According to official statistics, the Islamic Republic is home to 117,700 Christians, although the real number is probably closer to 350,000. The regime, while never tolerant of non-Muslims, seems lately to have intensified its anti-Christian policies. Earlier this month, twelve Iranians were reportedly each sentenced to a year in prison for “propagating against the Islamic Republic in favor of Christianity.” Julie Lenarz and Benjamin Weinthal note some other examples, and urge the West to take action:

Last year, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) arrested two Christians—a mother and her son—as part of a vicious crackdown on Catholicism in the country’s West Azerbaijan Province. . . . Iranian authorities regularly arrest worshippers, raid house churches, and confiscate Bibles, Christian CDs and other religious literature while regime-controlled media outlets spread anti-Christian propaganda.

Four evangelical Christians were arrested in May 2017 and sentenced each to ten years in prison for house-church activities and evangelism. Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani stood trial in July along with three co-defendants because of their house-church activities. They were all sentenced to ten years in prison. It is worth recalling that Nadarkhani was sentenced to death in 2010 for his conversion to Christianity. After a global pressure campaign ensued, Iran’s regime released him from prison, after a three-year incarceration. . . .

The 125,000-member-strong IRGC has a long record of brutality targeting Christians and democracy movements opposed to the mullahs’ regime. The U.S. administration of President Donald Trump designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization in October 2017. Europe, so far, has declined to sanction the IRGC for its blatant human-rights violations.

To isolate Iran’s clerical leaders—and hold those accountable for grave human-rights violations—the EU and U.S. should impose a potent round of human-rights sanctions on regime officials persecuting Iranian Christians. The Islamic Republic remains highly vulnerable when a spotlight is shined on its widespread repression of religious freedom. If past is prologue, new human-rights sanctions and global pressure can save the lives of persecuted Iranian Christians.

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.