Citing, among other things, the body’s “continuing anti-Israel bias,” the State Department announced last week that the U.S is withdrawing from the UN Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Sohrab Ahmari applauds the decision:

UNESCO’s anti-Israel stances have been egregious even by [the United Nations’] debased standards, especially since 2011. That was the year the Palestinian Authority sought and won admission to UNESCO as a full member-state. . . . UNESCO only doubled down on its anti-Israel agitation in the years that followed, passing a raft of resolutions that denied the Jewish (and Christian) connection to Jerusalem and other holy sites in Israel.

A resolution on Jerusalem passed in May described Israel as the “occupying power,” denying the Jewish state’s claim to its own capital. Another Jerusalem resolution, approved last year, referred to the Western Wall and the Temple Mount by their Muslim names only. The agency thus attached the UN’s name to the odious Arab project to de-Judaize the City of David. . . .

[A]nti-Israelism and—it must be said—anti-Semitism are part of UNESCO’s diplomatic culture. When, in July this year, Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO called for a minute of silence for Holocaust victims, Cuba’s envoy objected: “Only the chairman can request a minute of silence. So with your indulgence, let me request, Mr. Chairman, that we stand for a minute of silence for all of the Palestinians who have died in the region.” Footage of the scene . . . shows numerous delegates standing up and clapping in favor of the Cuban motion. . . .

By withdrawing from UNESCO, . . . the Trump administration is sending an important message to the UN mandarins: that America doesn’t have infinite patience for international institutions that function as platforms for Jew-hatred. Long before Donald Trump came on the scene, that used to be a bipartisan American position.

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.