This summer, London imposed sanctions on dozens of individuals involved in human-rights abuses—marking its first such step since it left the European Union and gained the ability to do so independent of Brussels. Behnam Ben Taleblu urges the British government not to overlook the Islamic Republic in crafting its new trade policies:

Iran, a notorious rights violator subject to increasing pressure from the U.S. Treasury, was absent from the UK’s [sanctions] list. This represents a missed opportunity for the UK, both to signal seriousness to its transatlantic partner about the Iranian threat, as well as to affect the calculations of kleptocrats in Tehran.

The EU has not announced any new missile- or proliferation-related sanctions on Iran since December 2012, and the last terrorism penalties came in January 2019. On the human-rights file, the EU—and by default, the UK—has renewed and occasionally added to a list of sanctioned persons and entities every year since the spring of 2011.

UK officials understand that Iran represents a multifaceted national-security challenge. In 2019, a British tanker was taken hostage by Tehran, and in 2020, pro-Iran militias in Iraq struck a coalition base, killing one British and two American service members. What’s more, Britain has been on the record condemning Iranian missile launches and strikes, and has led the way in international organizations to censure the Islamic Republic for its illicit conventional-arms proliferation.

While sanctions have not been the go-to UK response to these acts of aggression, [London can apply the same justifications for its recent sanctions against other countries] to Iranian acts of domestic suppression. Ample evidence of these abuses exists. . . . The use of sanctions . . . could also serve as a way to cooperate closely with the U.S. in using economic statecraft to address an area of mutual concern.

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.