Friday marked the 25th anniversary of the outbreak of the Crown Heights riots, precipitated when a ḥasidic driver accidentally hit and killed a black child. The media at the time reported what was happening in the Brooklyn neighborhood as “clashes” between “gangs” of black and Jewish youths, when—as was made clear by the official New York State report—all of the violence was committed by African-Americans and directed against Jews. While relations between the two communities have fortunately improved, the media persist in misunderstanding the local dynamics. Mordechai Lightstone, himself a Ḥasid who has lived in the neighborhood for over ten years, writes:

Today Crown Heights has been designated as “ground zero for gentrification.” . . . Suddenly a community of working- and middle-class families, both Jewish and black, find themselves no longer able to afford housing in the neighborhood they call home. . . .

Yet this displacement has been completely ignored in the media. Not once has the Jewish community been mentioned in the discussion. And why should it be? The story has already been framed: hipsters move in, black people are displaced. . . . Yes, there are ḥasidic Jews, almost entirely not from Crown Heights, who are active in real-estate development. But even in their respective neighborhoods they make up only a tiny sliver of the community. Yet somehow ḥasidic Jews of all types—teachers, scribes, plumbers, online merchants, and small-business owners of all backgrounds—have been relegated to only one role: the [stereotypical] ḥasidic landlord.

Ḥasidim are cast into the anti-Semitic stereotypes of old when it comes to Brooklyn. They are the alien force that preys upon the innocent, ever present but always foreign.

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.