The conquest of much of Iraq by Islamic State (IS) had a devastating effect on the country’s Christian population, most of whom identify as Assyrians. While the survivors have managed to rebuild some of their communities, many are now threatened by the Iran-backed militias that have increasingly exercised power in the country. Uzay Bulut reports:

The Nineveh Plain is considered the ancient Assyrian heartland and is the only region in Iraq where the largest demographic group is Christian. Assyrians there even have their own security force, the Nineveh Plain Protection Units. Most of the Nineveh plain is currently divided between the Shiite militia and the Sunni Kurdish Peshmerga.

Ashur Sargon Eskrya, the president of the Assyrian Aid Society of Iraq, [states] that Assyrians and other religious minorities such as the Yazidis, caught in the middle of these forces, have faced both physical violence and political marginalization. “The demographic and cultural structure of the Nineveh Plains continues to change changing due to increased Iranian domination, the ongoing presence of IS, and the competing tensions between the central government of Iraq and the Kurdish Regional Government,” he said.

Bulut goes on to cite the analysis of Juliana Taimoorazy, a prominent Iraqi Christian activist:

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s reach through its Shiite militia in the Nineveh Plain has severely affected the Christians of Iraq: this is one of the main reasons why Christians in the post-IS era are not returning to their homes. And let us not forget that [the Iranian] general Qassem Suleimani’s strategy of dismantling IS as an institution was part of a larger Islamic Republic expansionist scheme to create a Shiite crescent [extending] all the way to the Mediterranean. It intended to use the Nineveh Plain as a corridor to the West.

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.