On a recent episode of his television show on Fox News, the political commentator Tucker Carlson contrasted the “recognizably American” economic elite of 125 years ago with its supposedly more rapacious equivalent today. As examples of the former, he named Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and, above all, the notorious anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator Henry Ford. As his sole example of the latter, he chose the Jewish investor Paul Singer, whom he accused of getting rich by “feeding off the carcass of a dying nation.” Liel Leibovitz comments:

Almost comically, the main example of Singer’s alleged perfidy Carlson cited was influencing the selling of one American sporting-goods retailer, Cabela’s, to another American sporting goods retailer, Bass Pro Shops—hardly the stuff of which . . . economic nightmares are made. . . . It’s this kind of talk that . . . drove David Duke to praise Carlson for “naming the Jews,” taking care to point out Jewish individuals as the culprits behind everything from America’s crimes to its involvement with foreign wars.

And if you think the bad news stops at Fox News’ door, you’re mistaken.

Because while Carlson was out there ginning up exactly the sort of sentiments that led to the Pittsburgh massacre, our self-appointed defenders of moral rectitude and our champions of combating anti-Semitism alike were amazingly quiet. Why? When similar allegations are made against another Jewish billionaire, George Soros, many—from the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt to liberal journalist Josh Marshall—are swift to offer their unequivocal condemnations. But Soros is a lock-step funder of progressive causes, while Singer—who helped underwrite the public and legal campaigns to secure the right of gay Americans to marry, is a supporter of New York City’s food bank, and a signatory of The Giving Pledge, promising to give away more than half his wealth during his lifetime—is also a GOP donor.

For Jewish communal leaders as well as [a large number of influential journalists], that’s a flaw that apparently makes him fair game for overt, dangerous anti-Semitism.

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.