In his September 19 opinion column in The Globe and Mail entitled: “The Lebanon pager attacks are an escalation toward a war that few want,” Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, DC, downplayed a year of Hezbollah terrorism against Israel.

For nearly a year, Hezbollah, the Lebanese Islamic terrorist group dedicated to Israel’s destruction (and which is a banned terror entity in Canada), which is financed, trained and armed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, has fired 8,000 rockets indiscriminately into northern Israel, making much of the region uninhabitable and making tens of thousands of Israelis refugees in their own country.

And after 11.5 months of effectively tolerating that nonstop terrorism, Israel allegedly conducted a pinpoint strike on Hezbollah terrorists on September 17 with the sabotaging of thousands of pagers with explosives. And that, bizarrely, is considered an “escalation,” according to Ibish.

Ibish wrote that “the current fighting began after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7. Hamas demanded Hezbollah join the fray, but the Lebanese militia demurred…. Hezbollah increased cross-border rocket attacks, albeit mostly within the mutually accepted parameters of “routine” border violence within a mile on either side aimed at military targets.”

This is a dramatic sanitization of reality. On October 8, just one day after Hamas’ genocidal massacres in Israel, Hezbollah – unprovoked – began a campaign of firing rockets indiscriminately into Israeli towns and cities, all in “solidarity” with its ally, Hamas.

Hezbollah, like Hamas, is sworn to Israel’s total destruction through violence.

But for some reason, Hezbollah’s decision to launch war on Israel does not constitute an “escalation.” Only when Israel responds – albeit in a remarkably restrained way – did Ibish make such claims.

Repeatedly in his column, Ibish wrote that Hezbollah “doesn’t want a major conflict.” But what else could one call a relentless campaign of rockets fired into towns, cities and villages, with the express purpose of causing terror for Israelis and driving tens of thousands of them into other parts of the country as refugees, a point made explicitly and unabashedly by Hezbollah’s leader, which Ibish absurdly ignored, instead framing the terror group as engaging in some minor saber-rattling, and not in a major campaign of murderous violence. Tell that to the families of the 12 Druze children that Hezbollah murdered with a rocket attack recently.

No matter how precise and targeted Israel’s counter-terrorism operations, Ibish saw fit to criticize them, labeling Israel’s July assassination of a Hezbollah military leader as one of “recent Israeli provocations.”

This is simply obscene logic. By Ibish’s reasoning, Hezbollah can launch an unprovoked war on Israeli civilians, with the express purpose being solidarity with a fellow genocidal terrorist group, and then Israel’s targeted killing of a terrorist leader is a provocation? Based on this reasoning, there is literally nothing Israel can do beyond apparently succumbing to Hezbollah’s demands (namely, being destroyed) which would quench their blood thirst.

It is simply inconceivable that any other liberal democratic state, when faced with incessant rocket attacks from a genocidal terrorist group next door, would sit back for nearly a year, tolerating it, save for perfunctory ‘tit-for-tat’ exchanges. No country would – and should – tolerate such unprovoked aggression. However, not only did Ibish tacitly suggest Israel accept such aggression, he then had the temerity to lambaste Israel for doing anything about it.

Ibish’s entire column in The Globe and Mail is textbook victim-blaming: allowing Hezbollah to launch murderous terrorist campaigns, while he plays rhetorical interference for them, blaming Israel when it dares to hit terrorists in a precision strike.