Best known for her husband’s claims that Iraq did not have a nuclear program in 2003, and her role in the ensuing scandal that resulted in the conviction of the vice-presidential aide Scooter Libby, the former CIA official Valerie Plame has now returned to the public eye by running for an open Congressional seat in New Mexico. Meanwhile, in covering her campaign. the press has ignored a different scandal, from 2017. Warren Henry writes:

While on the board [of the pro-Iran deal] Ploughshares Fund, Plame used her Twitter account to promote an article by another former CIA officer titled “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars.” When decent people objected, she . . . added [that the article was] “very provocative, but thoughtful. Many neocon hawks ARE Jewish. . . . Read the entire article and try, just for a moment, to put aside your biases and think clearly.” The “thoughtful” article at issue asserted that Jews “own the media,” Jews should wear labels while on national television, and their beliefs are as dangerous as “a bottle of rat poison.”

Plame later claimed she “messed up” and only “skimmed” the article before sharing it. Her claim was laughable. She previously urged people to read the whole article. Plame also had a history of sharing articles from the same source, including one claiming “Israeli-occupied Congress confronts the White House.” Plame further shared a 9/11 conspiracy theory involving “dancing Israelis.” . . . For a former covert officer, Plame is not very good at cover stories. . . .

Now, the establishment media’s coverage of Plame’s announced candidacy ignores the bigoted stink that lingers on her. The New York Times omitted any mention of her anti-Semitism. [Likewise], the Washington Post ran an Associated Press story that ignores Plame’s support for anti-Semitism; the Daily Beast similarly ignored it. So did The Hill and Roll Call. . . .

Anti-Semitism has been a long-running scandal within the United Kingdom’s Labor party, particularly regarding its current leader, Jeremy Corbyn. The scandal has been long-running because party members and the media spent years arguing over whether Corbyn was an anti-Semite, no matter how many incidents piled up in public. America’s establishment media should strive to do better.

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.