Alexander and Leah Namdar have lived in the Swedish city of Gothenburg for 26 years, serving as emissaries of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Since there are no Jewish schools in Gothenburg, the Namdars have been homeschooling the youngest of their children. As a result, they have been involved in a six-year legal battle with the government in their efforts to be exempted from a 2010 law forbidding homeschooling, which states explicitly that exceptions will not be granted “on account of the religious or philosophical convictions of [a] family.” Sohrab Ahmari comments:

The public schools were religiously inadequate [for the Namdars] and, more importantly, physically unsafe for Jews, [given the pervasiveness of anti-Semitic attacks and harassment]. Private schools were no better. All schools, including “private” and religious schools, are government-funded in Sweden, and therefore required to accept all comers. For the Namdars, then, homeschooling was the only way to ensure their school-age children’s security and the Jewish character of their education. . . .

Throughout the [ensuing] litigation, the education board has never contested the quality of the Namdar children’s education. . . . Nor have municipal authorities been able to allay the family’s security concerns, which the Namdars argue fall under the special-circumstances exception to the anti-homeschooling rule. The city insists, however, that concerns about physical security and anti-Semitic violence don’t trigger the exception. . . . Officials have responded callously to [Rabbi Namdar’s] pleas, with one telling him last year: “Why don’t you leave the country?” . . .

The official zeal for rooting out religious homeschooling isn’t all that surprising when viewed against the backdrop of the country’s failure to integrate newcomers from Muslim lands. Swedes have good reason to worry about Islamist madrassas and other informal settings in which young Muslims are taught to hate the liberal society that has welcomed them. The city is going all out against the Namdars, I suspect, because it wants to make a show of applying the law uniformly and ruthlessly—as if to say: “See, we don’t permit the Jews to homeschool, either!”

But there is more to it than that. Nordic countries maintain narrow “opinion corridors” for acceptable ideas in the public square, and serious believers frequently find themselves locked out. Swedish authorities “don’t respect religion,” the rabbi told me. “They don’t understand that religion is part of your life. They see religion as a sort of hobby. And you either have a hobby, or you don’t.” Biblical religion is at best an amusing curiosity in this view and at worst a grave threat to secular order.

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.