Founded by an act of Congress in 1998, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCRIF) makes policy recommendations to the president and State Department about how to help those suffering religious persecution across the globe. One of its nine commissioners recently resigned to protest possible congressional efforts to reform it that would leave it bureaucratically hamstrung. Clifford May, himself a former commissioner, explains why he believes the proposed changes to be wrongheaded:

Some members of Congress disapprove of USCIRF. They object to its prioritization of “freedom of religion or belief”—which I regard as the most foundational right, the right upon which all others are built—over what they consider most important: expanding rights for select grievance communities (for want of a better term).

With that in mind, they are proposing to expand USCRIF’s remit to include opposition to “abuse of religion to justify human-rights violations.” Think about that: if a Christian baker declines to design wedding cakes for same-sex couples, is that abuse of religion? Is male circumcision a human-rights violation justified by abuse of Judaism and Islam?

I think commissioners should avoid such theological questions to the extent possible. They should focus instead on the plight of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, Buddhists in Tibet, Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan, Baha’i in Iran, Yazidis in Iraq, and Christians in Syria, Egypt, and many other lands. On such issues, USCIRF commissioners, Democratic and Republican, can find consensus.

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.