On my way to dinner on Saturday, I drove past Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s house on the Virginia bank of the Potomac River.

Police had just removed an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protest encampment that had turned the road into a mess of rags and flags and tents since January. Now, seven police cruisers were parked in their place with red and blue lights twinkling in the golden light of a glorious evening in late July.

But the protesters had not disappeared entirely. They were still there in substantial numbers, in fact, in cars driving down the steep road toward the river. Most had their windows open, and protesters held their arms out in the breeze with their index and middle fingers in the V-sign associated, ironically, with that most famous Zionist, Winston Churchill.

Drivers who were part of the normal non-protesting traffic going up the hill on the other side responded with their own hand signal — not of two fingers but of a single digit, presented with an upward thrust. I broke with my usual practice of not making public political pronouncements except in print and rolled down my window to respond to the “Free Palestine” chants with the retort, “Eliminate Hamas!”

I should have said, “Eliminate Hezbollah!” because although the war against Hamas in Gaza is not over and those terrorists are just as revolting and evil as ever, it was their northern brethren, the scum of Hezbollah in Lebanon, who were uppermost in the news at that moment.

It had just murdered 12 Arab children and wounded many others in northern Israel by firing a direct hit at them with an Iranian missile where they were playing soccer. Photographs of the scene were too appalling to print unblurred, as the playing field was strewn with body parts.

There was thus a special irony about one protest car outside Blinken’s home, for its owner had constructed a 3-foot, pink, papier-mâché hand with streams of crimson blood tastefully painted trickling down over its upturned fingers. It was intended as a depiction of Israel’s culpability for the war in Gaza but was more like one of those advertising vehicles you occasionally see driving around cities with a corporate message. This was a message writ large of what Islamist terrorists do.

Hezbollah has fired more than 6,000 rockets into northern Israel in support of its fellow Iranian terrorist proxy, Hamas, since the latter group invaded southern Israel and murdered 1,200 innocent people there on Oct. 7.

It would have made more sense if the protesters in their cars were driving past Blinken’s house in Virginia to thank him. For he is doing his best to push President Joe Biden’s policy that Israel should not “escalate” the conflict in response to this latest genocidal outrage perpetrated against the Jewish state. That means “not retaliate,” in other words, let the bastards get away with it.

The opposite would be a better idea. Although Israel has promised retaliation, it has indicated that Hezbollah will be its target. And sure, both of Iran’s proxies, the one on Israel’s northern border as much as the one on its southern border, should be destroyed.

But the real target for Israel and for the United States, if the latter had a less incompetent and feckless federal government, should be Iran itself.

The H&H proxies are just military pawns, cannon fodder, being manipulated by the mullahs in Tehran. And it is the mullahs, the brains — if that is the right word — behind the incessant killing who should be made to pay most.

Sanctions against their oil exports and international financial participation would be a good start, for they yield some $100 billion that pays for mass slaughter and destabilization of the Middle East. But sanctions and financial punishment should be only the beginning of a proper response.

What is really needed is not an effort to avoid escalation but a determined and concerted effort toward escalation — action by the civilized world to inflict much greater punishment on Iran, to rattle its leaders, and to stoke popular unrest against a regime detested by Iran’s suppressed citizens. Bombing Iran’s oil industry and military installations should be part of this, sending a clear message that we will return and inflict greater damage if the clerical tyranny continues its dastardly work.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

The West needs to stop treating Hamas and Hezbollah as though we believe they are independent organic groups that sprang naturally from popular Arab outrage over Israel’s heinous crime of existing. They are subordinates of the biggest terrorist state in the world, well-funded by money we have allowed them to receive by not imposing sanctions. Their controlling power aims to destroy the Jewish homeland and, more ambitiously, to inflict mortal wounds on our own civilization.

We are at war with Iran. We should try to win it.