In America and Britain, protesters have taken to vandalizing and even tearing down statues in the name of anti-racism—and not just statues of former Confederate generals and the like, but also of such figures as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Mohandas Gandhi. To Melanie Phillips, Jews should be particularly wary of this trend, and the anti-Western impulses behind it, given its similarities to the anti-Israel movement:

In Britain, the Board of Deputies of British Jews has set up a commission to investigate racial prejudice within the Jewish community. It isn’t clear whether this is to be confined to alleged racism by the community towards its tiny number of black Jews or whether it will cover alleged community racism towards non-Jews.

[T]he risk is that the Board of Deputies may have appointed a hanging jury to find Britain’s Jewish community guilty under rigged cultural rules. If so, this would be yet another example of the board “taking a knee” to people with a rotten agenda, but who have the power to dictate the terms of public debate. It’s not just that many liberal Jews are on the wrong side of this titanic struggle to defend civilization. It’s not even that they don’t recognize the danger to themselves from an agenda of destroying a culture whose roots lie in the Hebrew Bible. It’s also a striking fact that the tactics now being used in this ramped-up onslaught against the West are mirrored in the attempt to bring down the state of Israel.

Pulling down the statues is the physical manifestation of the decades-long attempt, through the hijack of the education system, to destroy the West by erasing the record of its achievements and presenting it instead as intrinsically racist, colonialist, and evil. In Israel, Palestinians have systematically vandalized archaeological digs in Jerusalem in order to tip into the garbage excavated materials containing possibly priceless artifacts. They do this to destroy the evidence that is constantly being dug up of the ancient kingdom of Israel and thus the unique claim of the Jews to the land. By attacking these ancient items, they are physically trying to erase the Jews’ own history.

What starts with the Jews never stops with the Jews. In this current mayhem on the streets of America and Britain, [this] is now playing out before our horrified eyes.

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.