Sinn Fein, the Irish pro-independence party that for a long time sponsored the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as its terrorist wing, allied itself with the anti-Israel cause many decades ago. Now, writes Ruth Dudley Edwards, it still propagates hatred of the Jews and their country:

Sinn Fein . . . trains its gullible followers to be virulent anti-Semites. They fly Palestinian flags much less as a mark of their compassion for Palestinians than as a sign of their hatred of Israelis. Loyalists, [who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom], see Israel as beleaguered and fly Israeli flags not because they hate Palestinians, but because they hate republicans [i.e., those in favor of detaching Northern Ireland from Britain]. . . .

Pro-Zionist in the 1920s and 30s, when [Zionism] was seen as a plucky anti-British movement for self-determination, once the state [of Israel] came into being public opinion shifted to seeing it as a colony imposed by the British on the native population. Ignoring Jews’ ancestral rights and Arab intransigence and inhuman treatment of refugees, Israelis became the bad guys and Irish political leaders unthinkingly endorsed policies that would lead to the total destruction of Israel. . . .

Sinn Fein is stepping up its anti-Israeli activism, since these days it needs, for electoral reasons in the south, to pretend it wants reconciliation with unionists, so its foot soldiers need a legitimate target for hate.

It has been worryingly successful in spreading its poison. . . . Dublin’s Lord Mayor Micheál Mac Donncha is Sinn Fein’s most recent anti-Israeli poster boy. . . . He’s been a key player in persuading the council to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS), which seeks to strangle Israel, and demands the expulsion of its ambassador.

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.