Western observers are all too eager, writes Liel Leibovitz, to sort Muslims into “moderate” and “extremist” camps. The limits of such distinctions immediately become apparent when the attitudes of supposedly moderate Muslims toward Israel come to the fore. Take, for instance, the seemingly “moderate” father of the perpetrator of the San Bernardino attack, who responded to his son’s obsessive hatred of Israel by reassuring him that Israel will disappear in a few years and the Jews will be sent “back to Ukraine.”

[W]hen it comes to moderate Muslims, we view Jew-hating as understandable, even acceptable. . . . [V]ile statements [about Israel] are explained away by mumbling something about the occupation or Gaza or the lasting effect of a strange religious conflict over some faraway land none of us well-heeled Westerners have any business trying to understand. That’s a travesty.

A tiny religious minority group with its own independent national existence, Jews are the Middle East’s essential others. A failure to think of them in any other way but yearning for their destruction [means] you should neither call yourself a moderate nor hope ever to strike roots in a democratic society that still believes in the bounties of peace, pluralism, and liberty.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].