Although his opinions on the Jews get little attention in the mainstream press, Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has been preaching anti-Semitism for much of his career. Indeed, write Ali Alfoneh and Reuel Marc Gerecht, his “near-pathological obsession” with Israel and the Jews has a long history:

Khamenei . . . thrived on Western literature in his youth, only to become a devoted admirer of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the Egyptian theorist of jihad, in his adulthood. The roots of his antipathy for Jews and Israel lie in the crisscrossing religious and political currents in his hometown, Mashhad, in the 1950s and 60s. In the literary salons that Khamenei frequented, Marxist and nationalist currents depicting Israel as an instrument of Western imperialism were common; concurrently, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini [Khamenei’s predecessor], a rising star among the religiously militant, attacked “Jewish influence” in the royal court. Khomeini also railed against Western imperialism, Israel, and Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s ambitious reform program. . . .

The young Khamenei was not a member of the close circle around Khomeini, but he claims that in May 1963 he carried a handwritten letter from Khomeini to religious authorities in Mashhad. The message read: “Prepare for the fight against Zionism. .  .  . Israel is in control of the country’s economic and political affairs.”

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.