Ursula von der Leyen’s response to the war against Iran was a masterclass in deflection.

Israel and the US carried out an unprovoked attack. Yet that detail was nowhere to be found in the first social media post issued by the European Commission’s president on Saturday.

Instead, von der Leyen directed her bile at what she called “Iran’s murderous regime.” She thereby implied that the country was a legitimate target for Israel and the US, both of which are responsible for infinitely more violence in the world than the mullahs and “revolutionary guards” who are routinely treated as bogeymen by the West.

If media outlets did their job properly, they would have castigated von der Leyen’s diversionary tactics and insisted that rather than making mealy-mouthed declarations, the EU actually stood up for international law.

Euractiv – a big player in the Brussels press scene – had no apparent problem with a blatant act of aggression. An opinion piece by Matthew Karnitschnig, the publication’s editor-in-chief, merely referred to the US-Israeli strike on Iran as “unprecedented.”

Karnitschnig was not using the word “unprecedented” as a euphemism for “illegal.”

In mid-January, he explicitly backed Donald Trump’s saber-rattling. The US president, Karnitschnig told a program broadcast by Germany’s ARD, “may be a moody narcissist – but, when it comes to Iran, he is for once right.”