On May 15, someone broke into and set aflame a shrine in the Iranian city of Hamadan that—according to local Jewish tradition—encloses the tomb of the biblical Esther and Mordecai. The Iranian government bears responsibility for this act of arson, write Alireza Nader and Benjamin Weinthal:

If some elements in the regime, or its Western apologists, eventually get around to shedding crocodile tears: don’t buy it. The shrine has been neglected and vulnerable to attack since the 1979 revolution that brought the Islamic Republic to power. . . . In 2011, anti-Jewish mobs rioted at the shrine, which had been restored by a Persian-Jewish architect under the shah, because the structure contains a Star of David. . . . As recently as February, the regime’s Basij paramilitary forces threatened to storm the site.

The threat to the shrine is of a piece with a wider pattern of attacks on minority religious sites in Iran over the last few days. Arsonists, most likely groups associated with the regime, also targeted a Hindu temple in Bandar Abbas and a Christian cemetery in Eslamshahr.

Such vandalism and hatred are in the regime’s DNA. The Islamist revolutionaries who took over Iran in 1979 began their reign of terror by targeting the Jewish community. Habib Elghanian, a successful businessman, was one of the first Iranians to be executed in May 1979. The triumphant revolutionaries picked him simply because he was the symbolic head of the Iranian Jewish community. Thus began a terror that would eventually encompass not only Jews, but also Baha’is, Christians, Sunnis, Sufis, Zoroastrians, secular Iranians, and anyone deemed an enemy of the republic.

The regime seems to be renewing its assault on religious minorities to send a warning to the population at large at a restive moment. . . . Iranian Jews are especially vulnerable. There are fewer than 10,000 Jews left in Iran, and the regime can use them as hostages in response to Western pressure.

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.