On Monday, the U.S. Secretary of State spoke at London’s Chatham House, where he urged big banks to start extending credit to the Islamic Republic, as a reward for its “having met its part of the bargain.” Even as he admitted that he was making “good-faith efforts way beyond” what the nuclear deal specifies, he erroneously reassured potential lenders that as long as they did “due diligence” they would face no problems from U.S. enforcement agencies. (So egregious were Kerry’s remarks that the State Department itself has had to issue a correction.) Elliott Abrams comments:

Despite the innumerable ways in which Iran has demonstrated bad faith—from its continuing support for terrorist groups to its detention of American sailors in January to its arming of the Houthi rebels in Yemen with missiles with which they have attacked American ships—Kerry wants us to bend over backward to help their economy. It isn’t enough to remove sanctions that prevent banks from lending to Iran; Kerry has become a cheerleader urging banks to make more loans, whatever the risks. . . . Kerry is now giving banks bad advice—advice that is directly contradicted by U.S. Treasury officials. . . .

The U.S. Treasury Department’s designation of Iran, including its central bank and financial institutions, as a primary money-laundering concern . . . still stands. As part of that designation, Treasury determined that “the international financial system [is] increasingly vulnerable to the risk that otherwise responsible financial institutions will unwittingly participate in Iran’s illicit activities.” . . .

So . . . Kerry is acting as a salesman for Iran, pressing banks to do business with entities there that present real dangers to the banks. In the past, banks have been fined billions of dollars for such transactions. Treasury keeps reminding them of the dangers—and it is Treasury, not State, that is in charge of enforcement.

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.