The public commentator Reza Aslan recently announced on Twitter that “Iran currently has the highest number of US college alums serving in any foreign government cabinet in the world” and appended a sleek graphic illustration. In light of Aslan’s general position on U.S.-Iranian relations, his message is clear: the Iranian government is populated by congenial, well-educated “reonciliationists” who are eager to establish good relations with the U.S. However, writes Armin Rosen, given “the distressingly vast range of despotic and otherwise anti-Western figures [who] were educated in the United States or Europe,” Aslan has only succeeded in disproving his underlying assumption:

Exposure to the democratic world is no guarantee that an individual will develop any kind of sensitivity toward its values or outlook. It can have the exact opposite effect. . . . This is a troubling reality for believers in the idea that the arc of history bends inexorably toward a Western-democratic notion of justice and freedom. Some very smart people have been exposed to the realities of that system up close and have not only found it inadequate but violently rejected it, using their personal experience as the basis for a powerful and often highly resonant critique of Western and American values. They serve as evidence that backlash may be more probable than universal democratic triumph, and that that backlash can originate from the heart of democracy itself.

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.