At a public event on Monday, the Vermont senator and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, while insisting that he is “not anti-Israel,” declared that the Jewish state “is now run by a right-wing—dare I say—racist government.” Ariel Bolstein comments:

Sanders didn’t explain his use of one of the worst insults that exist in American and Western discourse. Average onlookers . . . were expected simply to believe him. The problem is that there are millions who will. And worse—even those who don’t believe him will be influenced [by his remarks]. . . .

An analysis of Sanders’ previous comments about Israel demonstrates that insulting the Jewish state is not a one-time slip-up by a demagogue senator who is trying to gather votes from the fringes of the Democratic party. In Sanders’ case, this is his approach: in everything having to do with Israel, he isn’t deterred by half-truths or even outright lies that reference the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes. There are plenty of examples.

When Sanders wanted to win the Democratic nomination in 2016, he claimed that Israel had killed over 10,000 innocent Palestinians, launched indiscriminate attacks in the Gaza Strip, and shelled hospitals in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. The senator not only inflated the numbers by several orders of magnitude, he even outdid the Hamas spokespersons in creating a false narrative that the IDF was intentionally attacking the civilian population.

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.