During last week’s presidential debate, the right-wing journalist Ann Coulter made a vulgar comment about the candidates’ alleged pandering to Jewish voters. Ruthie Blum responds:

Enough has been said about whether Coulter is an anti-Semite. A sufficient amount of ink has [also] been spilled on the fact that anti-Semites, both on the right and on the left, came out of the woodwork to put in their two cents.

What I would like to know is how any intelligent person in America can imagine that championing Israel in general, and in the face of the Obama administration’s abominable nuclear deal with Iran in particular, constitutes “pandering” or “sucking up” to Jews.

As Coulter well knows, Jews overwhelmingly voted for Obama, not once but twice. She is also aware that the vast majority of Iran-deal opponents are Republican. Sheldon Adelson, whom she [also] made a point of mentioning in her [subsequent] Daily Beast interview, is an exception, not the rule. . . .

As for the evangelicals whom she brought up in the same breath [in the interview]: well, the U.S. has a lot of those. And it is the job of a candidate in an American campaign to persuade the electorate to vote for him. If that is “pandering,” so be it.

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.