Last month, Kenneth Marcus, the recently appointed assistant secretary of education for civil rights, announced that his office plans to reopen an investigation into an incident in 2011 in which an anti-Israel organization allegedly charged an admission fee only to Jewish students. The Department of Education had closed its investigation into the affair in 2014, finding no wrongdoing. On Wednesday, the New York Times published a heavy-handed front-page story about Marcus’s decision, which confusingly accuses Marcus of supporting a “definition of anti-Semitism that  . . . explicitly defines Judaism as not only a religion but also an ethnic origin.” As Noah Rothman argues, the article exhibits a severely warped understanding of anti-Semitism, and of what it means to be pro-Palestinian:

[The article] contended that Marcus’s decision has paved the way for the Education Department to adopt a “hotly contested definition of anti-Semitism” that includes: denying Jews “the right to self-determination,” claiming that the state of Israel is a “racist endeavor,” and applying a double standard to Israel not “expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” [But this] is precisely the same definition used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [and] adopted almost in total by Barack Obama’s State Department.

[The Times’s author, Erica] Green, went so far as to say that this not-so-new definition for anti-Semitism has, according to Arab-American activists, declared “the Palestinian cause anti-Semitic.” So that is the Palestinian cause? Denying Jews the right to self-determination, calling the state of Israel itself a racist enterprise, and holding it to nakedly biased double standards? So much for the two-state solution.

Perhaps the biggest tell in the Times piece was its . . . inability to distinguish between pro-Palestinian activism and anti-Israel agitation. The complaint the Education Department is preparing to reinvestigate involves . . . an event hosted by the group Belief Awareness Knowledge and Action (BAKA). . . . Green did not dwell on the group, which allegedly discriminated against Jews and pro-Israeli activists. If she had, she’d have reported that, just a few weeks before this incident, BAKA staged another event on the Rutgers campus—a fundraiser for the organization USTOGAZA, which provided aid to the campaign of “flotillas” challenging an Israeli blockade of Gaza. USTOGAZA’s links to the Turkey-based organization Insani Yardim Vakfi, which has long been associated with support for Hamas-led terrorist activities, rendered the money raised in this event legally suspect. Eventually . . . even BAKA conceded the point. . . .

Some might attribute the Times’s neutral portrayal of groups that tacitly support violence and people like Omar Barghouti—an activist who “will never accept a Jewish state in Palestine” and has explicitly endorsed “armed resistance” against Jews, who he insists are “not a people”—to ignorance, as though that would neutralize the harm this dispatch might cause. But [the] benefit of the doubt only extends so far. Even the charitably inclined should have discovered its limits by now.

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.