Last February, a student at Connecticut College discovered a Facebook post from the previous summer in which philosophy professor Andrew Pessin compared Hamas to “a rabid pit-bull.” The student complained to the professor via email; he apologized, admitted that the post could be misconstrued as speaking of Gazans in general, and took down the post. Then, David Bernstein writes, things got interesting:

[The student], unsatisfied, complained to other members of the university community. Just before spring break, the school newspaper published three (obviously coordinated) opinion pieces condemning Pessin. . . . The final piece . . . absurdly, perhaps even libelously, claimed that “Professor Pessin directly condoned the extermination of a people.” Before publishing these pieces, the editor-in-chief . . . failed to contact Pessin for a response or comment.

Pessin, acting under some bad advice from university administrators, in turn wrote a rather craven letter to the editor further apologizing for the Facebook post. The apology, rather than ending the matter, was interpreted by campus activists as an admission of guilt.

The result was an international controversy that included threats against Pessin and his family, knee-jerk reactions from academic departments throughout Connecticut College denouncing their colleague’s purported racism, denunciation without investigation by the usual suspects in the world of academic philosophy, and a school-sponsored “community conversation on free speech, equity, and inclusion” that was so “inclusive” that the two Jewish students who spoke [and] criticized the Pessin witch-hunt were, depending on the account, either booed or at least “met with derision.” . . .

Shame on the Connecticut College faculty for feeding the digital lynch mob rather than standing up for their colleague, or at least wallowing in ignominious silence.

(For an update, please see here.)

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.