The Islamic Republic of Iran likes to claim, at least to Western audiences, that it is opposed to Israel as a matter of policy and principle, but harbors no hostility toward Jews, and, moreover, that it’s 8,000 Jews enjoy tolerance and government protection and themselves want nothing to do with the “Zionist entity.” But that is a lie, as evidenced by the state-sponsored Center for Jewish Studies, which is quite unlike similarly named institutions in the West. After reading through many of the hundreds of articles the center publishes on its website, Behnam Gholipour reports:

In many of the texts published by this hate-filled website, Jews are presented as a “bloodthirsty,” “deviant” people who are guilty of “infanticide.” The site tries to present Israel and the Jewish people as one and the same, and claims “Israeli infanticide” is permitted in Judaism. One article claims that the roots of “child-killing” by Zionists in Palestine lies in the Old Testament, which “both the Jews and Christians believe in.”

Another article, filed under the category “Jewish Ethnic Traits,” explicitly calls “Jews and Judaism” perfect lab subjects for psychologists and psychiatrists to observe in order to verify their theories about pathological behavior in action. Echoing many Islamic Republic officials, another claims, “one of the most distinct characteristics of the Jews is their animosity towards religion and God, . . . even murdering divine prophets.”

In at least 30 articles, the Jewish Studies Center has tried to portray the Jewish people as promoters of corruption, drug trafficking, superstition, racism, and homosexuality around the world. . . . Several other articles . . . try to portray Jews as responsible, variously, for cancer, climate change, the production of weapons of mass destruction, bioterrorism, and efforts to alter humans genetically. In other words, they blame the Jews for every problem the world faces, and the ones it doesn’t.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].