Asked by a journalist to comment on the president’s executive order extending certain protections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to Jews, the chief executive of the Central Conference of American Rabbis said that “it feels dangerous,” adding that she had “heard people say this feels like the first step toward us wearing yellow stars.” John Podhoretz comments:

In my view, part of the responsibility of leadership in a community is standing strong against those within who peddle vile, ignorant, weirdly self-justifying and self-infatuated argle-bargle. But of course, Rabbi Hara Person of the Central Conference of American Rabbis didn’t just “hear” people say these things. She clearly shares a belief in this awful, unspeakable, vile calumny—the slander that a president who agreed to a change in policy to aid American Jews on college campuses in their efforts to advocate for the Jewish state is an anti-Semite.

Now, I write this as someone who came under constant daily, even hourly, assault on social media in 2015 and 2016 from noxious Jew-haters who emerged from the dank American cultural sewers as the Trump campaign gathered steam. These repugnant creatures felt empowered by Trump’s cultural divisiveness and the hostile rhetoric he used toward illegal immigrants and simply applied them to Jews who were not falling in line. So I am more than mindful that the rise of Trump has been accompanied by a rise in anti-Semitic rhetoric—and, of course and tragically, the targeting of two synagogues.

But if he hates Jews, Donald Trump has a funny way of showing it—through acts that strengthen us and strengthen the nation-state of the Jewish people.

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.