In November, after the Islamic State attack in Paris, the U.S. secretary of state distinguished it from the attack the previous January on the magazine Charlie Hebdo. The more recent one, he said, was “absolutely indiscriminate,” while the older one at least had a “rationale.” He pointedly omitted any reference to the murderous jihadist assault, two days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, on the kosher supermarket in Paris. And now, writes Elliott Abrams, Kerry has done it again, with an official statement on the anniversary of the earlier attacks that mentions the targeting of journalists and cartoonists but says nothing about the targeting of Jews:

Kerry’s magic here: he made the Jews disappear. Once again he refers only to Charlie Hebdo and “journalists around the world.”

But on January 9, one year ago, four hostages at the kosher grocery were killed. They had been shopping before the Sabbath began, on a Friday afternoon.

It should not be too much for our secretary of state to take notice of them, too: people who became victims because they were Jews. The Paris attacks in January 2015 were not attacks against journalists and others; they were attacks on journalists and on Jews who were killed because they were Jews. That Kerry continues to make them disappear is disgraceful.

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.