On Monday, protestors gathered in front of the offices of the New York Times after the paper’s international edition published a cartoon depicting the Israeli prime minister as a dog leading a blind and kippah-clad President Trump by his leash. Ruthie Blum comments:

[I]n the following weekend edition, the international edition of the New York Times published a second cartoon—this one of Netanyahu dressed as Moses holding the Ten Commandments in one hand and a selfie-stick in the other. . . .

Nobody at the paper, [however], is bracing for an armed Jewish onslaught. You know, like the slaughter in 2015 of twelve cartoonists and editors at the left-wing satirical French weekly, Charlie Hebdo, when it went after Islam. That the Paris-based paper regularly mocked Judaism and Christianity did not factor into the Islamist terrorists’ rampage, which continued on to the district’s Hyper Cacher kosher market, where shoppers were taken hostage and four Jews were murdered.

The Charlie Hebdo office was also fire-bombed in 2011, after publishing a cartoon of Muhammad in an issue whose cover was titled “Sharia Weekly.” This was five years after the paper was sued for running a series of controversial Muhammad-based cartoons that had appeared months earlier in the Danish daily, Jyllands-Posten, and caused a global Islamic assault. . . .

At least 200 people were killed during or as a result of those demonstrations, which were also used as an excuse for radical Muslim groups to vent their rage against Christians. Churches and Western embassies were attacked and Jyllands-Posten cartoonists, who were receiving credible death threats, went into hiding. . . .

[N]o cartoonist, editor, or anyone else ridiculing Jews or Judaism need fear for his life. The same cannot be said of those making fun of Muslims or Islam. Just ask the staff of Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo. If the New York Times editors are concerned today about the current uproar that their anti-Semitic cartoon has unleashed, it is not due to fear of death and destruction. It’s because the Jews complaining noisily outside their office . . . made it difficult for them to concentrate while coming up with their next batch of Israel-bashing pieces.

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.