A right-wing terrorist attempting a massacre in the German city of Halle on Yom Kippur found the targeted synagogue undefended by the police—although another attempted synagogue attack had taken place elsewhere in Germany just a few days beforehand. The police were also slow to respond once the attack began. Afterward, members of the two political parties that form the governing coalition responded by blaming not anti-Semites or ineffective security measures but their political rival—the right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD). Manfred Gerstenfeld writes:

The AfD is not a homogeneous party. It has both a mainstream and a highly problematic “ethnic” wing. . . . The political attacks on the AfD backfired. The AfD spokeswoman on anti-Semitism is also deputy chairwoman, Beatrix von Storch, who belongs to the party’s mainstream. In the Bundestag, the German parliament, she raised a number of unwelcome facts for the established parties and in particular for the Social-Democratic party (SPD).

Von Storch pointed out that violent neo-Nazi groups have existed for decades in Germany. Their ability to establish themselves showed the total failure of the established parties in domestic and security policy. The same was true concerning Islamists, left-wing extremists, and [organized crime]. Her remarks were accurate and are yet another indication of the dysfunctional state of law in Germany’s liberal democracy. Von Storch recalled that left-wing extremists had in 1969 laid a bomb at the Jewish community center in Berlin. They were also responsible for the terror attack on the Air France flight that was hijacked to Entebbe, Uganda in 1976. She also mentioned the murder of Israeli athletes by Arab terrorists at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics.

Von Storch then attacked the SPD, saying that while criticism of Islam is a reason for it to expel somebody from the party, anti-Semitism is not. She noted that the former SPD leader and [current] foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel has defamed Israel as an apartheid state. Von Storch also attacked the former SPD leader Martin Schulz, who repeated before the Knesset the lie that Israel let the Palestinians [routinely] die of thirst. She noted that the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier (also of the SPD), congratulated Iran on the anniversary of the Islamic revolution, and reminded her listeners that that revolution is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

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.