After some deliberation, the UN Human Rights Council has chosen as its new “special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” a dedicated Israel-hater named Michael Lynk, who has declared his objections to the Jewish state’s existence and, on September 14, 2001, blamed the U.S. for provoking the attacks on its soil. The U.S., Elliott Abrams notes, has declined to object:

[The appointment of Lynk is] a travesty of justice, a breach of the UN’s own rules—and absolutely par for the course when it comes to the UN and Israel. In his press conference on the Human Rights Council’s session, which thank God is now over, the U.S ambassador to the UN, Keith Harper, did not even mention this despicable appointment. He did however, denounce the “especially disturbing” resolution to set up a database of businesses operating in settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights. The resolution “only serves to reinforce the council’s one-sided actions against Israel” and exceeded the council’s authority, he said. Better than nothing, I guess.

Lynk will never set foot in Israel or the Palestinian territories, because the Israeli reaction to this nonsense is to deny these “special rapporteurs” a visa. He can write his report in Ontario, [where he now resides], and there will be no surprises in it: another in the long line of UN assaults on the Jewish state.

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.