On Tuesday, the Assembly of Experts—the body responsible for choosing who will succeed Ali Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader—named Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati as its new chairman. The selection of the eighty-nine-year-old Jannati, writes Amir Toumaj, is yet further evidence that the nuclear deal, despite the claims of its supporters, is hardly encouraging moderation within the regime:

Jannati . . . has a reputation for blistering denunciations of America, of Iranian reformists, and of any attempts to deviate from the founding principles of the Islamic revolution. His victory undermines the unsupported assessment that “moderate” clerics had won this year’s election to the assembly, and might one day choose a similarly moderate supreme leader to replace the aging Ali Khamenei.

In addition to his new post chairing the Assembly, Jannati has since 1992 headed the Guardian Council—which vets all assembly, parliamentary, and presidential candidates, and also oversees elections. Under his leadership, the council supervised and approved the fraudulent 2009 ballot that brought the firebrand president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. On other occasions, he has warned there can be “no room for mercy” for the regime’s opponents at home, and declared, “We are an anti-American regime. America is our enemy, and we are the enemies of America.” . . .

Ultimately, with the assembly that chooses the next supreme leader determined to stay Iran’s revolutionary course, it is all but guaranteed that Khamenei’s successor will be a hardliner’s hardliner like himself.

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.