While it may be true that Facebook struggles to strike a balance between avoiding censorship and upholding some basic standards of decency, Ruthie Blum argues that it is failing—mostly because Islamic fundamentalists have learned how to manipulate its rules.

Angry Islamists, bent on silencing . . . “blasphemers” and “apostates,” troll social media and abuse Facebook’s complaint system. It’s a tactic that works like a charm every time, as conservative and pro-Israel individuals and groups—whose posts are disproportionately targeted by political opponents and removed by Facebook for “violating community standards”—can attest. . . .

For its part, Facebook continues to claim that the sheer volume of material it deals with every day makes it virtually impossible even for its algorithms to distinguish accurately between posts that violate its own “community standards” and those that do not.

This claim has been refuted by the attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, head of Shurat HaDin – The Israel Law Center, who has been engaged in a billion-dollar, class-action lawsuit against Facebook for failing to prevent or halt anti-Israel incitement on its pages. Darshan-Leitner decided to put her premise to the test at the end of December 2015, by creating two fictitious Facebook pages—“Stop Palestinians” and “Stop Israelis”—and posting hate-filled comments and clips on each. . . .

[After] two days, . . . Shurat HaDin reported both pages to Facebook and requested that they be removed. “Facebook was very quick to respond to our reports,” [Darshan-Leitner] said on a YouTube video. “On the same day that we filed the report, the ‘Stop Palestinians’ page . . . was removed by Facebook. . . . [However], the “Stop Israelis” page . . . was not removed. We received a response from Facebook stating that the page was ‘not in violation of Facebook’s rules.’”

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.