The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has a long history of slandering Israel and abetting terrorism while doing little to help ordinary Palestinians. Elliott Abrams comments on the most recent revelations:

In a new report, UN Watch has found a dozen UNRWA employees spewing anti-Semitic hatred and celebrating violence and terrorism in Internet postings. On Facebook pages where they identify themselves as UNRWA officials, these UN employees laud killing and kidnapping of Jews and Israelis and post vicious anti-Semitic cartoons and drawings.

This is our tax money at work: the United States is by far the largest contributor to UNRWA, at over $400 million. . . . So now what happens? Does UNRWA discipline or fire these individuals? Does Ban Ki-Moon step in? Nope, not so far. The only reaction has been—you probably guessed it—attacks on UN Watch by UNRWA’s spokesman. Not a word about these postings or the employees.

The next step should be action by the State Department and by Samantha Power, our UN ambassador, demanding that the UN wake up. . . . Either such conduct is tolerated or it is not. Either UNRWA reacts with disciplinary moves against these individuals, or it attacks UN Watch. If the latter, . . . the United States should suspend payments to UNRWA. We should not be financing the spreading of hatred by UN employees. It ought to be simple.

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.