Last week, the reliably anti-Israel British newspaper the Guardian published a letter signed by 24 prominent citizens—some among them not otherwise known for friendship toward Jews or the Jewish state—stating that they could not vote for the Labor party on account of its leader’s anti-Semitism. Yet, writes Tamara Berens, the media in both the UK and elsewhere continue to portray the Labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn, as a “man of the people” rather than an unreconstructed Communist and to treat his hostility toward Jews as a matter for debate:

When it comes to anti-Semitism in the Labor party, the media have fallen for Corbyn’s deception. . . . Corbyn’s longstanding support for radical causes includes a penchant for Islamist anti-Semites. He invited members of Hamas and Hizballah to the British Parliament as “friends” and was paid perhaps as much as £20,000 (about $27,000 at the time) to appear on Iranian Press TV—the same network that was banned in the UK for its broadcast of a forced confession by a tortured Iranian journalist. In one appearance Corbyn mused that “the hand of Israel” was involved in a terror attack in Egypt.

Anti-Semitism has benefited Jeremy Corbyn politically. When he was unexpectedly elected leader of the Labor party in 2015, the media described an anti-Semitism “row” and “claims” surrounding him. This suggested that Corbyn’s association with anti-Semites was not factual but alleged. Labor’s grass-roots activists rallied around, defending Corbyn from these so-called allegations, and the conspiratorial anger toward his rivals, accused of stoking such “claims,” grew. The pro-Corbyn organization Momentum organized aggressive no-confidence votes against members of parliament who criticized him, including the former Labor Friends of Israel chair Joan Ryan.

Today, the party has been purged of almost all of its moderates and Corbyn’s ideology reigns supreme. The Jewish community in the UK is afraid for its future: a recent poll found that 47 percent of Jewish people in the UK would seriously consider emigrating if Corbyn came to power. Yet Labor continues to get away with anti-Semitism. For the British general election, the Labor party has selected multiple candidates with a history of anti-Semitism, including a union official who compared the state of Israel to a child abuser replicating the Holocaust.

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.