RUTHFULLY YOURS

According to Israeli defense officials, it’s only a matter of time before Islamic State terrorists perpetrate a major attack on the Jewish state.

You don’t have to be a Hezbollah or Hamas rocket scientist to have figured this out. ISIS has been increasing the frequency of its warnings to Israel on YouTube. And by now, anyone who doesn’t take such threats seriously is an idiot, a left-wing ideologue or the president of the United States.

This is not to say that Israel needs further proof that Islamists mean business when it comes to executing plans or innocent people. Nor do we Israelis really care what the jihadis in our midst or along our borders are called. “Daesh” is just another group to which terrorists out for our blood attach themselves. The fact that rivalries exist among them only matters where cutting their funding or other self-defense strategies are concerned.

But the rest of the world likes to categorize terrorists as “moderates” or “extremists,” and rank panic levels accordingly. The current bogey man happens to be ISIS, not only due to its flamboyant videos of beheadings and other atrocities, but because it took responsibility for the Paris, Mali and San Bernardino massacres.

Following the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings on 9/11, al-Qaida was the fear-flavor of the month. It didn’t matter that Palestinians had been blowing themselves up in Israel for an entire year prior to the mass murder in the United States — or that they took to the streets of Ramallah and Gaza City to celebrate the slaughter of thousands of Americans.

Osama bin Laden had become the world’s leading villain; his champions in the Palestinian Authority were still viewed as a bunch of guys with a gripe against the Israeli “occupation.”

Well, here we are again in the same situation.

Every single day, “lone wolf” Palestinians are murdering innocent Israelis. That the casualty count remains relatively low is a function of security measures, born of decades of experience confronting terrorism. The method of the moment involves knives, Molotov cocktails and vehicles used as weapons. But last summer, we spent our days and nights running to bomb shelters, while rockets from Gaza rained down on our populace.

The outcome of that war is still reverberating, in the form of an ideological assault on Israel’s very legitimacy. The customary international assessment that Israel used “disproportionate force” against its assailants is accompanied by the European Union guidelines for labeling Israeli products.

Meanwhile, Hamas has been sucking up to ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula, and the “moderate” Palestinian Authority is naming school activities after young terrorists who killed Jews or died trying.

The cognitive dissonance the world is exhibiting is as mind-boggling today as it was at the beginning of the millennium. Though Europe is scrambling to figure out how to fight ISIS — and some countries have even joined Russia in bombing its strongholds in Syria — it is still refusing to recognize that the only distinction between one terror organization and another is based on internal theological and political power struggles. Whatever their differences, they all share the goal of destroying Western civilization and wiping out Christians and Jews.

Which brings us to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the major benefactor of the behavior of the idiots, left-wing ideologues and president of the United States, who still don’t get it. While everyone is yammering about ISIS, Iran is having a field day jerking around its “partner signatories” to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, ostensibly reached in July.

And because the Shiite mullahs in Tehran oppose ISIS, a Sunni group trying to form the Islamic caliphate that Iran means to control, suddenly the largest state sponsor of international terrorism is viewed as an ally in the fight against the “real” danger. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ought to be saying prayers of thanks to ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi for providing the perfect distraction from the nuclear weapons program that is moving forward, full speed ahead.

Yes, Israel will end up facing and surviving an ISIS attack, because we are actually used to suffering the kind of trauma that befell France last month. We are all too familiar with events like that which terrorized San Bernardino, as well.

But how can we and the rest of the West overcome a nuclear Iran? This is the question that only Israel seems to be pondering and preparing for.

Ruthie Blum is the web editor of The Algemeiner (algemeiner.com).