in Gaza are really just calls for a return to the status quo ante bellum in which Hamas continually provoked and intermittently invaded Israel, and on October 7, brutally murdered 1200 people and kidnapped 251 others, some of whom were murdered in custody.

The predictable clichéd request of the G7 leaders (except for President Donald Trump who retains a grasp of geopolitical facts) for “

de-escalation

” in the Israel-Iran conflict, is effectively a call to enable and encourage Iran to complete and deploy nuclear weapons. The widespread lamentations about American withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement are utter nonsense, since that agreement would, at this point, give Iran an outright green light to join the ranks of nuclear military powers. Although some of the neighbouring Arab countries have uttered pro forma

statements of disapproval

of the Israeli attack on Iran, the Saudis and Egyptians in particular, had been urging the United States for years to interdict the Iranian nuclear program, and they are all informally urging Israel forward, as Prime Minister Netanyahu confirmed on Wednesday.

The world’s nuclear nonproliferation system is a farce, and if Iran were responsibly governed, even as responsibly as North Korea and Pakistan which are nuclear powers, the Iranian government would have a good point in claiming that the existing nuclear powers are not disarming at all, and are simply conducting an elite club of super-armed states righteously discouraging other countries from joining them. All that can be said for the present regime is that it is probably preferable to what will certainly happen if Iran does become a nuclear military power: an unlimited number of countries will do the same and avoidance of nuclear war will no longer be based on a policy of restraint in developing and deploying nuclear weapons, but rather in a policy of general deterrence, and in a few cases, intricate and extraordinarily expensive anti-missile defences, which only the United States and a few other countries would be financially and scientifically capable of building.

The Gaza and Iran wars are easily distinguished. Hamas committed an act of war against Israel, violating a ceasefire, on October 7. Israel made it clear, and public and parliamentary opinion have adequately supported this position, that it was not prepared to accept that the barbarous outrage of that day was just another of the innumerable skirmishes and border incidents, but rather, was an act of war that required the elimination of Hamas as a terrorist organization. That was a reasonable response, and it remains a reasonable policy. The successful accomplishment of that goal requires both a comprehensive uprooting and annihilation of the Hamas terrorist apparatus in all of its tunnels and redoubts in Gaza, and the termination of Iranian funding and material support for Hamas and Hezbollah (Lebanon) and the Houthis (Yemen), all of them infamous and designated terrorist organizations.

Of course, everyone wants the hostages released, and everyone (except Hamas) regrets collateral damage to civilians. But the early release of the

20 or so remaining live hostages

is not as important a goal as bringing terrorism in Gaza to a permanent end. What is mystifying is the claim by some, including the

joint statement

by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Mark Carney of several weeks ago, that a ceasefire was the only method for assuring the removal of Hamas as the governing authority in Gaza.

As everyone remotely aware of facts, including those three leaders, is aware, a ceasefire is the only method assured of preserving Hamas as the governing authority in Gaza and perpetuating it as a source of terrorist barbarism. Contrary to widespread propagandized belief, as distinguished military historian Andrew Roberts has

argued

, Israel has conducted its operations in Gaza with an unusually small proportion of civilian casualties, which are extremely hard to avoid in urban counter-guerrilla warfare, especially as Hamas uses its own population as human shields in hospitals, mosques, and schools and has made no secret that such casualties are useful to it for propaganda purposes. It is also astonishing that anyone pays any attention to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s

unreliable

estimates of civilian casualties. They have managed to roll this number up to

55,000 dead

, a grotesque exaggeration, and includes deaths caused by the “friendly fire” of Hamas itself, as well as dead terrorist fighters.

Of course, Israel is right to end terrorist activity in Gaza, and of course, it is essential that nuclear arms not get into the hands of the present government of Iran, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, the liquidation of its Jewish population and is the principal supporter of terrorism in the world.

Either the Iranian government will negotiate a verifiable disassembly of its nuclear military program, or the United States will lend Israel the necessary equipment and ordnance to complete its destruction, or the United States will do that itself. No sane person can claim that it would not be desirable to keep such deadly weapons out of the hands of that criminally diseased regime, or deny that it was

on the brink

of being able to create an atomic bomb (though not a deliverable warhead).

The accomplishment of Israel’s objectives in the present conflict would be a lethal blow to terrorism in the world. It would also salvage something of the international nonproliferation policy, such as it is. And it would be a well-earned and salutary slap in the face to China, Iran’s backer and enabler, recklessly making mischief in the West.

Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump are controversial men, but in these matters they are right.

National Post