In Indiana, the lawyer of a mother charged with severely beating her seven-year-old son has claimed that she was following Christian teachings and is thus protected from prosecution by the state’s version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). While this argument lacks any legal merit and is unlikely to convince a judge, some media outlets have seized upon it as grounds on which to object to RFRA and other such laws. Mark Hemingway explains the tendentiousness of this line of reporting:

I suspect providing an accurate understanding of what RFRA laws are was not what the coverage of [the Indiana mother’s] spurious defense was about. . . . Progressive activists, and their abundant allies in the media, clearly want people to perceive religious-freedom laws as being invoked only by scoundrels. They simply hate the idea that RFRA laws could possibly be used successfully to defend Christian pharmacists who don’t want to prescribe abortifacients or Christian grandmothers who serve gay customers but draw the line at providing floral arrangements for gay weddings. . . .

[A]ccurate reporting on RFRA laws might make readers sympathetic to them. Instead, major publications are disingenuously presenting the facts to make it sound as if “religious freedom” is a credible defense of child abusers. [T]hat’s a stunning indictment of the 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.