During the pedophilia scandals within the Catholic Church, serious experts and peddlers of pop psychoanalysis alike claimed that the fault lay with Christian sexual ethics. Without healthy outlets for their libidos, the argument went, priests directed their passions toward children. Thus, a report published this summer by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology described the perpetrators as “psychosexually immature, psychosexually maldeveloped, sexually deprived, and deeply frustrated.” In light of the recent scandals emerging from Hollywood, Naomi Schaefer Riley argues that these explanations can no longer be taken seriously:

[Can it be that] leading male actors are “sexually deprived?” . . . It is probably true that both the church and Hollywood had developed a “culture of secrecy,” but that seems to be where the similarities end. In [Hollywood] it seems that the ready availability of sex everywhere, the oversexualization of the culture, and the blurring of lines between children and adults—thanks, Roman Polanski—all seem to have contributed to the rampant abuse.

Indeed, the same seems to be true at prep schools . . . that have recently revealed widespread sexual abuse, much of which occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. These schools would not have been restrictive environments in the same ways as the church. For places in the middle of New York City, it would have been quite easy for male teachers to find women their own age. . . . Even where the student body was single-sex, the faculty was generally co-ed.

What distinguished these schools was not repression but a widespread atmosphere of sexual openness, including openness to sex with those who were underage. This is a culture that infected both religious schools and secular ones for decades. But while most of the culture has grown increasingly repulsed by these actions, Hollywood continues to exist in its own moral universe.

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.