Yesterday, the New York Times published an opinion piece by the Iranian foreign minister. In it, Mohammad Javad Zarif declares Wahhabism a “death cult” responsible for most of the Muslim world’s problems and blames Saudi Arabia for spreading this “fanaticism.” All this, from a high official of the repressive Islamic-fundamentalist state that is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. Danielle Pletka writes:

Zarif is right. Wahhabism is indeed a danger to the world, a scourge of extremist ideology that successive Saudi regimes have inflicted upon the Muslim (and Christian and Jewish) world. . . . And Zarif is right that the Saudis have used their wealth to hire lobbyists and directly to buy friends in the United States and Europe, which has surely influenced policy in their favor. But then Zarif stops, and it is in his silence where we find the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and sheer Machiavellian predacity of the Tehran regime

Because, you see, Zarif is only concerned with Sunni terrorism, but Iran is the veritable godfather of modern terrorism. . . . And worse yet, unlike the Saudi government, which has actually begun to grapple with its problems and its legacy, Iran has merely doubled and tripled down on its terror model. But let’s review the bidding, shall we?

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, men and women may not consort; women must be veiled (though not with their faces covered). Iran has executed, on average, a person a day in 2016. . . . And forget about being a minority in Iran, where only 50 percent of the population is Persian. . . .

It was the Islamic Republic that created Hizballah and sponsored the groups that kidnapped and murdered Americans through Lebanon’s long civil war. It is the Islamic Republic that funds Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It is Iran that props up the murderous Assad regime—you know, the guys that have repeatedly gassed their own people. It is Iran that has assassinated its enemies the world over, and it is Iran’s own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (and its expeditionary Quds Force) that was responsible, during the Iraq war, for hundreds of U.S. servicemen dying.

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.