During the most recent Republican presidential debate, Ann Coulter sent an obscene tweet about Jews. P. J. O’Rourke takes her comment personally:

[F]irst, my contempt is moral. Anti-Semitism is evil. . . . For the sake of argument, let us stipulate that you are not . . . an anti-Semite. . . . Being so stipulated, you are damn rude. One does not say, “f—ing Jews.” One does not say “f—ing blacks” or “f—ing Latinos” or even “f—ing relentlessly self-promoting Presbyterian white women from New Canaan.” . . .

[But also], Ann, it really is personal. . . . When I was growing up, Toledo was a factory town, a magnet for the immigrants you deplore (both foreign and from Kentucky). . . . The Jewish kids were the only kids who considered it cool to be smart. And so did their parents.

I was raised in a house without smart. My mother may once have had a life of the mind. . . . But being widowed, raising kids, marrying a drunk second husband, and having cancer distracted her.

One night at the dinner table, when I was about thirteen, my stepfather called me a skinny little smart-ass show-off for asking what Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was about. Of course I was showing off. What it’s about is self-evident. I was smugly savoring the fact that I was the only person in the family who knew the title and author (if nothing else) of such a tome.

But I bet the conversation wouldn’t have gone that way at my friend Barry Cantor’s house. There would have been a discussion. Perhaps with a tactful elision of how it was all the Christians’ fault. Or at least somebody would have looked up Gibbon in the World Book Encyclopedia. The Cantors owned the complete set.

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.