Since gaining power in the 1979 revolution, the Iranian regime has benefited from numerous efforts by Westerners to downplay its support for terrorism and its fanatical ideology, urging instead that once Iran’s wholly legitimate grievances are addressed, it will rapidly become a moderate and friendly power. Among the most zealous proponents of this approach is the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a Washington lobby whose positions are frequently mimicked by the Obama administration, as Sohrab Amari writes:

Barack Obama absorbed almost all of NIAC’s talking points; . . . these talking points are a crisp synthesis of the various lines of apologetic reasoning. . . . Recall how the president told NPR, in December 2014, that Iran’s “legitimate aspirations” should be taken into account. This was followed by the president’s remark . . . that the regime’s anti-Semitism is little more than an “organizing tool”—unpleasant rhetorical outbursts that don’t override Tehran’s other strategic interests. The hardliners-versus-moderates dichotomy, too, has found new life in the Obama administration’s accusations that the president’s own “hardline” opponents—that is, duly elected U.S. lawmakers—are empowering their hardline counterparts in Tehran.

Cut to the White House Situation Room, March 31, 2015. Diplomats in Geneva have just concluded the latest round of nuclear negotiations between the great powers and Iran, and a framework agreement is within view. President Obama has convened a debrief conference call with cabinet principals and other top officials. On the list of participants is one Sahar Nowrouzzadeh.

Nowrouzzadeh is Obama’s National Security Council Director for Iran. She is also, it turns out, an alumna of NIAC. . . . We have come full circle. The apologists are now running the show.

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.