Historically, Amir Taheri notes, the U.S. has compiled an exemplary record of defending Muslims, from Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to ensure Arab independence after World War I through the defense of Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s. Yet this history has engendered little affection, and neither have contemporary efforts to combat the supposed danger of “Islamophobia”:

[N]o major power in recent history has gone out of its way as has the United States to help, respect, please, and, yes, appease Islam. And yet, no other nation has been a victim of vilification, demonization, and violence on the part of the Islamists as has the U.S. . . .

[In modern times], the politically correct crowd has turned Islam into a new taboo. They brand any criticism of Islam as racist, ethnocentrist, or simply vile, all crammed together in the new category of “Islamophobia.”

Is it Islamophobia to question a religion whose Middle Eastern leaders often preach “Death to America” and hatred for Western values? More prevalent than Islamophobia is Islamophilia, as leftists treat Muslims like children whose feathers should not be ruffled.

The Islamophilia crowd does great disservice to both Western democracies and to Islam itself. It invites Americans and Europeans to sacrifice part of their own freedom to atone for largely imaginary sins against Muslims in the colonial and imperialist era. It also invites Muslims in the West to learn how to pose as victims and demand the rewards of victimhood as is the fashion in Europe and America. To the Muslim world at large, the message of Islamophilia is that Muslims need no criticism, although their faith is being transformed into a number of conflicting ideologies dedicated to violence and terror. . . .

All that Western intellectuals or leaders need to do is stop flattering Islam, as President Obama has been doing for the past seven years. . . . Many Muslims resent that kind of flattery, which takes them for idiots at a time that Islam and Muslims badly need to be criticized.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.