A year after the U.S. struck Syrian targets as punishment for the regime’s use of sarin gas on its own population, Bashar al-Assad has launched another particularly horrific chemical-weapons attack on Syrian civilians. Thomas Joscelyn explains how support from key allies makes these acts possible:

Assad’s principal international backer, Vladimir Putin, hasn’t stopped him from using [these weapons]. Nor has Iran, which is deeply embedded in Syria alongside Assad’s forces. In fact, the Assad-Putin-Khamenei axis has a legion of online apologists who argue that the high-profile chemical-weapons assaults aren’t really the work of the Syrian “president” at all. This noxious advocacy on behalf of mass murderers is readily available on social media.

It gets even worse, as another rogue state has reportedly facilitated Assad’s acquisition of chemical weapons: North Korea. This facilitation is especially worrisome in light of the two nations’ previous cooperation on a nuclear reactor that was destroyed by the Israelis in 2007.

In March, the UN . . . traced a number of visits by North Korean officials to Syrian soil, finding that “multiple groups of ballistic-missile technicians” have been inside Syria. . . . [T]he UN explained that these “technicians . . . continued to operate at chemical-weapons and missile facilities at Barzah, Adra, and Hama.” . . . In one such transfer, the North Koreans provided the Assad regime with “special resistance valves and thermometers known for use in chemical-weapons” programs. UN member states also interdicted suspicious shipments, including bricks and tiles that may be used as part of a chemical-weapons program. . . .

The U.S. and its allies will continue to face daunting challenges when it comes to restraining rogue nations and their pursuit of banned weapons. As Syria’s ongoing work on chemical weapons shows, such proliferation concerns often involve multiple rogue states. Assad’s chemical-weapons attacks inside Syria are principally his own doing, but not solely. He has friends outside of Syria who are willing to help.

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.