Read the major U.S. newspapers, or explicitly left-wing publications, and you will easily find stories about attacks by whites on blacks—not to mention instances of casual harassment. Nor need one journey very far into the depths of alt-right websites to find compilations of violence perpetrated on whites by blacks. Both sets of outlets, writes Wilfred Reilly, create an impression that America is living in a time of heightened racial tensions—an impression utterly belied by the facts. Indeed, Asian Americans are the only racial group more likely to be attacked by a member of a different race than by one of their own.

But then there is the case of the Jews, who are, in Reilly’s words, “another small, successful group who are subjected to interracial attacks with disproportionate frequency”—and these are not limited to the most publicized incidents:

New York City police have cited “at least eight anti-Semitic incidents” between December 13 and December 31 of the past year. In one case, an African-American woman, Tiffany Harris—who was arraigned on December 28 for slapping and cursing at three ultra-Orthodox women in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights—was charged again, on December 30, for punching a Jewish woman in the face in front of her two young children. Notably, Harris was released from custody without paying bail in either case, courtesy of “bail reform” laws championed by current New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

New York does not appear to be an extreme outlier. It would be virtually impossible to determine how many attacks against Jews have been subsumed into the “white” category of interracial crime statistics and thus estimate the percentage of all crime directed specifically at them. It definitely can be said, however, that American Jews—who, with an estimated population of 6,829,000, represent 1.7 percent of the total U.S. population—were the targets of at least 11.7 percent of all U.S. hate crimes (835 out of 7,120) and almost 60 percent of hate crimes motivated by the victim’s religion (835 out of 1,419) in 2018.

By contrast, American Muslims, with a population very similar in size to that of Jews, reported only 188 total hate crimes in 2018, while blacks experienced slightly more than twice as many hate crimes as those against Jews (1,943) despite having a population more than six times as large. As with Asian Americans, Jews are attacked by members of multiple ethnic groups.

[In short], the presentation of interracial crime by the center-left mainstream media dominant in the United States is more than a bit dishonest. . . . More broadly, entire storylines that characterize American criminal justice, such as the epidemic of diverse and minority-generated violence against Asian Americans and Jews, are frequently missing from the national headlines.

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.