While noting his concerns about the racist and ant-Semitic roots of Austria’s Freedom party, which is now part of the county’s governing coalition, Daniel Pipes urges Jews to work with the party, not against it:

The [current Austrian] government comprises two very different parties, which together won 58 percent of the vote: the arch-establishment and very mildly conservative Austrian People’s party and the populist, firebrand Freedom party of Austria, whose roots lie in the far-right swamp of German (not Austrian) nationalism.

The two parties’ coalition agreement is an anti-jihadists’ dream. Distinguishing between Islamism (which it calls political Islam) and the religion of Islam, it boldly stakes out new ground. . . .

Those hostile to the Freedom party stress its Nazi origins, its “politics of resentment,” and its anti-Western outlook. . . . My assessment: the Freedom party brings realism, courage, extremism, and eccentricity; it has a way to go before it becomes just another party. Its leadership’s efforts to address a problem like anti-Semitism (visiting Yad Vashem or calling for the Austrian embassy to be moved to Jerusalem) have gone down badly among rank-and-file members.

But I advocate working with the Freedom party, not marginalizing it. . . . [A] political party has no DNA or essence; it can change and be what its members make of it. Note, [for instance], how the U.S. Democratic party changed on the race issue.

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.