Thanks to some nasty comments President Trump made about her last week, the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar has received a fair amount of sympathy from the press, while her autobiography garnered an enthusiastic review in the New York Times. But Omar is used to fawning treatment not only from the news media but also from the world of entertainment, having appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone and the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. One hears less about her use of crude stereotypes about Jews, her apologetics for Iran, or her support for the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS)—or of the enthusiastic accolades she has won from such fellow anti-Semites as David Duke. Jonathan Tobin comments:

[Omar’s recent] New York Times Magazine interview demonstrates both her narcissism and the way she is allowed to get away with talking down to those she has subjected to hate. In it she claims to understand anti-Semitism better than her Jewish critics because her [supposed subjection] to Islamophobia have made her observations about prejudice particularly insightful.

The same theme permeates . . . many of her other public comments in the last two years: she defines herself as a victim of prejudice, saying those who try to call her to account for her threats to “burn down” American institutions are therefore anti-black, anti-Muslim, and anti-female. It’s a brilliant strategy that has so far worked perfectly. Omar has crossed so many red lines in less than one term in office, combining anti-Semitism with support for far-left causes. Yet she has become a mainstream-media favorite and idol of her party’s activist base.

In an era in which victimhood remains the coin of the realm, few have as much currency as Omar, who continues to pose as an oppressed, persecuted minority while becoming a national figure who can count on much of the chattering classes and, even more important, pop-culture influencers to applaud her.

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.