Surveying recent physical and political assaults on Jews from across Europe and America, Bari Weiss notes a perhaps even more disturbing tendency to ignore or downplay them: from the media’s indifference to violence against the ultra-Orthodox, to a French court dropping charges against an anti-Semitic murderer, to the invective directed at Jews with the temerity to criticize Jeremy Corbyn’s hostility toward them. And often the desire to turn a blind eye to anti-Semitism comes from those who consider themselves greatly sensitive to every other kind of bigotry:

If hatred of Jews can be justified as a misunderstanding or ignored as a mistake or played down as a slip of the tongue or waved away as “just anti-Zionism,” you can all but guarantee it will be.

Jordyn Wright is a Jewish sophomore who sits on the board of the Students’ Society of McGill University. Over winter break, she is planning, like hundreds of other North American Jewish college students, to go to Israel [in a trip organized by her campus’s] Hillel society. As a result of that trip, the student government voted to call for her resignation. . . . Never mind that another student-government leader is also going; apparently because that student is not a Jew, no resignation was required.

Jew-hatred is surging and yet . . . does not command attention or inspire popular outrage. Unless Jews are murdered by neo-Nazis, the one group everyone of conscience recognizes as evil, Jews’ inconvenient murders, their beatings, discrimination against them, the singling out of their state for demonization will be explained away.

When you look at each of these incidents, perhaps it is possible still to pretend that they are random bursts of bigotry perpetrated by hooligans lacking any real organization or power behind them. But Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral prospects in Britain tell a different, far more distressing story—that a person with some of the same impulses as those hooligans can stand within spitting distance of the office of prime minister.

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.