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Ah, how easy it is for our political and media elites, living safely in the West, to lecture embattled Israel, now engaged in a seven-front war (in Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran), on its need to exercise “self-restraint.” It’s especially grotesque advice when the fons et origo of so much of the region’s strife comes from Iran, through its malignant proxies — Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen — and the Islamic Republic is now not only seeing those proxies being crushed, but has itself proven incapable of landing a successful counterpunch. Its latest volley of 180 rockets flung at Israel in early October were aimed at military bases and Mossad headquarters.

Several rockets did hit their intended target, the Netavim airbase, but instead of damaging planes or military infrastructure, the attack resulted in minor damage, mainly to housing. Another target was Mossad headquarters, which remained unscathed. There was only one casualty from this volley of rockets — an Arab hit by shrapnel in the village of Ne’ima, near Jericho. This second Iranian volley of rockets — after the 300 rockets launched towards Israel in April, almost all of which were shot down, with the handful that did get through causing no damage — was even more humiliating for the Iranians than the first.

While Biden and so many others are counseling Israel to “exercise restraint” in its confrontation with Iran, the London journalist Brendan O’Neill is having none of it. He smites these self-satisfied simpletons telling Israel that it needs to “de-escalate” hip and thigh here: “Is this the death rattle of Iranian tyranny?,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, October 2, 2024:

So now we know it is possible for something to be both horrific and farcical. The known death toll of the wave of missiles fired by Iran into Israel yesterday is as follows: Israelis 0, Palestinians 1. Yes, the Islamic Republic, in its preening, violent display of solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon against the Great Satan of the Jewish State, laid waste to just one life. That of a 37-year-old labourer from Gaza who’d been living near Jericho in the West Bank, brutally slain by the falling shrapnel from one of Iran’s missiles. The Israelophobes of social media who salivated over Iran’s attack were cheering a military operation that killed yet another Gazan. You couldn’t make it up.

Of course, the merciful lack of Israeli fatalities should not detract from the fact that that was clearly Iran’s aim: to maim and kill the Jews of this nation that it hates above all others. When you fire 180 ballistic missiles at a state, with little advance warning, you know, and in Iran’s case hope, that death may very well ensue. That it didn’t, that only one, poor Palestinian perished under Iran’s rockets, is a testament to the extraordinarily high value Israel places on the lives of its citizens. Its Iron Dome intercepted much of Iran’s lethal arsenal, while its vast network of bomb shelters shielded civilians from the Iranian terror. It would appear that the Jewish desire to survive prevailed over the mullahs’ urge to kill.

And yet even as we grapple with the seriousness of what Iran did, with the criminality of its onslaught, it is important to clock Iran’s weaknesses, too. Are we witnessing the death rattle of Iranian tyranny? It is impossible to overstate the size of the blow Iran has experienced this past week, and this past year. The ruthless theocracy’s entire proxy strategy, its use of Islamist armies like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis to shore up its influence to its west, lies virtually in tatters. For now, at least….

It is such self-satisfied cant. How easy it is for Biden officials who live in leafy DC, and Britain’s liberal scribes who rarely venture from their East London bubbles, to insist that Israel patiently deter Iran rather than clash with it. Missiles paid for by Tehran are not dropping on Shoreditch or Martha’s Vineyard day in, day out. Militants backed by Iran did not recently swarm London or New York City to rape, kidnap and kill civilians. There aren’t Iran stooges mere miles from our towns threatening to excise our ‘cancerous’ presence from our own lands….

Israel is not only protecting itself when it crushes Hamas in Gaza and is now doing the same to Hezbollah in Lebanon. It is stymying Iran’s imperial designs on the entire region. Iran is an ally of Russia and China, a threat not just to Israel, and to such Sunni Arabs as the Saudis and Emiratis, but to the entire West. And because of Israel’s valiant efforts and devastating victories on so many fronts, the humiliated and confused regime in Tehran, now waiting fearfully for the Jewish state’s response to its latest failed rocket attack, is beginning to crack. Enemies within Iran of the regime are taking heart from the defeat of its proxies and its inability to land a real blow on the Jewish state. The Israelis are now determined, despite whatever discouragement emanates from the Bidenites, to exploit the Islamic Republic’s current disarray, after seeing its proxy Hamas dismantled, and its proxy Hezbollah now being subject to a similar battering that the Iranians never expected, and to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. The Biden administration, with characteristic wrongheadedness, is trying to hold Israel back from this attack. But such an attack on Iran’s nuclear program would benefit not only Israel but the entire non-Muslim world. Washington should instead be providing the IDF with whatever it thinks it needs, including delivery of its heaviest, 30,000 pound MOPs (Massive Ordnance Penetrators).

It bears repeating: as Brendan O’Neill insists, cutting to the heart of the matter, “you are either on the side of a barbarous theocratic regime that oppresses and murders women, workers and minorities and whose allies recently carried out the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, or you are on the side of Israel. It’s time to choose.”

Right on, Mr. O’Neill. And as the Protestant hymn has it — “Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide.”