In France’s 2017 election, Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right Front National, was the second most-popular candidate. The party’s surprising electoral success may be a testimony to Le Pen’s efforts to improve the party’s reputation by shedding some of its anti-Semitic and pétainiste rhetoric since taking over its leadership from her father five years prior. Yet, writes Bill Wirtz, most of the change has been cosmetic; the “identitarian” movement that drives the Front National and other likeminded European parties remains, at its core, ugly:

[When it comes to] marketing tactics, these far-right activists have drastically improved from old-school neo-Nazi parties. Everything is hip and fresh, ranging from the websites to the banners, the music in their videos and the style of their activists. No skinheads or tattoos. . . . The movement shows off a lot of female faces, by featuring gender-balanced videos and putting women in the first row in their protests. The goal is to break with the burden of old European neo-Nazi parties, which are heavily male and unattractive to (at least) half the population.

Behind the hipster look and the inclusive marketing campaign, however, lies a deeply worrying philosophy. . . . Talking points on “race” become talking points about “blood” and “heritage.” Instead of talking about “preserving racial foundations of white people,” the new kids prefer to “defend Europeans.” In news coverage, identitarianism and neo-Nazism are talked about as different categories, but the reality is that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

To the extent that there is a difference between the two, it may be that identitarians aren’t openly anti-Semitic. They dodge questions regarding Jews and the Holocaust, and sue TV channels as soon as there is a suggestion that they are Nazis. However, when you enter the identitarian blogosphere and chat rooms, you see different attitudes at the grassroots level. In [one] identitarian forum post, for instance, an author argues that Judaism is a dangerous religion and his (her?) commentators fill the sections with remarks such as “mohammad [sic] copied most of his shtick from the kikes” and “It’s like they are both sand-nigger religions. Imagine that.”

Earlier this year, inhabitants of the French village of La Salvetat petitioned local authorities to kick out the identitarian music group “Les Brigandes,” which writes songs that target Muslims and Jews. Back in 2003, budding French identitarians distributed pig soup to homeless people, with the intent of excluding Muslims and 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.