In 1991, Al Sharpton instigated a three-day pogrom against the ḥasidic residents of Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, in which a Jewish student was killed. A few years later, the reverend organized protests against a Jewish-owned business in Harlem, inspiring one protestor to attack the store, killing seven. Liel Leibovitz explains how mainstream Jewish organization willfully forgot all this:

This past weekend, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella group uniting 125 local Jewish communities and seventeen national Jewish organizations, sent an email to its followers proudly announcing that it has signed on as a partner in the Virtual March on Washington this week, an event organized by Al Sharpton.

[L]ast week also marked the 29th anniversary of the Crown Heights riots. . . . When [the neighborhood’s] residents rioted in the streets, chanting “death to the Jews!” as well as looting stores, attacking anyone who was visibly Jewish, and ripping m’zuzot off of door posts. Sharpton was quick to arrive on the scene, leading a march in which participants burned an Israeli flag and called to kill all Jews. At the funeral a few days later of the young boy [whose accidental death sparked the riots], Sharpton delivered a eulogy that borrowed heavily from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, saying that the Jewish residents of the neighborhood practiced “apartheid” and were there only to further the Jewish global grip on money and power. He ended by ominously shouting: “pay for your deeds.”

As the years went by, Sharpton was given ample opportunity to apologize for his prominent role in this modern-day anti-Semitic bloodletting. He never did. . . . Why, barely a year after a spree in which visibly observant Jews were violently attacked in record numbers, are Jewish organizations sidling up to kiss Sharpton’s ring?

Leibovitz places the blame on the Antidefamation League and its CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, who led the way in partnering with Sharpton:

[H]aving made his odious moral decision, [Greenblatt] then refused even to seek out the most minor price from Sharpton for bringing him back into the fold of acceptability—not even a simple apology that would at least telegraph a distaste for anti-Semitism to Sharpton’s many followers. Greenblatt couldn’t even muster that small gesture.

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.