When Hassan Rouhani won the race this summer for a second term as the Islamic Republic’s president, no small number of Western observers saw his victory as a triumph for the country’s “moderates,” whom Rouhani supposedly leads, and for the nuclear deal, which was ostensibly intended to encourage “moderation” within the regime. But Rouhani, since taking office, has fulfilled none of the promises he made to more liberal Iranians, and if anything the “hardliners” in the government have grown stronger. Elliott Abrams takes as an example Rouhani’s unfulfilled promise—from his first presidential campaign, in 2013—to free Mehdi Karroubi, a seventy-nine-year-old dissident, from house arrest:

It does not really matter whether in his heart Rouhani wishes he could free Karroubi. What does matter is that once again Westerners hoping for change in Iran have deceived themselves; allowed themselves to believe that Iran’s closed, corrupt, and repressive theocracy was about to change; concluded that Rouhani was some sort of “moderate” despite the fact that human-rights conditions in Iran worsened during his first term in office; and continued to treat Rouhani, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, and others whom the regime uses to calm Westerners as if they were actors in an effort to liberalize Iran.

They are not. They are important parts of the repressive and brutal regime that rules the Islamic Republic. The real actors in the struggle to change Iran and free its people from tyranny are the people of Iran, not officials of the regime. As Misagh Parsa recounts in his fascinating book Democracy in Iran, the regime has been at war with the people since 1979—year in and year out, month after month. Iranians have no illusions about those who rule them. Neither should we. When a regime cannot release someone like Mehdi Karroubi from house arrest after six years, . . . we are reminded of the nature of the regime—and of its own understanding that Iranians will be rid at once of it if ever they have the chance.

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.