Reportedly acting on a tip from the Mossad, Belgian police discovered and arrested a married Iranian couple in Antwerp who had a powerful bomb in their car. The same day, German police arrested Assadollah Assadi, a member of Iran’s diplomatic mission in Vienna, who had provided the bomb and ordered the couple to use it to attack a rally being held by an Iranian opposition group in the French town of Villepinte—an event that prominent American political figures were expected to attend. Struan Stevenson comments:

Despite clear evidence that Iranian embassies in Europe are now used as terrorist bomb factories, EU lawmakers on July 5 nevertheless approved plans for the European Investment Bank to do business with the theocratic regime in Iran in a desperate bid to keep the 2015 nuclear deal alive. The EU appeasers seem to think that if you keep throwing steaks to the tiger it will become a vegetarian.

Opponents of the regime inside Iran are regularly imprisoned, tortured, and hanged, often in public. An estimated 100,000 political prisoners have been murdered since the ayatollahs seized control of Iran in 1979. Outside the country, the mullahs’ preferred option is assassination or terrorist attacks. They have trained Ministry of Intelligence and Security agents implanted in every European embassy. Their job is to track down and eliminate political dissidents or enemies of the fundamentalist regime. . . .

Although the Iranian terrorist plot was foiled on the eve of a visit to Austria by Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani and his foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Austrian president went ahead with the meeting in a sickening act of appeasement. In a blind panic over President Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal, Iran is desperately trying to bully and cajole the EU into making up any shortfall caused by renewed sanctions, and Europe seems tragically happy to comply. . . .

Europe needs to wake up. Iranian embassies should immediately be closed across the EU and their diplomatic staff expelled. The days of kowtowing to this medieval and murderous regime are over. Europe must show that we support the Iranian people in their ongoing uprising and their bid to end the tyranny that they have suffered for four decades. But for the vigilance of the Belgian Security and Intelligence Service and the Belgian and German police, dozens of innocent people would have been maimed and killed in Villepinte. Murderous attempts of this magnitude can no longer be ignored.

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.