On Tuesday, the Treasury Department announced that it is placing sanctions on three high-level al-Qaeda operatives based in the Islamic Republic. This is just one more piece of evidence, writes Benjamin Weingarten, that Tehran, in addition to sponsoring Hizballah and various other Shiite terrorist groups, is also a key supporter of Sunni groups like al-Qaeda:

It strains credulity to believe that a closed Shiite nation like Iran, often competing against Sunni forces, would be unaware of al-Qaeda officers within its borders. And in this case we have clear evidence that it was comfortable with al-Qaeda operating on its soil because Iranian authorities were negotiating with [one of the three sanctioned individuals]. . . . Another element of this story is . . . [the] ample compelling evidence indicating Iranian support for the 9/11 attack. . . .

Foreign policy necessarily involves dealing with hostile regimes, and sometimes making common cause with them in order to advance greater interests. But there is little to indicate that as concerns the global jihadist threat, comprising state and non-state actors, . . . each with competing but often overlapping interests and motivations, America has the faintest clue as to how best to proceed in its national interest.

With great regularity we appear to be on every side of every conflict, evincing a lack of clarity about ourselves and our enemies. The jihadists are playing a game of “Heads I win, tails you lose.” They know what they want and are doing everything in their power to achieve it. Does America?

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.