Last week, the New York Times published an editorial complaining about a public swimming pool in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg that has designated women-only hours every week, to accommodate the mores of the area’s large ḥasidic population. The policy also provoked the ire of the New York City Human-Rights Commission. Mark Hemingway writes:

After an anonymous complaint, the Human-Rights Commission intervened and stopped the pool from offering female-only swimming hours. Those hours were later restored after city officials and the state assemblyman Dov Hikind stepped in.

This is the second high-profile attack the Human-Rights Commission has made on the city’s Orthodox Jewish population in the last couple of years. After Jewish stores in Williamsburg started putting up signs in their windows requiring that customers adhere to a dress code, the commission sprang into action and threatened fines. Again, there was a big double standard. The Four Seasons [restaurant] could require diners to wear a jacket and tie, but Jewish business owners could not.

There seems to be a troubling trend where local officials are attempting to criminalize behavior that would otherwise be acceptable—but only when it has religious motivations. The attacks on Jews by the New York City Human-Rights Commission and the New York Times are also a good reminder that religious-liberty concerns are not just limited to Christians. Accommodating a large local religious population at a public facility a few hours a week hardly seems like an injustice, but at this point it’s hard to refute the fact that a major goal of the left seems to be driving any trace of religiosity from the public square.

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.