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Iran launched its first full-scale military attack against Israel on Saturday, unleashing a barrage of missiles and drones on dozens of targets across the country. Sirens filled the air well into Sunday morning as Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system picked off the incoming projectiles one by one.
While certainly dramatic, the weekend’s developments shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody who has been watching the region’s politics closely since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terror attacks in southern Israel.
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Iran’s state media said in a statement on Saturday that the strikes were launched by the air division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in retaliation for a deadly airstrike on its embassy in Syria earlier this month. The IRGCC reportedly seized an Israel-affiliated container ship near the Strait of Hormuz earlier in the day.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre each issued statements on Saturday evening condemning the Iranian attacks on Israel.
The hostilities set off after the attack on southern Israel where Hamas killed 1,200 people over half-a-year ago were all but certain to culminate in a direct Iran-Israel confrontation. After all, the Islamic Republic’s fingerprints were all over the attacks themselves.
As Iran-born lawyer and human rights activist Kaveh Shahrooz wrote just days after the attacks, it’s almost inconceivable that Hamas, an entity whose leadership is in regular communication with Iranian officials, would launch such a large-scale operation against Israel without first obtaining Tehran’s sign-off, especially when doing so might have jeopardized the reported US$100 million per year the terror organization gets from its longtime patron.
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It’s also no coincidence that the southern Lebanon-based Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi movement, both known proxies of Iran, have each inserted themselves into the Israel-Hamas conflict at various points over the past six months.
Anyone who’s still in doubt of Iran’s apocalyptic designs for the Jewish state need only look at the numerous statements Iran’s top officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, have made on the public record calling for Israel’s destruction. (Khamenei shared a plan called “9 key questions about the elimination of Israel” on his personal social media account in late 2014.) Iran’s open ambition to one day wipe Israel off the map has also been at the heart of its decades-long effort to build a nuclear weapon.
So it shouldn’t have come as a shock to any informed observer when Iran revealed itself, over the weekend, as the true power behind Hamas’s bluster towards Israel. The irony, of course, is that the spate of woke leftists beating the drum for Palestinian liberation over the past six months have effectively been cheerleading a regime that brutalizes women for wearing headscarves too loosely and was recently named the most dangerous place in the world for gay travellers.
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Although, in fairness, a love-in with the Islamic Republic of Iran is pretty on brand for the crowd that gave us such gems as “Queers for Palestine” and “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud! Turn another ship around!”
The weekend’s events are also an indictment of the Trudeau government, for both it’s half-hearted allyship of Israel and its soft line on Iran. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a backer of the Obama-era Iran nuclear agreement, inexplicably chose not to add the IRGC to Canada’s list of known terrorist organizations after 63 Canadians were killed in the corps’ Jan. 2020 downing of Flight PS752.
The Trudeau government’s freeze on new arms export permits to Israel, in effect since Jan. 8, could also play into Iran’s hands in the event that it launches new attacks in the coming days. A subsequent non-binding motion, passed by the House of Commons last month with the support of all NDP MPs and all-but-three Liberal MPs, called on the government to “cease the further authorization and transfer of arms exports to Israel.
“Trudeau risks doing permanent damage to Canada’s credibility if he doesn’t immediately lift his arms embargo on Israel,” Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told me on Saturday.
Affter Iran’s historic strike on Israel, Canada — for now, at least — finds itself on the wrong side of history. This should concern all of us.
National Post
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