In 2011, as the Arab Spring came to Bahrain and protestors filled the streets, President Obama spoke out in favor of democratic reforms in the small island country, which is home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. When Bahrain’s royal family responded with repressive measures, the U.S. protested publicly on several occasions. About a year later, however, Washington abruptly ceased its pressure—unwisely, as Elliott Abrams explains:

The United States maintains considerable leverage in [Bahrain’s capital] Manama. Even a small drawdown of U.S. military personnel would reverberate loudly there, as would moving—or even announcing a study of moving—any piece of the U.S. military presence out of Bahrain. . . . More public pressure might well force the royals to think harder about compromises, and strengthen the hand of those who are privately arguing for reform. . . .

[Now Bahrain] is on a path toward increasing instability, featuring growing Sunni extremism, growing Shiite outrage, and ever-widening sectarian divisions. The Fifth Fleet is a hostage, and the Obama administration is spending hundreds of millions of dollars there as if America’s welcome will be permanent. That’s a suspect assumption: as the majority of Bahrainis conclude that the United States is indifferent to the crackdown and siding with the most regressive elements of the royal family, support for the Fifth Fleet’s presence will start to disappear. As will Bahrain’s very sovereignty, as it is caught up in the regional rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Once upon a time, Bahrain was an outpost of civility and moderation in the Middle East. Now, it is coming to share the pathologies of its neighbors. That’s tragic, and it is in part the result of weak American policy. By placing security matters—Bahrain’s minuscule participation in the anti-Islamic State coalition and its hosting of the Fifth Fleet—above all other considerations, the Obama administration is putting that very security relationship at risk.

Once upon a time, Bahrain was also an example of a sensible Obama human-rights policy. Today, one can sadly say that it’s a good example of how that human-rights policy has vanished into thin air.

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.