In the midst of the Battle of the Bulge, a unit of the Waffen-SS massacred 84 captured American soldiers near the Belgian village of Malmedy. Having taken hundreds of members of the unit prisoner after the war, the Army arranged for their interrogation and trial, assigning Colonel Willis Everett the unenviable task of defending them in the courtroom. Everett tried to make the most of their stories of mistreatment at the hands of their interrogators—most of whom were German-speaking Jewish intelligence officers—and thus unleashed a familiar brew of anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and Holocaust inversion. Reviewing a recent study of the episode by Steven P. Remy, Gabriel Schoenfeld writes:

Remy shows that Everett had come to regard the Allied occupation of Germany as “corrupt and misguided.” Worse, his sympathies “lay not with the victims of Nazi Germany but with Germans—including former Nazis—victimized, in his mind, by ignominious defeat and a vengeance-filled occupation.” Everett’s fervor was fueled by a prejudice not uncommon at the time: believing that American military justice had been “subverted by vengeance-seeking Jews,” i.e., the interrogators.

In his anti-Semitism, as Remy shows, Everett was swimming in a broader current. Warren Magee, the American defense counsel for the last seven Nazi war criminals condemned to death at Nuremberg, regarded the Allied war-crime trials as “Mosaic” justice. . . .

As Everett and like-minded personages floated their accounts of German prisoners subjected to physical abuse, stories began to appear in various quarters of the American press. . . . It did not take long for the story to seep into the mainstream media and central institutions. Time hailed Everett for revealing abuses that “read like a record of Nazi atrocities.” . . .

The problem with all of this is that the allegations of abuse were false, [products of] a coordinated campaign devised by the SS defendants themselves while awaiting trial.

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.