Last week, the Washington Post published an in-depth article about a woman who appeared at a 2018 Halloween party—hosted by a Post columnist—wearing blackface. The subject of the article, who is not a public figure of any kind, was swiftly fired from her job. The same week, the comedian Chelsea Handler posted a video of a Louis Farrakhan speech on Instagram, subsequently shared by numerous other celebrities. Handler responded to the ensuing criticism by insisting that Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism might not be nice, but, in effect, it shouldn’t be held against him. While she eventually took down the video, she—unlike the partygoer—hasn’t been “cancelled.”

This double standard, whereby even a whiff of prejudice against some groups can lead to vicious censoriousness, whereas prejudice against Jews is given a pass, is what concerns Jonathan Marks when considering recent events at Florida State University, where the student-senate president Ahmad Daraldik appears to have created a website dedicated to the spurious and perverse claim that Israel harvests organs from Palestinians:

[A] student senate that quite recently, in an overwhelming vote, removed its [former] president over remarks he’d made in an online group chat—he’d stressed the incompatibility between his Catholicism [on the one hand] and queer and transgender politics on the other—voted to keep Daraldik in office. Perhaps they were motivated to do so by a letter, signed by numerous purportedly progressive organizations, that mentions Daraldik’s First Amendment rights, doesn’t mention the website, and pretends that Daraldik is the victim of a “smear campaign” to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel.

As a rule, I am not in favor of taking the extraordinary measure of removing someone from office over troubling remarks, even in student governments. Nor am I in favor of picking on young people who may well know better when they’re a little older. What we should object to and be concerned about is this: even in a time of heightened scrutiny of people’s utterances and actions, even in a time when admissions offers are being rescinded for racist social-media posts, anti-Semitism wins plaudits.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, the “woke” are fast asleep.

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.