On Monday, the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) had to disinvite the journalist and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, whom it had previously engaged as the keynote speaker at its annual conference on the grounds of its commitment to “free speech.” David French argues against making people like Yiannopoulos into icons of free expression:

[I]f Yiannopoulos is the poster boy for free speech, then free speech will lose. He’s the perfect foil for [far-left activists], a living symbol of everything they fight against. His very existence and prominence feed the deception that modern political correctness is the firewall against the worst forms of bigotry. . . .

[Yiannopoulos’s] isn’t the true face of the battle for American free-speech rights. That face belongs to Barronelle Stutzman, the florist in Washington whom the left is trying to ruin financially because she refused to use her artistic talents to celebrate a gay marriage. It belongs to Kelvin Cochran, the Atlanta fire chief who was fired for publishing and sharing with a few colleagues a book he wrote that expressed orthodox Christian views of sex and marriage. Stutzman and Cochran demonstrate that intolerance and censorship strike not just at people on the fringe—people like Yiannopoulos—but rather at the best and most reasonable citizens of these United States. They’re proof that [the hard left] seeks not equality and inclusion but control and domination.

Yiannopoulos has the same free-speech rights as any other American. He can and should be able to troll to his heart’s content without fear of government censorship or private riot. But by elevating him even higher, CPAC would have made a serious mistake. CPAC’s invitation told the world that supporting conservative free speech means supporting Milo. If there’s a more effective way to vindicate the social-justice left, I can’t imagine 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.