On September 8, Iran launched a missile at a meeting of the leaders of an opposition group in northern Iraq known as the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI). The strike killed six of the 21 members who were present. Eli Lake comments:

Iran faces no real danger from the Kurds, especially the KDPI. Some Kurdish separatists in Iran have conducted attacks on Iranian targets over the years. But the KDPI has pursued a nonviolent strategy for equal political rights in Iran. . . . Even after the missile strike, the KDPI has refrained from calling for a violent response. . . .

Iranian state media initially described the strike as a successful act of counterterrorism. Later, however, the mask slipped. In a television interview, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the missile strike was intended as a warning to America. “The attack against the terrorists in Iraq’s Kurdistan conveys a message to [our] enemies, particularly those superpowers who think they can impose their evil plots on Iran and bully us,” said Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari.

That’s a not-so-veiled threat to military bases in the Iraqi Kurdish region that host U.S. special-operations forces and intelligence officers. In fact, Iranian-backed militias have recently fired at the airport compound in Basra, where there is also a U.S. consulate. The White House subsequently warned Iran that it would be held responsible for any attack on U.S. personnel.

[Furthermore], the missile strike is notable for its precision. . . . That Iran was able to hit the room [in a large compound] where the KDPI central committee was meeting suggests it had both valuable intelligence and the technology to exploit it. . . .

The U.S. and European leaders should schedule a summit with a delegation of Iranian Kurds to discuss how the free world can help their struggle. Iran’s leaders would certainly get that message.

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.