Medgar Evers College, a branch of the City University of New York (CUNY), has announced that, at its upcoming commencement ceremonies, it will grant an honorary doctorate to Reverend Al Sharpton—whose past incitements of anti-Semitic violence have led to multiple deaths. The editors of the New York Post comment:

What makes this [decision] especially galling is that it’s to take place in [the Brooklyn neighborhood of] Crown Heights, the site of the 1991 anti-Jewish riots in which Sharpton played a key role in riling up the mobs. The reverend has never apologized for his actions during those days, which included denunciations of Orthodox Jews as “diamond dealers” and a false claim that Jews operated an “apartheid ambulance service.”

Not until twenty years later did he finally admit he’d made some “mistakes,” while still claiming Jewish “extremists” deliberately misconstrued his remarks.

[L]ittle about Sharpton has changed over the years—save his weight, fancier clothes, fatter bank account, and now-national platform. Medgar Evers College thinks that adds up to an “unwavering commitment to racial, educational, and socioeconomic equity.” . . . But he isn’t a worthy choice for this honor—especially not from a college named for a true civil-rights hero who paid the ultimate price for his genuinely “unwavering commitment” to racial justice.

Sharpton is also expected to speak at a conference sponsored by the Religious Action Center, a major arm of organized Reform Judaism in America, in May.

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.