Citizens of the Jewish state, per capita, consume more turkey than those of any other country, reports Nicholas Nehamas:

According to the market-research firm Indexbox, Israelis eat 25.4 pounds of turkey annually and Americans put away 17.5 pounds of the mouthwatering fowl each year. Because of land and climate constraints, red meat costs a lot of money in Israel. Turkey has become a popular alternative and is often served in pita bread as shawarma.

In the U.S., we’ve known about the bird’s succulent white meat since the 17th century. The Aztecs and other native cultures also relied on Meleagris ocellata—a different breed from our North American Meleagris gallopavo—for meat and eggs. And the United Kingdom has long celebrated Christmas with a dinner of roast turkey.

But the rest of the world didn’t start catching on until the 1990s. . . . After Israel and the U.S., the top per-capita consumers of turkey are Canada (9.2lbs per year), the European Union (7.9), Brazil (4.2) and Australia (3.7).

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.