While the Hizballah-loving Jeremy Corbyn has won the leadership of Britain’s Labor party, Sahra Wagenknecht, one of two leaders of Germany’s hard-left die Linke party, recently made headlines by equating the aerial bombing campaign against Islamic State with the group’s own barbaric deeds. Her opinions are shared by her fellow party members, as Benjamin Weinthal reports:

Die Linke is a formidable force in German politics. . . . This amalgam of West German leftists, trade unionists, and East German communists (including many former Stasi officers) catapulted itself into the largest opposition bloc in the 2013 national election. . . .

Die Linke’s foreign-policy spokesman, the Bundestag deputy Wolfgang Gehrcke, has attended pro-Hizballah and pro-Hamas demonstrations in Germany. He participated in a 2006 rally where “We are all Hizballah” blared from the loudspeakers. Many of the party’s parliamentarians hold views from a catalogue of horrors. Christine Buchhloz, [for instance], supports the “legitimate resistance” of Hamas and Hizballah. . . .

Wagenknecht and Buchholz’s refusal to participate in the standing ovation for . . . Shimon Peres during his Holocaust remembrance speech in the Bundestag was praised by Germany’s neo-Nazi NPD party. [Furthermore], die Linke has a peculiar obsession with fanning the flames of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement in Germany.

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.