Last week, Malaysia’s ninety-four-year-old prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad—a candid and committed anti-Semite—spoke at Columbia University’s “Global Leaders Forum,” where he drew a large crowd. Clifford May comments:

No one challenged Mr. Mohamad’s right to voice his hatred of Jews. Nevertheless, he felt compelled to defend that right. “When you say ‘you cannot be anti-Semitic,’ there is no free speech,” he instructed his audience. . . . “Why can’t I say something about the Jews, when people say nasty things about me and about Malaysia?” . . . Among Mohamad’s oft-stated beliefs: “Jews rule the world by proxy.”

[T]he moderator, Professor Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, never asked a tough question or challenged the speaker’s assertions and expressions of prejudice and animus. I’m sure Columbia faculty and students extend similar courtesy to speakers who [are] Republicans, conservatives, and especially officials of the Trump administration. . . . “We have a lot of wisdom that we can draw on from you,” Nguyen [told] the senescent politician. At the conclusion of the program, he exclaimed: “That was amazing.”

I want to give Mr. Mohamad credit on one score: he’s honest about his hatred of Jews. He doesn’t pretend he’s only attempting to champion Palestinian rights. He doesn’t pretend to be supporting boycotts just to encourage Israelis to withdraw from “occupied territories.” He doesn’t claim that he’s not anti-Semitic but merely anti-Zionist.

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.