Spokesmen for the U.S. State Department did not hesitate to condemn Israel for its alleged lack of “restraint” or “proportionality” during the Gaza war. Now, as the U.S. steps up its bombing campaign against Islamic State, is the American military being held to a higher standard? Although the Pentagon has not publicized any estimates of civilian casualties, it is unlikely the air force is sending text messages to warn of impending missile strikes. How to explain the State Department’s hutzpah? Roger L. Simon has an answer:

It’s easier (safer) to attack the Jewish state, which is democratic and often wildly self-critical, than it is to be honest with totalitarians who are truly dangerous. And when you criticize Israel, to justify your behavior to yourself, you then have to make yourself believe something is genuinely wrong with it, just as wrong as with the Middle Eastern countries that surround it where torture, misogyny, and murder are commonplace. This is the process that goes on in our State Department and administration and has for a long time. It’s a kind of low-rent version of the old saying, “Europe will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”

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].