After spending some time studying white supremacist websites, Stephen L. Carter draws some conclusions about their ideology, including their attitudes toward Jews:

[I]t is particularly instructive to examine [these websites’] approach to Israel (and by extension to Jews, because the sites do not seem to draw a clear distinction). Zionists, we are told, have too much power in U.S. foreign policy. The Obama administration is shot through with them. (There are passages aplenty where writers seem to hate President Barack Obama more for what they see as his pro-Israel tilt than for the color of his skin.) The U.S. Zionists, for example, are in charge of negotiating the Iran deal, and are taking their orders from Israel—which, by the way, they describe as a genocidal state intent on destroying its peaceful Arab neighbors.

Then there is the economy. Globalization and profit-seeking multinational corporations are destroying the middle class. Economic policies are made by and for the big banks—which, incidentally, are also run by and for greedy Jews. As are the mass media.

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.