In 2013, Hassan Rouhani was elected president of Iran, succeeding the blunt revolutionary Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who loved to provoke Western sensibilities. To the Obama administration, the smiling cleric Rouhani was destined to bring “change” to Iran, and the American press hailed him as a “moderate” who favored liberalization. He was, of course, nothing of the sort, as Isaac Schorr writes:

To Rouhani, “Israel is the great Zionist Satan” that “can never feel that it is in a safe place,” and “the beautiful cry of ‘Death to America’ unites” his country. In a 2004 speech, Rouhani boasted that nuclear negotiations he was holding with Britain, France, and Germany bought time that allowed engineers to install “equipment in parts of the [nuclear conversion] facility in Isfahan.”

This much could be determined from Rouhani’s words alone, but his actions speak far more loudly. Not only has Iran, under his watch, continued to export terror, war, and slaughter throughout the Middle East, but Rouhani’s government has also brutalized its own population. Schorr cites a recent report by Amnesty International detailing the treatment of those who participated in last year’s protests:

During his original campaign in 2013, Rouhani ran on a platform of freeing political prisoners and curbing the power of the morality police. . . . During and after the protests, [however], thousands of Iranians were arrested by security forces—in the vast majority of cases, for merely showing up to demonstrations. . . . Children as young as ten years old were taken into custody.

Many of those arrested disappeared for weeks and even months. Family members who inquired as to their status were often “subjected to harassment [and] intimidation.” . . . Torture was used not only to force the “confessions” of individuals’ unlawful behavior, “but also about their alleged associations with opposition groups outside Iran.” Among the methods used by authorities to elicit such confessions were beatings, prolonged stays in solitary confinement, stress positions and suspension, electric shocks, mock executions, and sexual violence and humiliation, including “forced nakedness, invasive body searches intended to humiliate the victims, sustained sexual verbal abuse, pepper spraying the genital area, and administering electric shocks to the testicles.”

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.