In an interview with the comedian Jon Stewart, the president stated his hope that Americans and their elected representatives will come to see the wisdom of the Iran deal, and then added: “despite the money, despite the lobbyists.” Lee Smith writes:

“What do you mean by lobbyists?” the man some viewers regard as the Cronkite of our age never asked the president. It was a lost opportunity to gain some clarity into President Obama’s thinking about America’s Middle East policy, since he has used the formulation often. For instance, in a press conference following the signing of the [accord with Iran], Obama said that he hoped Congress would evaluate this agreement fairly, “not based on lobbying, but based on what’s in the national interests of the United States of America.”

In his efforts to get the deal through Congress, Obama is . . . hinting broadly at anti-Semitic conceits—like dual loyalties, moneyed interests, Jewish lobby—to scare off Democrats tempted to vote against [it] because they think it’s a bad deal. If they do come out against the agreement—if they line up, for instance, with the new organization AIPAC formed, Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran—to warn the public “about the dangers of the proposed Iran deal,” then he’s going to tar them as dual loyalists who are willing to send Americans out to make war on behalf of Jewish causes.

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.