On International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27), the Canadian prime minister issued a politely anodyne public statement that somehow omitted any mention of Jews. Gil Troy, addressing Prime Minister Trudeau in an open letter, explains why this enraged so many of his Jewish constituents:

The key to understanding the Holocaust and to empathizing with those of us who felt excluded when you didn’t single the Jews out for sympathy is realizing that the Nazis singled us out for slaughter. Yes, they killed others, targeting dissidents, Communists, and gays. But . . . killing Jews . . . was central to their ideology, to their mission. It was “the war against the Jews,” not just an unjust war. It wasn’t any kind of evil. It was a specific evil, with a particular pathology and focus. . . .

This visibility-invisibility issue is playing out to our disadvantage again. Shortly after your statement, Israeli [security forces] killed three heavily armed Palestinian terrorists in mid-attack outside Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate. The terrorists had killed Hadar Cohen, a sweet nineteen-year-old who had just been drafted two months earlier to serve her country. Yet CBS News proclaimed (in a headline that was amended after complaints): “Three Palestinians killed as daily violence grinds on.” . . .

It’s not “daily violence” that both sides provoke equally. It’s not Palestinians being killed as part of some routine. It’s Palestinian terrorists hunting Jews. . . .

Please reassure freedom-lovers worldwide that while positioning Canada to be a constructive force for peace, you won’t succumb to the moral laziness of a pox-on-both-your-houses evenhandedness, failing to see who is guiltiest for perpetuating this conflict.

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.