Within minutes of Hamas jihadists breaching the Israeli border on Oct. 7, 2023, and commencing the largest slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, Western leftists and other defenders of the genocidal Palestinian-Arab cause rallied around a talking point: "This did not occur in a vacuum." The claim, blithely offered by armchair revolutionaries without even acknowledging the many hundreds of butchered babies, sadistically tortured families, raped women and young music festivalgoers taken hostage, was that Israel had somehow impelled the horrific rampage on its own civilians. Those with a functioning moral compass recognize this as obvious terror apologia.

Reflecting back one year later on the Hamas massacre and the current Middle East imbroglio in which Israel is now fighting a seven-front war, however, I wonder whether the terrorist apologists may have had a point. That is not to suggest that these moral monsters were in any way whatsoever correct to justify, defend or praise a pogrom so barbaric that it would have made Heinrich Himmler blush. But the mini-jihadists were correct to suggest there was a broader geopolitical context to the massacre -- just a totally different one than what they had in mind. The actually  relevant context was the weak, failed and Iran-emboldening foreign policy of former President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

As Americans get ready to select our next commander in chief, the stark contrast between the failed foreign policy of successive Democratic administrations and the successful foreign policy of the interregnum Republican administration, that of former and perhaps future President Donald Trump, is instructive.