On Sunday, two Middle Eastern refugees in the German city of Chemnitz fatally stabbed a native of the city. Demonstrations followed almost immediately, culminating in unruly protests. The next day some 6,000 members of various far-right parties, some of whom had traveled across the country for the occasion, gathered in Chemnitz; the police arrested ten for making Nazi salutes. While the German media and mainstream politicians make much of the growing popularity of the far right, notes Bill Wirtz, they are extremely reluctant even to discuss the problem of crime among refugees, not to mention other issues relating to their integration.

Germany’s Nazis are both real Nazis and Nazis afraid to admit that they are. The existence of the far-right [in Germany] is not a new phenomenon, and believing that the influx of refugees into Germany caused people to do Hitler salutes would be ill-informed. But there is a necessity for authorities to address issues like the Chemnitz stabbing in order not to embolden these movements.

The origin of this problem lies in the sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015, which saw at least 24 women raped and a total of 1,200 otherwise assaulted or harassed. Both German news media and local police were caught attempting to downplay the incident, and the mayor of the city even went so far as to blame the victims for not keeping “men at arm’s length.” In the end, social-media backlash made the story flame up, and it ended up strengthening far-right movements. . . . Similar events, and terrorist attacks, since have further strengthened the far right. . . .

The responsibility of the government in the current situation is a) to enforce the law, whether it be in a refugee community or in a middle-class suburb, and b) to provide people as soon as possible with the right to acquire a job. Germany should draw on its prior experience with immigrants and let these immigrants integrate into the labor market. The German criminologist Christian Pfeiffer confirms this: he links the reduction in overall crime by refugees between 2016 and 2017 to the considerable increase in those who found work.

The rise of neo-Nazis in Germany is a worrisome trend, but it cannot be fought with bans and people being imprisoned for saying outrageous things. If liberal democracy wants to survive, it needs to use the tools that it purports to defend: free speech, open dialogue, and the rule of law.

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.