With the expiration of copyright protections on Hitler’s political manifesto, it has been republished by a German scholarly institute, complete with extensive annotations. Contrary to the longstanding belief in Germany that the book was best kept away from the public, Peter Ross Range defends the decision to publish it:

Fears that Hitler’s feverish but rambling and repetitive writing would somehow incite a neo-Nazi revival are dismissed by most observers. The pure text has for years been posted on extremist right-wing websites, in German and other languages, and has not yet triggered a fascist groundswell. . . . For contemporary readers of any political persuasion, digging into Hitler’s overheated, simplistic theories of racial domination and his tangled 1920s foreign-policy prescriptions is more in the nature of historical homework than political inspiration.

But the homework is important, and that’s what makes the arrival of the new critical edition of Mein Kampf a positive step. Closeting the single most important original source of the Nazi enterprise is hardly the way to educate and inoculate future German generations about their country’s darkest hour. Putting the academic imprimatur on the beast somehow tames it, converting it from inflammatory political pamphlet to interesting historical artifact. Now it can be taught for what it is. . . .

With the footnotes snaking throughout the text, the new Mein Kampf more closely resembles a theological treatise than a political tract.

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.