A few months ago, the president guaranteed Congress the right to approve or disapprove any accord reached with Iran. Now, despite his solemn declaration to the contrary, it seems he’s planning to sideline Congress altogether. Fred Siegel and Sol Stern write:

Throughout the international negotiations, the White House has essentially served as Iran’s lawyer; now the administration’s rhetoric has created an insuperable dilemma for opponents of the deal. [John] Kerry has not so subtly hinted that the administration has no intention of honoring the commitments it made in signing the bill authorizing congressional review. Kerry’s comments suggest that no matter what happens in Congress, the administration will feel little obligation to carry out the wishes of the people’s representatives on the most important national-security issue of our time.

Should two-thirds of both houses override a presidential veto, Obama will likely ignore Congress, waive sanctions by executive decree, and leave Iran on the threshold of achieving a bomb. And if Iran does decide to pursue a nuclear breakout, nothing Congress does will likely convince Obama to use a credible threat of force to restrain the mullahs. But Obama will certainly blame Congress and particularly the Republicans for this national-security catastrophe of his own making.

The best that can probably be achieved by opponents of this disastrous agreement is a moral victory that embarrasses the president and provides an opportunity to regroup. A strong anti-Obama showing in the Senate that falls just short of the two-thirds majority could serve as a rebuke to his imperial presidency and a warrant for a new president to reconsider the agreement. But for the time being, Obama has undermined the Constitution and the Congress, even as he has empowered Iran, Assad, and Hizballah.

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.