The American Studies Association (ASA) made headlines last year for endorsing a boycott of Israel and then retreating from its position. It recently elected a BDS supporter as its president, and three additional supporters as members of its four-person governing council. They include Steven Salaita, whose blatantly anti-Israel pronouncements cost him a job at the University of Illinois. David Bernstein comments:

It would hardly be surprising for the ASA to stand up for Salaita on academic freedom or free-speech grounds (even though Salaita himself is an opponent of academic freedom when it comes to supporting Israel); but electing him to a leadership position signifies a tacit endorsement of his incendiary rhetoric in general and his Judeophobic sentiments in particular, which puts the ASA out beyond the ordinary lunatic fringe and into the racist lunatic fringe.

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.