As of last week, physician-assisted suicide is legal in the state of New Jersey, making it the ninth U.S. jurisdiction to allow the practice. Lawmakers responsible for permitting the policy claim that it will promote “humanity, dignity, and respect”—but, writes Monica Burke, the truth might be wholly otherwise.

Who qualifies for physician-assisted suicide has no natural limit. New Jersey is limiting practice to the terminally ill with a six-month prognosis—for now. . . .

Other countries have already started down the slippery slope of expanding who qualifies for physician-assisted suicide. Many also practice nonvoluntary euthanasia—another seemingly natural consequence of the logic of physician-assisted suicide.

Canada’s parliament is considering expanding physician-assisted suicide to include requests by mature minors, advance requests, and requests where mental illness is the sole underlying medical condition.

In response, a Canadian children’s hospital unveiled a plan to help sick children commit suicide without their parents’ consent—a practice that is already legal in Belgium, where doctors have euthanized children as young as nine.

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.