Despite overheated rhetoric about America’s imminent descent into fascism, despite the frequent labeling of President Trump’s advisers and supporters as “Nazis,” and despite the anti-Trump left’s habit of calling itself the “resistance,” neo-Nazis and white supremacists are few and far between in the U.S. James Kirchick tries to make sense of the current hysteria:

[W]here do all these legions of Nazis and passionate brigades of anti-Nazis come from? . . . They are the products of a moral panic with an underlying political cause, which is now being exploited by a wide range of political operatives. . . . Fighting Nazis is a free and easy moral victory because there is almost no one on the other side. This suggests that [those who] advertise themselves . . . as brave and forthright fighters of Nazis are either immature or deploying lazy rhetoric to get their listeners to join in the unwitting pursuit of some other, presumably much less popular or acceptable, goal. . . .

The use of Nazis as a political strawman was long a propaganda technique of the Soviet Union, which casually slapped the label “fascist” on anyone or anything it didn’t like. (The tradition continues with today’s Kremlin propagandists, for whom “fascist” or “Nazi” is interchangeable with “critic of Russian foreign policy.”) In the American context, hyping the threat of Nazism is a proven fundraising tool. . . .

Besides the obvious dangers, and inherent foolishness, of such thinking, Kirchick notes that it can also have particularly deleterious consequences for Jews:

[W]hile anti-Jewish social prejudice, like saying the words “smelly kike,” for example, or refusing Jews admittance to your country club, has become a serious social crime—the sort of transgression that can destroy careers—actual anti-Semitism (“a cabal of rich Jews secretly manipulates and controls American foreign policy to benefit Israel,” “Israel is an illegitimate foreign colonial implant whose bloodthirsty leadership hates peace and delights in killing Palestinian children”) has become increasingly acceptable, even mainstream in some parts of the left.

Standing up to Nazism, as members of the Democratic Socialists of America valiantly did in Charlottesville, serves as a convenient fig leaf behind which to hide institutionalized organizational anti-Semitism, which the group giddily expressed just a week prior at their annual convention in Chicago, chanting “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” after passing a motion in support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. . . .

Social prejudice may be annoying, depressing, and generally unpleasant, but it’s anti-Semitism that has proved to be physically dangerous—and very often lethal—to Jews.

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.