The 2015 agreement to restrain the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions, despite its many egregious faults, allows the U.S. to take a variety of steps to slow the regime’s progress toward building atomic weapons—steps that the Obama administration consistently refrained from taking. But there is no reason for Donald Trump to continue his predecessor’s commitment to interpreting the deal as leniently as possible. On the contrary, argue David Albright, Mark Dubowitz, and Brian Katulis, Washington should demand its strict construction and enforcement while coordinating with its allies to punish and counteract Tehran’s trouble-making throughout the Middle East. (Moderated by Oren Dorell; video, 1 hour. A transcript is available here.)

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.