“Transhumanism” is the idea that, at some point in the not-so-distant future, technology will be able to enhance the human experience beyond recognition, bringing mankind to a state of near immortality. Wesley J. Smith comments:

[T]he church of transhumanism . . . substitutes faith in technology for belief in God (or in reincarnation and karma). . . . Transhumanists take these hopes very seriously. Indeed, they proselytize for their ageless post-human future with the kind of fervor materialists usually disdain in traditional religionists. . . .

Transhumanists used to repudiate any suggestion that their movement is a form of religion. But that wall of denial is cracking. According to [one leading enthusiast], the human inventions of religion and money long succeeded in subduing the earth. But with traditional religion waning in the West—and who can deny it?—we need new “fictions” to bind us together. That’s where transhumanism comes in. . . .

Alas, for transhumanists, technology is a very hard pillow. The fantasy of uploading one’s mind into a robot might be fun to contemplate at academic symposia and in boardrooms of high-tech companies overflowing with investment capital. And I certainly understand why living longer is preferable to the alternative of permanent nonbeing. But such temporary detours and—let’s face it—highly unlikely scenarios will never supply true meaning to yearning souls (if transhumanists will pardon the term), only a diversion. In the end, transhumanism is a wail of despair in the night, spitting vainly into the howling existential winds of what most true materialists see as a meaningless void.

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.