In a new book titled The English Job: Understanding Iran and Why It Distrusts Britain, Jack Straw—who served for five years as Tony Blair’s foreign secretary—attempts to explain the recent history of Anglo-Iranian relations, while arguing in favor of the 2015 nuclear deal. Straw also makes a case for further diplomatic initiatives to expand upon the deal. Not only is the book riddled with factual errors, major and minor, writes Amir Taheri in his review, but its prescriptions are deeply flawed:

[Straw] thinks that because Iran, as he reminds the reader, is an ancient civilization—and has produced great poets, weaves exquisite carpets, and offers one of the world’s hautes cuisines—it deserves indulgence for its [malign] activities in other domains such as hostage-taking, hate-mongering, human-rights violations, and the export of terror in the name of revolution. This is like granting Stalin indulgence because one appreciates Pushkin and Tchaikovsky and enjoys a dish of borscht with a glass of vodka on the side. . . . That Cyrus the Great was a great king and, arguably, even the founder of human rights, as Straw suggests, does not justify, to cite just one example, the mass murder of Syrians by a mercenary army [controlled] by the Iranian mullahs.

[There is also] Straw’s strange belief that the Khomeinist ruling elite includes a “reformist” faction that desires close relations with Western democracies and must, therefore, be supported in order to weaken and eventually get rid of the “hardline” faction led by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. But . . . Straw is unable to cite a single reform proposed, let alone carried out, by his “reformist” faction in Tehran.

Straw is critical of President Donald Trump for rejecting secret diplomacy, [but] offers no evidence than any deal made with the Islamic Republic in the past 40 years has had a long-lasting impact on the Khomeinist strategy and behavior. The Khomeinist rulers of Iran have perfected the art of diplomatic cheat-retreat-advance.

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.