The Moscow-based “World Without Nazism” (WWN) purports to be an independent organization dedicated to combating anti-Semitism and neo-fascism in Europe. In reality, it is a Russian-backed propaganda tool meant to defame leaders of former Soviet republics as the legatees of Nazi collaborators. James Kirchick writes:

World Without Nazism’s name harks back to cold-war days, when Soviet front organizations took on anodyne titles like the World Peace Council [or the] World Federation of Democratic Youth, and embroidered themselves in the general cause of “anti-fascism.” Blundering disingenuousness, however, did not go away with the collapse of the Soviet Union. . . . WWN focuses its energies mainly on the former Soviet Union, and has a particular obsession with Ukraine and the Baltic States. . . . The agenda of WWN with regard to those countries is to defame their governments—all resolutely opposed to Russian influence—with the “fascist” label. . . .

The difficulties that some post-Communist countries have had in wrestling with their Holocaust histories have necessitated careful work by researchers, scholars, and witnesses alike. But by perverting and politicizing the memory of the Shoah—digging into the Stalinist playbook and labeling anyone and everyone who disagrees with them a “fascist” or a “Nazi”—WWN has in fact contributed to the very problem it was purportedly founded to combat: it has trivialized the Holocaust.

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.