Addressing the United Nations last Tuesday, the president compared the plight of Syrian refugees to that of “Jews fleeing Nazi Germany,” and declared that “history will judge us harshly if we do not rise to this moment.” He then said that “to address the crisis, wars like the savagery in Syria must be brought to an end, and it will be brought to an end through political settlement and diplomacy, and not simply by bombing.” Eli Lake comments:

No one who has argued for more U.S. involvement in Syria has said more bombing alone will solve these problems. What’s more, the U.S. itself is doing a lot of bombing in Syria today against Islamic State. But there is also something sinister about Obama’s formulation. The U.S. is not just another country when it comes to the collective security of the Middle East. Through its alliances and interventions, it has been the region’s reluctant sheriff since the end of World War II. . . .

[The Obama] administration’s pursuit of diplomacy and publicly stated policy not to attack Syrian forces gave Russia a green light to establish its forward air bases in Syria a year ago. As Secretary of State John Kerry pursued Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to restart peace negotiations, the Russians deployed bombers and jets to Syria and struck a pact with Iran to regain territory for the dictator Bashar al-Assad.

This toothless diplomacy has further immiserated the Syrian people. The U.S. government confirmed Tuesday that it was Russian aircraft that destroyed an aid convoy this week, halting the delivery of food and medicine to the besieged citizens of Aleppo, and killing twenty aid workers. . . . This atrocity was committed during what was supposed to be a cessation of hostilities negotiated by Kerry and Lavrov this month in Geneva. . . .

Think about that for a minute. Kerry negotiated a deal to collaborate with an air force that just bombed an aid convoy and has bombed hospitals and civilians now for a year. . . The tragedy in Syria is primarily the fault of Assad. But Obama’s failure to challenge Assad and his Russian and Iranian supporters has extended the war that has forced so many Syrians to flee their country.

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.