In 1977, when New York City was at the nadir of its urban decay, a 25-hour electrical blackout struck much of the city leading to widespread looting and destruction of property. Midge Decter responded with a seminal essay in Commentary analyzing both its causes and the invidious prejudice white middle-class liberals (perhaps especially Jewish ones) revealed in their reactions. With unrest once again besetting America’s cities, her words are worth revisiting:

It is cant to call the looters victims of racial oppression, and it is still worse cant to say that their condition is the result of our apathy. But it is cant above all to say of the looters’ conduct—as Herbert Gutman did in a truly disgraceful piece (which also appeared on the New York Times Op-Ed page), in which he compared them with a group of Jewish housewives in 1902 who organized what turned into a rowdy protest against the high cost of kosher meat and threw meat into the street to rot—that they were giving us “a pained message.”

Anyone who actually watched the looters at work, as those of us who live in looted neighborhoods were privileged to do firsthand and as millions of Americans did briefly on television, knows that they were doing no such thing as expressing rage or even blindly giving vent to some pent-up experience of torment: they were having the time of their lives. . . .

“Pained messages” are being transmitted and received, all right, but in exactly the opposite direction from the one suggested by Herbert Gutman. Young blacks are getting the message from the liberal culture, more subtly but just as surely as from any old-time Southern sheriff, that they are, inherently and by virtue of their race, inferior. There are virtually no crimes they can commit that someone with great influence does not rush in to excuse on the grounds that we had no right to expect anything else.

The message they are given [by liberals], in short, is that they are not fully enough human to be held morally responsible for their own behavior. They are children, as the Southerners used to say, or ironically, they are, in the terminology the New York Times editorialist so much objected to but so inevitably himself implied, “animals.” This is the message that has for some time now, at least since the late 1960s, been consistently transmitted by the “best” people, and certainly widely received by their intended interlocutors. It is, to be blunt about it, the message of liberal racism.

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.