The British biologist Richard Dawkins has, in the past decade, made himself an outspoken crusader for atheism. Andrew Brown notes something akin to blind religious devotion among his most dedicated followers, some of whom are willing to pay membership dues:

[T]he Richard Dawkins website offers followers the chance to join the “Reason Circle,” which, like Dante’s Hell, is itself arranged in concentric circles. For $85 a month, you get discounts on his merchandise, and the chance to meet “Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science personalities.” . . . After the neophyte passes through the successively more expensive “Darwin Circle” and then the “Evolution Circle,” he attains the innermost circle, where for $100,000 a year or more he gets to have a private breakfast or lunch with Richard Dawkins. . . . At this point, it is obvious to everyone except the participants that what we have here is a religion without the good bits. . . .

Like all scriptures, the Books of Dawkins contain numerous contradictions: in The God Delusion itself he moves within fifteen pages from condemning a pope who had baptized children taken away from Jewish parents to commending [the] suggestion that the children of creationists be taken away because teaching your children religion is comparable to child abuse.

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.