While praising Abbas Amanat’s Iran: A Modern History as a “rich, detailed, [and] nuanced” scholarly work, Michael Rubin also notes some glaring omissions:

When he turns to the [1979] Islamic Revolution, [Amanat] does not whitewash reality. He discusses the recruitment of children to the frontlines of the Iran-Iraq war and the televised confessions forced by Iranian authorities engaged in post-revolutionary purges.

Amanat is weakest, [however], discussing the relationship between the United States and Iran. He describes the beginning of the embassy-hostage crisis but glosses over its end. He sometimes gets [individual] episodes wrong: the Iran-Contra affair originated in a desire to influence a post-Khomeini order, not simply to check Soviet influence, and it was German and Dutch firms, not the United States, that shipped chemical-weapons precursors to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

And like many of his academic peers, he prefers simply to ignore terrorism: Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups such as Hizballah are mentioned only in passing and only in the context of the arms-for-hostages deal. There is no mention of the attacks that post-revolutionary Iran has sponsored from Buenos Aires to Beirut to Bangkok. . . . While Amanat’s narrative is excellent, especially up to the Islamic Revolution, sins of omission and his political agenda erode the credibility of his treatment of recent history and, more broadly, undermine what could have been the definitive book on modern Iran.

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.