In addition to being responsible for much of the worst domestic repression, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) manages Hizballah and similar terrorist proxies and sends its troops to fight in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. On Monday, the White House officially designated the IRGC as a terrorist group—a move, Eli Lake writes, with real consequences:

There is a difference between saying a state is a sponsor of terrorism and calling an arm of a state an actual terrorist organization. . . . The threshold is now lower for proving that someone is providing material support to the IRGC. The designation also makes any non-Iranians who wittingly or unwittingly do business with the IRGC vulnerable to having their U.S. visas revoked. This is [a] powerful disincentive for Europeans [investing] in Iran, . . . because the IRGC’s tentacles reach into most aspects of Iran’s economy.

[T]here are two basic objections to this move. The first is that the designation may provoke Iran to target U.S. forces. . . . Already, Iranian government officials have promised a response to the designation. The mistake is thinking that pressure is any more provocative to Tehran than entreaties. In the days leading up to the final implementation of the nuclear deal in 2016, for example, the IRGC briefly took U.S. sailors hostage and released a humiliating video of the incident after they were released.

The second objection is that the designation further undermines the 2015 nuclear deal. A progressive group chaired by alumni of the Obama administration made this point; however, some see this objection as a point in the Trump administration’s favor. “It makes it much more difficult for a Democratic president to go back into the Iran deal in 2021,” says the Iran-sanctions expert Mark Dubowitz, who favors the designation. Any future administration would have to make [an official] determination that the IRGC was out of the terrorism business [before removing the sanctions].

Determining that the IRGC is no longer engaged in terrorism is about as likely as determining that the IRS is no longer engaged in collecting taxes. It’s in the organization’s nature. . . . Donald Trump’s strategy, unlike his predecessor’s, begins with the premise that Iran is an outlaw state—and treats it as such until it changes its behavior.

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.