Such periodicals as Vogue, which once focused mostly on style, celebrity gossip, dating advice, and movie reviews, have in recent years waded into politics—especially of the left-wing variety. But the British version of the glossy magazine seems to have a particular fondness for anti-Semitic political activists, as Karen Bekker notes:

British Vogue, . . . which claims over 800,000 print readers and 3.2 million unique monthly online visitors, has put what it calls “an inspiring army of activists” on the cover of its September issue (arguably the most important issue of the year). Among the twenty activists the magazine chose to feature are Tamika Mallory and Angela Davis. The magazine called Mallory “one of the most vital activists of her generation” in a feature interview, and called Davis a “straight-up legend.”

In January of 2017, Tamika Mallory rose to prominence as one of four main leaders of the Women’s March, one of the largest political marches in U.S. history. It was not long afterwards, however, that news about her connection with Louis Farrakhan, . . . as well as her own anti-Semitic comments, began to slowly trickle out. . . . In April of 2018, she slandered the Antidefamation League as “CONSTANTLY attacking black and brown people.” . . . At the March’s very first leadership meeting, Mallory asserted . . . “that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade.” . . . She also later accused “white Jews” of “upholding white supremacy”.

And then there is Angela Davis, an obsessive Israel hater who herself played a role in a 1970 domestic terror attack:

Davis has supported Rasmea Odeh, a member of the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Odeh was convicted in Israel for the killing of two Hebrew University students, Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner. . . . The September cover is the third time this year that British Vogue has prominently featured Davis.

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.