Why has the U.S. refrained from intervening in the Syrian civil war? It’s not out of fear of getting dragged into a Middle Eastern conflict, Lee Smith argues, but in order to placate Iran:

As President Obama wrote to the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, “the U.S.’s military operations inside Syria aren’t targeted at Mr. Assad or his security forces.” The president didn’t do anything to bring down Assad because he was afraid it might anger the Syrian president’s patrons in Iran, and getting a nuclear deal with Iran was Obama’s foreign-policy priority.

There is plenty that the president might have done to support Syrian rebels . . . without ever risking putting American forces on the ground in Syria. . . . Obama, however, kept his eyes on the prize: the Iran deal. . . .

According to the White House’s negotiating partners in Tehran, it’s not their fault if Assad has to keep killing people. No, says Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, it’s those demanding Assad’s ouster who “are responsible for the bloodshed in Syria.” [But] of course it’s Zarif and Iranian allies—from Assad and Hizballah to Iraqi and other foreign Shiite-majority militias—who . . . are still responsible for the vast majority of the deaths in the Syrian conflict. It’s Assad and his Iranian patrons who are responsible for turning what started as a peaceful protest movement against the regime into a civil war that has caused around a quarter-million deaths in four and a half years.

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.