Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister and the chief negotiator of the 2015 nuclear deal, has recently returned to the American media spotlight, authoring an essay for the Atlantic and participating in a long public interview with Charlie Rose in New York. As ever, writes Armin Rosen, Zarif’s mission is to put a smiling face on the Islamic Republic and obscure its many crimes:

Zarif enjoys remarkable prestige in the U.S. It could be that he’s seen as a leading defender of an Obama legacy item, given the Trump administration’s disavowal of the Iran deal. Or maybe the explanation is simpler: Zarif speaks English beautifully, and writes in sophisticated-sounding bromides. He is a credulous listener’s idea of a foreign-policy whiz. . . .

Under pressure from the . . . sometimes-assertive Rose, Zarif said [in his interview that] “we have no proof” that the Assad regime, which owes its survival to Iranian military intervention, ever used chemical weapons. “We are in Syria not to support anyone but to fight Islamic State,” Zarif said—never mind that Islamic State didn’t really exist as a separate entity from al-Qaeda, a group Iran has often assisted, until February of 2014, several years into Tehran’s efforts to rescue Assad. “Our region needs the message of dialogue,” he said, neglecting to mention that over 500 Iranian troops have been killed
“dialoguing” in Syria. . . .

Like Zarif’s agnosticism as to whether the Holocaust actually happened, the most cringe-inducing parts of his [recent] talk hint at where his heart may actually lie: he is not just a defender of his regime’s policies, but a proudly transparent believer in its larger mission and meaning. Zarif has been widely viewed as an interlocutor between longstanding enemies, and has presented himself as such since the early 2000s. But he’s also spent decades working for the Islamic Republic, and he has an uncanny ability to deflect even the appearance of conflict [between his public persona and the government he represents]. . . .

Some are helpless to resist him, and commit public debasements at his feet. “We’re friends, you have to understand,” Charlie Rose said by way of backing down from a tense exchange over Iran’s role in Syria. “It doesn’t look that way, but it’s true!,” Zarif beamed, happy for this inexplicable off-ramp.

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.