Known as “the Latvian Lindbergh,” Herberts Cukurs was, in the 1930s, a hero in the young country of Latvia for his daring aeronautical exploits, at least one of which suggested that he did not share the original Lindbergh’s attitude towards Jews. Robert Philpot writes:

[I]n December 1939, [Cukurs] returned from . . . a 2,900-mile flight to Palestine, to enthrall Riga’s Jewish Club with a talk, complete with photographs, describing the sights, sounds, and smells of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Petaḥ Tikva, and Rishon Letzion. . . . This was not the only indication that, his fierce nationalism and occasional anti-Semitic remarks aside, Cukurs was, as one Latvian Jew later put it, “not really considered a Jew-hater.” He was, for instance, often seen with Jewish intellectuals in Riga’s cafes.

Yet his activities following the Nazi conquest of Latvia in 1941 belied this picture:

Cukurs . . . became second-in-command of the notorious Arājs Kommando, a 300-strong Latvian paramilitary group which enthusiastically participated in the murder of the country’s Jews. . . . Max Tukacier, a young Jew who had known Cukurs for over a decade, . . . saw the aviator “beat to death ten to fifteen people.” And Cukurs was recorded giving orders to his commandos at the scenes of the Judenaktionen. . . on November 30 and December 8, 1941, when roughly 25,000 Jews were murdered in or near the Rumbula forest.

After participating in the bloodletting of Riga’s killing fields, Cukurs and his men traveled around Latvia’s villages, towns, and small cities, helping round up and murder Jews. Within five months, 60,000 Latvian Jews had perished.

But the most extraordinary—perhaps unique—aspect of Cukurs’s story was what happened next. Like many other war criminals, the Latvian . . . escaped to South America after the war. But, unlike his fellow killers, Cukurs arrived in Brazil under his own name—and then almost immediately began seeking out members of the country’s Jewish community. Cukurs portrayed himself as both a political exile who had been targeted by the Communists and a man who had rescued Jews during the Shoah.

Several survivors in Israel knew the truth however, leading the Mossad—in an episode Philpot describes as worthy of the best of spy thrillers—to track down and kill Cukurs in 1965.

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.