Addressing a congressional hearing last Thursday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez complained that conservatives invoke religious freedom only “in the name of bigotry and discrimination.” Such arguments, now commonplace in progressive circles, often point to the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and its state-level equivalents as especially suspect in this regard. That the claim is scurrilous is demonstrated by the recent decision of a federal district court in Arizona in favor of a group of Unitarian Universalists who illegally entered a wildlife refuge in order to provide food and supplies to illegal immigrants.

The ruling clarified many aspects of the RFRA’s interpretation, beginning with its applicability to any sincere religious belief, which places the burden of proof on the party arguing that a belief is insincere, as Howard Slugh explains:

Judges cannot substitute their own judgments for those of a litigant regarding the validity of his religious beliefs. It is understandable that a judge might find a practice that he has never heard of more suspicious than one he has. Most judges understand that a Christian in the military might need an accommodation related to Easter or Christmas. . . . But those same judges might be less familiar with accommodations needed by a Jewish soldier, such as being able to eat in an outdoor booth and carry a palm branch on the holiday of Sukkot.

By requiring concrete evidence of insincerity, judges can eliminate any temptation to deem adherents with familiar beliefs to be more sincere than those with unfamiliar beliefs.

After this discussion, the court turned to the question of whether the law placed a “substantial burden” on the defendants’ religious liberty, [since] the RFRA protects religious adherents only from substantial burdens on their faith. This requirement has been one of the most misunderstood provisions of the statute, with some claiming that a “substantial burden” exists only if the law in question requires religious adherents to violate a particularly important or “substantial” obligation of their faith. This is absurd. Courts have no expertise or authority to decide the relative importance of different religious requirements.

This interpretation [also] protects religious minorities: a judge is likely to recognize the importance of religious practices that are observed by major faiths, especially if he has personal experience of those practices; he is less likely to understand the importance of obscure practices held by religious minorities.

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.