On Monday, the United Nations issued its most recent condemnation of Israel, a product of its Commission on the Status of Women. Sponsored by Ecuador on behalf of a group of 134 countries that include Iran, Sudan, and Yemen, the resolution blames Israel for every problem faced by Palestinian women, and calls for more money to be spent on programs that supposedly ameliorate these problems. Claudia Rosett writes:

It is illuminating—or it ought to be—that this latest anti-Israel resolution from the UN . . . followed a report on the same theme by the UN secretary-general, which included a litany of . . . at least fifteen UN offices, agencies, and/or special programs involved in assisting Palestinian women. With slight variations, this has been going on for decades. Yet somehow the UN reports, over and over, that the situation is endlessly dire. And while blaming and condemning Israel, the UN demands that yet more money flow to the aid of the Palestinians, via the UN.

This routine does not deserve to be described as “assistance” to women. There may be a smattering of aid in all this, but in the main this entire setup is a shakedown. Effectively it is an extortion racket that targets not only Israel (and its turf and legitimacy as a state) but also the U.S. (and its great rolling river of tax dollars).

This UN-abetted racket has become big business for Palestinian bosses, and a trough in which American tax dollars are transformed into a grand muck of resources that nourish the lies, bigotries, jobs, and wallets of far too many officials at the United Nations. And for the worst regimes associated with the UN (Iran and its pals come to mind) this is a political bonanza, underwritten by the Great Satan.

Any real remedy needs to start with cutting off the American money that helps bankroll this monstrous sham. And insofar as anyone’s aim is really to help Palestinian women, it’s hard to think of a better place to begin than by doing everything possible to remove from their lives—as well as ours—the pervasive and too often pernicious presence of the United Nations.

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.