The German novelist Günter Grass, who died yesterday, devoted much energy to lecturing his fellow Germans on their need to come to terms with the Nazi past. He also condemned Israel with great enthusiasm. But not until 2006—just in time to promote a new memoir—did he admit that he had himself been a member of the Waffen-SS. The editors of the New York Sun write:

The German Nobel laureate spent most of his career as a moral scourge, preaching for peace, the environment, and all the good leftist causes. He was an opponent of the reunification of Germany into a single, free, anti-Communist democracy. . . . After the pipe-puffing pontificating prevaricator finally confessed his membership in the Waffen-SS, the head of the Germany’s Central Council of Jews, Charlotte Knobloch, declared that Grass’s “long years of silence over his own SS past reduce his earlier statements to absurdities.” . . .

It’s not our purpose here to get on too high a horse. It is a great thing to be a novelist, and some of Grass’s earlier works are literary accomplishments. Nor is it our aim to tar all leftists with the brush of Grass. But there is this recurrent streak on the left that reminds us from time to time that the left itself, with its dirigiste conceptions, is not so far from the rightist tyrants. The real moral high road is [the] avenue of liberty, a story that Günter Grass managed to miss.

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.