On Thursday—the day of the national election in the United Kingdom—the Bernie Sanders campaign announced its support for the British Labor party. Setting aside the question of whether it is prudent for an American presidential candidate to endorse a foreign politician, especially one with a fondness for terrorists and dictators and who has unleashed a torrent of anti-Semitism in his own party, Noah Rothman notes that the Sanders campaign has some problems of its own that are not unlike Labor’s:

Bernie Sanders has thus far evaded scrutiny over the values he and his campaign share with the Labor party’s discredited leader, but that lack of curiosity is indefensible

Don’t take my word for it; take that of Sanders’s own surrogates. Representative Ilhan Omar, one of Sanders’s most visible endorsers with whom the senator frequently shares the stage, has apologized for some of what she’s admitted were anti-Semitic remarks. . . . Amid the failed Democratic effort to condemn Omar, Sanders’s foreign-policy adviser, Matt Duss [a veteran Israel-hater], attacked the maneuver as one purely designed to “police criticism of Israel.” It is worth recalling that the remark Duss considers scrutiny of Israel was Omar’s claim that pro-Israel lawmakers exhibit an “allegiance to a foreign country.”

Duss joins Sanders’s campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, as two of the more prominent members of the Sanders team who have been implicated in the propagation of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Sanders, [because he is Jewish,] may be insulated from the charge that he shares these suspicious sentiments . . . , but this clear pattern raises some disturbing questions. It is incumbent on the press to ask them. To at least a degree, Sanders clearly evinces some of Corbyn’s instincts on policy, [and] his affiliations suggest a similar tolerance for the radical left’s occasionally anti-Semitic indulgences.

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.