Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) has received harsh criticism for its apparent cooperation with China’s efforts to repress information about the severity and danger of the COVID-19 outbreak. But the WHO’s credibility should already be suspect given the fact that it has consistently singled out the Jewish state for calumny. Mitchell Bard writes:

A year ago, WHO member countries voted 96 to eleven—with the U.S. in opposition—for an annual resolution blaming Israel for “health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory [sic], including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.” While one might expect the WHO to be apolitical, it—like nearly every other UN-associated organ—is used by Israel’s enemies as a platform for viciously attacking the Jewish state. What may be even more disturbing is that democracies that should know better—including France, Belgium, and Sweden—joined in the unjustified condemnation of Israel.

[O]ut of 21 items on the WHO agenda, the only one focused on a specific country concerned Israel. This targeting of Israel has been going on since at least 2000.

In 2017, reportedly under pressure from Syria, the WHO hid a positive report on Israel. This was especially galling given that four years earlier the Israel Defense Forces had begun treating hundreds of sick and wounded Syrians at field hospitals staffed by volunteers in the Golan Heights. . . . The operation was shut down in September 2018 after Syria’s brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad reestablished control over southern Syria in that country’s civil war.

While the WHO condemns Israel for health conditions on the Golan Heights, it says nothing about Assad’s attacks on hundreds of Syrian medical facilities and the humanitarian disaster he has created in the war against his own people. The WHO simply refers to “attacks” as if no one is responsible.

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.