The Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has received much criticism for her comment—in a speech last month at a Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) banquet—that on, September 11, 2001, “some people did something.” But Abe Greenwald notes a revealing pattern in these remarks that has received less attention:

Omar issues calls for compassion out of one side of her mouth and appeals for contempt out of the other. She is, among other things, a run-of-the-mill flimflam artist. . . . If you set aside the canned baby talk of her speeches and articles, her actions don’t reveal much in the way of understanding and compassion. Or was she “showing up with love,” [to use one of her platitudes], when she claimed that Americans who support Israel are guilty of “allegiance to a foreign country” and that pro-Israel American leaders are somehow being paid off to support the Jewish state, and that—lest we forget—“Israel has hypnotized the world. May Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel”? Are all these examples of what she sees as a “mission as humans to love one another”?

Whenever Omar gets called out for her anti-Semitism or anti-Americanism, she makes a steady retreat back to her faux compassion and understanding, simultaneously vowing to “learn” from her actions and claiming innocent victimhood. It’s then that her liberal supporters seize on her sunny rhetoric and denounce all the criticism that’s come her way. That’s precisely what’s been happening since she was caught describing 9/11 as a null event.

The con artist will thrive as long her marks are willing to be conned.

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.