In 2015, a group of students at Connecticut College drove the philosophy professor Andrew Pessin off campus, aided by faculty and administrators who were more than willing to throw him to the wolves. Pessin’s crime? First, he commented on the intolerance of fundamentalist Islam at a panel discussion about the Charlie Hebdo killings; then Khandaker dug up a Facebook post from the previous year in which Pessin compared Hamas to a “rabid dog.” Elliot Kaufman, reviewing a recent book on the affair, comments:

Did Pessin write anything wrong in his [Facebook] post? In one sense, perhaps it doesn’t matter. Wilfred Reilly’s research on hate-crime hoaxes has shown that where no racism is forthcoming, many activists will fabricate it. They know that lectures on structural racism aren’t enough; enemies are needed to spur radical action. On U.S. campuses, “the demand for bigots exceeds the supply,” Reilly has said. Still, the truth should guide our judgments. We owe it to Pessin to search for it.

A careful examination of text and context, the sort of thing that liberal arts colleges are supposed to teach, must conclude that Pessin meant to speak harshly only about Hamas. But . . . Katherine Bergeron, the college president, objected in a speech to the “vehemence” of the image in Pessin’s analogy. But, of course, she really only objected to a certain kind of vehemence. . . . It is indicative of the prevailing moral confusion that a university president would tut-tut a defender of a free society for his vehemence in opposing a genocidal terrorist group.

I decided to take a look at the Facebook profile of Lamiya Khandaker, [the student who led the crusade against Pessin], as she and fellow activists did to Pessin. . . . On May 7, 2019, Khandaker shared a graphic of the casualties from “Israel’s war on Gaza” and wrote the following comment: “Blame Hamas all you want, but numbers don’t lie. Our politicians are despicable dogs” (emphasis is mine). This from the woman who attempted to destroy a professor’s life for using almost the same “dehumanizing” language.

Turns out, it’s just standard heated political rhetoric, which she favors herself. The whole thing was a ploy, a cheap appeal to liberal compassion that works if you belong to a favored group and your opponent, a Jew, does not.

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.