For several years, Students for Justice in Palestine and other anti-Israel groups have been disseminating the claim that the Jewish state trains U.S. police officers to use brutal and lethal techniques, especially on black men—an accusation as absurd as it is malicious. In the wake of the death of George Floyd, this canard has taken on new life, leading the English actress Maxine Peake to claim that the police officer who murdered Floyd did so using a technique introduce by Israel. Jonathan Tobin comments on the uproar Peake inadvertently started in her own country, and an American parallel:

The Labor parliamentarian Rebecca Long-Bailey . . . got into hot water this week when she retweeted an article about Maxine Peake [containing] the lie about Israel and Floyd’s death with the comment, “Maxine Peake is an absolute diamond.” Labor’s former leader, [the anti-Semitic radical Jeremy Corbyn], might have joined her in that sentiment. But Corbyn’ssuccessor, Keith Starmer, . . . fired Long-Bailey as shadow education secretary, a post that would have ensured her membership in Britain’s cabinet if Labor were to win the next election.

But while Labor was attempting to change course, the most important newspaper in the United States has been heading in a different direction. Charlotte Greensit was hired as part of a changing of the guard at the Times after a staff revolt. . . . Greensit has personally tweeted defenses of the anti-Semitic statements by Representative Ilhan Omar, and argued that Hamas was justified in seeking to invade Israel. But in 2017, she also specifically tweeted that “Israeli security forces are training American cops despite history of rights abuses,” while promoting a libel of Israel.

It says something that in an institution that had become as thoroughly infiltrated by anti-Semitism as Labor, there’s now a new commitment to ridding the party of such hate. At the Times, however, left-wing anti-Semitism isn’t merely tolerated; it’s the sort of thing that can help you to rise to the top.

Britain’s opposition party may be serious about wanting to change course after becoming a home to Jew-hatred under its former leader. But . . . the Times, which has a lamentable history when it comes to Jewish issues, is heading down a path in which it is being bullied into taking radical positions that are antithetical to liberal values.

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.