In December, Nikki Haley, the current U.S. ambassador to the UN, denounced the world body for its condemnation of America’s recognizing of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Her performance put many in mind of a 1975 speech given by her late predecessor, Daniel P. Moynihan, assailing the UN’s infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution. Six years later, Moynihan returned to the same themes in a seminal Commentary essay, “Joining the Jackals,” in which he skewered the then-outgoing Carter administration for abstaining from two anti-Israel votes at the Security Council and for the generally craven attitude of its UN delegation. Greg Weiner, the author of a biography of Moynihan, revisits the statesman’s career in Turtle Bay and his commitment to Israel and to the West—and to the meaning of words. (Interview by Jonathan Silver. Audio, 31 minutes. Options for download and streaming are available at the link below.)

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.