A famous adage of unknown origin posits that for evil to triumph, good men must do nothing. But allowing that evil to triumph seems perfectly acceptable to many commentators, who have – following American and Israeli strikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran – complained about efforts to weaken one of the world’s most brutal regimes.

In his March 5 opinion column in The Globe & Mail, “The West’s delicate, troubling dance with Trump on Iran,” commentator Gary Mason praises the leftist government of Spain in (initially) refusing to cooperate with the American government on its strikes on the Iranian regime, saying that “at least they (Spaniards) will have their dignity” in refusing to assist in the defeat of an Islamic dictatorship.

Mason, the newspaper’s national affairs columnist, demonstrates remarkably little understanding of current events, including when he rails against the “obsequiousness of Western leaders” regarding standing up to the Americans on Iran.

As The Globe and Mail itself notes, the response of European leaders has been varied, hardly unified. More importantly, for Mason to describe opposing the openly genocidal dictatorship in Iran as problematic simply because it means supporting the United States suggests that the columnist is missing the forest for the trees.

While United States President Donald Trump is highly unpopular in Canada due to his leveling of tariffs, this has no bearing on the murderous nature of the Iranian regime, though Mason appears to have difficulty separating the two.

Mason, who has previously spread anti-Israel tropes, repeats allegations that American forces bombed a school in Iran, omitting that it remains unverified, claiming that it “brought back fresh and painful images of the atrocities in Gaza, where thousands of innocent Palestinian children were killed in the conflict.”

There is indeed a connection between Iran and Gaza, though it was presumably not one Mason meant to make.

Though he bizarrely made no mention of any of it, Iran’s regime massacred tens of thousands of its own civilians in January of this year, Iranians who were guilty of the crime of protesting against the Islamic Republic.

The Iranian regime has also sought to export its fanatical Islamic ideology around the world, including via its proxy terrorist groups like Hamas, the Houthis and Hezbollah. Thus, the Iranian regime has the blood of countless thousands on its hands, and civilians in Gaza killed because the Hamas dictatorship there used them as human shields is ultimately on the shoulders of Tehran.

Rather than tackle the deadly threat to global peace and order, radical Islam, and its primary purveyor, the Iranian regime, The Globe and Mail’s Gary Mason takes a far easier approach, castigating anyone who dares to assist the United States.

The Iranian regime, not the United States, has murdered Canadians. The Iranian regime, not the United States, massacres protesters, and the Iranian regime, not the United States, exports violent Islamic terrorism.

Though Mason is an opinion columnist, he is nevertheless ostensibly a journalist, part of a profession that is supposed to hold the powerful accountable. But in his March 5 opinion column, he has not done that. Instead, in his zeal to label the Americans enemy number one, he has all but entirely erased any crimes and threats from the Iranian regime.