Yesterday, Israeli police working in cooperation with U.S. law enforcement arrested a nineteen-year-old dual Israeli-American citizen for making dozens of bomb threats against Jewish institutions in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand. The young man has reportedly suffered from a brain tumor for several years, which may have affected his behavior. David Bernstein makes sense of this unexpected discovery in light of some of the more overwrought reactions to the recent wave of threats:

Even if the threats had been the work of an anti-Semitic alt-righter, one [lunatic] with a phone shouldn’t cause panic, nor should one [lunatic’s] actions be used to extrapolate wild exaggerations about the declining safety of American Jews. But . . . various groups and individuals had an incentive to hype the “threat” and, not incidentally, blame it on President Trump.

Note also what this does not mean. It does not mean that all reported hate crimes, or all reported anti-Semitic hate crimes, are a hoax. Most of them are not, and the anti-truck-bomb barriers in front of my local JCCs and Jewish day schools bear witness to actual threats. It also does not mean, as I’ve seen far too many commenters on the Internet assert, that all anti-Semitism in the United States and/or around the world comes either from the left or from Muslims. That is not just false, but egregiously false. . . .

Unfortunately, the points above will be lost on many, and the fight against actual anti-Semitism and other forms of racism will likely have been dealt a blow because self-serving groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) chose to hype and politicize the threats without any idea of their actual origin. The ADL’s board of directors needs to clean house to regain credibility, starting with anyone who publicly attributed the bomb threats to emboldened white supremacists.

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.