The Globe & Mail has been working overtime to cast aspersions on Israel’s efforts to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The newspaper’s senior international correspondent Mark Mackinnon recently attempted to frame Jerusalem’s defensive actions as just a cynical attempt to distract Israeli domestic audiences away from what he depicted as a warmongering prime minister and his “political and legal troubles.”

Just days after the newspaper’s editor-in-chief signed a scandalous anti-Israel open letter, Staff Columnist Doug Saunders added his own commentary to the conflict in a June 13 piece entitled: “Tactics without strategy: How Trump’s weakness and Netanyahu’s self-interest exploded in Iran.”

Like Mackinnon, Saunders downplayed the threat of Iran’s nuclear threat to Israel and the wider Western world, and instead ascribed Jerusalem’s actions against Tehran’s regime as being a result of Israeli Prime Minister “Benjamin Netanyahu’s political opportunism and absence of strategic vision,” adding confidently that “there was, in fact, no looming nuclear-weapons threat from Iran.”

Yet on June 10, two days before Israel’s strikes against Iranian nuclear targets, General Eric Kurilla, the commander of the United States Central Command (CENTOM), said that Iran was as little as three weeks away from being able to obtain as many as ten nuclear weapons.

Additionally, Saunders wrote that “this week the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors Iran’s commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, censured Iran for failing to provide comprehensive data. This is a familiar tactic practised by Tehran during negotiations over the last 20 years: increasing tension over its nuclear program in order to create a sense of urgency.”

This is a significant downplaying of what actually happened. Despite calling Iran’s actions “a familiar tactic” and a political ploy, it was highly significant, and the first time in nearly 20 years that the IAEA censured Tehran for doing so. Just hours before Israel’s pre-emptive strikes, Iran’s reaction to the IAEA announcement was that it would further bolster its uranium enrichment capabilities.

It is not simply Iran’s nuclear program that Saunders sanitized. Not once did he acknowledge the regime’s stockpile of thousands of deadly ballistic missiles, which in recent days the regime has used to fire indiscriminately into Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities, nor its support for regional proxy terrorist groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

With these proxies, Iran built what it termed the ‘Axis of Resistance’ aimed both at harassing Israel with relentless rocket and other terrorist attacks, but slowly squeezing the Jewish State and eventually destroying it, a point that Iranian leaders never made any attempt to hide.

Both by its actions and its rhetoric, the Islamic Republic of Iran has made clear that it sees it as its religious duty to destroy Israel, committing genocide against millions of people who pose no threat to Iran, nor mean it any harm.

Iran’s theocratic leaders have far more ambitious goals, having murdered scores of Canadians, Americans and others, and supporting terrorist groups that are active around the world.

Yet rather than acknowledge the Iranian regime as the head of the octopus, with its tentacles around the Middle East and beyond, Saunders chose to whitewash Tehran’s dangerous actions and demonize Israel for daring to do something against an existential threat.