In a recent interview, the secretary-general of the Red Crescent spoke frankly about Hamas’s policy of deliberately launching rockets from hospitals during the 2014 Gaza War and noted that jihadists working with Hamas in the Sinai even opened fired on him and other Muslims aid workers. While such brazen behavior is hardly news, Western journalists, readers, and State Department officials have time and again shown themselves gullible enough to believe Hamas’s version of events. Liel Leibovits comments:

Israel, for all of its flaws and its faults, is an open and democratic society. Its armed forces obey rules of engagement that are more restrictive than those under which American or European forces operate. Israel also grants the local and the international media largely unfettered access to its cities and to battlefields. Israel, therefore, has virtually no incentive to lie about easily verifiable matters of fact that occur in public while operating under a global microscope. . . .

Which leaves us with Hamas. Why is the group blatantly falsifying facts? The answer here is simple, too: because they can get away with it. . . . What the terrorist organization offered the world in Gaza in 2014 was a version of the story contained in its founding charter, which is only the latest chapter in a very old story: the Jews are sucking our blood. Deliver some version of this libelous tale, and no one rushes to examine the evidence. After all, anti-Semitic atrocity stories don’t need evidence to back them up; they’re part of a larger conspiracy theory, in which “the Jews” are responsible for the world’s misfortunes.

Why do Western governments and news organizations endorse this insane medieval garbage? Well, that’s also easy to explain: if the people you are trying to strike deals with believe that a malignant sea-serpent is their main foe in life, who are you to disabuse them of that idea, however idiotic? Western governments and news organizations are happy to pay at least lip service to vile and nonsensical anti-Semitic canards to ease their commercial relationships with unfree societies whose leaders repeatedly blame the Jews for their perpetual failures. The price of not doing so might be high. The price of doing so is guaranteed to be low, especially when you dress up the old anti-Semitism in fancier garb and call it anti-Zionism.

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.