“In Israel, as in France, terror is terror,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting Nov. 15. “Behind it is radical Islam and its desire to destroy its victims.” Netanyahu’s message was quickly picked up by social media and the public discourse in the aftermath of the murderous Paris terror attacks Nov. 13: Here’s your proof, spelled out with the blood of at least 129 dead and hundreds injured, that we are all victims of vicious Islamist terror, that those who fired at innocents in the heart of the French capital are the same Muslims who stab innocents in the heart of the Israeli capital, and they all have the same goal: to destroy anyone who is not part of extreme Islam.

The message that “terror is terror is terror” runs like a thread throughout Netanyahu’s demagogic rhetoric. In a statement to the cameras at the start of the Cabinet meeting, he spoke in the same breath about the Palestinian who shot dead a father and son (Ya'akov and Netanel Litman) near the settlement of Otniel in the Hebron Hills Nov. 13, and about Europe becoming a terror target several hours later.

“We are not to blame for the terrorism directed against us, just as the French are not to blame for the terrorism directed against them,” Netanyahu said in barely veiled mockery of Israel’s critics in Europe’s capitals. “It is the terrorists who are to blame for terrorism, not the territories, not the settlements and not any other thing.” The root cause of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, according to Netanyahu, is “the desire to destroy us.”

From there it is but natural to resort to preaching morality to the “world,” which does not condemn terror attacks against Israel the way it condemns terrorism everywhere else. And how can one not mention Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who thinks that condemning terrorism in France is enough and does not act to stop the incitement motivating terrorism in the occupied territories. “The terrorists who attack us have the same murderous intent as those in Paris,” Netanyahu added. But unlike those French weaklings, we know how to handle them. “Thanks to our aggressive policy against terrorism … we succeed many times in frustrating and preventing more serious disasters." That justifies, Netanyahu says, soldiers going into Palestinian villages, the demolition of family homes and most importantly, “control of the ground,” meaning continued occupation.