After backtracking on its move to permit Iran to conduct transactions in dollars through American financial institutions—in violation of promises to Congress—the Obama administration is now poised to allow the Islamic Republic to achieve similar results by using foreign banks. In a recorded conference call, Mark Dubowitz and Eric Lorber explain why Iran was originally denied access to the U.S. financial system, and the troubling consequences of providing a workaround:

These sanctions were [originally] put in place because the Iranian financial sector represented a threat to the integrity of the global financial system. . . . And that threat is on the basis of its proliferation financing, nuclear financing, and missile financing, [as well as] terror financing, money laundering, and sanctions evasion. . . . [T]here was a 2011 finding under the Patriot Act that found Iran’s entire financial sector—in fact, the entire jurisdiction of Iran—to be a jurisdiction of primary money-laundering concern. . . .

[With the greenlighting of transactions] in an offshore dollar-clearing facility, [the Iranians are] setting the stage for the next steps, where they can begin to erode coercive leverage [provided by existing sanctions] . . . legitimize themselves as a “responsible” financial actor without doing anything to demonstrate that they’ve turned the corner on the money laundering [or] the . . . financing of terror. . . .

[T]here’s no provision [for this U.S. move ] . . . in the JCPOA. If Iran did not negotiate that [in the original deal], then Iran needs to negotiate it, and the administration should not be providing a unilateral concession without any reciprocity from the Iranians. Particularly [because], since the JCPOA has been reached, rather than being a more responsible global actor, Iran has become an even less responsible global actor.

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.