The ongoing fighting in Iraq and Syria has caused the destruction of many Jewish sites—remnants of once great Jewish communities—and threatened many others. One of them is the tomb of Ezra the Scribe in Iraq, where the nearby synagogue seems to have been turned into a mosque. Lyn Julius reports (with video):

Neglect, destruction, or Islamization are the triple threats facing historic Jewish shrines in Iraq.

Since 2010, there has been concern that the shrine of Ezekiel at Al-Kifl south of Baghdad, the most important of Jewish holy sites in Iraq, was also being converted into a mosque, and Hebrew inscriptions were being painted over. These reports turned out to be mostly false, but one visitor testified to the loudspeakers affixed to the outside to call the Muslim faithful to prayer.

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.