The British government is poised to change its laws so that the standard sexual-education curriculum—introduced when children are four years old and including information about homosexuality, transsexuality, and other variations—must be taught even in private religious schools. Sohrab Ahmari comments:

Dame Louise Casey, [a] senior government adviser, singled out Catholics in particular [as targets of the new regulations]. It is “not OK for Catholic schools to be homophobic and anti-gay marriage,” she testified in the House of Commons. “I have a problem with the expression of religious conservatism because I think often it can be anti-equalities.”

Yet it isn’t only Catholics who have found themselves on the sharp end of the government’s anti-religious drive. Last year, a government regulator threatened a private Jewish school in London with closure over its refusal to teach students about homosexuality. The failure to teach about homosexuality and gay marriage, the inspector said, deprives the students of “a full understanding of fundamental British values” and limits their “spiritual, moral, social, and cultural development and does not promote equality of opportunity in ways that take account of differing lifestyles.”

Bear in mind that that was under existing regulations and distinct from the [current changes to the law]. The new rules make it even easier for the government to control what private and religious schools can and can’t teach about sex and gender. Nor is it clear that parents would have a right to withdraw their children from these courses. That this is happening under a Tory government tells you that the future of religious freedom and parental autonomy in the UK is bleak.

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.