Observing the media’s enthusiastic reporting of a new breakthrough in treating prostate cancer, Stephen Pollard notes an oddly consistent omission:

[Despite] all the coverage, you would [still] have to guess where the research was carried out: the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel. . . .

I wish I could believe this is just an honest mistake—that, purely by chance, the Israeli origins of a medical breakthrough had been left out. But I’m afraid I don’t think that—and I don’t think you will, either. It happens too often and too regularly for it to be pure chance. It’s what I call the soft-boycott strategy.

The campaign for BDS is so obviously racist and anti-Semitic, singling out the Jewish homeland alone in the world for boycott, that some of those who would rather Israel didn’t exist choose an alternative approach—ignoring anything remotely positive about Israel and focusing only on bad news that fits their anti-Israel agenda.

And it is an unfortunate fact that many of those Israel-haters work in the media and have the ability to shape perceptions. So Israeli scientific breakthroughs . . . are reported as if they have simply happened by magic, with their Israeli origins ignored.

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.