Following a series of scandals involving anti-Semitic comments by Labor politicians, the party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has suspended several offenders and initiated an official investigation. According to Douglas Murray, these efforts are merely for show:

In the run-up to his election as Labor party leader, Corbyn was often asked about his tendency to hang around with Holocaust deniers, anti-Semitic hate-preachers, and others of a similar ilk. Apart from not quite owning up to his connections to such people, the other technique he employed at this time was to put on a look of extreme affront and say that he had spent his entire life “fighting racism.” Whenever the specific question of anti-Semitism was raised, he would say how opposed he was to all forms of racism “including Islamophobia.” It has apparently proved impossible for Corbyn to realize the specific nature of anti-Semitism; whenever it has come up, he has used the opportunity to talk not about racial hatred against Jews but what he believes to be an epidemic of hatred toward Muslims. . . .

Even now, Corbyn supporters are trying to distract attention from their own party’s very evident problem and turn racism allegations around on the Conservative party. None of which suggests any serious desire to get on top of their problem.

We can already predict what the conclusions of the . . . inquiry will be. . . . Will [Shami Chakrabarti, the human-rights advocate appointed by Corbyn] be able to explain that the main originator of anti-Semitism in the Labor party today comes from its growing Muslim base? If she does identify that, will she then need to have an inquiry into herself for such flagrant “Islamophobia”? More likely she will find the party entirely blameless. Just a few dozen bad apples, and so on. . . .

The Labor party has a serious problem, and it is in institutional denial. Things can only get worse.

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.