After receiving much bad publicity over an employee’s eviction of two black men from one of its stores, the Starbucks coffee chain decided to subject its employees to “bias training.” To this end it consulted with various organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL’s presence in turn provoked the ire of the leaders of the Women’s March—still, more than a year after its anti-Trump demonstration in Washington, an influential organization on the left. Jonathan Tobin comments:

[T]o its credit, the ADL has been willing to take on leaders of the march regarding their soft spot for anti-Semitism. . . . Earlier this year, many people who took part in [the march’s] events were shocked to learn that Tamika Mallory, the group’s president, was a supporter of the Nation of Islam’s leader Louis Farrakhan. . . . Others were concerned over the comments of Linda Sarsour, another leader [of the march], in which she demonized the state of Israel and its supporters, and claimed Zionists could not be true feminists. Along with many other people of good will on both the left and the right, the ADL criticized the pair.

So when Starbucks announced that the ADL would be part of its race-education program, Mallory and Sarsour pounced. Mallory denounced the ADL on Twitter for “CONSTANTLY attacking black and brown people.” Sarsour echoed that smear and chimed in with her own indictment of ADL for supporting programs in which U.S. law-enforcement personnel are given training in Israel, as well as for the ADL’s criticisms of the Black Lives Matter movement’s attacks on Israel. . . .

No one with even a cursory understanding of the role that the ADL has played in the civil-rights movement and in promoting bias education in recent decades can possibly take the statements from Mallory and Sarsour seriously. . . . However, in a leftist mindset in which intersectional theories that link worries about lingering racism in the United States with the war to destroy the Jewish state, even a liberal-[leaning] group like the ADL must be considered beyond the pale because of its willingness to stand up against anti-Semitism. . . .

At this point, anyone who chooses to work with Mallory and Sarsour is sanctioning Jew-hatred.

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.