Having devoted itself to orchestrating and campaigning for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), a Washington-based organization with close ties to the regime in Tehran, has now turned its attention to easing restrictions on Iranians seeking to enter the U.S. Jordan Schachtel writes:

The . . . Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 passed in the House with an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 407 to 19.

The new law tightens the already-established U.S. Visa-Waiver Program (VWP) to prohibit some Iranian, Syrian, Sudanese, and Iraqi nationals from entering the United States, recognizing that the citizens of these nations come from war-torn states and live under the control of anti-American . . . regimes and Islamic insurgencies. The Iranian regime fiercely opposes the measure. Tehran has accused AIPAC and other “Zionist” entities of being behind the measure.

Though the bill received almost unanimous support from the public at large and in the halls of Congress, NIAC has implemented the same strategy it used in garnering support for the Iran deal. It has described the bill as “racist” and “discriminatory,” and has called upon Congress and the president to revoke the national-security legislation. It has achieved some success thus far.

Members of Congress have alleged that the Obama administration—which remains close with NIAC (and employs a NIAC alumna, Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, as the National Security Council’s director for Iran)—is carving loopholes into the waiver restrictions, specifically for Iranian nationals.

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.