An uncritical reader of the major U.S. newspapers and journals of opinion could be forgiven for expecting the people of Iran to rally around the flag after recent American retaliatory attacks on their country’s military positions in Iraq and Syria. Indeed, enormous crowds turned out in Tehran for the funeral of Qassem Suleimani, the general killed in one of those counterattacks—although many of those present undoubtedly were cajoled or forced into attending. But what followed instead were mass demonstrations against the mullahs, as David Patrikarakos and Rashad Ali write:

[Protestors] chanted, in clear voices, for the end of the regime: “America is not the enemy,” they roared. “The enemy is in Iran.”

For now, the regime appears to have backed down from repression and mass murder. It is rattled. And well it should be. Despite the dangers to their own lives, Iranians are making it clear that the regime—and not the “Great Satan”—is the oppressor of the Iranian people. They have called not for death to America but rather for “death to the Islamic Republic.”

What comes next will be critical. The world’s eyes are on Iran. This has almost certainly stopped the regime from once more massacring people in the streets. How long this forbearance will last remains unclear. . . . But if one thing the last year in Iran has made clear, it is that people will not stop.

President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have made statements reassuring Iranians that they stand with them. Trump even tweeted [to this effect] in Farsi, [in what] is reported to be the most widely read tweet in Persian-language Twitter. Will this statement of solidarity result in genuine, tangible support with meaningful consequences for the regime? Consistency is not a virtue one associates with Donald Trump. But now is the time not for mere rhetoric but for substance. We owe it to the people of Iran.

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.