Paul Josef Goebbels spent his early adulthood searching for religious truth; he found the salvation he sought when he met Hitler. Algis Valiunas reviews Peter Longerich’s biography of the Nazi Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and compares its subject to another leading figure in Hitler’s regime:

Goebbels adored Hitler and loved his work. . . . Hannah Arendt never said so directly, but her account of Adolf Eichmann conveyed a man who supposedly took no pleasure in the killing of Jews or in seeing them dead. . . . That is what Arendt called banal, as though such indifference deserved a place in hell less hot than that reserved for the maniacal true believers. Goebbels was a consummate bureaucrat, but he was also one of the maniacs. The Führer occupied the god-shaped hole in what passed for the proud underling’s soul, and Goebbels never again felt a pang for his youthful infatuation with the peaceable Galilean. He revered the beast in man, wished that human beings could summon more of it, and delighted in the thought of the predator perfected for killing.

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.