Last week, high-ranking Iranian politicians and clergymen eulogized Moshfeq Kashani, who served as court poet to the ayatollahs. As it happens, Kashani’s death fell close to the first anniversary of the death of another poet, Hashem Shaabani, executed for using verse to protest the regime. Amir Taheri contrasts the artistic visions of the two men:

Because the Persian language is extremely musical, even the most amateurish poems could resonate with Iranians. Kashani’s poems are no exception. Using a limited vocabulary, heavily dominated by clichés borrowed from classical poems, things like “your eyebrows resemble the crescent moon” and “Zohreh (Venus) playing the sitar in the sky,” Kashani’s poems sound familiar and thus, to many, somehow reassuring . . . part of the ambient noise of life—something like pumped music in lifts or shopping malls. . . .

Shaabani, on the other hand, is a modernist through and through. He represents the new Iran which wants to be part of the modern world with its gift of nonconformity, diversity, and, yes, risk-taking.

Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani prevented Iranians from remembering Shaabani even with a simple ceremony. However, history will remember him long after they are forgotten.

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.