Evidence that the anti-Trump Women’s March movement has been infected by anti-Semitism, beginning with at least two of its leaders, has been accumulating for some time; a recent exposé in Tablet brought the issue to a head. To Christine Rosen, the new revelations are all too predictable:

In the two years since the Women’s March came together in Washington, the fog of intersectionality descended over it. The umbrella organization lists a broad range of missions on its website, including “gender justice,” racial justice, economic justice, and environmental justice. It pursues these missions, it claims, on behalf of “all women—including black women, indigenous women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled women, Muslim women, lesbian, queer, and trans women.”

The four female public faces of the organization are Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, and Bob Bland. Notably absent from this vision of gender justice and from the leadership of the Women’s March organization? Jewish women.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the relentlessly anti-Semitic career of Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American professional activist who has been confidently tweeting her bigotry for years. “Nothing is creepier than Zionism,” she tweeted a few years ago. She’s also argued that “while anti-Semitism is something that impacts Jewish Americans, it’s different than anti-black racism or Islamophobia because it’s not systemic.” (Sarsour might want to examine the statistics on hate crimes in the U.S. The group most frequently targeted isn’t blacks or Muslims; it’s Jews.) . . .

The leadership of the Women’s March likes to cloak itself in the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil-rights movement. As their bigotry, their comfort with anti-Semitic conspiracists, and their questionable ethics reveal, their behavior is much closer to the “white-nationalist patriarchy” they denounce than it is to the ideals embraced by movements for equality.

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.