Apologists for the Islamic Republic—including Secretary of State John Kerry—have tried to explain away the anti-Semitic rhetoric of its leading political and religious figures, along with their frequent calls for the destruction of Israel, as mere populist rhetoric, intended for “domestic consumption only.” Ben Cohen highlights the dangerous absurdity of this line:

[It is] puzzling . . . that, while there is now an expectancy in Western societies that politicians will be held to account for everything they say as well as do, the bellicose threats of Iranian leaders should, by contrast, be ignored. The implication is that Tehran’s leaders, in threatening Israel’s very existence, are catering to a domestic desire to hear such rhetoric. This assumes that erasing Israel from the map is a bigger priority for ordinary Iranians than rescuing their economy or bolstering the miserably poor levels of political freedom they currently enjoy.

Most importantly, the domestic-consumption theory elides the revolutionary Islamist identity that has defined the Iranian state since the overthrow of the shah in 1979. Yet it is precisely this identity that should stop us from treating Iran as just another country. What distinguishes revolutionary states is the belief that history is leading to a pre-ordained outcome. In Iran’s case, this is a transcendent Islamic state grounded in sharia law. In an Islamic state, there is no place for such liberal indulgences as women’s rights or a free press. And above all, there is no place for a Jewish state, which is regarded as the primary source of oppression and injustice in the world.

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.