The nominally pro-Israel lobbying group J Street recently claimed that on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, 84 percent of American Jews favor Obama over Netanyahu. However, writes Ben Cohen, the statistic is a mendacious distortion of the actual data—one that says something about the group and its mission:

After being called out [over its claim], J Street trotted out a three-month poll it conducted in which 84 percent of respondents said they would support a deal that would prevent Iran from weaponizing its nuclear program. Frankly, so would I—but that is not the deal that Obama is negotiating, and to claim that people who genuinely don’t want to see an Iranian nuclear weapon are supporting the president over Israel’s prime minister, even as he makes concession after concession to the mullahs, is an outright, willful lie. . . .

Now look at where this dangerous nonsense leads us. A significant number of Democrats are threatening to boycott Netanyahu’s forthcoming speech on Iran to Congress, thereby allowing themselves to be co-opted by the anti-Semites of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Europe is bewildered and scared; after all, the French, British, and German leaders have clearly identified both Islamism and anti-Semitism as civilizational threats, and now the American president is telling them otherwise. Dissidents and democracy activists fighting Islamism in the Arab and wider Islamic worlds have been abandoned, after being told, in effect, that they don’t know what they’re talking about. And resentment toward America’s current leadership continues to grow among its allies: not just the Israelis, but the conservative Arab states like Saudi Arabia, too.

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.