In recent weeks, Iranian military vessels in the Persian Gulf have been flouting international law and accepted standards of nautical safety by navigating dangerously close to the American navy’s ships. Comparing the White House’s lack of response to these acts of provocation to its total indifference to the fate of Guillermo Farinas—a Cuban dissident subject to persistent abuse by the Castro regime—Elliott Abrams writes:

[T]he Iranian navy is making a laughingstock of the U.S. navy, taunting it with small-boat actions that endanger our ships, get within about 100 yards of them, and have forced them to take evasive action to avoid collisions. . . .

[Contrary to what the New York Times has reported], it is crystal clear that these confrontations were deliberate efforts to send a hostile message. It is crystal clear that Iran is showing the world, as it did in January with the capture [of American sailors], that the United States no longer runs the Gulf and is in fact afraid of Iran.

What has been the American response? What has the White House decided? To do nothing, and to tell the navy to bob and weave and duck. The administration remains committed to its nuclear deal above all, and is willing to allow these dangerous and humiliating maneuvers against the navy [to go unanswered]. It is engaged in covering up Iran’s violations of the nuclear deal, denying them, and allowing secret exemptions. Meanwhile Iran increases its presence and activity in Iraq and Syria and uses the nuclear deal to build its economy. . . .

[I]t will be up to our next president to distinguish between friends and enemies. If he or she wants to send the world a message that the Obama era is over and America is back, visits to Cuban dissidents like Farinas and one sinking of an Iranian ship that is illegally and dangerously harassing a U.S. navy vessel would be the best and likely the cheapest ways to do so.

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.