The Islamic Republic allowed a journalist from a Jewish paper (the Forward) to travel around the country and interview both officials and private citizens. The resulting article, writes Michael Totten, avoids some of the worst pitfalls of reportage from repressive regimes, but is not without its share of naïveté—beginning with a misunderstanding of the role of the translator and fixer provided by the government to accompany him on his travels:

[Larry Cohler-Esses] has no way of knowing if the translations are accurate, and meanwhile I know for a fact that both the translator and the fixer reported on him to the government. They were required by law to do so. For all he and I know, they worked for the Ministry of Intelligence. . . .

[Furthermore], anyone and everyone in Iran who talks to an American journalist flanked by an official fixer and translator knows that every word he utters will be carefully read by the authorities. That’s as true for people inside the government as it is for people on the street. Authoritarian regimes install fear in everyone, including their own officials. Nobody wants to be purged. So who knows what they privately believe?

As for the insistence of government officials and “senior ayatollahs” to Cohler-Esses that they object to Israeli policies, and not to Israel’s existence, Totten writes:

[I]t makes no sense [to say] that Iran objects only to Israeli policy. Iranian leaders routinely scream “Death to Israel.” (They also routinely scream “Death to America.”) . . . The United States government objects to plenty of Mexico’s policies, but not even Donald Trump or Pat Buchanan begins meetings by screaming “Death to Mexico” or appears at any “Death to Mexico” rallies. The United States doesn’t even have “Death to Mexico” rallies.

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.