Last week, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a prestigious bipartisan think tank, hosted a lecture by the Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif—something it has done for several years running. While there are always a few activists protesting these visits, this year the issue received far more attention because of the Islamic Republic’s recent execution of the wrestling champion Navid Afkari, who had participated in pro-democracy protests. The CFR’s president—and former State Department panjandrum—Richard Haas responded to his critics with the following tweet:

Like many others I condemn the execution of Navid Afkari. I also hold the view that human rights constitute an important dimension of U.S. foreign policy. Nevertheless, I believe that CFR is correct to meet with Iran’s foreign minister.

Amir Taheri comments:

In November 1938, a few days after Kristallnacht, the French ambassador to Berlin, Robert Coulondre, reported the event to Paris, describing the savagery in the heart of Europe, concluding that “nevertheless one should understand German grievances against the Jews.” Western intellectuals who visited the Soviet Union under Stalin tacitly admitted that thousands were killed by the regime and millions starved to death but—using the same “nevertheless” talisman—they also concluded that all was for the best in that best of all worlds.

[In his lecture] at the CFR meeting, Zarif repeated the same claims, not to say lies, that he has been dishing out to the illustrious audience for years. And it seems that his audience gobbled them up with the same appetite as before. . . . [As] portrayed by Zarif, the Khomeinist regime is a peace-and-love enterprise where the judiciary is independent, all freedoms are respected, and the strategic aim is to establish peace and harmony across the globe. There are no political prisoners in Iran. Tehran’s support for Hizballah and Hamas is cultural and Iranian presence in Syria is only advisory at the invitation of the Syrian government.

In the CFR echo chamber the airing of opinions without an ethical barometer is, at best, a trivial pursuit, and, at worst, a betrayal of scholarship.

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.