The July 19 events marking the 10th anniversary of the Second Lebanon War provided Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with an opportunity to address his favorite subject: Islamist terror. The July 14 truck attack in Nice that killed at least 84 people and injured more than 100 gave Netanyahu’s speeches a present-day dimension.

With a draftsman’s hand, the architecture studies graduate drew a straight line, crossing countries and continents, from Lebanon to Israel and the West Bank. From there he went farther afield, to Europe and then the United States. “Terror does not only strike in Sarona and Otniel,” Netanyahu said at a memorial ceremony on Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl for the fallen soldiers of the 2009 Lebanon war, referring to the attacks at central Tel Aviv’s Sarona Market on June 8 and the West Bank settlement of Otniel on Jan. 17. “It is striking in Paris and Nice, in Brussels and Orlando. We are in a global war.”

That same day at a special plenary session of the Knesset marking the anniversary, Netanyahu declared, “One cannot differentiate between one terror attack and another.” As far as he is concerned, there is no difference between organized terrorism and terror attacks by individuals driven by incitement, between vehicular terrorism in Nice and a terrorist stabbing in Jerusalem, between an American Muslim who murders revelers at a gay nightclub in Orlando and the murderer of diners in Tel Aviv.

“The goal of the terrorists,” Netanyahu said, “is to cut short as many lives as possible as they make their way to raising the flag of the caliphate over the ruins of the enlightened world.” For Netanyahu, “Israel is a frontline bastion of the democratic world.” The only state in the enlightened world that rules over another people by force is, according to him, “a laboratory for determining the results of the violent struggle between the forces of progress and the forces of darkness.”