Wednesday marked the 80th anniversary of the death of Carl Laemmle, who produced such films as All Quiet on the Western Front, Frankenstein, and Dracula. Born in Laupheim, Germany in 1867, Laemmle came to the U.S. in 1884 and would go on to open one of Chicago’s first move theaters and to found what later became Universal Pictures. He also spent his final years trying to save Jews from the Nazis, as Rafael Medoff and Sandy Einstein write:

Laemmle experienced the Nazi menace [from afar] even before Adolf Hitler rose to power. The Berlin premiere of All Quiet on the Western Front in December 1930 was violently disrupted by a Nazi mob led by Joseph Goebbels. . . . In January 1932—more than a year before Hitler became chancellor of Germany—Laemmle outlined his fears in a letter to the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who had published occasional columns by Hitler.

Soon after the Nazis came to power, a street which had been named after Laemmle in his hometown of Laupheim was renamed Hitler Street. Soon after that, Universal closed its offices in Germany.

[At the time], one of the devices the Roosevelt administration used to obstruct immigration [was a legal requirement that] a would-be immigrant find an American citizen who would pledge to support him financially in the event he could not support himself. . . . Laemmle served as the financial guarantor for more than 300 Jews, many from Laupheim, to come to the United States. Some of them were his relatives; most were not. By the spring of 1938, U.S. officials stepped in to block Laemmle’s rescue initiative.

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.