While the U.S. Department of State is poised to declare Islamic State’s mass murder of Yazidis a “genocide,” it is unlikely to recognize the mass murder of Iraqi and Syrian Christians as such. Nina Shea explains:

It is difficult not to conclude that the reason for the administration’s reluctance to designate a Christian genocide is not for lack of evidence but for political reasons. One possible obstacle is the Genocide Convention’s requirement that states act to “prevent and protect” the victims of genocide. . . .

But might there be another political reason at the root of the administration’s reluctance to recognize this Islamist genocide of Christians? Consider how it would parallel the reason that Holocaust scholars have found for President Roosevelt’s silence about the genocide of Jews in the Holocaust: “Nazi propaganda, which portrayed the Allied involvement in the war as being on behalf of ‘the Jews,’” led him instead to “refer in general to the aim of ending the mistreatment and murder of civilians under Axis rule.” That silence proved devastating for European Jews and came to be seen as a historic moral failing. . . .

In the face of IS’s anti-“crusader” propaganda, might the Obama administration be on the verge of making that same mistake, of silence, over the genocide of Christians? Whether the official U.S. list of genocide victims includes or excludes Christians will affect the persecuted Christians enormously: in raising humanitarian aid, receiving asylum, overcoming de-facto discrimination in UN resettlement programs, receiving restitution and reparation for seized land, and securing a place at the peace-negotiations table. It would also give these two-millennia-old Christian communities a sense of justice.

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.