The eyes of all New Yorkers will be on the Bush administration and the American delegation at the Olympics to see how they deal with the refusal of Iran’s judo champion, Arash Miresmaeili, to compete against an Israeli athlete. Reuters yesterday quoted a statement of the Iranian National Olympic Committee explaining Mr. Miresmaeili’s position: “This is a general policy of our country to refrain from competing against athletes of the Zionist regime and Arash Miresmaeili has observed this policy.” The wire quoted Mr. Miresmaeili as telling the official Islamic Republic News Agency: “Although I have trained for months and am in shape I refused to face my Israeli rival in sympathy with the oppressed Palestinian people.”

Iran’s treatment of the Israeli athlete is absurd. The Palestinian Arabs are oppressed because of their own corrupt, terrorist leadership and because of the neighboring Arab dictatorships. There’s not a democrat among them. With their terrorist attacks on Israeli civilian targets and American civilians and diplomats, the Palestinian Arabs are far more oppressors than oppressed.

It’s a mark of what Iran has been able to get away with that its own athletes are at the Olympics at all. We were reminded of this over the weekend while reading Norman Podhoretz’s masterful tour of the horizon in the war on terror, “World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win,” coming in the September issue of the magazine Commentary and now available on the publication’s Web site, Commentary.org.

Mr. Podhoretz reminds us of President Bush’s January 29, 2002, speech naming Iran as part of the “axis of evil.” Mr. Podhoretz reminds us of Mr. Bush’s speech of June 24, 2002, in which Mr. Bush said “nations are either with us or against us in the war against terror….Every nation actually committed to peace will stop the flow of money, equipment, and recruits to terrorist groups seeking the destruction of Israel, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hizbullah. Every nation committed to peace must stop the shipment of Iranian supplies to these groups.”

And Mr. Podhoretz quotes the distinguished scholar Fouad Ajami as disheartened and fretting, by 2004, that it had become clear that Mr. Bush would not “sack the Iranian theocracy.” Mr. Podhoretz speculates that this lament may have been a result of “the caution George Bush felt it necessary to adopt in seeking reelection.” Yet Mr. Podhoretz offers hope that if Mr. Bush wins re-election, he will go on fighting, much as Truman sent American troops to Korea in 1950 after winning the election in 1948.

There is plenty of opposition to a strong stand. The New York Times had an editorial about Iran over the weekend in which it said America should deal with the Iranian nuclear threat at the moment by supporting the diplomatic efforts of France and Germany. No word there about Iranian support for terrorism against Israel and America, about its harboring of al Qaeda, about its repression of its own people, its murder of a Canadian journalist.

The challenge America and the world faces in Iran isn’t just about the threat of a nuclear-armed state ruled by Islamic extremists.

It’s about helping the Iranian people create a democracy in Tehran. It’s about the faith that a democratic Iran would find a way to live in peace with the Jewish state and that Israeli athletes, and American ones, can compete with Iranians without being singled out for approbrium. An important sense of which way the wind is blowing will be found in how the world reacts to the anti-Israel stunt that is being attempted by the Iranian judo champ.