On Monday, the organization that runs the now-annual anti-Trump Women’s March announced that, after a variety of complaints, it had severed its ties with three of its four former leaders: Bob Bland, Tamika Mallory, and Linda Sarsour. Presumably among those complaints were Mallory’s close association with Louis Farrakhan and Sarsour’s record of venomous hatred of the Jewish state. Siraj Hashmi comments on what followed:

Monday’s announcement should have been a turning point for a movement that has been tainted by the recurring strain of anti-Semitism. Instead, in a move both remarkable and disheartening, the Women’s March has managed to find yet another anti-Semitic Muslim woman to serve on its board.

Zahra Billoo [is] an attorney and the executive director of the San Francisco chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Billoo’s hateful and anti-Semitic tweets, particularly in relation to Israel, were brought back into focus when she was promoted to the Women’s March board. In a June 2012 tweet, [for instance], Billoo wrote, “Apartheid Israel kills children as a hobby.” . . . Billoo also made direct comparisons between Israel and the terrorist Islamic State (IS), posting on Twitter, “Who has killed, tortured, and imprisoned more people: apartheid Israel or IS?”

In the intervening days, the organization announced that it was removing Billoo from her position; but, to Hashmi, the incident points to a larger problem, which he sees as well in the progressive left’s elevation of Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison:

Unfortunately, Billoo’s racist tweets do not stand alone. They seem to reflect the views of most prominent Muslims in America on the left. . . . [I]t’s disheartening, not least because not all Muslims are anti-Semitic. The left’s apparent alliance with American Muslims who hate Israel and are openly anti-Semitic is doing a great disservice to all Americans, including Americans who are Muslim like me, and is damaging to the fabric of our country.

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.