Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front (FN), called for banning her father, the party’s founder, from running for regional office after he engaged in rhetoric of implicit Holocaust denial. The elder Le Pen, who has a long history of anti-Semitism, at first refused to back down but then withdrew his candidacy. His decision, writes Nicholas Farrell, is a sign that the daughter may finally be succeeding in distancing the FN from the ugliest aspects of her father’s legacy:

When Jean-Marie Le Pen says, as he so often does, that the Holocaust is “a detail of history,” he tries to justify the remark by saying that he is stating a fact rather than expressing an opinion—but it does not wash: it is, of course, an opinion. His real target, I am convinced, though, is not the Jews but the big banks and of course Israel. This puts him in perfect tune with standard left-wing anti-Zionism: it’s not the Jews (good); it’s the Israelis (bad). . . .

Whatever. For someone like Jean-Marie Le Pen even to mention the Jews is fatal. This is why his daughter has insisted that the FN abandon all discussion of the Jews unless positive. What Marine Le Pen has not abandoned, though, is the FN’s hostility to rampant immigration and radical Islam. Indeed, she defends the Jews against Muslim anti-Semitism.

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.