Even after the 2015 nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic went into effect, certain sanctions remained in place. The Associated Press reported this week that the Obama White House tried to help Tehran avoid them, until American banks refused to participate. Sohrab Ahmari comments:

[In 2016,] the Obama Treasury Department issued a special license that would have permitted the Tehran regime to convert some $6 billion in assets held in Omani rials into U.S. dollars before eventually trading them for euros. That middle step—the conversion from Omani to American currency—would have violated sanctions that remained in place even after the nuclear accord. . . . The Obama administration, [to make the currency conversion possible], pressed American banks to sidestep rules barring Iran from the U.S. financial system; the only reason the transaction didn’t take place was because the banks had better legal and moral sense than the Obama Treasury. . . .

[At the same time], the Obama administration reassured the public and lawmakers that Tehran would “continue to be denied access to the world’s largest financial and commercial market,” i.e., the U.S., as then-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew testified before Congress in July 2015, shortly after the nuclear deal was signed. That was a lie. And it would be repeated by other Obama officials.

So much for liberals’ supposed Wilsonian commitment to “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.” A better way to describe subterfuge and secrecy objectively aimed at enriching an enemy of the United States would be to call it—oh, what’s the word?—collusion.

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.