Leading the much-ballyhooed “Women’s March” that took place in Washington in January, and the simultaneous marches in cities across the U.S., were four women who have since become the face of the progressive left in the U.S. In keeping with the current obsession with racial quotas, one is white, one black, one Hispanic, and one Arab. Bari Weiss notes that they share a fondness for bigots, especially of the anti-Semitic variety:

Start with [Linda] Sarsour, by far the most visible of the quartet of organizers. It turns out that this “homegirl in a hijab,” as one of many articles about her put it, has a history of disturbing views. . . . “Nothing is creepier than Zionism,” she wrote [on Twitter] in 2012. And, oddly, given her status as a major feminist organizer, there are more than a few statements that seem to make common cause with anti-feminists, like this from 2015: “You’ll know when you’re living under Shariah law if suddenly all your loans and credit cards become interest-free. Sound nice, doesn’t it?” She has dismissed the anti-Islamist feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the most crude and cruel terms. . . .

Largely overlooked have been the similarly outrageous statements of the march’s other organizers. Tamika Mallory, in addition to [joining Sarsour] in applauding [the convicted police-killer] Assata Shakur as a feminist emblem, also admires Fidel Castro, who sheltered Shakur in Cuba. . . . [Carmen] Perez also expressed her admiration for a Black Panther convicted of trying to kill six police officers.

But the public figure both [Mallory and Perez] regularly fawn over is Louis Farrakhan. On May 11, Mallory posted a photo [of herself] with her arm around Farrakhan—the eighty-four-year-old Nation of Islam leader notorious for his anti-Semitic comments—on Twitter and Instagram. “Thank God this man is still alive and doing well,” she wrote. It is one of several videos and photos and quotes that Mallory has posted of Farrakhan. . . .

Readers born after 1980 will probably have little idea [of Farrakhan], since he has largely remained out of the headlines since the Million Man March he organized in 1995. But his views . . . remain as appalling as ever. “And don’t you forget, when it’s God who puts you in the ovens, it’s forever!” he warned Jews in a speech at a Nation of Islam gathering in Madison Square Garden in 1985. . . . He called Hitler “a very great man” on national television. Judaism, he insists, is a “gutter religion.”

Yet, Weiss notes, even those progressives who find such sentiments and associations distasteful turn a blind eye to the dubious connections of their new leaders.

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.