RUTHFULLY YOURS

While the date may be extended slightly, today marks the official deadline for concluding a U.S.–Iranian atomic-weapons deal. One might think that Obama’s supposed partners in peace would use conciliatory words befitting the occasion. Instead, top Iranians keep kicking hot gravel in his face.

• Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei recently declared that America “is stubborn, difficult to deal with, breaks promises, and is a backstabber.”

• “I will not allow foreigners to come and talk to the nation’s dear scientists and children and interrogate them,” Khamenei said last month. “Our rude and brazen enemy expects us to let them talk to our scholars and scientists about a fundamental national and domestic [achievement], but such permission will never be issued.”

• When a crowd that Khamenei addressed early this month chanted “Death to America,” he got swept up in the excitement. “Yes,” Khamenei chimed in. “I, too, say death to America!”

• As Amir Taheri reported in the June 21 New York Post, Iran stages a Death to America Conference every November, to coincide with the 444-day kidnapping of U.S. diplomats that began in November 1979. A few years ago, the Islamic Republic also added an End of America seminar every February.

But not even that was enough for the ayatollahs. They organized yet another Death to America conclave this month in the town of Hamdan.

• Of course, anti-Americanism is the gasoline that fuels the Iranian regime. As Dr. Hassan Abbasi, a speaker at the latest anti-U.S. colloquium explained, Iran’s purpose is to “work tirelessly for the destruction of the United States.” He warned that Tehran has “tens of thousands of sleeping cells” inside this country that would be triggered “at the proper time” to demolish America from within.

None of this seems to deter the enthusiasm of Team Obama, which is as enthralled as ever about a deal.

As Fredrik Stanton, author of Great Negotiations: Agreements That Changed the Modern World, observes, “Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the negotiation is how the unwavering hostility of the Iranian government is exceeded only by the tenacity of the Obama Administration’s wishful thinking.”

“Conservative experts have long warned that the Obama administration is seeking a dangerous nuclear agreement with Iran,” writes Fred Fleitz of the Center for Security Policy. “This agreement is now so bad that liberal foreign-policy experts and former Obama officials have turned against it.” Fleitz points to a Washington Post op-ed by Ray Takeyh, a onetime foreign-policy adviser to Obama.

Takeyh believes that the details of the pending deal “offer the theocracy all that it wants.” As he concluded Sunday:

It would permit an elaborate research-and-development program and would likely rely on an inspection regime that falls short of indispensable ‘anytime, anywhere’ access. In the meantime, the sanctions architecture will be diminished, and the notion of ever ‘snapping back’ sanctions into place once they are lifted is delusional.

The result of all this most likely will be continued atomic R&D by the world’s foremost purveyor of radical-Islamic terrorism. Come 2025, they will have the capacity to build one or more bombs within a year. At that point, America will have twelve months to do . . . exactly what?

Come 2025, Iran will have the capacity to build one or more bombs within a year. At that point, America will have twelve months to do . . . exactly what?

Once Tehran tests such a device, probably underground, the world will start thinking about what the ayatollahs might do with such weapons above ground:

Why not unleash a mushroom cloud over Riyadh, capitol of Shiite Iran’s Sunni arch-enemy, Saudi Arabia? Humanitarian and environmental apocalypse aside, this disruption in oil supplies would shatter the world economy.

Why not lob nuclear warheads at Israel and turn some 8 million Jews into radioactive ashes? Why should Hitler be the only one to have his way with the Jews?

Why not deliver one or more backpack nukes to jihadists based in America? Instruct them to detonate them in Grand Central Terminal, the Lincoln Memorial, and Disneyland — preferably simultaneously. That will put the Great Satan in his place.

If Kerry and Obama seem concerned about such scenarios, it doesn’t show. The whole world is watching these two salivate for a deal, any deal.

Such an agreement might secure for Kerry a Nobel Peace Prize to match the one that Obama won for completing eight months in office.

Obama, for his part, wants at least one foreign-policy “accomplishment” to display in his presidential library and museum. Right now, its international-relations wing would promise such stirring exhibits as “The Failed Russian Reset,” “The Vanishing Red Line in the Syrian Sand,” “The Charlie Hebdo March: America AWOL,” and “Benghazi: Americans Fatally Abandoned in the Desert.”

The Jewish Rapid Response Committee knows precisely what to do about this potentially fatal nonsense: Take to the streets and scream “Hell No!”