Last month, Adam Purinton shot two Indian-Americans in a Kansas bar, killing one, after accusing them of being illegal immigrants and shouting ethnic slurs. He reportedly confessed to a bartender afterward that he shot “two Iranians.” In response, Trita Parsi—president of the lobbying organization the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) and an influential supporter of the nuclear deal with Tehran—produced an essay with a colleague placing responsibility for the attack not only on Donald Trump and his supporters but on anyone who called for the U.S. to take a tougher stand against Iran. Jonathan Zalman comments on the essay and on NIAC itself:

Per Parsi and [his coauthor Tyler] Cullis, journalists, think-tankers, and policy advocates who have allegedly demonized the Islamic Republic’s regime . . . bear some responsibility for the Kansas atrocity. More than a few people [have] noticed that the only people the authors called out by name—Michael Rubin, Eli Lake, Adam Kredo, Josh Block, and David Keyes—had one curious thing in common: they are all Jews.

Parsi and Cullis argue that these five, [who include] a Bloomberg columnist, the CEO of [the advocacy organization] The Israel Project, and the English-language spokesperson for Benjamin Netanyahu, “push war with Iran in the most hyperbolic terms, all the while defaming those—most particularly, those in the Iranian-American community—who urge a peaceful resolution to the historical tensions between the two countries.” The Kansas shooting, the authors argue, was the inevitable result of this group’s allegedly warmongering work. . . . The authors rhetorically connect . . . their perceived political opponents to a hate crime without going through the effort of proving that the shooter had drawn any inspiration from their work, or even knew that these five people existed. . . .

But these logical leaps represent the least of NIAC’s current issues, as the organization is now facing increasingly visible opposition from the constituency it claims to represent.

On February 20, a diverse group of over 100 Iranian-Americans and Iranian exiles, including former officials of both the shah and the current regime, submitted a letter to Senator Bob Corker and Congressman Ed Royce, the respective heads of the Senate and House Foreign Affairs committees, calling for “a congressional hearing on the efforts of Tehran’s theocratic regime to influence U.S. policy and public diplomacy toward Iran.” The letter, which . . . does not mention NIAC by name, . . . requested that Congress “launch an investigation into any and all lobbying activities of Iranian-American groups, which ostensibly promote the interests of our community but whose real goal is to undermine long-term U.S. national-security interests in Iran and its neighborhood.”

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.