The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum recently announced and then canceled the release of a study purporting to show—using computer modeling and game theory—that American intervention to halt Bashar al-Assad’s slaughter of his own citizens would not have succeeded. The study, overseen by the Obama-administration national-security official Cameron Hudson, appeared to be a defense of the previous president’s inaction in the face of the Syrian regime’s war crimes and atrocities—while also ignoring his assiduous efforts to provide ample funds to Iran, Assad’s most important backer. Noah Rothman comments:

On Wednesday, United Nations war-crimes investigators indicted the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his government for complicity in the commission of gross crimes against humanity, including the use of weapons of mass destruction against civilians. . . . One of the earliest and most grotesque of these assaults . . . took place in 2013 in Ghouta. There, approximately 1,000 people died as a result of exposure to sarin [gas].

It was this attack that finally compelled Barack Obama to take seriously his year-old, self-set “red line” for action in Syria. . . . His [resulting] speech was a Frankenstein’s monster of last-minute attempts to absolve [himself] of his responsibilities as president, and he’s been struggling to clarify his motives ever since. “I’m very proud of this moment,” Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, unconvincingly, almost exactly one year before the massacre at Khan Sheikhoun, [where Syrian troops again used sarin gas on civilians]. . . .

If history was inclined to provide Obama absolution for his inaction in the face of war crimes, you might think his team would be content to allow history to run its course. They’re not. . . . The Holocaust Museum’s Memorial Council members at the time of this report’s composition included former Obama-administration officials who are deeply invested in ensuring that history [vindicates him]. Among them are the former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes and several Obama-era National Security Council members. . . .

It wasn’t Obama’s lofty rhetoric but his apprehension that emboldened Assad to exacerbate the worst humanitarian and refugee crisis of the century. That’s a legacy that needs polishing. Apparently, team Obama isn’t above hijacking the moral authority of Holocaust memorials in the pursuit of that objective.

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.