At a recent concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the musician Billy Joel appeared on stage wearing a six-pointed yellow star—apparently in response to the anti-Semitic demonstrations that had taken place in Charlottesville. Thereafter, the actor and producer Nev Schulman appeared at a Los Angeles awards ceremony wearing a similar star. Stephen Pollard finds this new trend among Jewish celebrities “crass, infantile, ignorant, stupid, [and] offensive”:

Presumably Joel was thinking that he was “reclaiming” [the star] in some way. . . But it’s not his to reclaim. It’s not mine. It’s not anyone’s, however much they might want the world to know they’re Jewish, or that they love Jews just so much. The only people [whose it is] to “reclaim” are Holocaust survivors. And I seem to have missed the pictures of survivors donning their yellow stars again as a fashion accessory.

[M]ake no mistake, . . . this is virtue signaling in the worst possible taste. . . .

[Y]ou do not express your pride in being Jewish, or your revulsion against hate, by donning the Nazi yellow star as a fashion statement of that supposed pride. All you do is insult those survivors who lived through the Shoah, and who did not wear their yellow stars to draw media attention to themselves but because they were forced to do by the Third Reich.

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.