Among its many aspects, Iran’s outrageous April 13 attack on the sovereign nation of Israel was a trifecta of shadows, schadenfreude, and antisemitism.

The global consensus is that the insidious Saturday night bombardment of the Jewish State has finally exposed Iran’s puppet master mullahs to the glare of world condemnation.

For years, they’ve hidden their nefarious regional maneuverings within the shadows of war-ravaged proxies such as Yemen and Lebanon or apocalyptic terrorist groups such as Hamas. Now, it’s blindingly evident that even the second holocaust of Oct. 7, 2023 had the future of the long-suffering Palestinian people as, at best, a secondary consideration. That abomination against everything just and humane was, above all, merely a masque for the Iranian government’s obsession with wiping Israel off the map and “cleansing” the world of Jews.

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If the geopolitical stakes weren’t so high, and the prospect of more unimaginable carnage so real, there might be a temptation to cheer that those who flung about 300 missiles and drones at Israelis will finally be seen for exactly what they are: monstrous death merchants made mad by Machiavellian territorial ambition.

As much as that enticement must be declined, so too must people of good faith resist the urge to indulge in schadenfreude – happiness in the embarrassment of others – at the expense of some of our fellow citizens. They would be the ones who leapt incautiously into public support – often vehement – of Hamas’ professed cause without awareness or acknowledgement of who was pulling the terrorist thugs’ strings.

In many cases, they doubtless fell prey to the human, all too human, impulse to back the perceived victims. In doing so, they failed to see the full extent to which it was Hamas and its masters in Iran who were the true victimizers of Palestinians. In a panel discussion in Ottawa only 24 hours before the Iranian bombing campaign began, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett set out explicitly how such hoodwinking unfolded.

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“Hamas devised a strategy (that they) brought to perfection and it is ‘we go and massacre babies, rape women, murder families (and) burn them. Then we run back and hide within a civilian population…and we know that when the enemy comes back at us, we’re going to cause the death of many civilians and the world will blame Israel,’” Bennett told the audience of about 1,000 at a conservative networking conference in the nation’s capital.

“If we allow it to work , mark my words, you’re going to see it everywhere…in Europe, the United States and Canada…because (it will be the) inspiration for imitation terror,” he added.

The former PM stressed Hamas terrorists are but water-carriers for Iranian theocratic violence and power-mongering, which he represented as “an octopus of terror” stretching its tentacles across the Middle East to efface Israel. The very proof of that was Jordanian support for the effective defensive response to Saturday’s bombing campaign.

Yet if Catholic charity obliges us to treat with tolerance those who unwittingly fell into the Iran-Hamas propaganda trap, nothing justifies forbearance in the face of the rank antisemitism that has erupted among some frequently obnoxious, at times violent, demonstrators who have disrupted Canadian life for the past six months.

As Bennett rightly said, the “blatant antisemitism” that has become commonplace during those protests would have everyone “rightfully up in arms” if the same calls for violence were directed at racial groups or on the basis of sexual orientation. And then he shone the light of truth and reason on why that matters.

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“Societies ultimately dissolve when they lack moral clarity, when they can’t make a distinction between good and bad,” Bennett said.

Moral clarity has indeed emerged now that the current ruling clique of Iran has shown its death-skull face. Those who can now see, and whose energies are inclined to public calls for justice and demonstrations of revulsion, owe it to the Iranian people, to Israelis, and to peace, order and good government here in Canada, to catalyze pacific resistance to the warmongering mullahs, that is to those who have had the blood 1,200 Jews and tens of thousands of Palestinians on their hands since Oct. 7.