Last month, Rodney Muhammad, the president of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) posted a crass anti-Semitic cartoon on his personal Facebook page. Despite protests from the local Jewish community—soon joined by black leaders, the Pennsylvania governor, and others—the national organization took two weeks to react. Ben Cohen considers the belated and anemic statement from the national NAACP spokeswoman, stating that the group is “saddened and deeply disappointed” and that Muhammad “now recognizes the offensive nature of the imagery” he used:

The Facebook post that got [Muhammad] into trouble showed the faces of three celebrities who recently made anti-Semitic statements (Ice Cube, Nick Cannon, and DeSean Jackson) above a cartoon of a hook-nosed Jew wearing an evil grin and rubbing his hands together in glee. It is exactly the kind of image one would expect to find on a neo-Nazi website, as exactly the same image of Jews was promoted in the gutter press of Nazi Germany itself.

As a follower of the Nation of Islam, [Rodney] will doubtless deflect the charge of appropriating Nazi imagery by referring to the views of his master, Louis Farrakhan, on the Holocaust. According to Farrakhan, who pals around with Holocaust deniers among other conspiracy kooks, the Holocaust was just another Jewish swindle.

Similarly, on the website of the Nation of Islam’s Mosque No. 12 in Philadelphia, where Muhammad presides, numerous videos are available in which speakers matter-of-factly outline Farrakhan’s conceptualization of Hollywood’s hold on the American public as the “Synagogue of Satan.”

None of this is very subtle—and that is what makes the NAACP’s response so bitterly disappointing. . . . Whether the NAACP national leadership likes it or not, their point man in Philadelphia has embraced a view of the Jewish people that would sit happily with any and every white supremacist. In the meantime, Jewish organizations should freeze all contact with the NAACP until Rodney Muhammad is a part of its past.

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.