This weekend, the Islamic Republic will hold its third Holocaust-cartoon festival, with submissions vying to mock the Shoah, deny that it happened, or insult Jews and Israel more generally. When asked about the contest in an interview for the New Yorker, the Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif insisted that it is run by an NGO and not sponsored by the government. Nikahang Kowsar, a cartoonist who fled Iran after receiving death threats for publishing work critical of the regime, sets the record straight:

The claim that the Iranian government doesn’t control this platform for spewing hate and denying the Holocaust is a pure lie, coming from a pathological liar [Zarif] whose previous absurd claim, exactly a year before this one, was “we do not jail people for their opinions.”

The director of the Iranian Cartoon House, a former member of the Revolutionary Guards, runs the contest according to rules set by the Culture and Arts Center, [part of the] Tehran municipal government. Cartoon House is not allowed to hold international competitions and contests without permission from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. . . . [T]he winners of this hate-fest are awarded prize money that is sent to them through the standard channels, controlled and monitored by the government.

Interestingly, the spokesman for the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance denied Zarif’s claim.

Mr. Zarif is the darling of many American reporters, and he knows that most of them avoid scrutinizing whatever he spouts in order to secure another interview or even travel to Iran without facing any problems. . . . [T]he Islamic Republic has not only jailed but tortured, assassinated, and executed [citizens] for their opinions, including converts [from Islam], practitioners of the Baha’i faith, members of the LGBT community, and critics of the government.

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.