The Justice Department is currently pushing an approach to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) that, according to Howard Slugh and Mitchell Rocklin, would turn judges into interpreters of religious doctrine and thereby undermine accepted understandings of religious freedom:

The RFRA requires the government to demonstrate the compelling nature of any law that would place a substantial burden on a person’s religious exercise. This leads to the inevitable question of what constitutes a “substantial burden.” . . . Religious plaintiffs have argued that the test requires courts to weigh the burden of the punishment a religious person may face for refusing to violate his faith, rather than the importance of the religious practice at issue. . . The administration rejects this view, arguing that a judge must “look at the [religious] action that the plaintiffs want to take.” . . . According to this view, if a court decides that a particular religious principle is unimportant, the state can force a believer to choose between violating it and facing a draconian punishment. . . .

[S]uch a test would inevitably ensnare courts in thorny doctrinal questions. . . . A government that adjudicates the relative merits of religious commandments has invaded the most central and sacred sphere of life, usurping the role of ministers, priests, rabbis, and imams.

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.