New Yorkers got a reminder of just what is the nature of our adversaries yesterday when the terror-sponsoring, nuclear-bomb-building, Holocaust-denying president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, released an open letter at the United Nations directed to the American public. It alleged that those “infamous aggressors,” the “Zionists,” have “imposed themselves on a substantial portion of the banking, financial, cultural and media sectors.”

It is a classically anti-Semitic myth that was mobilized in the effort to kill millions of Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, the occurrence of which Mr. Ahmadinejad denies. It is a timely reminder, coming as it does at a moment when there is a little-noticed divide among New York’s two senators, both senior figures in the Democratic Party, about how to handle Iran. In an interview with the Daily News that the newspaper published yesterday, Senator Schumer said of Iran, “I really think that they are an evil country, and do you talk to an evil country?”

Senator Clinton, by contrast, in her Halloween speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, accused the Bush administration of “a simplistic division of the world into good and evil. They refuse to talk to anyone on the evil side.” She called that “dangerously unrealistic.”

Well, chalk us up with Mr. Schumer in this matter. If Mrs. Clinton persists in deriding as “simplistic” the description of the Iranian regime as evil, she can count on the Iranian leadership to keep issuing anti-Semitic statements, arresting and beating democratic activists in its own country, and funding terrorists in Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel. If the American people get wind of it, as they probably will, and if Mrs. Clinton doesn’t revise her position on the matter, we’d reckon that Mr. Schumer stands a better chance of getting elected president than she does.