Yesterday, the philosopher Roger Scruton lost his largely advisory position as the head of a UK housing commission on the grounds of allegedly anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and anti-Chinese statements cited in an interview by one George Eaton, published in the New Statesman. Douglas Murray comments:

It appeared that Scruton had said that Islamophobia is “a propaganda word invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue.” Which is true. He also said that “Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts.” A fact which is also true.

Obviously since the British Labor party became a party of anti-Semites it has become exceptionally important to pretend that anti-Semitism is equally prevalent on the political right in Britain and that to criticize any of the actions of George Soros is in fact simply to indulge in anti-Semitism equivalent to that rolling through the Labor party. A very useful play for the political left, but wholly untrue. Anyway, I say “it appears” that Scruton said this because there seem to be a few journalistic problems here.

Though Eaton says that Scruton said the above I am not confident that this is so. Eaton . . . claims, for instance, that what Scruton said about Soros was in actual fact a quote “on Hungarian Jews,” as though Scruton had attacked all Hungarian Jews, rather than one very influential and political man who happens to be a Hungarian Jew.

Scruton’s remarks about Hungarian Jewry, it turns out, were quoted by Eaton—with liberal use of an ellipsis—from a speech Scruton had given in Hungary. A closer examination of the paragraph of the speech cited by Eaton shows that Scruton was expressing sympathy for Hungarian Jewish supporters of Soros and expressing his concerns over Hungarian anti-Semitism.

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.