On September 18, the Iranian supreme leader gave a speech to officers of the Revolutionary Guard Corps arguing that investment in the military must take precedence over allocating funds toward economic development. He then cited the example of Germany and Japan, both of which, after suffering from a crushing and humiliating defeat in 1945, were forced by the victorious Allies to disarm. Eran Lerman comments:

As far as Khamenei is concerned, the bad guys won and the good guys lost in 1945, and the time has come to overthrow the entire post-war dispensation.

This position is, after all, in line with Iran’s denial of the Holocaust (recall the caricature competition designed to denigrate and diminish it) and exterminatory stance toward Israel. [These attitudes are] not personal quirks of the former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. [They are part and parcel of] the position of Khamenei himself and of Ayatollah Khomeini before him. . . .

According to [the ayatollahs’ ideology], Iran has a religious imperative to reject all Western mores. For this to be possible, the revolution, even more than the state as such, must position itself as a strong military power in regional and global affairs. The alternative is unthinkable. . . . Military weakness, [the reasoning goes], would lead to moral weakness, a “cultural invasion,” and the loss of all that Khamenei and Khomeini have sought to establish.

There could be an opportunity here. Neither candidate for the U.S. presidency seems to have bought into the strange notion, implicit (and at times explicit) in the positions taken by President Obama and his inner circle, that Iran can serve as a useful counterweight to other forces in the region. Nor have they bought (yet) into the delusion that Iran’s revolutionary impulse can be assumed to be benign. The U.S. is thus still able to think of Iran as an enemy, which it is.

If so, the domestic tension and turmoil over the unfulfilled promise of economic relief, and over Khamenei’s demand for more and more sacrifices by the people (a “resistance economy,” as he calls it) can provide fertile ground for destabilization of the Iranian regime. Such an opportunity was lost in 2009. It need not be lost again.

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.