Last week, Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, both known for spouting the vilest accusations against Israel and its American Jewish supporters, co-sponsored a resolution affirming “that all Americans have the right to participate in boycotts in pursuit of civil and human rights at home and abroad, as protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.” The text makes no explicit mention of the Jewish state, but Omar made clear in an interview what was already evident amidst all its rhetoric about free speech and American traditions: namely, that the resolution is intended to protect the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS). David French explains that the resolution rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of American law:

Individual anti-Semites have just as much a constitutional right to boycott Israeli products as individual racists have a constitutional right to refuse to patronize black-owned businesses. The fact that the Constitution protects such conduct doesn’t render it any less repugnant. . . . Supporters of BDS, however, must reckon with some inconvenient facts and some rather important laws.

[In 2014, for instance], I co-authored [a] letter . . . to Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California system, warning her that if the student-employee union voted to join the BDS movement, the University of California system risked serious violations of federal law, state law, and its own nondiscrimination policies. How? “The consequences of any boycott would be grave for Israelis working and studying alongside [union] members, subjecting them to scrutiny, reprisals, and retaliation merely because of their national origin or the national origin of their sponsors or affiliates.”

[Indeed an] analogy to white supremacists holds up quite well. Yes, you have a right to join the tiki-torch brigade and march to your heart’s content. You have a right not to watch professional sports because most of the athletes are non-white. But the instant you form or join a public accommodation—or the instant you join an arm of the state—your discrimination becomes unlawful.

The bottom line here is clear: when Ilhan Omar supports BDS, she shouldn’t be permitted to wrap herself in the American flag. The Constitution grants her the same rights it grants all other bigots, but for the movement to mean anything it has to violate the law, including the very non-discrimination statutes that were designed to lead the United States out of its Jim Crow past.

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.